Socialist Publication Current Affairs Fires Staff for Doing Socialism | Hacker News Reader

Socialist Publication Current Affairs Fires Staff for Doing Socialism

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44 pointselsewhen15 comments

One thing I do no not understand about free market extremism (no government intervention) is that governments are democratically elected organizations but private companies have power structures that one would normally associate with authoritarianism if they were governments. The very thing the "no government" idealists want to get away from.

In this case it's not free market extremism but still, the desire to stay in power and reduce accountability exists no matter the ideology.

I have some answers here although they are incomplete: The libertarians (anarcho capitalists) have specific ideas of consent that mean the government's use of force is non consensual but a private corporation's authority is consensual.

The point is you have an overarching government, a State, that you cannot escape easily from, and thus using that state to interfere in the lives of its citizens for any reason should be looked at with extreme caution. I would also view Command Control economies and their prerequisite governments, as a form of Extremism, in that it assumes whomever is in power has the ability to decide Better than the individual him/herself on matters. The realms controlled abound, it does not really matter, the point remains the same. It is far easier to create your own organization, or move to another, then to leave, say, the North Korea or Cuba. The same applies to past administrations such as the USSR, & West Germany. Command & Control economies & their governments are notoriously harder to leave than western democracies. So I find it amusing that some intellectual elitists do not reconcile the very obvious: most people want to be free, or as free as possible.

common business culture is bad if reinfree bcs only a minority of the workforce has effective bargaining power, the majority has to accept the reality or go homeless. i Consider unions an (obsolete) solution to these power dynamics

The difference is the consent of the governed.

I cannot refuse to consent to being governed by the State. Plenty of democratically elected governments have oppressed and abused their citizens.

I can refuse to exchange goods and services with a private entity, or refuse to work for them. I consent to the authority of my employer.

>I can refuse to exchange goods and services with a private entity, or refuse to work for them.

Not if they buy the road you live on to set up tolls, or buy your town, or make deals with the local death squads to be the sole suplier in your area, etc.

>make deals with the local death squads to be the sole suplier in your area

Mysteriously, all the major grocery chains in my area switched from Buitoni to Rana tortellini a few years ago. I don't like the latter and refuse to buy it.

I never thought of it being the death squads.

It is a good point that markets are always run by someone and are never free in the sense of ungoverned.

However, relationships with private entities tend to not be geographically exclusive in most cases. Whereas governments usually are.

I could move to another city or state, but unless I uproot myself, I'm stuck with one city, one county, one state, and one country.

There could be more competition, say, between Lowe's and Home Depot, but if I really want something and hypothetically they are colluding, I can probably find it somewhere locally, or online.

This might have been true in the past when corporations were more limited. However, as corporations grow, their power is becoming ad hoc equivalent to those of the state.

You will have even less consent to being governed when you're governed by corporation heads, who will be more and more like lords and barons from the middle ages.

So this can be a good opportunity for practical test. Let the workers and writers organize and create their own magazine. Use their own funds (or borrow from like minded investors) to execute their own vision.

yep, just snap your fingers and it's done.

This seems like the owner/EIC threw a temper tantrum when it seemed like he wouldn't retain all the power anymore.

Yup. This is specifically about Nathan Robinson disappearing up his own ass lately. He's advanced some truly bad opinions of late, and it's probably his worst nightmare to be forced defend those opinions against his own staff and to maybe be overruled or publish opposing opinions on his own site.

A lot of nominal "socialists" are the most traditional, patronizing, power-tripping, small-business tyrants when the rubber meets the road. The problem is that most socialisms don't have any concrete description of how a socialist workplace should actually operate, and nothing even approaching how one should work within a capitalist society.

He has always been a conservative's parody of a socialist- a rich fancy lad pretending to care about the workers.

I'm pretty sure most socialisms have a pretty good idea of how socialist workplaces should actually operate.

i mean, the fired/quitted Current Affairs staffers were trying to start a worker co-op.

does that not qualify as 'how a socialist workplace should actually operate'?

This is so karmically perfect.

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