There's No Justice Without Power
A rich guy's lesson for the left.
Nick Denton is the richest person I’ve ever known well. He founded Gawker Media, and, at least at one point, had a nine-figure net worth. I worked with him there for eight years, including a bizarre year when he was my direct editor. I wasn’t friends with him socially, but I spent enough time with him and went to enough parties in his loft to come to a sort of understanding of him.
The sort of understanding of him I had was: I did not understand him. In fact there is no one I have known for that long who I understand less. I never understood the slang he used, the cultural references he made, or the obsessions he frequently developed. He has a strong British accent, which meant I could only catch around three of every four words he used, as a baseline. I recall multiple lunches with him at restaurants in Soho where we sat and talked back and forth, ostensibly about a shared topic, and at the end my takeaway was, “What was that guy talking about?” I can only assume that he thought the same about me.
If you asked me to describe Nick’s politics, I wouldn’t say they were “right wing” so much as they were “what some obscure British lord who exclusively reads things that you have never read, and does drugs, might think about the affairs of people in a foreign country.” He certainly wasn’t left wing, but neither was his position on any given subject easy to predict. Trying to have what you might think of as a “normal” political conversation with Nick would be kind of like traveling to Nepal and renting a guide and a donkey to take you up to the highest and most remote mountain village there and finding the oldest person in that isolated village and then trying to have a conversation with them about who will win the NBA playoffs. Probably not worth the effort.
For as long as I have known Nick he has been almost completely inscrutable to me, and kind of a lunatic. His greatest quality is that—despite all of that, and despite being a wealthy media mini-mogul with all types of personal and professional connections to maintain—he hired and employed, for more than a decade, all of the great writers at Gawker Media who mercilessly made fun of his peers, and sometimes of him. Many of the writers who worked at Gawker have gone on to be some of the sharpest political and social commentators in America. And do you know how many of them shared Nick Denton’s politics? None of them! Zero! They were all a bunch of commies, because they were smart! And yet Nick gave them all jobs, because he actually believed all the stuff he said about Letting Writers Tell The Whole Truth—not without limits, but more than any other media boss I have ever seen in this country. In the long run, that unique quality that he had of being able to build a bastion of editorial freedom rather than just a mouthpiece for his own beliefs will constitute a much more meaningful legacy than any of the crazy beliefs he happens to have.
Nick is back in the news, momentarily, because he has decided to start tweeting things again and also giving various press interviews about how he has decided to sell his big apartment and leave America. When you read all of the stuff he says in these interviews—particularly if you are not well acquainted with his mysterious nature—you may be tempted to respond in ways such as, “Why would he say Peter Thiel, who sued Gawker Media out of business, is smart?” or “Why is he obsessed with Denmark and random Chinese car companies?” or “Why is he raving about being an ‘Atlanticist,’ and what does that mean?” Let me emphasize again: I don’t know. Still no idea where his fountain of unpredictable Europe-tinged opinions emerge from. Try to unlock that mystery at your own peril.
In the spirit of using Nick as a peephole into the minds of the rich, however, I do want to focus in on one thing that he said in his interview with New York Magazine. While going on about Silicon Valley, and its power, and how the most incisive critics of that power are actually Silicon Valley moguls themselves, he said: “I guess the left is a complete distraction. They’re so easily dismissed. They know nothing, and they come at it with so many prejudices that they can’t see anything clearly at all.”
As a person on the left who rarely chats with megabillionaire tech guys, I find this to be a valuable comment. In fact, in a broad sense, I actually agree with Nick. (Declaring that you agree with some weirdo that people would assume to be your enemy is a classic Gawker rhetorical move.) The left, as it is currently constituted in America, is easily dismissed by rich and powerful people. The sort of people who wield the biggest fortunes and control the biggest companies and have the most influence are just not very worried about us. They don’t have to be. That is a problem—for the left, yes, but also for humanity, which the left is trying to defend.
I am going to generalize a bit here, but in a way that I think is fair: The left tends to think a lot about justice, but less about power. We are adept at figuring out what is just and unjust, how and why the oppression happens, what a better world would look like. We are able to produce detailed policy prescriptions that would, if enacted, remedy many of the world’s wrongs. We raise our voices in the streets—or, hello, write brilliant essays—about why these things should happen. But they do not happen. All of the effort we expend on polishing and promoting a program of justice does not accomplish anything if that program is not accompanied by the power to make it a reality.
The two most direct forms of power are money and guns. If you have a lot of money, you can pay people to do what you want. If you have a lot of guns, you can force people to do what you want. The left, in America, has neither the money nor the guns. Leftists do not tend to spend their lives running hedge funds or developing missile programs. We regard those things as manifestations of injustice. And indeed they are! I am not advocating that the left deploy a legion of young people to go into private equity and weapons manufacturing. I am saying that it is incumbent on all of us who want to change the world to ask ourselves: “If our power is not money, and it is not violence, what is it?”
Typically the left’s answers to this are “protests” and “political advocacy” and “persuasion in all of its forms.” These are all great and valid techniques. But a quick glance at the state of the world tells us that they are insufficient for balancing out the power on the other side of the equation from us, which consists of all the billionaires and all the corporations and all the guns. Is there a form of direct power that we can wield, that will be effective in this radically skewed battle? Yes. It is organized labor power. That is it, my friends. That is the left’s power vector. That is where our focus needs to be.
What makes the power of organized labor any better or stronger or more important to highlight than protests or politicking or persuasion? Simply this: Organized labor, which creates the ability of workers to collectively strike to withhold their labor, is a form of direct power. It does not rely on persuasion. It does not ask those who already hold power to do something on our behalf. It is power. It shuts things down directly, because all enterprises—warmongering and oppression included—require labor. If we are able to withdraw that labor, those enterprises stop. The people with all of the money cannot make their money without labor. In this, the power of organized labor stands apart from the other ways that the left typically tries to enact our will. A strike is not a request; it is a physical fact of the world. It is a roadblock to the other side’s will. It is the strongest move that we have.
Labor organizing that creates the ability of working people to strike is the only threat that the left can make that is on par with money and guns. It is our hammer. It is our most powerful tool. The power of the strike is not useful only in service of “better labor rights.” It is a power that can be applied to any cause. If you can strike, you can stop the enterprises that do anything. You can strike to stop a polluting factory, you can strike to stop a weapons manufacturing factory, you can strike to stop a Silicon Valley privacy destruction company, you can strike to stop a bank. Furthermore, you can use a strike as leverage to make any sort of demands, and be assured that those demands are not simply a misbranded effort at persuasion, but rather a demand that is accompanied by a clear and meaningful consequence if it is not met. Money buys labor. Guns compel labor. The power of the strike stops labor. It is the only equal of the power of money and guns. It is the one form of hard power available to regular people who don’t own all of the money and guns. Our power is that the world can’t run without us.
This basic fact is why I believe and write with nauseating frequency that we must focus on building the strength of organized labor if we want to change the power imbalance in America. I know that many people on the left think, “I care most about the environment/ democracy/ women’s rights/ racism etc. Labor rights is not my personal pet cause, and therefore I don’t need to spend my time focusing on it.” This misapprehends the situation we face. Building organized labor power is the key that opens all of those other doors to justice, because it is the form of power that enables us to sit at the table with billionaires, as equals. The forces that we are fighting against need precisely one thing from us: our labor. Other than that, they could give a fuck if we die. In fact, they would prefer it, in many cases. Appealing to their intellect, or their conscience, therefore delivers paltry results. We need to be able to meet the power of capital and guns with our own power. That power is organized labor. If you are of the left, embrace the idea that every time you ask oppressors to change their ways, your request should also be accompanied by a form of power that they will care about.
At Gawker, we wrote a shitload of essays about the ways that we thought the world should be different. A lot of them were good. They were not a waste of time. They had value. But when we wanted to change our own situation—when we wanted to sit at the table with Nick Denton and negotiate as equals—we formed a union. Let’s not let ourselves be, as Nick put it, “so easily dismissed.” For every workplace, a union. For every demand, a consequence. For every billionaire, a strike. This is the way. Not only justice—also power.
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Related reading: It’s Not Looking Great; Incuriosity, Inc.; The Hammer, Not the Handshake. If you want to read more about Nick Denton, our friend Tom Scocca also wrote about him on his own excellent site.
Begin trudging the road to power by organizing your own workplace and joining the labor movement. For help, contact EWOC, or the AFL-CIO. If all else fails, email me and I will help you. If you want to learn more about why the labor movement is the key to this whole motherfucking situation we’re in, see my book “The Hammer,” available for order wherever books are sold.
Nick, let’s have coffee before you move to Hungary! Long time no see man.
Hamilton, this fact that organized labor is viewed as a threat to the uber rich explains in part their investing in AI and robotics don’t you think?
Didn't realize you were from Gawker, it makes sense though because I adored that site more than anyone living in Louisville, KY could be anticipated to love it. I also think that much of our current nightmare has been less surprising (not less awful, more drawn out though) to people who watched what happened to Gawker and how it was orchestrated. Thiel's training wheels, so to speak. I have been thinking a lot lately about guns and violence and how the people that abhor violence are going to have to decide if violence is ever justified. Your arguments about harnessing the potential of labor are spot on. Even if every worker in every industry in every state became organized it feels like violence is still a possibility coming from the current "leaders". I don't want violence but it seems unwise to refuse to consider categorically since what I want, what many of us want, is absolutely not being factored into Thiel's/Musk's/Trump's plans for the country.