question about anarchist employers

I mean a boss is a boss is a boss, dude.

An lefty/liberal boss might make your working environment better, but one can't fundamentally be an anarchist and an employer.

What do you do if you have a labor dispute with your "anarchist" boss?

I think it's entirely possible (mandatory, even) for a human, on one hand, to hold an idea about how the world should be and on the other hand, to act in a contradictory fashion, to whatever extent. It's called hypocrisy and we're all guilty of it, to some extent. Pretending otherwise is fantasy. We can't avoid it, we can be aware of it and attempt to minimise it.

Freedom Press describe themselves as a co-operative but there's not much more detail I could find. I'm sure someone else knows the details.

don't put out the rubbish. see how they like that.

Whilst I agree with Pikel that life forces us to be hypocrites quite often, you can't be a boss and an anarchist. For that to be the case anarchism would have to be a nice idea about how you'd like the world to be, not a movement rooted in our everyday lives.

There is a distinction between being an employer and being being the kind of boss I'm talking about though. For example, if you're a disabled person and you employ a personal assistant with your personal budget (state benefit) that's obviously fine. It's an economically exploitative relationship that's inconsistent with anarchism.

That's quite a nuanced view, which is a good thing, but it's a very fine line to draw, and I don't think you can demand that the line is always drawn exactly, because it's so difficult to measure. I mean, in your example, it doesn't take too much effort to imagine a case where the disabled employer is effectively extracting surplus value from the personal assistant. I just think it's silly not to judge individual cases on their merits, and it's silly to count beans.

I mean, if an anarchist bookshop is providing a useful resource to anarchists, this contribution is likely to outweigh anything but large economic imbalances between the effective employer and employees, but I would expect the employer to strive to minimise such imbalances.

EDIT:

Also, on your first paragraph, surely anarchism is a nice idea about how you'd like the world to be - theory - as well as a movement rooted in our everyday lives. Is that not what we call praxis? I'm not sure. But we do not with every waking breathe practise our anarchism. Sometimes it's more an idea and other times it's more action.

For instance, right now I find it quite difficult to put my theory into practise because I am largely "economically inactive" and more or less geographically/socially isolated (well it's not as extreme as that sounds but I have no local "milieu"). But I am thinking about ways to change that.

While I think co-ops have their own contradictions, attempts can be made to overcome them. That's not the case with an "anarchist" boss unless who turns his business into a co-op and all staff have equal power in decision making.

Then the business would be subject to the whims of those notoriously fickle "workers"! That road leads to anarchy, my friend.

But seriously, do you think you can take organisational structures from the post-revolutionary future and operate them in the pre-revolutionary present just like that, devoid of all the post-revolutionary communist context and overflowing with all the pre-revolutionary capitalist context?

NB I'm playing with ideas here, not stating my "position".

I think in the example I gave if the personal assistant started engaging in commodity production and had the surplus value extracted by the disabled employer they would no longer count as a personal assistant according to the meaning of the term in this context. Plus it would be illegal under the benefit rules. However, I take your point that there are bound to be blurry lines somewhere. I imagine for example that if a self employed person got some one in to help shift stock around every now and again, and payed them a fee for that, we'd not have a problem with it, but if it became something that happened one day a week and the stock shifter was partly dependent on that income, and the employer was making more from that day's work than the stock shifter, we'd start getting uncomfortable.

Maybe it's just me but I don't think that anarchism or the anarchist movement is a good thing in itself, and I've no particular interest in the advancement of thing that calls itself the anarchist movement in and of itself. The reason I (usually) call myself an anarchist is because I think anarchist communist ideas represent, by and large, the best way of thinking about combating the alienating and exploitative nature of capitalism. So capitalist economic relations are the problem, anarchist communism is my best guess at the solution. I don't want to replicate the problem in order to promote my favoured solution to it, if you see what I mean. I think in the example you give the employer could best strive to minimise the imbalances by turning the thing into a co-op and stop being an employer. Maybe there are some especially moral people who could be a 'good' employer, despite market pressures, there need to pay rent, and so on. And if there are fine. But then there's not really any reason for that sort of person not to turn things into a co-op anyway. The only reason I can see to keep on being an employer is to keep on holding power over the enterprise and the other people involved in it.

Having said all that, I don't care all that much about arguments over personal conduct, because I don't think anarchism ought to be about whether we conduct ourselves well, but should be the name we put to a particular tendency emerging from the workers' movement.

I don't think that not being economically active or being isolated from the 'scene' or whatever negates the idea that anarchism ought to start with our day to day experiences and work from there to build our analysis and aspirations. The experience of an employer is not the same as the experience of a worker. Anarchism is (at least in my understanding of the word) a tendency within the workers' movement, which is shorthand for 'the mode political expression of the working class' or something like that. Being economically inactive doesn't stop you being working class, neither does being politically isolated. Anarchism needs to emerge from a particular social force in order to have any power to actually transform the world. If anarchism were simply an idea about how we want the world to be we could write books envisioning every detail of it, but it'd have no real impact in the world because it'd have no basis in the existing social forces that make things happen.

Which is different from saying we all need to be living the anarchy 24/7. I agree that doing anything coherently anarchist is not something that can fill up our lives. Though having said that, for many of us much of our work life consists of finding ways round the impositions of our bosses, i.e. slacking off, which is base level communist praxis . But yeah, actual 'revolutionary' activity is something only a tiny number of people can spend a large amount of time on.

Pikel, I think you might have overlooked the first bit of my post about the contradictions of co-op (many of which I think you've highlighted very well in your post).

The discussion becomes difficult (for me anyway) when the text becomes so copious! I have a huge monitor in front of me, full of words. The effort involved in slicing and dicing posts seems as huge as the monitor. I think we must find a way to improve this, if only for my sake! I can't efficiently process the text. I'm going to trim a lot out.

It's probably not that relevant to the discussion, but commodity production is not the only route to surplus value. I could give examples but I'm sure you can come up with them yourself.

What does it mean, to "get uncomfortable"? When I recently bought some jumpers I was aware that the sales assistants were being exploited. I didn't do anything about it. They didn't look like they were enjoying themselves. I did feel a bit uncomfortable, but there have been many similar occasions when I've not been conscious of the exploitation and the only discomfort was on the soles of my feet When I bought a copy of Aufheben at Freedom Press in Whitechapel, the "sales assistant" there seemed quite happy. She may have been an exploited employee, I don't know definitively. I did not feel uncomfortable, aware as I was that she may have been the exploited party in a boss-worker relationship.

Edit: I'm aware the above paragraph is a bit aimless, but feel free to aim it at your notion that anarchism is not about conduct. What do we do with our discomfort other than allow it to inform our conduct? Anarchist discomfort surely leads to anarchist conduct.

I would agree that the movement in itself is not a "good thing" but that is surely self-evident. It would be best if the movement did not exist, because it did not need to exist. The movement serves a purpose, to replace exploitative conditions with non-exploitative conditions. So I would think of it as a "good movement". We surely have an interest in the advancement of a good movement!

Do you see co-operatives as having revolutionary potential?

I understand that anarchism is a "tendency" which emerges from the workers movement, as a matter of history. But that's purely descriptive. If we are to change things consciously, then not only do we have to describe what is, but we have to imagine something that could be and then we have to engage in the struggle for it. Surely that is about conduct and not naming?

I'm conscious of the pregnancy of words here. Class struggle leads to class consciousness leads to... what? I suspect you're going to take issue with the terms I have used, that's fine!

Edit: Just to clarify this last bit, I was tired and out of it when I wrote it. What I meant to say is, in the preceding paragraph, which starts "I understand", I have used the word "struggle" and "conscious" in their simple every day meanings and do not specifically mean class struggle or class conscious(ness).

I'm sorry I can't give your post as much effort as I gave to RedEd's, which came first and was huge!

I don't know what the contradictions of co-operatives are. I've worked at a nominal co-operative, it seemed culturally similar to a mutual that I've also worked at. But at the co-operative I was a contractor amongst many other contractors, and a bare handful of employees, so I don't think this is typical of the co-operative form, although I think it's instructive that the co-operative form is in no way immune to the forces which shape capitalist business.

Basically, yes. Even worker co-ops (as opposed to the Mondragon or Cooperative type co-ops) operate in a capitalist market. They do not have revolutionary potential (obviously outside of Argentinian situation of factory take-overs) and, to succeed, will either create a form of 'self-exploitation' or have to adopt more and more overtly capitalist tenancies and practices.

There's two or three really good articles about this on libcom, which I can dig up for you if you're interested.

Is the Co-Op chain actually supposed to be a co-operative? I thought it was just a coincidence; If you want to work at the one near mine, you need to do unpaid 5 hour shifts for a couple months but they even fully take you on.

Yeah, they actually came out of the workers movement as a way to offer pure food at a cheap cost to working class communities.

The building is owned by the friends of Freedom Press, while the bookshop/distro/publishing house is run by a separate Freedom Press collective.

In practice, decisions about employing people are made at a monthly all-members meeting, where membership criteria involves regular attendance at meetings and a direct role in keeping the place operating (so paid staff vote alongside unpaid). Certain individuals are also tasked with paying off things like bills, everyday expenses etc which are again overseen by the monthly meetings.

There's two people who are paid as ongoing full-timer roles (shop and publications layout), shop staff and the editor now get some payment where they didn't before but it's mostly a token thing as the general line is that they are volunteers getting a bit for their travel and trouble rather than employees.

By "yes", I presume you mean "yes, co-operatives are subject to the same shaping forces as capitalist businesses"?

If these are a small, easily identified subset of the ones tagged "co-operatives" then it might be helpful as there are 19 of those, ta!

Yes, but their employers are effectively the employees (ie. a workers' co-op), and the building wouldn't function otherwise.

There's some problems with how the group operates (which can be said of any group, as humans aren't perfect) but the structure is basically the only way it can be done atm, unless a dozen volunteers can be found who are willing to work full time for free (and tbh I'm not sure how that's "better" than self-exploitation through a workers' co-op format). The other option of course is to have no anarchist bookshop at all and nowhere for anyone to meet.

How can you expect a straight answer about anything meaningful? OK it's possible, but not from a forum where there are as many nuanced opinions as there are people. Well, maybe not that many.

Here's my straight answer. Yes there are "things wrong" with it but they're not that important.

Here you go Pikel:

http://libcom.org/library/co-ops-or-conflicts
http://libcom.org/library/co-operatives-all-together
http://libcom.org/library/participatory-society-or-libertarian-communism

cheers Chilli.

And at RedEd:

I haven't got round to thinking about this sentence, I know it's quite an important part of what you said though and I will think about it.

Why are you interested in the political flavours of your possible bosses? Take the job and do what you always should do: Work as less and worse as possible, expropriate as much things from your workplace as you can do, agitate your fellow workers. Do it and you will see how much difference it makes between an anarchist boss and any other one.

The problem with bosses is not whether they are more or less nice guys (or girls), whether they say they are an anarchist or share any other ideology. The problem with bosses is that they are bosses and thus are in command over a remarkable part of your life.

Any anarcho-syndicalist union I know for good reasons kicks off members, who change side by turning from a worker into a boss. Co-operatives are a different question. As long as everybody who works there is at the same time a member of the cooperative, this might be ok. But even with co-operatives. If they are buying waged labour, they cross the line.

So there are several things with workers co-ops, but I think they mostly boil down to a handful of points:

1. It is not a revolutionary form of workers organisation (Pikel I'm not sure if it's the one being recommended, but this was covered quite a lot by http://libcom.org/library/co-ops-or-conflicts). Not being revolutionary doesn't make it automatically bad (except for the case when people who are in a co-op claim that it's revolutionary simply because of that fact).

2. Workers co-ops have to self-exploit (this is somewhat the same position that someone who's a self-employed sole trader is in except it is collective self-exploitation and they might be doing different kinds of work).

3. Some workers co-ops will also be small proprietors (for example a shop, publisher or cafe might have capital invested, a web collective like rise-up won't necessarily (although it might)). There's various levels of this.

4. Some workers co-ops hire staff who are not members of the co-op. Again there are various levels of this. Paying an accountant (which could be a separate company so not really an employee anyway depending on the setup) once a year vs. a permanent employee etc.

So with Freedom, it sounds like there is a workers co-op which has paid/unpaid/full-time and part-time members, that is not employing people outside the co-op? That's not entirely clear to me if that's the case or not though.

I think this is a fairly popular line here. When I first started out in the world of work I was quite the opposite, I worked hard and to be honest I enjoyed it as I was pretty good at it despite having little formal training.

Later on in life, fairly recently, and as I was discovering my own libertarian communist beliefs (not so much through class struggle but just through observation of the world of work and my own and my fellow workers' exploitation) I found I no longer cared about working hard and doing my best and did start working less and agitating for people to fight mandatory overtime and such like. Now and again pieces of work which were particularly interesting would come along which I couldn't help but put more effort into but by and large the opposite.

But I've worked all my life doing IT in financial services. When I started out working I was involved in the technical details and only later did I become more aware that the role I played was purely an enabler in the capitalist system, not actually doing anyone any good.

Recently I've been considering a career change as I can't bear to spend my life doing this. So, I think naturally, I've thought about work which is tangibly useful to people. I'm thinking about nursing specifically.

Now, as a nurse I would have real problems following through this anarchist plan of working less and at lower levels of quality. I would want to provide good care to people that need it.

Can I not be an anarchist and a (good) nurse?

On another level, when I get work done on my house, like getting the roof and guttering repaired after a heavy winter, I want it done properly! I don't want the roofer coming along and doing as little work as possible, as shoddily as possible. I don't want the roofer to be exploited, I just want my fucking roof fixed properly! Does this make me reactionary?

I don't think there's necessarily a requirement to do a half-assed job - the abolition of work is an injunction against the capitalist hegemony over life, not against the things we need to do to make life better and more worthwhile. Personally, I quite like the idea of doing something well but doing it slowly and carefully - ie. the way I would expect to do it in a communist society.

In practice, a lot of people already do this - most people in offices for example work at maximum 50% capacity, thus ensuring more jobs for all, but are usually careful not fuck up what is done as that gets them in trouble where having a norm of a certain speed of working doesn't.

I can absolutely agree with the sentiment that jobs should be done properly even if they take a bit of time, I've seen so many rushed jobs that turn into shit and a headache.

But to steer back to my practical here and now example, if as a nurse I find I have ten patients to attend to and it will take two hours to do carefully and slowly, but I knock off in one hour, and I'm not a cunt so I do not want to saddle my shift replacement with an extra hours work, what do I do?

I can either work an extra hour or I can work quickly (and carefully!). Or I can work slowly and carefully then go home at home time leaving five patients untreated.

Is this reactionary? (to not want to leave five patients untreated).

Bearing in mind all the time I can be moaning at the boss, even shouting at the boss, for the extra work I am having to put in. I can be filing reports saying that nurses are overworked due to understaffing and that the patients' care is being put at risk. And I can be refusing to do work which is not directly related to the care of patients.

+1. i don't think i'll ever enjoy developing software as much as i did when i was a low-paid education worker doing it for the sheer joy. at some point that turned into an IT career and gradually, methodically, that enthusiasm was harnessed and exploited until all the joy was completely gone. (diddums, i know...at least the pay is decent).

My mum was working in insurance when she had a self proclaimed anarchist boss. But she reckons he just used to sit at the end of bars, listening in on other people's conversations. And this one time he pointed out to her that he was going to go support the busdrivers picket and pointed to a group of people saying "there's the lads now". But it was just the bus queue.

That's my rather nuanced opinion of anarchist bosses anyhow...