A decent microcosm of my experience with the C4SS

I suppose, at its core, this is a labor story. If you’re looking for some sort of refutation of the politics of William Gillis, or of the C4SS, I’m afraid that you will be disappointed. This is a personal story, not a political one, though I’m sure that there are those who can and will find some sort of political meaning in it.

Until recently, I worked for the C4SS, though my pay was so small as to be purely symbolic — between $5 and $50 dollars a month, or so. All this for, at times, writing half of their content and editing the other half. When I slacked off on my efforts, people I knew commented to me that they thought that the C4SS was dying.

However, it isn’t really true that I worked for them for money. I saw it as essentially an internship — I was helping them out so that I could say that I was associated with them, for the byline, for the leg up towards better-paying positions, for the clout. It was a resume builder. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t genuinely like the institution, or that I didn’t have genuine loyalty to them — at least, at first. Still, I was under the impression that I was going to benefit from my labor, long-term. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted a fat Patreon, like William Gillis (he had ~$700 a month in his for most of the time I was writing, and I’m not certain where all of the support has gone. As of this writing, he has $165 a month) or Kevin Carson ($803 a month, as of this writing) had. Something that I could use to move out of the my parents’ place, or perhaps simply use to pay off my student loans. Something that could make my dream of being a paid writer come true.

It’s also not really true that I worked for the C4SS. I worked for William Gillis. The C4SS is not a non-hierarchical institution. It has an inner and outer circle — the coordinators, and the writers. Within that inner circle, William Gillis held sway. Almost nothing happened without his approval, and if it accidentally did, he would throw a tantrum and get his way. Informal, or pseudo-informal, power rules at the C4SS. In all my months of association with the C4SS, no one ever handed me a list of rules — though, it seemed, there were certainly rules that were being followed. I did my best to pick them up as I went along. One of the few formal rules I was ever explicitly informed of was that William Gillis, and William Gillis alone, has authority over whether or not someone is kicked out of the C4SS — his title of ‘Director’ intitles him to this power. I was never informed as to how someone might be replaced as Director, though I do know that it has happened.

My association with the C4SS started as follows:

However, I should note, I had been a reader of the C4SS for quite some time before this.

For those who hated my first essay (link to a copy— hopefully, they didn’t change anything in the version on their site. I didn’t catch it, if they did) and see my disassociation from the C4SS as some sort of victory, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news: I think (but cannot quite prove) that Gillis mostly kept me around for as long as he did because I agreed with him more than almost anyone else at the C4SS, and he liked that I was willing to say things that he thought but did not want to be seen saying — he could then reiterate those same ideas in softer terms, and be seen as the reasonable moderate offering a compromise. For example, he published Insurrection in Omelas less than a week after my initial essay. At the time, I saw it as a sign that Gillis and me were in conversation, and was delighted to be treated as such by my idol. At this remove, I think that I was just really dumb.

All that, of course, is unprovable. At the least, he certainly approved everything that I wrote for the C4SS — and, if he disliked anything I was saying, he had me change it.