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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I suppose we are in agreement then.