The Dialectic of Tolerance

By Bryant William Sculos

Until the Right-and liberals-are going to defend the free speech rights of everyone, until they are going to put themselves on the line to promote solidaristic tolerance of others whom they "disagree with," they do not deserve to utter the words free speech, tolerance, or persecution (but sure, they have "the right to"). And the Left must continue to refuse to let them get away with it.

We cannot be afraid of being perceived as intolerant. We are intolerant. We do not tolerate hatred. We do not tolerate repression or oppression. We do not tolerate bigotry, racism, or cisheterosexism. We are also aware that letting any government or unaccountable body like a university board of trustees-never mind obscenely corrupt, undemocratic ones-determine what is tolerable and what is not, is extremely problematic-and as of now must also be resisted. It is a tight rope to walk, but it is one we must walk.

This is the internal contradictory nature of universal tolerance. It is impossible to defend universal, emancipatory tolerance without asserting directly that whatsoever undermines tolerance must not be tolerates. What form this intolerance takes should and must be democratically debated and contested.

Counterrevolutionary (In)Tolerance

I am not talking about legality here though. I am talking about the relationship between the principles of free speech and tolerance, which should (and are) central to any notion of socialism from below, and the contemporary reactionary practices covered in the so-called debates around free speech and tolerance in the US (and somewhat in the UK and Europe, specifically around the "no-platform" policies pursued in many universities).

Defending a white supremacist's right to speak at a university while decrying protesters of that speech is a hypocrisy so ripe that it is literally rotten. That is, it is no defense of tolerance nor is it a defense of free speech. It is a reactionary silencing portrayed as a neutral defense of freedom and toleration. "Of course I don't agree with the white supremacist, but those protesters are hypocritical and violating the free speech of others. The protesters are the ones being intolerant of views they disagree with!" Then when controversial professors on the left are targeted for their speech, surely the outrage is the same, right? Right? Righ....Wrong.

Protesting is a form of free speech. Opposing intolerance is rooted in tolerance. In fact, tolerance would be incomprehensible without this element. Actively battling against the comprehensively intolerable, actions and kinds of speech that directly threaten vulnerable peoples' lives, is a virtuous, solidaristic defense of freedom. Openly advocating exclusionary, bigoted politics and repressive structural (and inevitably direct) violence might be legal, but it is certainly not any kind of freedom worthy of the name, and it is certainly not something worthy of toleration-at least so long as those who are targets of such speech are not guaranteed the right to openly oppose that exclusionary bigotry and violence-advocacy.

This is what my co-author Prof. Sean Noah Walsh and I were getting at in our 2016 New Political Science article "The Counterrevolutionary Campus" applying philosopher and social critic Herbert Marcuse's concepts of repressive tolerance and liberating tolerance to the student protest movements (primarily on college campuses and associated with Black Lives Matter and Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Against Israel [BDS]). [1]

Here, put very simply, we argued that right-wing claims of having had their right to free speech violated or that they are experiencing intolerance at the hands of activists who were organizing and protesting against intolerance, exclusion, inequality, and oppression, were not actually attempting to defend the principles of free speech and tolerance. The counterrevolutionary Right was deploying these claims to silence those they didn't want to hear from, those whom they want(ed) society to remain intolerant of. We argued that Marcuse was right in the 60s and his argument is still applicable today: the most prominent arguments about free speech and tolerance, predominantly by the Right, are exemplary forms of repression and oppression-not freedom.

In his March 2016 National Review article, Fred Bauer took umbrage with our argument, which he seemingly willfully misinterpreted (as he has done of Marcuse's work in the past) in his article condemning the Middlebury College protests against racist pseudo-intellectual Charles Murray. Bauer writes:

"Sculos and Walsh try to discount the anti-liberal implications of this viewpoint by arguing that Marcuse here is calling for the repression only of 'those thoughts and words that promote destruction, bigotry, racism and deprivation. Any science repressed is that which is geared toward developing technologies of war, environmental catastrophe and human exploitation.' However, Marcuse's criteria for repression may be far broader, and far more open to abuse, than Sculos and Walsh might think. After all, the question of which 'thoughts and words' really promote 'destruction, bigotry, racism and deprivation' is itself a topic for debate."

Bauer is not wrong that there are certain aspects of discussions about free speech and tolerance that are genuinely up for debate, but just because there is some room for debate does not mean that all sides of the debate are equally viable or worth seriously considering. Furthermore, Bauer refuses to take the central aspect of our argument seriously: that the Right deploys free speech and tolerance claims in order to silence those groups who are most often targeted by their vitriol and discriminatory policy agenda; that they have very little interest in defending the free speech of those they disagree with.

The beauty of Marcuse's work on repressive tolerance [2], that those like Bauer so often overlook or perhaps just politically disagree with, is its admittedly controversial conclusion that in situations where 'tolerance' produces more intolerance, we need a new notion of tolerance that refuses to tolerate the silencing of systematically oppressed peoples and views.

It is not a neutral conception of tolerance at all, and even a superficial reading of Mill's On Liberty actually supports our position (and Marcuse's). Mill's liberal understanding of tolerance is justified based on the results of tolerance--that in tolerating all view points the more tolerant views will eventually win, and society will progress. In our and Marcuse's evaluation, that progress is not occurring, and therefore the notion of tolerance lacks a coherent justification-under these specific circumstances. To put it very simply, we are defending a position that says: We value tolerance, and until society is systematically tolerant, we need a different conception of tolerance in-place that prevents the spread-and dominance-of intolerant ideas.

It is not, as Bauer suggests, that I am unaware of the potential for abuse of this position by so-called "mandarins" (and if such abuse occurred, I would be among the first to speak out against it), but instead I am willing to risk the abuse of our position, in principle, to argue against the existing abuse by the Right of the liberal notion of tolerance-seemingly deployed only when it supports their desire to defend their own intolerance. The abuse of tolerance (by the Right) is already occurring, so, there is not much in the application of the liberal position to defend at the moment (besides Mill's initial argument that tolerance should serve Progress-which, it is worth noting, led him to defend socialism towards the end of his life).[3]

Towards a Socialist Tolerance

Again, legal interpretations aside, we must look at the hypocrisy of claiming to defend free speech and tolerance while actively defending the rights and freedoms of those who want more and greater exclusion and repression in our world. We must be willing to accept the very real possibility that hypocritical defenses of free speech and tolerance are actually more dangerous to these concepts and the oppressed peoples these principles are supposed to protect, than a curtailment of the "freedoms" of others that are called precisely that.

It is not just the Right that has a problem with Marcuse's approach to tolerance though. Renowned socialist Hal Draper, writing in 1968 for the Independent Socialist, excoriated Marcuse's supposed anti-democratic elitism, imploring the radical left to avoid following Marcuse's guidance:

"Revolutionary socialists…want to push to the limit all the presuppositions and practices of the fullest democratic involvement of the greatest mass of people. To the limit: that is, all the way. No progressive social transformation is possible except insofar as the largest mass of plain people from way below in society start moving. And this movement both requires, and also helps to bring about, the fullest opening-up of society to democratic controls from below not their further restriction. It means the breaking up of anti-democratic limitations and restrictions. It means the greater unleashing of new initiatives from below. In other words, it means the exact opposite of Marcuseism." [4]

Draper's point here is only wrong insofar as he perceived that Marcuse would have fundamentally disagreed with him. Against Draper's suggestion that Marcuse desired some kind of elitist group to determine what should be tolerable and what should not be, Marcuse states quite clearly that he has little faith that there is an existing institution or coterie that could do so effectively, justly, and democratically. [5] This takes nothing away from his point about the general tendency of demands for tolerance and free speech to be deployed in defense of intolerable, counterrevolutionary positions-and the importance for the Left to take this reality seriously.

My goal here is not mainly to defend Marcuse from misreadings, but instead to mobilize the core of his argument for what I perceive to be its original purpose and contemporary value: we must comprehensively refuse to concede ground to the right-wing establishment when it comes to defending the best versions of free speech and democratic tolerance. We must be clear-eyed, nuanced realists whilst also promoting a radically reimagined future for ourselves and future generations. Idealist notions of the purity of free speech and tolerance have yet to provide an adequate basis for radical Left politics, and there is little reason to think this is going to change anytime soon.

What I am not advocating here is that the Left abandon its defense of free speech or tolerance. In fact, I am arguing the opposite. However, history has shown us often enough that liberal and right-wing defenses of free speech and tolerance effectively protect the most reactionary forces in our societies, not the people who are fighting to overcome those forces. The Left needs to be strategically clearer and more open about this fact in order to insulate the principles of freedom of speech and tolerance from their abusers. In other words, the Left must aggressively defend democratized, emancipatory conceptions of tolerance and free speech-before these ideas have lost all practical meaning.

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow at The Amherst Program in Critical Theory, adjunct professor at Florida International University, contributing writer for the Hampton Institute, and Politics of Culture section editor for Class, Race and Corporate Power.

Notes

[1] B.W. Sculos & S.N. Walsh, "The Counterrevolution Campus: Herbert Marcuse and the Suppression of Student Protest Movements," New Political Science (Dec. 2016), pp. 516-532.

[2] Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, and Herbert Marcuse (eds),A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

[3] See John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, pp. 1-115 and Mill's Chapters on Socialism, pp. 221-279 in Stefan Collini (ed.), On Liberty and Other Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

[4] Hal Draper, "Free Speech and Political Struggle" in Independent Socialist (April 1969), pp. 12-16.

[5] Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," pp. 81-83.

Activism or Revolution?: Deciphering Modern Forms of Resistance

By Kevin Bailey

Here in the United States, and the global North in general, there is a lack of clarity regarding activism and revolutionary activity, in fact one is often confused for the other. This is part and parcel of our post-modern condition in which every action, no matter how small, has the intrinsic property of being in and of itself a revolutionary act simply by rejecting dominant cultural narratives or withdrawing from participation in politics, for example. Lifestyle choices like veganism, ethical consumerism, buying fair-trade, or a simple rejection of politics in general, have become substitutes for a political line in many circles on the Left. A negation is thus inverted into a positive affirmation in which the mere act of verbal rejection, or non-participation, or withdrawal/retreat is treated as a substantive revolutionary act. Furthermore, what matters is one's membership to a micro-community, one's inward beliefs and values, and one's outward appearance and individual actions. There is no emphasis on a political and individual transformation in connection to a larger collectivity struggling for general emancipation. That is not to neglect the importance of smaller communities that often do serve the important function of providing personal assistance, empowerment, and support networks to marginalized communities, but rather, that these variants of lifestylism or micro-communities, if self-isoloated and not linked up to a broad emancipatory struggle, are not revolutionary but separatist. And not only that, but as de-politicized and isolated phenomena they can never be revolutionary, only expressions of petty-bourgeois individualism thoroughly tinged with accommodationist leanings towards bourgeois society, or a general apathy or cynicism towards mass struggle and politics.

Of course this notion of a withdrawal, or separation, from political life and struggle, to a retreat into the confines of a self-isolated community mirrors the transformation of bourgeois democracy in the global North from traditional social democratic models of supposedly inclusivist participation to the "low intensity" democracy of neoliberalism. With the prevalence of micro-struggles and a general receding of participatory channels for democratic expression as the State is literally, and quite physically, deconstructed, the notion of activism itself has been transformed. Previously what it meant to be an activist was someone who had been transformed politically, either through a long struggle or through a "revelatory" event (think of the young people who were radicalized by seeing the mass killings in Vietnam on television), and then submerged themselves in the stream of the mass movements and participated in the class struggle for definite political ends. Now activism has become a rejection of political transformation, because it is a rejection of the politicization of things themselves, it is the anti-politics.

Anyone who has witnessed a picket, protest, or rally in recent decades has probably witnessed the following: people standing around holding signs with vague slogans devoid of political content, a few chants lazily cast skyward, and a few raised fists as people march, or even worse, attendees standing silently while listening to some half-dead academic speak on the issue of the day. Of course after all of this is said and done we can wash our hands of guilt, since we did something, we acted, (after all, doing something is better than nothing, right?), and that makes us better than those who did nothing or are ignorant of our cause. But that's the problem, activists have become so satisfied with doing something that they have forgotten to stop and ask the "whys" and the "whats" of that something. Asking that question, which was asked by the activists that came before us, leads straight towards a universalization of struggle, away from separatism and towards political transformation. It leads to class struggle. And why does it lead there? Because a collective conceptualization of your struggle necessitates you grappling with your struggle's relation to all other struggles. Its recognition is anathema to separatism, apathy, cynicism, and identity politics, it leads to a general theorization of a linking up of seemingly disparate micro-struggles, to the recognition of their role in the mass struggle, which in our capitalist world is the class struggle.

Counter to activism, revolutionary activity requires politicization, it requires the revolutionizing of an individual. To most students, thoroughly ingrained with petty-bourgeois ideology, the notion of the necessity of transformation and of incorporating one's own personal or community struggles into a larger struggle screams of an oppressive totalization and marginalization. However, disregarding the rejection in toto of all totalities as being a totalization itself, the notion that one's own struggles have to take a subordinate role, or backseat, to some other issue is missing the point, as well as implicitly privileging one's own struggle over other's. A revolutionary struggle, unlike an activist struggle, is totalizing in that it is the sum total of all oppressed people's struggles for liberation linked and forged through direct experience. This is not a negative as the post-modernist dread of totalization would have us believe, it is a positive. And it is a positive because mass revolutionary, not activist, struggles have led to the liberation of hundreds of millions of people historically (the revolutions in Russia and China freed over 600 million people, across both countries, from the yoke of capitalism, semi-feudalism, and imperialism). Yet, what has the activist line produced? Micro-struggles that lead to gradual reform measures to better the lot of a particular oppressed group while another oppressed group is ignored, until of course their own micro-struggle emerges to lessen their oppression (because it would be "oppressive" or "totalizing" if these two struggles were linked since one is not a direct member of the other's oppressed community or group).

In my own organization, as well as countless others, there is a contradiction between an activist line and a revolutionary line. Or, more specifically, between the line expressing a desire for a depoliticized and loose grouping that wishes to do nothing more than protest this or that, and the line of those who wish to politicize themselves and the masses and march forward towards organizing and building for collective liberation. This activist line must be struggled against, and those who uphold it must be won over to the revolutionary line and be convinced of the necessity of its application. While activism bills itself as the most revolutionary trend, in that it rejects politicization and mass struggle in favor of micro-struggles, inward looking personal development, and depoliticized spaces, it is thoroughly anti-revolutionary. Not only because it opposes the revolutionary line elaborated on here, but because it cannot lead towards a liberation from the oppression that it seeks to end by the methods it employs. While the activist Left in Western Europe and North America continues to naval gaze and search for anti-political solutions to political problems, revolutionaries in India, Turkey, Afghanistan, and the Philippines are seeking to storm heaven, to capture State power and free millions from the chains of capitalism, imperialism, patriarchal oppression, and semi-feudal conditions. They are revolutionaries, not activists.

We must grapple with the fact that our own approach has produced nothing more than a few isolated apparent victories that have done nothing more than ameliorate our existing conditions. We have rejected politics in favor of being cynical or apathetic, we have discarded parties and organization in favor of disunity and a deified decentralization, we have unspokenly privileged our own struggle over those of others, and we have done all of this as the State and capitalism continue their assault on us. We have voluntarily dismantled our own power, our own defense, in the face of the neoliberal offensive and called it liberation. We were wrong, activism was wrong, and it has proven to be a dead end. It may not be easy for many of today's activists to admit this, but it is a political necessity to self-criticize and transform oneself politically in the service of the masses. It's time to come out of the ivory towers, come out of the hermetically sealed safe spaces, come out of our own self-imposed ideological and political exile and step into the class struggle and serve the people. It's time to integrate ourselves with the masses and cast aside petty-bourgeois illusions of separatism, apathy, and cynicism and say that we won't settle for anything less than total emancipation and a destruction of the old society through our collective power. Most importantly, it's time to become a revolutionary in the service of the oppressed peoples, to become more than just the chanter or sign holder that is the activist, to transform oneself politically to fight for liberation. To this I say down with activism, and up with revolution.

This piece was originally published at Necessity and Freedom.