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.
"gives up ownership... can still fire people" :picard:
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?
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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.
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.
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.