>That extends to the leadership of the company. It seems structureless, or "democratic" organizations can only work if the will/resolve/capacity of the lowest common denominator is good enough, and there's a large pool of commonly-minded individuals.
It’s a chicken or the egg problem kind of problem. For all its talk about its love “freedom,” America is a deeply authoritarian and putative society.
The institutions that define much of our default “social scripts” (e.g. school, and later, work) are run like little dictatorships and their hierarchy and despotic bent come to define and permeate broader culture. Surrendering your “fundamental rights” (like freedom of speech and assembly), the moment you cross the threshold of your workplace leads to cognitive dissonance and a diminished belief in the truth of their “inalienable” status, both at work and in society at large.
The democratic participation of working class people in labor unions used to act as a check against this orientation, but as businesses interests have succeeded at undermining and destroying unions, businesses have filled the resulting power vacuum with even more authoritarianism, both in the workplace and in the outside politics they fund and support.
To change things, you’d have to do something like what Valve is attempting, but from the bottom up and at a more baseline level of culture and social arrangement.
> as businesses interests have succeeded at undermining and destroying unions
Unions largely have done that to themselves, as they organized into the same structures they purport to combat and act accordingly, with a capitalistic bend.
While this arguably might be true of some sectors (like the auto industry), the same cannot be said for unions like those of service workers, teachers, and those organized by the IWW.
And this narrative of course absolves business interests of things like how they used the red scare to attack union leadership, buying themselves judicial and favorable NLRB rulings, not to mention how curbed they are in their power relative to unions in Europe by the Taft-Hartley act:
TEACHERS? Teacher's Unions (as well as various other service workers...like the Department of Water and Power) are notorious. Their authoritarian and misappropriation has been the top story in California off-and-on for decades. This isn't to say that unions are a bad idea, but there's a direct correlation between union leadership corruption and 10th percentile income bases those unions derive from. They fail uniformly (over a long enough period of time) to prevent bad actors from subverting their purpose.
It’s a chicken or the egg problem kind of problem. For all its talk about its love “freedom,” America is a deeply authoritarian and putative society.
The institutions that define much of our default “social scripts” (e.g. school, and later, work) are run like little dictatorships and their hierarchy and despotic bent come to define and permeate broader culture. Surrendering your “fundamental rights” (like freedom of speech and assembly), the moment you cross the threshold of your workplace leads to cognitive dissonance and a diminished belief in the truth of their “inalienable” status, both at work and in society at large.
The democratic participation of working class people in labor unions used to act as a check against this orientation, but as businesses interests have succeeded at undermining and destroying unions, businesses have filled the resulting power vacuum with even more authoritarianism, both in the workplace and in the outside politics they fund and support.
To change things, you’d have to do something like what Valve is attempting, but from the bottom up and at a more baseline level of culture and social arrangement.