Direct FB link. TLDR: A lesson in real time that power, not money, is at the heart of the capitalist system. It's easy to be a "good" boss, giving your workers good pay and benefits. Much harder to share power.
I'm trying to produce a more formal statement about it but bottom line is: I screwed up badly and did not live up to my values. I feel bad because I think I've generally done a good job for five years of making Current Affairs a pretty ethical organization and in a single day I bungled it and disappointed a lot of people. I've got a lot of work to do to rebuild trust, but I'm not sure if CA will survive, as subscribers rightly feel betrayed and we're getting cancelations. I don't blame people who cancel, all I can say is that I tried hard for five years to do right by people who worked for us and I'm really sad that I undid it in a single week.
Even though I screwed up, the truth is more complex than the 'fired the staff for wanting democracy' narrative. I've done many egalitarian things with Current Affairs. I don't earn any more than anyone else (we all get $45k a year). I gave up ownership over it, and don't make any kind of profit from it. Anyone can tell you I don't order people about. Everyone works when they like. I've hardly ever exerted authority over it internally at all. Partly as a result, the organization developed a kind of messy structurelessness where it wasn't clear who had power to do what and there was not much accountability for getting work done. The organization had become very inefficient, I wasn't exercising any oversight, and we were adrift. I did feel that it badly needed reorganizing. Our subscription numbers had not been doing well lately and I felt I needed to exert some control over the org to get it back on track, asking some people to leave and moving others to different positions. Unfortunately, I went about this in a horrible way that made people feel very disrespected, asking for a bunch of resignations at once and making people feel like I did not appreciate their work for the organization.
The charge made in the statement by staff is that I didn't want CA to be a worker cooperative. I think this is complicated, or at least that my motivations are somewhat explicable. A worker cooperative had been floated as one of the possible solutions to the structurelessness problem. I am not sure my position on this was defensible, it might have been deeply hypocritical and wrong and selfish, but I will at least explain how I felt. **Since starting CA, I have resisted making Current Affairs 'owned' by staff not because I want to own it myself but because I don't want it to be owned at all, I want it to operate as a not for profit institution that does not belong to particular people. ** ow, I don't want to be a workplace dictator, and I think nobody can say that before this I acted like one in my day-to-day work, but I do feel a strong sense of possession over the editorial vision and voice of the magazine, having co-founded it and worked at it the longest. I had been frustrated at what I saw as encroachments on my domain (editorial) by recently-hired business and admin staff. I had also been frustrated that people were in jobs that clearly weren't working. Plans that were discussed for making the organization more horizontal in its decision-making seemed like they would (1) make it impossible to fix the structurelessness problem and exacerbate the problem of lack of oversight/accountability/reporting structure (2) make it less and less possible for me to actually make the magazine what I think it can be. I felt that without making sure we had the right people in jobs, this was going to result in further disorganized chaos and slowly "bureaucratize" CA into oblivion. But I do not think I tried to fix that problem in the right way at all.
I have never ever tried to own CA or make a profit from it. This was not about money, or keeping people from getting their rightful share of the proceeds. I am not a capitalist, I do not expropriate surplus value. I have never taken more money for myself than anyone else on the full-time staff got, and want to do everything possible to ensure fair working conditions. What I did want was the ability to remain the executive director of the organization and be able to have staff report to me so as to make sure stuff was getting done. That may have been wrong. But that is how I felt.
I am open to believing that this cannot be justified. I can say where the feeling came from which is: for years I made the magazine basically alone in my living room, and I have felt like it is my baby and I know how to run it. It was hard to feel like I was slowly having my ability to run it my way taken away. I think that it's easy to talk about a belief in power sharing but when it comes down to actually sharing power over this thing I have poured my heart and soul into, it felt very very difficult to do. I found it easy to impose good working conditions and equal pay. Giving up control over running CA was a far harder thing for me to accept. This is a personal weakness that ran up against my principle.
I am sorry to all of you and to the staff of CA who did so much to make it what it is today. It's my sincere hope that CA makes it through this because I think we have much more great work to do in the future. I will try my very best to make sure this is done in accordance with sound leftist values. This was not that.
No, you see, I don't want Current Affairs to be owned by anyone at all! Like all the NGOs! We have to look to them to see working socialism...
I can't believe he actually typed that out.
He typed this out, read it, and then published it. Dude shouldn’t have fired all his editors.
Kinda feel like between Greenwald, NJR, and maybe others who I'm forgetting, we've really been learning the value of editors lately
Does a manager at McDonald's own the location because they can fire employees?
I'm not saying CA is a co-op; it's not. I'm pointing out the difference between ownership and management.
You can have management power without having an ownership stake, which appears to be the case here.
Are we really getting pedantic about a dunk?
They don't own the location, because that's not how franchises work, but they get to act like they have some ownership.
It's not pedantic -- there's a big difference between him doing this to protect his ownership interest (which doesn't exist in this case) and him doing it for some other reason. Hard to call him a capitalist when he doesn't own the business and is making what everyone else is making.
Weeellll.... he pretty much admitted that he viewed it as "his baby" . So I can assume there was some feelings of ownership and not wanting somebody else to take over. Sure, its not a "capitalist" thing 'cause he wasn't holding onto his stake as its owner for a money making reason but he was still viewing it as "his".
I get it, though. I've made things and handed them off to other people who then used them "wrong" or didn't use them at all and I felt pretty defensive about it. I just didn't have the ability to get angry and fire anybody who would have told me to not take it personally that the people I made tools for didn't want to use them or used them wrong.
You're right that he has that feeling of ownership, but how legitimate that feeling is depends on how much work he and others have put into the project. If you put five years into a project solo, then hire a person in January to contribute, it's hard to argue in February that they deserve as much of a stake in the project as you. If you work ~200 days per year on a project and a few other contributors work only a handful of days per year, it's again hard to argue that everyone deserves an equal stake. This shouldn't become an overly technical game of measuring everyone's precise contribution -- that's impossible in most cases, easily becomes wasteful, and can lead to people working the system instead of working the job -- but if some workers contribute a lot more than others, I don't think giving that first group a greater stake or greater say is non-socialist.
The other interesting question here is what to do if there's a real concern that handing a project off will kill it (which benefits no one). If some workers aren't contributing what they should already, at some point it doesn't make sense to put additional responsibility in their hands, because all that would do is crash the business.
He fucked up the resolution of all this, no doubt, but who had legitimate points in the underlying issue largely turns on who was doing how much work, and how well.
but how legitimate that feeling is
Yeah, but its feelings. They don't have to be rational to be legitimate. Then they go and help make people do things that might be seen as an over reaction, which complicates matters.
The other interesting question here is what to do if there’s a real concern that handing a project off will kill it (which benefits no one). If some workers aren’t contributing what they should already, at some point it doesn’t make sense to put additional responsibility in their hands, because all that would do is crash the business.
True, but it also kinda implies that Robinson might not have as much trust his employees as he could have if he thought that becoming a coop would keep him from being able to advocate for the workers keeping on task.
“i DoNt wAnT iT tO bE oWnEd aT aLL”
It should be owned by the fucking workers, you goddamn capitalist.
The more I think about it the less I feel NJR even matters that much to what's happening as a unique individual. It just seems that way because he's weird. What I think is happening is an early sign of the pitfalls of socialist views spreading among the upper class, the pmc or whatever you want to call it. You end up with people trying to launch labor movements from places that don't necessarily generate surplus value because the bourgeoisie are willing to subsidize projects to appear respectable and give their children something to do.
The ties to any kind of real need in society are so weak that people like NJR will make concessions, not really caring and giving the illusion of progress "Sure have a union!" because why not? It is all a game. Everyone gets equal pay, whatever. The meaningful exploitation has already happened so far upstream that we can simulate class conflict without consequence. The only red line was attacking the hobbyist nature of the thing itself. At which point he says "This is my toy I made to play with, go away" because of course.
I wondered about the $45/k a year thing. Makes complete sense if he's already well off and doesn't need the money.
This magazine gave meaning to his otherwise empty life...and if someone was about to take that away from him? You bet that's going to be met with all means at his disposal. Up to and including betraying his principles that he strongly believes everyone else should live by.
Speculating that the guy is independently well off is just making stuff up to justify what you already want to believe. It's saying "we have no evidence of this, but I think he sucks, and if this is true he definitely sucks." Tons of people work for a lot less than they could make because they're invested in what they do -- look at public defenders.
And speculative personal attacks -- "his otherwise empty life" -- is frankly a disgusting way to treat other leftists, even when they fuck up. Who wants to join a movement that invents a bunch of shit about you and rips you apart when you stumble? There are enough problems with divisiveness and splitting on the left; there's no reason to tolerate this.
It's not speculating. His family is rich. He went to Harvard and Yale.
You saying a mean who preaches socialism and then fires all his workers when they try to organize shouldn't be roasted in public? Really?
It's absolutely speculating. You don't know his family's finances and plenty of non-rich people go to Ivy League schools. But say his parents are rich and they paid for his tuition -- that doesn't mean they're writing him a blank check for whatever he does in life. You're making assumption after assumption to allow you to reach the conclusion you've already settled on.
You saying a mean who preaches socialism and then fires all his workers when they try to organize shouldn’t be roasted in public?
I didn't day anything like that, no. I said speculating about someone, and especially inventing stuff like "empty life" as a basis for personal attacks, is a shit way to criticize another leftist.
We literally know his family is wealthy and finances his magazine. He's a complete shitbird who deserves the complete load of shit he's getting. A socialist who believes strongly in socialism who fires his staff? It's like something the MAGA types would make up in a satire column.
Defending a shitbird just because he's "our tribe"? Failing to cast these hypocrites out just because they mouth platitudes is what's wrong with leftism.
Lol show me one shred of evidence that his family finances the magazine. You're pulling shit straight out of your ass -- textbook wrecker stuff.
It's distressing you find yourself defending a shitbird like this. Why's it so hard to denounce him? He's a wealthy piece of shit who had it on easy street his whole life, and his type will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
I'll spend a couple of days delving into financial documents to win an internet argument. I'll get back to you when I'm done.
Can you not even admit to yourself that you're making shit up? Holy shit get a grip
The bit about the push to restructure coming from new workers pricked my ears up a little. I see three options:
- NJR is being dishonest or ignorant in some way about the reality on the ground (always possible no matter who it is or what the situation). Exaggerating this fact would be a particularly good way at making him look justified without looking petty.
- New workers came in, saw the disheveled structure, and were less complacent than everyone else so pushed for a restructure. I think most new employees want to leave their mark, even if that means wood shedding a little. Given that it’s a socialist publication, insisting on an ideologically-consistent top-down restructure wouldn’t be out of character.
- These people were saboteurs coming in to disrupt an already shaky organization. Tbh if CA got salted by feds or by corporate goons, that’d be pretty funny but also very sad.
I think no matter what the explanation, NJR has acknowledged the root mistake, which is a lack of organization held together by a single person. Suddenly people lose trust in one person and the entire thing is at risk of falling apart? That’s incredibly fragile and prone to disruption whether it’s intended or not. (Also has he done no research into how coops operate on the ground? It’s not like they’re all completely flat orgs). Super irresponsible to insist on centralizing power and then to not use that power effectively.
All this said, as long as he’s not lying through his teeth, this seems like a real genuine and honest response. If I were those employees I’d be open to a long struggle session followed by a mutually agreed upon restructure of one sort or the other.
Long term writers and staff also supported the move to co-op. This isn't just new workers demanding it.
Yeah, it’s amazing how many of the standard boss lines for busting labor efforts he fell back on.
Super irresponsible to insist on centralizing power and then to not use that power effectively.
Completely agree, It’s egotistical and selfish. You have to trust the workers. A self-proclaimed socialist not doing this is really strange.
And if you have more than even just a couple workers who are so disengaged that they’re just not working, how do you not see that as a red flag for your own behavior as a manager?
And why the hell did the group as a whole not identify this and take steps to correct?
So this is a dispute about management control, not money or ownership. Calling him a capitalist makes little sense when he's taking home $45k and doesn't own the thing (and there's a big difference between being able to fire people and owning a business -- a manager at McDonald's can fire people but doesn't own shit).
He obviously fucked up the execution -- everything he said should have been on the table with the rest of the staff for months before anything came to a head -- but he has a point. You can't have a rudderless organization, especially in an industry that has firm deadlines and in a time when it's never been easier to do nothing for long stretches. You either need to pick someone to have some management power, or have some well-established collective decision making process. And yeah, he was the one who had the management power up to this point, and as such is the one most responsible for letting the organization become rudderless. But it can be extremely difficult to get your friends to do real work if they aren't already holding up their end.
I mean, what would you do if you put a lot of time and effort into a project, and you're working with some friends who haven't invested as much time and effort, and that's keeping the project from moving forward? Is the situation likely to improve if they have more control? There's a lot you can try that'd be far better than this, but there's no easy solution.
He's definitely not a good leader -- this situation would have looked a lot different otherwise. But it doesn't sound like he's fearful of losing power because he wants to be king of a magazine that pays everyone equally poorly. It sounds like he doesn't think the other people on staff are up to running it, which is pretty reasonable if they already aren't holding up their end.
My assumption is that he sees CA as a pet passion project and doesn’t want to relinquish control of his baby, which democratising would threaten if he’s a poor a leader as he seems to be.
Honestly that's pretty much exactly what he's saying. And I get it too. Unfortunately, when your passion project becomes other people's livelihoods it's gets troublesome.
And NJR also actively encouraged them to do this to begin with. The guy created a total mess.
That is his framing, but if we're going to read his story critically (as we should) then we have to read the other side critically as well. I see a lot of people taking the other side as the gospel truth but finding all sorts of places to be skeptical of this. That's not a good way of sorting through disputes.
I don't think it's about clout -- what clout is there to be had at CA in the first place? It looks closer to him being (or at least seeing himself as) more committed than anyone else and not trusting people he sees as less committed with a project he's put so much effort into.
I don't know. It's a small, divided community, and I'd say more people know of Briahna Joy Gray (a former CA contributor or editor) than him. Hell, most people here only "know" him because they like to rip on his clothes and voice (totally how we should treat other leftists, but that's a different discussion).
and I’d say more people know of Briahna Joy Gray (a former CA contributor or editor) than him.
...because she was Bernie's Campaign Press Secretary, not because of CA
That's the point. CA itself is not a big deal and BJG has more "clout" than NJR by doing non-CA stuff.
NJR had built up a decent amount of respect because of CA, much more so than other writers for the publication because he was the face of it. The example of BJG doesn't change that. Bernie's campaign isn't just some random stuff outside of CA , his 2 campaigns have been the impetus for a rebuilt left in America. So yeah, you get more clout in a notable role on his campaign than just about anywhere else. That doesn't disprove that NJR got a good amount of clout from building and running CA.
That is his framing, but if we’re going to read his story critically (as we should) then we have to read the other side critically as well. I see a lot of people taking the other side as the gospel truth but finding all sorts of places to be skeptical of this. That’s not a good way of sorting through disputes.
In a labor dispute there are 2 sides: the boss and the workers. I'm going to believe the workers every time, especially when they explicitly say the boss is lying, but you do you.
That's true in a capitalist enterprise, but this isn't a capitalist enterprise. The boss is doing as much actual work as anyone (and likely more) and getting paid the same low salary. No one is extracting surplus value from anyone else's labor.
That's what makes this so interesting: it's a case study of a workplace disagreement in a non-capitalist organization. You can't default to the easy answers in a typical workplace dispute because it's far from a typical workplace.
As long as he retained hiring and firing power, along with the editorial control that he had, then it was a capitalist enterprise. The equality of pay may lessen the surplus value extracted by the boss, but by maintaining those power dynamics his workers are still alienated from the product of their labor. They wanted a co-op model to have a much more democratic say over those processes, and when his control over that was materially threatened for the 1st time, beyond just saying it would be great to have workplace democracy!!, he lashed out and fired everyone.
This is a boss vs worker dispute. The equal pay doesn't change the power dynamics.
Actual co-ops have individuals with hiring and firing power, so that alone doesn't make a business a capitalist enterprise. The touchstone is whether someone is extracting surplus value from others' labor, and there's no evidence of that. He doesn't even own the business, and it's structured such that no owner can skim off whatever profits are generated (it's a not for profit).
Could it be more democratic? Absolutely. But there are degrees to this stuff, it's not just purely capitalist or socialist.
Actual co-ops have individuals with hiring and firing power
Who are democratically decided, sure. Even if it's true that there was no surplus value extracted it doesn't matter because the workers are still alienated from the product of their labor. When they attempted to have more democratic control over the process of making the magazine, they got fired. Sounds like a capitalist boss worried about losing control, to me.
He doesn’t even own the business, and it’s structured such that no owner can skim off whatever profits are generated (it’s a not for profit).
As someone who's worked in the non-profit sector, trust me when I say that this means basically nothing. These set-ups can often become even more exploitative because they're generally set up to do work that people consider "good," like organizing workers or fighting climate change. But regardless, the pay isn't the issue here. It's about power dynamics and how the boss reacted when the workers attempted to organize to change those power dynamics.
I agree it's not a co-op with democratic management, but that doesn't make it capitalist, necessarily. There are types of unfairness or inequality that don't amount to capitalism. To your point about how non-profits can be exploitative by taking advantage of people's enthusiasm to do "good" work, that's true, but I think "exploitative" only fits if you have a person doing the exploitation. If no one is reaping any benefit above $45k/year, it sounds like a group collectively deciding to prioritize the project over pay. It might not be the best decision for everyone, but it's not as if one person is depressing everyone else's wages to that one person's benefit. There are bad situations that don't amount to exploitation.
There are also some interesting questions here about how (or if) the amount of democratic input one gets should vary with their work contribution, and what should be done if workers don't appear to be willing or able to effectively mamage the workplace collectively. Say you're a bricklayer. You work ~200 days per year, and nine other bricklayers at the company each work 1 day per year. Does everyone get one vote? If the nine people with small contributions don't appear to be willing or able to manage the company, should they still get to? Whatever contribution discrepancy existed wasn't anywhere near this stark, but the example highlights some of the legitimate questions that could arise in a more realistic situation.
I mean, what would you do if you put a lot of time and effort into a project, and you’re working with some friends who haven’t invested as much time and effort, and that’s keeping the project from moving forward?
I’ve been in this situation many times. You sit down and have a frank conversation about your vision for he future and if/how they want to recommit or lower their contribution. It’s hard when money’s involved, but these are the sort of conversations it’s your responsibility to have and handle professionally as someone in a leadership role
I agree that this is the right approach, and that he's at fault for being in charge and not doing it. But it's also really hard to do, and as you point out, it only gets harder when money's involved.
It looks to me like he had good intentions and a reasonable position, but failed spectacularly at a very difficult management task. Obviously he deserves blame, but people are going way overboard.
Yeah it’s the internet. Most of us don’t know these people and can’t help them one way or the other. And most of us aren’t discussing the theoretical implications so much as talking shit, which is fun. Some funny lines getting thrown around. But regardless, I hope people who are organizing can take some notes and try to be proactive about preventing these types of breakdowns in their orgs. This was an unforced error and a reactionary one at that.
and there’s a big difference between being able to fire people and owning a business
This is true, but I note the cut off for many union memberships (especially the IWW) is firing authority.
He's management for sure. But there's a difference between a traditional management dispute and a dispute with a manager who does the same work as you (and possibly more of that work), who doesn't represent the interests of any capitalist owner, and who has some credibility if only through the fact that he's taking exactly the same low salary as you. This isn't squeezing anyone to generate higher profits, it seems like a legitimate disagreement about what's best for the future of a not for profit.
Yes, there's some difference. But extraction of surplus value maps on to extraction of surplus labour. And this brings in concerns about agency. NJR seems to still have a great deal of control where labour gets directed in the organisation, and from a socialist perspective, that's where I feel his acts become Bourgois in nature. The workers have demanded more democratic control of the distribution of their labour, and he has refused.
This is more the Bourgois ideology of the guild-master rather than the modern capitalist, but it still is one.
On control, which seems to be the heart of the issue, I think the other staff wants democratic control (reasonable) and NJR has doubts about their ability to handle that (reasonable if they actually aren't quite getting things done). If more stuff stops getting done and the business fails, that benefits no one.
The default should be trusting workers with the responsibility, but there are definitely workplaces where that would fall apart pretty fast. I think it comes down to how legitimate the concern about not getting things done is, and I don't think that's something we have enough information to adequately assess.
Yeah, I don't find his issues to be unreasonable, and potentially (since there's every chance he'd still have had even stronger editorial control if he'd worked things out) giving up control of something you started from scratch is really hard and bittersweet.
But his reaction, instead of collaboratively solving these issues (maybe a worker co-op wasn't the solution, maybe a worker co-op with a strict management hierarchy with only periodic recall was. Maybe some of his fellow senior members had the same issues he did) was to take what he saw as his ball and go home. He says that some roles weren't working out.
I've had those discussions in companies, I've stepped down from roles or transitioned to new ones after conversations with both management and the team about if a role was achieving a certain goal. It was a workspace, those things happen, it's not personal and if you take care of the team member and respect them it generally works out pretty well.
If a shitty shareholder run top-down corp can have cordial discussions about internal structural issues, a more horizontal company can and needs to be able to have them.
He definitely handled the situation in perhaps the worst possible way. Among other things, it shows that management ability is a real asset, an idea that's not popular in leftist spaces because so many managers are overpaid and are terrible at their jobs anyway. Sucks that a pretty good leftist magazine is very publicly in crisis, but at least there are some lessons to he learned.
100%. Not "taking sides" per se but I think it's important to note that NJR also produced like 500 articles last year - literally something like 70% of their content/production. My man fumbled the whole approach to this situation but if all things pay/ownership are equal as he says, I'd also tell the like Director of Subscriptions and web designer if they wanted some equal yet ultimately futile editorial control to fuck off
Nathan is a mewling, obsequious socialist, but in this sick leftist prism, he's Jeff Bezos.✊
Holy shit Glenn go outside
Outrage is good and noble when directed at major power centers engaged in injustice. That's too much work for them. They have no clue how to do that. So they funnel their frustration into petty HR office grievances against other leftists, then feel like they're revolutionaries.
From the guy who quit a cushy job because his editor dared to edit him.
God those replies. Knowledge is understanding that Frankenstein is the name of the doctor. Wisdom is understanding that no ones impressed if you rush to correct someone on it.
Wish these fucks would focus on his actual point, but instead he's now able to basically make it unchallenged because an opportunity to correct someone is impossible to resist for certain types.
Knowledge is understanding that Frankenstein is the name of the doctor. Wisdom is understanding that no ones impressed if you rush to correct someone on it.
Goddamn, that is a good one.
I’m prescribing everyone involved (including all of you) 50 cc’s of going outside. Touch grass dammit.
Became a little g g*mer. It's how I've survived this shit so far
Ironically, that’s probably up to the workers. Retaliation for trying to unionize is a major labor law violation. Protected concerted activities and whatnot
well i mean they werent trying to unionize they wanted to form a co-op, i think theyre already unionized. but his response of "im not the owner" "im not a capitalist" is just dumb seeing how he literally fired everyone, and who can really fire him? how is he not the owner if he gets these powers?
If they were already unionized, it’s really weird he retained power to fire all of them the minute they disagreed with him.
Yes all employees have the right to discus their conditions. Like I said above it’s called protected concerted activity
The dude let a lot of shit slide for way too long and it made the organization dysfunctional. When some employees recognized he wasn’t exercising his power responsibly they wanted to add in some formal structure. He either didn’t understand how coops work or didn’t care and pulled a reactionary “fuck you”. He admits the original dysfunction was a mistake, but the knee jerk reaction gets more of “I’m sorry it ended up this way” treatment
If all the writers want this, why can't they just make their own co-op without NJR? Bosses are just parasites that don't contribute anything, they just steal surplus value. So surely the creators of that surplus value can be just as successful organizing a co-op without the parasite.
The "everyone makes 45k a year" thing gives it away. There is no way the writing itself was supporting that.
According to wiki, they have approximately 6400 subscribers. They're bimonthly and the subscription starts at $40 for 6 issues. So that would put them at about $1 million in annual revenue. Idk how high the fixed costs were.
Current Affairs is print as well, right? That seems more expensive than a purely digital publication.
Yeah, it's full color too, they're probably barely breaking even.
Honestly, transitioning to a worker Co-op would probably have massively helped the magazine.
Print copy subscription is extra, but yeah CA and Jacobin both have hard copies. Honestly always seemed like a bizarre choice. Unless you're shipping enough copy to justify owning the equipment printing fees tend to be pretty high.
From the description it sounds like it was originally NJR doing it himself with no expectation of making a profit. Like the whole things sounds more like a hobbyist project than an actual self sustaining company.
Did some digging and seems so. Father worked at a corporate training firm. They were doing well enough for him to attend Yale and Harvard after getting his Bachelor's and Masters at Brandeis. I'm not sure he actually had any other job before current affairs.
They have some sort of subscription because he talks about cancellations in his statement
This all just came out today. Sounds like they might head that direction, I hope they do.
I also get if they want to try fighting for gaining ownership of CA, but the chance of any boss backtracking after this extreme a reaction is slim.
This is a horse shit excuse that nobody should buy. He didn't want to give up his kingdom and that's the end of it.
It seems like he wanted to expand and then realized he didn’t actually enjoy any of the work required to do that. It doesn’t sound like he particularly wants to run a company / co-op / etc. It especially doesn't look like he wants to have any employees.
That sounds like a co-op might be exactly what they need then, but I'm also just some stoner on the internet. I don't know how anyone could ever take him seriously as a leftist after this.
That’s the ridiculous thing about this. If he’d just talked to some co-op organizers he could have made an informed decision.
I don’t know how anyone could ever take him seriously as a leftist after this.
I won’t be.
This is somewhat unfair but considering how he talks about his accent, having moved to Florida at like age 5 from the uk and being angry enough to “keep it,” he’s clearly got some baggage and poor execution on handling things he doesn’t like.
He really was creating a whimsical infrastructure for left dissemination that I even had my lib friends send me ( no one ever shared a jacobin article). I genuinely want to believe he awkwarded this up being the little unMarxian weirdo he is. But part of taking responsibility for that fuckup is accepting the consequences and salvaging what you love about what you do, not you doing it. He needs to reinstate everyone no questions asked and resign if he cares at all about anything but his ego.
having moved to Florida at like age 5 from the uk and being angry enough to “keep it,”
Oh damn, who can blame him. What a massive downgrade.
I am going to buck the trend a bit and say this is not 'capitalism'. He is well within his rights to want to maintain an editorial direction for the paper. Under socialism you can still have products where 1 or a few people set the creative direction. The only difference is that people can join freely to help them (esp cuz survival won't be an object).
This is clearly a problem of the tyranny of structurelessness and the 'domination' anxiety anarchists and lib. Soc types feel while trying to deal with this. He could never be upfront about what vision he had cuz he thought doing so would be bad and then pretended he is making the paris commune in his mag. When the chicken's came home to roost he handled it extremely poorly.
People here should think about whether the editorial direction of a newspaper should be set like a pure co-op. Esp if it intends on maintaining a consistent political line. Do you want new employees suddenly being able to contest what is being published? An alternative model could be subscriber's co-op where a vote just functions as a vote of confidence. If it were affiliated with a party then it would be easier. A party could vote for the editorial board. Maybe in socialist socities local communities would vote for local editors and randos can make hobby mags in their free time. In any case editors would hold some creative power here and I am not sure if the democreatization should be within org or through readership or some proto-party type grp.
I am going to buck the trend a bit and say this is not ‘capitalism’.
It's tragic that an obviously true statement must be prefaced in this way.
Do better, you people.
Is the crux of the issue really whether NJR is "capitalist" or not? Isn't it that he has advocated repeatedly for workplace democracy, encouraged it at CA, and then fired everyone when the chips were down?
Also this dude thinks we'd be better off if Marx had never been born. NJR stans GTFO
Yes it's actually important for us to discern between things that are the result of capital and those which would exist independently.
NJR can eat shit, don't care about him, nice edit, good appeal to emotion, enjoy the easy upvotes!
If you're not defending him, I apologize. Just sick of people swarming out the woodwork to defend this dude whenever he shows his ass. I'm hoping this finally does him in for good
dude thinks we’d be better off if Marx had never been born
This really doesn't capture what he said. Part of the reason people pipe up when NJR gets shit on is that much of the criticism directed towards him is misleading or inaccurate. That's OK for dunking on chuds, but when someone's working in the right direction we owe them a little bit of good faith.
You can literally hear him say it right here: https://twitter.com/world_is_alive/status/1428083349147557891
🙄
Yes, he literally said those words. But what is the actual argument he makes? What is the reasoning he's giving? It's along the lines of "focusing on Marx has led leftists to spend inordinate amounts of time discussing concepts like Hegelian dialectics that sound inscrutable to ordinary people." Which is a completely fair point. I belive he's also pointed out how few other political movements (and scientific fields, as we want socialism to be scientific) place such an emphasis on the original works of a guy who's been dead over a century. The focus should be on the ideas and principles, and those advance over time as the world changes and we learn what does or doesn't work. Again, a completely fair point.
This is just how hot takes work. You say something big and bold and then put out your argument for why your counterintuitive position actually has some legs. Are we really going to ignore those substantive arguments and pretend we don't know what a hot take is? That's not very productive.
Ignoring the substance of what other leftists are saying to do pedantic internet owns will bring the revolution any day now; great stuff
People here should think about whether the editorial direction of a newspaper should be set like a pure co-op. Esp if it intends on maintaining a consistent political line. Do you want new employees suddenly being able to contest what is being published?
from libsoc perspective there are different ways of answering that, the throughline would be that whatever structure exists should be decided collectively. you may go for a rather horizontal structure where there's no editor per se or go for a clearly defined structure (how many editors, how they are elected, what powers they have exactly, what limits the editorial line should stay within, now many levels are there in between the editor(s) and the writers etc) but always decided collectively and also what are the mechanisms for addressing grievances and the actual power workers have (ie. a new start should have more limited voting rights, and how that is structured again should be decided by the collective, maybe the collective decides for the first 6 months a worker has only low impact voting rights and becomes full voting rights afterwards). sounds like nerd shit maybe and also I'm not saying the system would work perfectly. as I see things, it usually ends up being a fluid culture stemming from all the individuals working together than being set up by the rules you have set up at the beginning. as a libsoc my ideal is a structure that is very much designed to be challenged and changed so it never breaks but is always evolving as pressure builds.
Well then in this framework if he wanted a clear editorial line he would have been allowed to be explicit about it and pursued that. Also if you want a political line to be maintained that has to be done via some central control no? CA only had 5 employees I think and I would say the problem is that Nathan as an idealist mystified what he really wanted and just vaguely pointed to some egalitarian message which just impedes discussion. Having said that, he did promise them vague egalitarianism so if the employees wanted that then it is the logical conclusion of his actions.
Plus I don't agree that the writers should get to vote on editors necessarily. I use necessarily because if someone wants to do this feel free but I don't think it is a moral obligation or even 'socialism'. If a bunch of editors are setting the direction for the magazine they can negotiate between each other democratically but what gets published should be in their hands. This is essential to maintaining the creative direction I think (at least in many cases - not to say that someone else can't try something different). If you wrote one piece for the mag you should not necessarily get any say over the editorial decision, but this fact should be made clear to you of course.
A subscriber base voting for editorship makes more sense to me at least (or the other examples I mentioned - a party paper for instance seems simpler to tackle). Having ways of dealing with grievances is obviously good and you want ways in which writers if asked to write something are paid and not duped because the article wasn't up to snuff. I really think the 'collective' in this case needs to be defined more carefully and it is not implicit to me that this must include writers or it can't be just one or a handful of editors.
Iskra is an interesting case study. To my understanding it was run by a circle of editors (including Lenin I think) and it was used as the main organ of the Russian Social Democratic Party. Its point was to create some national theoretical line for the movement and disseminate it. When it came time to consolidate the party in a congress the logical thing to do would be to make this editorial board electable. But lo and behold a no of editors were unwilling to do that because their viewpoints were in the minority and they didn't want to let go as it would disrupt the 'continuity of the circle'. This is one of the many things which led to the Bolshevik-Mehshevik split I think (the Bolshevik's were calling for elections for the editorial board). Here it is easy to see that the paper being a party organ needs to subordinated to the party congress. I don't see CA to be that clear cut - the problem is not him refusing to make it a co-op but him being unclear on what he wanted and acting like an ass when shit hit the fan.
have you heard of platformism? this is when you set out some specific limits, and so the political lines would be held by that. everything is fair game to vote on collectively and if the time comes that enough workers want a different political line different from the platform they can band together and start a new platform (ie. found a new magazine or maybe a special edition), this could lead to the original platform eventually withering and dying or the daughter platform could forever remain a minoritarian thing. you can still work for both platforms you just need to comply with each platform's editorial line.
Plus I don’t agree that the writers should get to vote on editors necessarily
well whether the workers vote for their editors and what kind of power the editors have should be decided by the workers.
i don't really know the history of iskra either but sounds like they had more of a horizontal power structure than CA. Nathan was clearly not following through with his ideals. like it's nice and all you are paying yourself 45k same as all the workers, but who made that decision you or the workers? if he had set up some rules for how the collective ownership would work and what power structure CA would follow and a basic platform then there would have been proper channels for the workers to initiate a change of structure and for sure no single individual could ever fire everybody else. easier said than done of course.
have you heard of platformism? this is when you set out some specific limits, and so the political lines would be held by that. everything is fair game to vote on collectively and if the time comes that enough workers want a different political line different from the platform they can band together and start a new platform (ie. found a new magazine or maybe a special edition), this could lead to the original platform eventually withering and dying or the daughter platform could forever remain a minoritarian thing. you can still work for both platforms you just need to comply with each platform’s editorial line.
Isn't this how a party would function anyway? The little Lenin I have read makes me think this is how his party ran as well (well at least until the civil war at least). Anything suggested reading?
well whether the workers vote for their editors and what kind of power the editors have should be decided by the workers.
I don't agree with that. If I call my newspaper 'The Recluse times' and have an editorial team which curates and publishes stuff then suddenly the people I curated stuff from shouldn't get to change the editorial line. The point of the paper is to maintain some ideological coherency that can't come from the writers. Readership or some other affiliated org say if this is a party paper then the party votes for its editors (this will exclude non-member writers) makes a lot more sense to me. In any case clearly negotiating these terms is key. A writer's collective publishing something could function how you are proposing.
CA's case is clearly a problem of him promising them the kind of democracy you mention which may not have been the best fit for his creative vision. Workplace democracy is something we gotta figure out but there are a lot more variables and I would contend it is not at all clear that people who work in a place should have the complete and final say. For instance if we have two factories which produce things the other needs and also the wider society then we need a way as an entire society (not just the people who would end up working in some place) to come together and vote on allocating responsibilities which would but constraints on all of us. You will want to give some local control but there will be clear constraints because of global requirements which means we have to build a system to democratically negotiate those terms.
If you want ideological purity you should publish all by yourself. As soon as you call on others and engage their labour they should have a say just as valid as yours. You can define an editorial line that all involved workers agree to before engaging their labour. Platformism is an strategy for doing that.
You can define an editorial line that all involved workers agree to before engaging their labour.
I suppose we are in agreement then.
Okay Jesus, DO NOT READ the Facebook comments. Now I know why he's posted this on FB instead of on Twitter.
I would like to officially disassociate the well-dressed radicals of the 18th century from the man who can't tie a proper cravat knot.
So...I dunked pretty hard on NJR, but if this is right he was actually mostly correct and the other writers are being babies. Like, workers' co-ops also need management and structure in order to ensure basic things are getting done. Huawei is the most successful workers' co-op on earth, but Ren Zhengfei still gets to run the fucking thing. The Mondragon Corporation members elect their bosses and regulate wage differentials, but they still have to do the things their bosses tell them.
Nah, this is basically a confession to running an abusive workplace. NJR admits he's bad at running an organization, but demands the unilateral power to hire and fire and editorial control over the business. He wants to be a workplace dictator. Co-ops can have managers, sure, but co-op bosses are democratically decided on and are accountable to the workers. NJR demanded everyone be accountable to him and he be accountable to nobody.
NJR is a liar and an abusive manager, and leftists shouldn't fall for his narrative. His actions are not only antithetical to everything we organize for, they're arguably a labor law violation. Don't lose sight of the facts: he blew up his workplace because his workers asked for better conditions. That's the only thing that matters.
And I want to be clear I'm not saying this because I have an axe to grind with him. I literally have a stack of CA magazines on my nighttable and one just has to look into my post history to see I'm a huge fan of his work. But his statement should be read as a confession and little else.
It sounds like he has personally invested a lot of time into this magazine and doesnt think other workers with fewer responsibilities, who havent invested the same time or energy will care as much about it succeeding. Hell he might even feel responsible for the magazines success and in turn feel entitled to controlling the workplace based on his efforts. Its like how when you create a band thats lasted a few years and has has developed a following, you dont want to hand off creative control of the band to the roadies.
In other words, NJR is a fake fucking socialist.
But seriously all the writers should just fuck off and make their own co-op. Nathan doesnt have any means of production that they need and they are the ones that make the magazine run.
"Abusive" is totally unwarranted. How is a company that pays everyone equally, isn't enriching any ownership, and has an informal-to-the-point-of-ineffective management style abusive?
We don’t know if it’s “informal to the point of ineffective” - that’s just what the boss is saying to (conveniently) undermine worker organization. The business manager at CA has said the company was doing fine and was in no financial danger (https://twitter.com/ajthrillcox/status/1428133516009672707?s=21).
Just because there’s pay equity doesn’t absolve management at CA. Working conditions matter. It would be like defending an abuser by saying “well, think about all the types of abuse he’s not doing.” It’s cleverly disguised anti-worker propaganda, comrade.
I make the charge of abuse because the employees who were fired for organizing mention being humiliated in meetings and receiving scathing emails for the crime of organizing. The business manager has said as such here: https://twitter.com/ajthrillcox/status/1428043400960434176?s=21
The workers at CA are united in saying NJR is lying about the situation to undermine their attempts at improving working conditions. I don’t see a reason not to believe them.
If we're going to be skeptical of NJR's story, we should be skeptical of the other story, too. You could just as easily say that the rest of the staff omitting any mention of workplace disorganization suggests they weren't on the ball, or weren't adequately concerned about the problem. A company doesn't have to be in financial danger to not be getting stuff done. They were notorious for getting print issues out late, for instance.
Similarly, a claim of being humiliated at a meeting -- with no supporting details or corroboration -- should not be taken as absolute truth.
The workers at CA are united in saying NJR is lying
NJR is a worker, too. No one is making money off of anyone else's labor here, least of all the guy who produces the most content. This isn't a typical labor dispute. It sounds like he shit the bed from a management standpoint, but that doesn't make him automatically wrong on everything and the rest of the staff automatically right.
My best guess is that a lot of people weren't quite getting the job done, NJR failed at the extremely difficult task of telling one's friends that they need to step it up, and he balked when the folks already underperforming brought up the issue of taking on even more responsibility.
Sounds like there were some firings, some pressured registrations, and some unpressured resignations. And "boss" here doesn't mean what it usually does, because no one in this scenario is a capitalist. No one is making money off anyone else's labor, least of all the guy who seemingly works the most of the whole staff.
They’re generating revenue from subscriptions and that’s going somewhere. Plenty of businesses run at a loss the first couple years. There’s still capital being generated, even if it is only covering operational costs and salaries.
I’ve seen nothing to indicate NJR works more than the other workers of Current Affairs aside from NJRs claims, but maybe I missed something. I’m not going to trust anything said by a boss who just fired the majority of workers for organizing.
Regardless of that, should the person who works the most at a company deserve to control whether the other workers stay employed? That seems dysfunctional. How do you measure “works the most”? Is it time? Senority? Effort? How do you measure the value of different labour against each other?
NJR controls the LLC which owns Current Affairs and has power to fire and remove anyone who questions him. Current Affairs sells subscriptions and so is paid for the value of their labour. NJR controls the proceeds of those payments. NJR is against the workers employed by the LLC organizing.
NJR sounds like he’s practicing capitalism.
Capital is being generated, but that doesn't necessarily mean anyone is making money off anyone else's labor. They're all paid the same low salary. Not for profits specifically don't allow anyone to profit from ownership shares, either.
As for who works most, flip through the site and see who wrote the most articles. Especially early on, CA was basically NJR's blog with occasional contributors. Even now that there are a lot more authors, the guy's still the most regular and frequent.
should the person who works the most at a company deserve to control whether the other workers stay employed?
I don't think he was right to fire anyone. I think he should have handled this situation far differently. But ask a different version of that question: is the organization going to succeed if people who (supposedly) aren't great at getting work done are given more work and responsibility? That outcome doesn't look very promising, either.
Yeah, I guess the mass firing of people dependent on that job for income is what really rubs me the wrong way here. I’ve been on the other end of that and being retaliated against by a boss is terrible.
He fucked up big time, no argument there. It seems more like a failure to manage an extremely tough situation, though, and less like something greedy or egotistical. People are way too eager to shit on the guy, and have been for a long time.
The workers were fucking fired. For demanding a more equal workplace. The fuck are you on about? NJR wants you to believe that if he isn't personally in control, the magazine would fail. That's just not true. The workers can democratically elect, from amongst themselves, who they feel shall best lead the rest. The position can be alternated. The role can be distributed among different people, each focusing on what they can do. Not to mention, given that he was already the boss, which means he already had more experience, they probably would've just voted to keep him in charge!
If anything we’re seeing exactly what happens when he tries to personally control the magazine. He just demolished “his baby” within a day.
The workers don’t need him. They should leave, found their own co-op, and blacklist him. Their subscriber base is even ideologically sympathetic to backing the workers here.
Guarantee there’s a sympathetic comrade with access to their mailing list
Based on what I've read in CA, those workers with their own co-op will do substantially less quality work to less acclaim than NJR by himself, probably even with all of the fallout from this.
I dislike NJR for some of the fights he's chosen to pick, but I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that people in positions of artistic control don't want to be unseated by hacks. Communist orchestras would still have conductors, and the best conductor doesn't try to take the average of every musicians opinion on each section of the music.
Any organizational management should be democratically elected by the workers. It sounds like NJR thought he wasn’t going to win that vote or is so rabidly insecure that he didn’t have confidence that others viewed him as a good fit for the role.
Ironically, he went and proved them right.
Exactly! Like, a lot of long-term staff were personal friends. They all knew each other very well. They (probably) would've voted to keep NJR in charge because he has the most experience at that position. Like...this is a nothing "apology".
Of course it is, NJR wrote it. The hack has made a career out of eloquently saying nothing.
