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.
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.