SPRING 2025
ISSUE 02

₁ “Just Say Moe: Maureen Tucker, Original Riot Grrrl,” Entertainment Weekly, January 28, 1994. Available at: https://ew.com/article/1994/01/28/just-say-moe/. Stephen Holden, “Moe Tucker is Back,” New York Times, December 5, 1990, C20. Available at https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1990/12/05/561290.html?pageNumber=75.

₂ See Tucker’s 1997 interview with Daniel Colston for the Charlotte-based music publication Tangents: Daniel Colston, “Tales from the Underground,” Tangents 2, no. 7 (1997). Available at https://danielcoston.blogspot.com/2013/10/moe-tucker-interview-1997-part-two.html.

₃ For IBM’s later labor strategies, see the translated interview with a Spanish IBM worker from the early 1990s published in the last issue of the original series of Processed World: “IBM: From the Guts of the Monster,” Processed World no. 33 (2000). Available at https://libcom.org/library/ibm-guts-monster.

₄ Jason Resnikoff, Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 57. Resnikoff relies on a 1965 US Department of Labor report by Audrey Freeman et al., The Impact of Office Mechanization in the Insurance Industry. Available at https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED018585.

₅ See Mike Duncan, “Microelectronics: Five Areas of Subordination,” in Science, Technology, and the Labour Process: Marxist Studies, ed. Les Levidow and Bob Young, (London: CSE Books, 1981) 1:173–207; CSE Microelectronics Group, Microelectronics: Capitalist Technology and the Working Class (London: CSE Books, 1980); Diane Werneke, Microelectronics and Office Jobs: The Impact of the Chip on Women’s Employment (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1983); Jean Tepperman, Not Servants, Not Machines: Office Workers Speak Out (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976): Margery Davies, Woman’s Place is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers, 1870-1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Jane Barker and Hazel Downing, “Word Processing and the Transformation of Patriarchal Relations of Control in the Office,” Capital & Class 4, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 64–99; Judith A. McGaw, “Women and the History of American Technology,” Signs 7, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 798–828.

₆ Mike Boehm, “Her Beat Goes On: Moe Tucker, a Hall of Famer With the Velvet Underground, Is Back Drumming With a New Band, Magnet,” Los Angeles Times, June 20, 1997. Available at https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-06-20-ca-5076-story-html.

₇ Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009).

₈ On Walmart’s refinement of the retail industry’s attack on solidarities fostered on shop floors, see Thomas Jessen Adams, “Making the New Shop Floor: Wal-Mart, Labor Control, and the History of the Postwar Discount Retail Industry in America,” in Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First Century Capitalism, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein (New York: New Press, 2006), 213–229. One of Walmart’s famous anti-union handbooks, “Labor Relations and You at the Wal-Mart Distribution Center #6022,” was written in response to a 1991 UFCW organizing drive at an Ohio distribution center. It is available at https://reclaimdemocracy.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/distribctr6022manual.pdf.

₉ Colston, “Tales from the Underground.”

₁₀ Thomas Aiello, Bound Labor in the Turpentine Belt (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2024).

₁₁ See Tucker’s continued comments in a 1998 interview: “I wouldn’t really be comfortable with writing a song about something I don’t know or have experience with. That is a drawback obviously. When I started writing songs, I was so embroiled in Wal-Mart and trying to pay the bills on this ridiculous salary and being stuck here and all this, so it all came out in my songs. It’s funny. I’ve never tried to write a song until those on Life in Exile. When I was writing those songs, I thought, ‘Is this stupid?’ I was really worried about that.” See Jason Gross, “Maureen Tucker Interview,” Perfect Sound Forever, May 1998. Available at https://furious.com/perfect/maureentucker.html.

₁₂ Richard Johnson, “‘Really Useful Knowledge’: Radical Education and Working-Class Culture, 1790–1848,” in Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, ed. John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 75–102; Tobias Higbie, Labor’s Mind: A History of Working-Class Intellectual Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018).

₁₃ See Jacques Rancière and Alain Faure, La parole ouvrière (Paris: 10/18, 1976); Jacques Rancière, “La maladie des héliotropes: Notes sur la ‘pensée ouvrière,’” Ethnologie française 14, no. 2 (April–June 1984): 125–30.

₁₄ Alessadro Portelli, “Research as an Experiment in Equality,” in The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 29–44.

₁₅ Angry Workers of the World, Class Power on Zero Hours (London: PM Press, 2020). Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). Also: Ruth Milkman, New York City’s Retail Grocery Industry: Economic Restructuring and Its Impact on Organized Labor, (New York: The CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, 2021); Françoise Carré, Chris Tilly, Chris Benner, and Sarah Mason, Change and Uncertainty, Not Apocalypse: Technological Change and Store-Based Retail, (Berkeley: UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, 2020).

₁₆ Angry Workers of the World, Class Power on Zero Hours (London: PM Press, 2020). Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital Is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). Also: Ruth Milkman, New York City’s Retail Grocery Industry: Economic Restructuring and Its Impact on Organized Labor, (New York: The CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, 2021); Françoise Carré, Chris Tilly, Chris Benner, and Sarah Mason, Change and Uncertainty, Not Apocalypse: Technological Change and Store-Based Retail, (Berkeley: UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, 2020).

₁₇ Bruce Reid, “Arbeit Macht Frei: A Children’s Film Espouses the Virtues of Labor,” The Stranger, July 2000. Available at https://www.thestranger.com/film/2000/07/27/4528/arbeit-macht-frei.

“When I get my check, I know something’s wrong,” Moe Tucker sings in the chorus of “Work,” from her 1989 record Life in Exile After Abdication, a forceful document of working-class existence in the Reagan years. Tucker’s blunt, seething lyrics, set to a rumbling tom beat and a surf rock chord progression, testify to the mental and physical effects of deteriorating working conditions. The pent-up degradation felt by ordinary people in an extended period of economic and political counteroffensive against workers in every sector cracks through the track’s screeching thicket of guitars.

Life in Exile and its 1991 sequel, I Spent a Week There the Other Night, consist largely of Velvet Underground and ’60s girl group covers, tributes to some of the important figures in Tucker’s life (namely Bo Diddley and Andy Warhol), and rollicking indictments of the stress and despair inflicted by US society. A host of indie rock luminaries and ex-Velvets contribute. The tracks written by Tucker name broader feelings of disillusionment and discontent that were bubbling right under the surface of a tense historical moment. When she recorded Life in Exile, Moe Tucker was employed as a billing and receiving clerk at a newly constructed Walmart distribution center in Douglas, Georgia.¹ Free market fundamentalism and the neutralization of the workers’ movement’s organizing power was at a peak. Tucker struck back by excavating the industrial ballad form from the depths of a firm that epitomized refined patterns of workforce control in retail.

I was first advised to listen to Life in Abdication, and Tucker’s solo work in general, by Bruce Reid, my co-worker on the night shift at Quality Food Centers (QFC), a Kroger-owned grocery chain in the Pacific Northwest. Bruce was a devoted fan of the Velvet Underground, the type who had all the live bootlegs and tracked the members’ solo projects. His encounter with their music and mythos had clearly left an imprint on his life. When I sought to contact him last year about whether he might have any copies of the late ’80s–’90s Tucker fanzine, Moe Works at Wal-Mart, I discovered that he had passed away in 2023 at the age of 53. Like Tucker, Bruce worked a low-wage job in middle age, a life station that reflected a deep-seated recomposition of demographics and employment paths in the US labor force. Moe and Bruce both found meaning in the interwoven histories and everyday struggles of the people and places around them.

Tucker’s stint at the Walmart billing office was, as she put it in an interview, “three years of hell.” She did data entry and worked with computer systems requiring training and expertise, adding up to a combination of drudgery and precision – “skilled labor at $4.65/hr.”² One can imagine the mountains of paperwork Tucker and her coworkers had to pore over. The distribution centers also reconfigured the setting of administrative labor, as the office spaces were hidden within a giant complex of heavy machinery in perpetual motion.

It was not the first employment experience Tucker had at a firm that initiated a technical revolution in capitalism. When she started drumming for the Velvet Underground, Tucker would drive into the city in the evening after her shift at an IBM facility in the Tri-State area, where she worked as a keypunch operator.³ Keypunch machines performed intricate data processing combinations but were generally clunky and difficult to repair. They also demanded a level of know-how, dexterity, and patience from their operators. In a quote on the front page of Tucker’s website, Velvet Underground guitarist Sterling Morrison declared her the “fastest keypunch in the United States.”

Keypunchers occupied a critical position in the explosion of white-collar clerical work in the 1950s and ’60s, becoming an anchor in the electronic data processing units of many firms. But with the growing dominance of microelectronics and digital processing, by the 1980s the post had slowly died out.⁴ The introduction of systems of office automation stifled sites and routines of informal resistance among clerical workers.⁵ While automation did not immediately eliminate these job posts or the labyrinthine conflicts between different strata of the office workforce, the human labor-power required for these tasks “remained essential and was, often, grueling,” as Jason Resnikoff argues.

Tucker had been living in Douglas for a few years with her mother and five kids, having moved there after a divorce. She got the job shortly after the center opened in 1986 by means of some verbal arm-twisting at the state employment office that was directing the hiring process. The years since she had moved to Georgia were hardscrabble. The tight labor market in the South had taken its toll, and the region as a whole was suffering the aftereffects of the 1981–82 economic recession. “I hadn’t worked in a year and a half,” she later remembered in an interview. “Desperate wasn’t the word. I’m not a pushy person, but I leaped out of my seat screaming. I can’t tell you how pissed I was.”⁶

By the mid-1980s, Walmart was rapidly expanding and exerting a strong pull on business trends among US and global retailers.⁷ Its managerial practices became part of the standard playbook for the service industry. Employees at the firm’s sprawling stores and expansive supply and distribution arms had to combat a new arrangement of pressures that crossed white-collar and blue-collar positions. Unionization threats were snuffed out with fanatical precision, an inflexible emphasis was placed on customer service, and store design and job training focused on a remolding of workers’ instincts and affects away from solidarity with fellow employees and toward full trust in supervisors.⁸ What looked like passive quietism on the industrial relations front was a symptom of a broad and carefully constructed consensus around corporate missions and principles.

The organizational culture at Walmart disarmed Tucker. “The people down here have no concept of being pissed off at the boss or opening your mouth if you think something’s wrong, and I think that was the most irritating thing to me,” she recalled.⁹ Her comments speak to missed conduits of worker insubordination, as well as to a gap in the historical memory of southern Georgia. Coffee County, where Douglas is located, lies in a region whose archive of struggle includes the sustained civil rights campaigns of Southwest Georgia and the pitched resistance against the convict labor and debt peonage schemes that stamp the history of southern Georgia in the Turpentine Belt.¹⁰ But Tucker’s comments also point to the effective outcomes of Walmart’s labor control protocols.

Fury, irascibility, and disbelief at the daily situation she walked into permeate Tucker’s lyrics. As she announces in “Work,” “You know they say work hard all day and you’ll do fine / well, let me tell you something, they’re all lying.” But Tucker goes beyond deceit and betrayal as motifs for the mechanisms that shield the real operation of surplus-value extraction. In “That’s Bad,” she queries, “It’s a mystery to me / a well-kept secret / how I work all week / and this is all I get.” Beyond the time clock, the burden of rent, utilities, and other necessities siphon off whatever might be left over on the weekly paystub. Tucker stares at piles of unpaid bills on the counter, with debt relief notices and permanently unbalanced checkbooks as paper reminders of an untenable way of life.

The emotional circuits and poles of a bleak historical situation course through these songs. If anger and indignation are dominant, there’s also a dark humor and resolve that rises above resignation and bitterness. In “Lazy,” Tucker rebels against the monotonous household chores that need to get done every day, instead opting for lying in bed and staring out the window, daydreaming. When she sings that she “can’t get [her] ass in gear,” it’s clear that there’s much more behind that repulsion and inaction. What does dusting the windows or cleaning the toilets mean in a society that reduces existence to “trying to get by / just living to die,” as she implores in “S.O.S.”?

Tucker’s dip into the political pipeline of the Tea Party over the last decade was made infamous in a widely circulated 2012 interview of her at a protest in Georgia railing against socialism. There are signs of this progression in songs like “Fired Up” or “Stayin’ Put” which delves deeper into themes of lousy jobs, poverty, and desperation, but channels them toward willful isolation, bitterness, and moral panic. Social bonds are explicitly rejected: “Don’t knock / go away, door’s locked,” she insists, while repeating the kind of “drugs and crime / flashing knives / violent people / wasted lives” narrative that characterized law-and-order responses to the urban and deindustrialization crises of the 1980s.

But Tucker’s writing is at its strongest when she gets more concrete about the dynamics of workplace antagonism and the openings for solidarity. In “Spam Again,” a blues work song set to a jaunty acoustic guitar figure, Sam Walton and the management apparatus he oversaw fall under her steely gaze. Tucker decries, “I guess he don’t worry / about the people like us / as long as we / don’t make no fuss.”

In describing her songwriting process for Life in Exile, Tucker expressed embarrassment and fear at the prevalence of themes around work and family life. “That’s what I mostly know about,” she says, before confiding that it is “actually a hindrance. I’d give my right arm to write a song about a car or something. It’s really debilitating.” Yet the tone and quality of the songs of her solo records, their directness and coruscating perspective, have only grown more revelatory.¹¹ They are attempts to make sense of one’s lot in life and the endless discouragement and brief flashes of a way out that accompany that reflection. In “Work,” Tucker repeatedly hints at an unspoken class awareness: “Me and you and him and her work all day long / some of us do okay living pretty high / but me and you both know, it ain’t you or I.” She subsequently switches to the plural subject in the last chorus: “When we get our checks we know / oh, something’s wrong!” The faint spark of shared struggle was what Tucker took back from the shop floor. 

—

Overnight grocery jobs attract all kinds of people. Each crew has its specific routines, in-jokes, friend groups, and degrees of camaraderie. The mood and disposition depend on the temperament of the crew chief, the roles we’ve grown accustomed to, the relationships we have with other shifts or departments, and, of course, the size of the load we have to break down and stock. In some environments, every member of the night crew has almost complete autonomy – a set number of aisles to restock, done at their own pace. Everyone finishes the job on their own time, helps each other out, and smokes weed in the meat cooler at 3am. In other stores, the strictness of the crew chief makes every night a grind. What Bruce and I went through in that Seattle QFC was more like the latter. We had to keep our chatter brief, find ways to distract ourselves, and take advantage of the moments when we worked alongside each other.

Distribution centers like the one Moe Tucker worked at are the starting legs, the preconditions for night crew work. From a regional distribution center, drivers transport daily orders to stores, with multiple store loads on one truck, that arrive anytime from the afternoon to late evening. The second-shift grocery clerks wheel the pallets onto the floor to be broken down by the night crew when they arrive. The bulk of the night is spent “spotting” the items to their correct location, stocking them to the shelf, breaking down cardboard, and picking up backstock. Most stores have people who do frozen food and dairy shipments, but in others the grocery night crew or day team complete them. Save the general merchandise and vendor-stocked sections of center store, the night crew also has to “face” every aisle, bringing items up to the front of shelves and making things look pretty. In a sector where public-facing interactions focus on customer service, it’s hard physical work. Stocking is also a job that is resistant to automation – while coworkers joke that the job task is easy enough for a child to do, there is a certain efficiency and know-how bound up in it. There are localized time-saving tricks for opening boxes or fitting items into small spaces, as night crew clerks often have a good sense of the store’s peculiar features.

I worked with Bruce from January 2020 to August 2021. The pandemic marked that span, and the uncertainty that hung over the first phase of the shutdown fostered a camaraderie among the regular crew members. One positive feature of our process at QFC was that we all cooperated in finishing the aisles. When the chance arose or our boss was off for the night, we could socialize a little bit. One night Bruce and I were in a “heavy” aisle – the middle aisles, which usually have soup, baking ingredients, salad dressings, pasta, canned goods, and the like – which take the longest to complete. As we stocked on the same side, we ended up having an in-depth discussion on themes in Australian New Wave cinema critical of the atomization of capitalist society – namely, The Cars That Ate Paris and Walkabout. Our conversations over the following months veered into doo-wop, krautrock, bebop, Joni Mitchell’s influence on Prince, Brian De Palma movies, and Dziga Vertov Group films, among other topics. I could tell Bruce was someone who had watched, read, and listened to an astounding amount of media. But in his digestion of this material, his eye was trained on the conditions of artistic production, the historical trajectory of each medium, and the transformative impact that such works could have on spectators.

In my experience at different grocery stores, one or two coworkers often prove to be walking encyclopedias of pop culture. Off the clock, they soak up movies, television series, comics, science fiction or mystery novels, anything they can get their hands on. Their obsessions and passions poke through at random moments. Bruce certainly had that breadth of cultural consumption, along with something else: he was an autodidact steeped in the principles and pursuits of radical education.¹² It is a tradition that goes back to the acute class conflicts of the late 18th and 19th centuries, when laborers in various trades began to transmit and circulate their ideas and action across deeper layers of the working class. It involved a vision of learning as a process that encompassed informal networks of sociability, reading, and discussion. It also defined class politics as a messy mixture of discourses and practices operating across borders and fractures.¹³ Proletarian politics did not have a single center but were articulated by activists and writers who traversed the boundaries of several social spheres. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Bruce did the same.

Originally from Nevada, with family in the Central Coast of California, Bruce came to Seattle at the height of the ’80s and ’90s alternative culture scenes. This encounter had a lasting effect on him. He was a longtime film critic for The Stranger, one of few publications that both developed in and outlasted that milieu. I never asked him how he ended up at QFC – he had been working there for at least five years when I was hired – but I could tell that the decline of underground print and the competitiveness of the freelance journalism market had something to do with it. Yet he retained a fidelity to the ethos that came out of that moment in Seattle. He enjoyed hanging out at Scarecrow Video, the last video store left in Seattle and one of the few keeping the flame of video retail alive in the United States.

Bruce never rushed in his work, and he eschewed any competition with others in a job where displays of masculine bravado often prevail. He walked with a limp and wore thick glasses with oversized frames and an apron, giving him the look of an old-school clerk. He’d lay on the floor to stock and face the bottom shelves – the job absolutely destroys your knees if you don’t wear kneepads. Bruce had a particular aptitude for figuring out shelf space and quickly calculating the amount of a particular item we needed. More importantly, he could hold a conversation on any topic with anyone. He engaged with every interlocutor from a place of intellectual and emotional humility. A conversation with him felt like Alessandro Portelli’s luminous definition of the oral history interview: an “experiment in equality.”¹⁴

The London collective Angry Workers of the World recently conducted a penetrating inquiry of the supermarket distribution chain in the UK, grounded in the warehousing and packing plants of West London. As they make clear, organizing in these spaces is no easy task, ridden with “chaos and frictions.”¹⁵ This has long been a condition of retail work and a hard truth of shop-floor organizing in department stores, grocery stores, and supermarkets. Susan Porter Benson wrote in her 1986 classic that workplace resistance in retail involves a constant “give-and-take” between agents and actors, that cultures grow out of both the “conditions and struggles within . . . stores” as well as “other contexts in which each group moved.”¹⁶ Fissures between employees, fragile alliances, and various outside pressures shaped the terrain.

On my last night at QFC, Bruce and I took our breaks down in the parking garage, as we always had. He’d smoke a cigarette and I’d eat a snack. We’d people-watch, talk about some show or movie we watched that day. Our last conversation was about my plans for returning to school to finish my dissertation. He gave me some sage advice about friendship and a commitment to openness, and we made plans to keep in touch. We never managed to see each other before his passing.

I asked Bruce one night when we were clocking out for break if he believed in the subversive promise of the counterculture. He gave his answer with no hesitation. He said that he believed in the counterforce, an incompressible minimum that resists subordination. In his Stranger review of the 2000 dud Thomas and the Magic Railroad, he writes, “can’t anybody, even a little blue steam engine, dream of doing more than just hauling coal around all day?”¹⁷ In “That’s Bad,” Tucker neatly sums up this sliver of resistance, the same one Bruce identified: “Living for working ain’t how it’s supposed to be.”