A group of employees at the far-left magazine Current Affairs are complaining that Editor-in-Chief Nathan J. Robinson has terminated their employment for attempting to organize a worker co-op at the organization.
Robinson, the author of Why You Should Be a Socialist, is accused of unilaterally firing several staff members for attempting, socialist style, to form a worker co-op — a type of company that is, more or less, controlled by its workers.
The five employees, including Business Manager Allegra Silcox, Editor Lyta Gold, Kate Christian, Aisling McCrea, and Cate Root, laid out their grievances in a statement which began with the salutation, “Dear Comrades.”
“On August 8th, editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson (author of Why You Should Be A Socialist) unilaterally fired most of the workforce to avoid an organizational restructuring that would limit his personal power. Yes, we were fired by the editor-in-chief of a socialist magazine for trying to start a worker co-op.“ (Emphasis in original.)
The statement goes on to describe an August 7 Zoom meeting during which Robinson reportedly became increasingly agitated as he learned about the workers’ plan to do what many socialists want to do — organize and take over the company to serve the collective good.
The statement claims that Robinson wrote individual letters to the five individuals in which he relayed to them that he had “irreparably lost faith” in them and their ability to work together as a group going forward.
Less than a day later, Robinson reportedly retracted those statements, but also claimed that “in his guts” he thought of the magazine as his creation and therefore felt like he should be the lone voice, and that he should be at the top of any hierarchy at the magazine.
“This organization has been heading slowly for some sort of reckoning where it was going to have to be made clear once and for all what kind of authority I wanted to have over it,” Robinson explained. “And I was in denial about the fact that the answer is I think I should be on top of the org chart, with everyone else selected by me and reporting to me. I let Current Affairs build up into a sort of egalitarian community of friends while knowing in my heart that I still thought of it as my project over which I should have control.”
Sounds like something a greedy capitalist might say.
The Current Affairs Board of Directors issued a statement of its own, denying that anyone was “fired,” technically, at least. The company’s Board of Directors did hint, however, that changes were coming to the magazine in one form or another.
“The staff of Current Affairs has not been fired,” the Board wrote. “Although Nathan Robinson demanded that some staff members resign, and stated to at least some individuals that their employment had ended, he did not have the authority under our organizational rules to fire people without cause or process.”
The Board did state some uncertainty about what exactly will happen to the magazine in the coming weeks. They also announced that the publication was on hiatus through September.
“The future of Current Affairs is uncertain after this period. What happens next depends on what the staff wish to do, what the organization can financially sustain, and what the Board can legally authorize.”
The “fired” employees were having none of that, however, and accused Robinson of being a hypocrite as well as a poor leader.
“We are sad, aghast, betrayed, and of course, angry to realize that this person we trusted has been lying to us for years,” the disgruntled employees stated.
“Nathan J. Robinson can write articles and give speeches, but when it comes to running an organization, he simply isn’t up to the task,” the five employees wrote.
The staff shared a portion of one of Robinson’s retraction e-mails, in which he, more or less, agrees with the employees’ assertions.
“I think you saw yesterday that ultimately I just felt Current Affairs slipping slowly away from me and I took an insane course of action to do what I thought would get it back,” Robinson reportedly wrote. “I am not good at running an organization. I freely admit this.”
Running a business is essentially anathema to a socialist — Robinson is finding that out the hard way. When the leader of a business promises employees that their voices will be heard, they expect that leader, in practice, to hear their voices.
What a shock to learn that a person so committed to foisting socialism on the rest of us is reluctant to engage in it himself.
