It's Not Just In Your Head

Two union organizers from Atlanta, Georgia join us to explore questions about the psychology of bosses versus workers in the context of union organizing. What's a typical reaction of managers and bosses when workers form a union? Are these reactions any different with more liberal or progressive bosses? Are workers who organize a real or imagined threat to a business owner's sense of identity and accomplishments? What are common fears that prevent workers from organizing? When workers do organize together, what helps them overcome fear of retaliation from the boss and how do they develop a sense of solidarity over horizontal distrust and competitiveness?

Voice of Jen Garcia, workplace organizer and "reformed animator." Get access to the full episode and our monthly reading groups at patreon.com/itsnotjustinyourhead.

Marxian economist Richard Wolff joins us for this episode to help us define our terms. What do we mean when we use words like capitalism, socialism, and communism? Wolff begins his explanation by describing different kinds of relationships and tensions between who has owned property throughout history and who has not. Relationships between slave owner and slave, feudal lord and serf, and capitalist employer and employee, all share some commonalities through history and during each historical period there have been both supporters and critics of each economic system. Wolff explains that although in the US, Karl Marx has been made into an almost cartoon-like villain largely due to the 20th century's "Red Scare," that Marx was just one of many critics of capitalism who believed capitalism was born and would die, followed by eventually systems we might call socialism and communism. Wolff makes clear that definitions of socialism and communism have always been heatedly debated, as has been the question of how we are to move from capitalism to socialism, but Americans in particular are only now coming out of decades long hibernation -- having lagged behind the rest of the world in understanding these ideas, discussing and debating them, and applying all of this to their own lives and societies.

Voice of Professor Richard Wolff - for early access to this episode become a patron at patreon.com/itsnotjustinyourhead.com

For this episode we invited Asad Haider on to talk about identity politics and mental health. Haider wrote a book called Mistaken Identity in 2018, which weaves in a blend of personal narratives and scholarly analysis; Haider shares on the one hand the "lived experiences" of being on the receiving end of racism having grown up in a Pakistani immigrant family in post-9/11 America, and on the other a deep challenge for the left to consider whether modern identity politics are capable of significantly and positively transforming society.

https://saaganthology.com/Emancipation-and-Exhaustion

This is the voice of Asad Haider, founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine and author of Mistaken Identity.

https://saaganthology.com/Emancipation-and-Exhaustion

Max interviews Occupational Therapist Maria Dong to talk about the many ways our for-profit healthcare system negatively impacts healthcare workers and patient outcomes. Maria can be reached at @mariadongwrites on twitter.

Get early access to this episode and other patron perks at patreon.com/itsnotjustinyourhead.

Bethany Morris joins us to talk about critical and community psychology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and borderline personality disorder. Dr. Morris is an assistant professor of psychology at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she teaches and does theoretical and qualitative research. She is a transdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges critical psychology, literature, philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, and film studies.

Get early access to episodes and extra perks at patreon.com/itsnotjustinyourhead, and email us at [email protected]

Harriet reviews Biden's ambitious infrastructure and jobs plan and the inclusion of various aspects of the "caring economy," including investment into childcare, healthcare, eldercare, etc. Such jobs are overwhelmingly performed by women, mostly women of color, and are notoriously underpaid. Harriet praises the arguably "revolutionary" potential of Biden's plans, then critiques them with focus on proposed timelines of implementation and lack of attention to pay disparities within "caring" fields (ie, physician to nurse aid; psychiatrist to mental health counselor). Max explains how union and worker co-op efforts to set pay ratios within workplaces and industries could address the pay disparity problem for women, and generally, but questions whether workplace democracy needs to be "made allowed" more from the top or "fought for" from the bottom.