Firing Your Boss

-
Many people's work environments--from factories to law firms--are deeply unpleasant and dehumanizing. This Australian pamphlet offers a variety of suggestions for changing the power dynamics in your workplace. It's all worth reading, though I have some reservations about the fairness of some of its proposals. The left-libertarian political economist Kevin Carson offers a spirited defense of even the more radical tactics for which it argues here (note that there's a good deal else in Carson's post, which forms an entire book chapter).

What do you think?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians for Redistribution

-
Libertarianism is a redistributive project. That’s another way in which radical market anarchism is rightly seen as part of the socialist tradition. Statists on both the left and the right favor the redistribution of wealth. Libertarians, by contrast, are often assumed to be dead-set against all varieties of redistribution. But it’s important to see that whether this is really the case or not depends on how we answer several questions: Agent : who effects the redistribution? Rationale : what justifies the redistribution? Means : how is the redistribution accomplished? Statist Redistribution For statists, the agent of redistribution is the state. The rationales for redistribution are primarily consequentialist —it’s seen as designed to bring about some favored end-state—though it may also be used to punish the putatively undeserving and to reward the arguably virtuous. The means ? The creation of monopolies, the enactment of regulations, the confiscation of proper...
Read more

Nicholas Lash (1934-2020)

-
I learned a few minutes ago that Nicholas Lash had died earlier today. Nicholas was a brilliant, incisive philosophical theologian who was by far the most formidable member of the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge during the time I was a PhD student. He was, as far as I'm aware, the first Catholic to hold a chair in the Faculty since the Reformation. (A laicized priest married to a former nun, he was not, like many people with similar profiles, an enemy of his church. He remained unapologetically and obviously Catholic.) Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and the holder not only of a PhD but also of an earned DD from the university, he was an elegant prose stylist whose work was rarely simple—he sought to remind us repeatedly of the complexity of thought, language, and the human situation—but always stimulating and insightful. He engaged with a broad range of topics and figures—from Newman (the subject of his dissertation and first book) to Marx to William Jame...
Read more

Socialism revisited

-
I'd like to try to tie together and expand my observations re. the great “socialist”/“capitalist” terminological debate that’s been proceeding at C4SS and AAE . “Socialism” as Genus; “State-Socialism” as Species I think there is good reason to use “socialism” to mean something like opposition to: bossism (that is to subordinative workplace hierarchy); and deprivation (that is, persistent, exclusionary poverty, whether resulting from state-capitalist depredation, private theft, disaster, accident, or other factors . “Socialism” in this sense is the genus; “state-socialism” is the (much-to-be-lamented) species. Indeed, using the “socialist” label provides the occasion for a clear distinction between the genus “socialism” and the species “state-socialism.” Thus, it offers a convenient opportunity to expose and critique the statist assumptions many people reflexively make (assumptions that make it all-too-easy for political theory to take as given the presupposition that its subject...
Read more