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.
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.
This is a great read on the situation and makes a lot of sense.
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.
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.
Oh so you have none. Fuck off, wrecker.
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
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