How the Capitalist Class Censors Dissenting Voices Via the US Government: The Case of TikTok and the Midwestern Marx Institute

By Carlos Garrido, Noah Krachvik, and Edward Liger Smith

​The First Amendment of the United States Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law… Abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Yet in 2023 the United States is attempting to extradite Julian Assange because he published proof of U.S. civilian executions in Iraq, systematic torture at Guantanamo Bay, and the DNC rigging of the 2016 primary election against Democratic Socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, which is itself a violation of the Democratic rights enshrined in the American Constitution. The U.S., with its supposed constitutional guarantee of free speech and media, has indicted four leaders from the African People's Socialist Party (APSP) and Uhuru Movement on flimsy claims of “advancing Russian propaganda,” simply because they challenge the narrative of the imperialist financial cartels and war mongers. Even if we look only at these examples, how can we say there is freedom of speech or press in our modern age of neoliberal capitalist-imperialism? The Political establishment has shown that it will crack down on anyone who shares information that is damaging to its foreign policy interests, and most social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, owned by wealthy shareholders like Mark Zuckerberg and others, have proven not only to be impressionable to the influence of US intelligence agencies like the FBI and other institutions of the ruling class, but (after the release of the Twitter files) directly steered by them at times.

No social media platform is more tightly linked to the intelligence community, NATO, or US State Department than the incredibly popular Tik Tok app. In 2020 the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis, within a few months of work, amassed 375,000 Tik Tok followers when the app was still owned and operated by the Beijing, China based company Bytedance, a testament to the people-oriented algorithms of Bytedance that allow any content that is genuinely popular to go “viral”, and a stark contrast to the money-centered way our Western software works. Unfortunately, that year the Biden administration would force ByteDance to hand over management of their U.S. servers to the Texas-based company ORACLE, a company with intimate ties to the CIA. No sooner had news of this forced change of control happened would the Institute have its account, which received millions of views on many videos containing factual information that challenged the narratives of the US war machine, banned from the platform. A second account that we started when the first one was wiped quickly accumulated 200,000 followers, and right when a growth parallel to the previous account was evident, the second account would also be banned. This blatant censorship would continue without explanation as the Institute had five more accounts banned by Tik Tok after they started to quickly gain popularity. It was later revealed that Oracle had hired a litany of former US State Department and Intelligence Operatives to manage the content for Tik Tok, as well as a few NATO executives for good measure. Tik Tok said that they deleted 320,000 “Russian accounts” which included many American socialist organizers who have never been associated with Russia in any way, such as an account ran by an organization of socialist organizers called “The Vanguard” that had over 100,000 followers when it was deleted.

Countless hours of our work that helped inform millions of people were stripped from the internet with little to no explanation, while truly hateful and incendiary accounts were allowed to remain up. Our institute's co-founder and editor, Eddie Liger Smith, was doxxed twice during this period, having his phone number, job, private social media profiles, and location shared by two creators working in tandem to attack Midwestern Marx. Both responsible accounts, Cbass429 and ThatDaneshGuy, were allowed to remain up until recently, when Cbass429 was finally banned for a completely unrelated incident. However, ThatDaneshGuy still has 1.6 million followers on Tik Tok, where he consistently calls for his political opposition to be fired from their jobs. ThatDaneshGuy called for his followers to contact Eddie’s place of employment and ask for his firing, claiming that it was deserved because of Eddie’s stance against US backed regime change efforts in Iran, which Danesh conflated with support for the Iranian Government executing people. Similar campaigns to these have been waged against other Institute co-founder Carlos Garrido and Institute contributor Kayla Popuchet, the latter who, like Eddie Smith, was fired from their place of employment because of the work they do for the Institute. On Tik Tok, the voices which speak the truth and champion peace are quickly banned, while those who harass and deceive people with imperialist lies are upheld by the algorithms.

Since the transfer of power to US entities, Tik Tok users have been fed a steady diet of neoliberal and imperialist propaganda, while critical voices are systematically being censored by the app’s content moderation staff. Neoliberal commentators like Philip Defranco are never made to retract errors, such as when Phil claimed that Russia blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline, despite all the evidence at the time pointing towards a Biden Administration sabotage. Award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later proved this to be the case in his detailed report on the incident. Despite all this, Defranco never had his account suspended or removed for posting this misinformation, and his video remains on the platform to this day, as do his comments accusing anyone who suggested the US might have sabotaged the pipeline of believing “Putin propaganda.” The Midwestern Marx Institute had predicted that Biden sabotaged the pipeline before it was revealed in detail and was unsurprisingly attacked and reported for doing so.

Censorship, clearly, does not emerge out of a void. And so, we must ask the question: what are the social conditions which make censorship necessary? Who does the censored speech threaten? Who does it uplift? In whose interests is censorship carried out? On whose side is truth - a category our moribund imperialist era, dominated by postmodern philosophical irrationalism, scoffs at? The liberal ideal of freedom of press can never be actualized so long as the press is owned by a small ruling class, by corporations and shareholders who profit from war and the exploitation of the mass of people. They will always censor dissent and push coverage that suits their foreign and domestic interests. This has been the case throughout history, and the modern Western ruling class is, in this regard, no different from any other. It lies, it manipulates, it misinforms to the best of its ability. It needs a population that can view its actions as ethical and just, and so it must spend countless hours and dollars papering over every crack that appears in the facade its media apparatus has built around the minds of the people.

A revolving door between the media, intelligence agencies, NATO, and the U.S. State Department is only the logical result of a society based on capitalist relations of production, where capitalists not only control the production of material goods, but the production of information as well. The ruling class sees the media, including social media, as a vital part of the societal superstructure that is needed to maintain and reproduce the relations of production at the core of society. In other words, they see it as an important tool to convince you that capitalism and U.S. Imperialism are good and eternal. Under these social relations, the constitutional right to free speech and media have always been exclusive - it excludes all speech and media which substantially challenges the dominant forms of societal intercourse. The freedom of speech and media is, therefore, actually the freedom of pro-capitalist speech and media. V. I. Lenin’s description of the media in capitalist society rings truer than ever in the 2020s, it is dominated by an “atmosphere of lies and deception in the name of the ‘freedom and equality’ of capital, equality of the starved and the overfed.” Any absolute statements about the freedom of the press must be followed by the Leninist question: “freedom of the press… for which class?” The capitalist media’s freedom to deceive the masses in their defense of the existing order is in contradiction to the masses’ interests in searching for and publicizing the truth.

Those who keep our people misinformed and ignorant, who have made their life’s purpose to attack truth-tellers, do so under the insidiously categorized guise of ‘combating misinformation.’ In their topsy-turvy invented reality, as Michael Parenti called it, they posit themselves as the champions of truth and free speech – a paradox as laughable as a vegan butcher. Anyone with the courage to fight for the freedom to speak truth to power should unite in fighting this blatant attack on our constitutional rights. We must stand against this censorship from our ruling class, those who are the worst purveyors of misinformation imaginable, and who now, in the backwards-world name of ‘fighting misinformation,’ censor the truth. 

There is ‘fighting misinformation,’ and there is fighting misinformation. The divide of class interests between the ruling class of the West, and the good, honest, hard-working people who live under their regime could not be clearer. One side finds it necessary to invent a reality, under the guise of fighting the ‘mis-informers,’ that paints the world in a disfigured backwardness, the other side, on the contrary, is sick to death of being lied to by the media machine, and their screams of “fake news” grow more and more common every day. The American people not only deserve the truth, but absolutely need its existence to find commonality in the world, stability, and the ability to pursue lives of meaning and dignity. They are tired of the private monopolization of media that has erased the ability for regular working people to speak on an equal playing field; they feel their voices drowned in a sea of well-funded lies by MSNBC, Fox News, and the rest of them. This struggle has crystallized into a fight over The Truth itself.

And so, if fighting misinformation is to be done, we must begin by asking: Where was the crackdown on the media outlets who got 4.5 million people killed by claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Where are the crackdowns on those who are lying us into a third World War with nuclear-armed powers? Where are the crackdowns against those who play the drums for those marching humanity towards nuclear Armageddon? Why is it only the outlets calling for peace that are dubbed “Putin propagandists” and wiped from the internet? Where are the crackdowns on the blood-thirsty warmongers? The answer is: they are nowhere, and they will continue to be nowhere while giant corporate financial interests control the lives and realities of regular Americans. Truth is censored and lies are proliferated because it serves the interests of the ruling capitalist class, and only through the overthrow of this class can a real freedom of thought, not an abstract empty freedom to deceive the people, be achieved. Until then, all we can have – it seems – is a media and culture that elevates the most odious imperialist voices while suppressing those who seek truth and peace. Nonetheless, the fight must continue, and with the dignity that comes from the incessant speaking of truth to power, the enemies of humanity will fall.

Let us remember the words of Julian Assange, whom the imperialists have rotting in a prison because of his sterling bravery… because he is a true journalist and not a lapdog of the powerful: “if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by TRUTH.”

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy teacher at Southern Illinois University, editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute, and author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism and Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview.

Noah Khrachvik is a working class organizer, teacher, and editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute. 

Edward Liger Smith is an American political scientist and editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute.

Elon Musk, Twitter, and the Power of Ownership

[Musk family wealth came from property ownership throughout Africa, including Apartheid South Africa and Zambia, where Errol Musk owned an emerald mine like the one pictured above]

By Carl Beijer

Republished from the author’s blog.

Last month, Elon Musk purchased Twitter and immediately disbanded its entire board of directors. This may have surprised you if you get your ideas about power from the populist right, who have been telling us that “power has passed from individual bourgeois business to a new ruling class” — the so-called “managerial elite.” Evidently, their “cultural power” with its full arsenal of “wokeness” and “cancel culture” couldn’t do a damn thing to save them in the end.

Even their enormous incomes couldn’t help them! These are no blue collar workers; these are multi-millionaires with astronomical salaries. “Heterodox economists” like Lévy and Duménil tell us that capitalism is over and we now live in the age of “managerialism”, in which “the main social split is nowadays between lower and higher wage earners, and increasingly so in conformity with the rise of managers”; but Musk had no problem whatsoever kicking some of the highest paid managers in the world to the curb.

Capitalist discourse loves to dismiss Marxist economics as a kind of obscurantist and contrarian analysis that no sensible person could possibly take seriously, but look at how everyone is talking about Musk right now and it’s obvious that we all know exactly what happened. He won because he took ownership of Twitter. That is what allowed him to crush the assembled power of the professional managerial class — Twitter’s corporate governance structure, the complex of NGO professionals and celebrities and academics who protested his takeover, all of it — on a whim. Taking ownership was his coronation, and the moment it happened everyone knew that his opponents would never prevail.

If you take one lesson from the Musk takeover, it should be this: capitalists can do this whenever they want. And even the highest-level managers and corporate executives know it, which means that they can only either defer to ownership or risk getting fired. This is a point I spelled out a few months ago when former WWE CEO Vince McMahon resigned:

Whether or not he has plans to exercise that power [majority ownership of the the WWE] is beside the point; at any given moment, shareholder Vince can decide to appoint a new board that will re-appoint him as CEO. And the very possibility that he could do this gives him the exact same power over management that shareholders have when Vince pleads that he only fired wrestlers because he’s a publicly traded company.

Private ownership confers a unique form of power unlike anything else in our politics. It matters more than professional titles, than academic degrees, than cultural norms and values, than the power of free speech and public reason. Even the state’s victory against it isn’t assured. And there is no form of power concentrated in fewer hands.

Nor is there any form of power that we meet with less skepticism. If you don’t believe me, just pay attention to how we talk about Musk’s power-play moving forward. You’re going to see a lot of talk about how Musk is a bad apple, one of those dreaded right-wing Silicon Valley billionaires. You’re going to hear about the rising tide of fascism, driven by vague hatreds of egalitarianism and freedom. You’re even going to hear some talk about “corporate” power, as if Twitter’s board would still be in control if it were structured slightly differently. But what you won’t hear is skepticism of the basic legal, political, and economic institution — private property — that actually keeps Musk in control.

"We Are Entering a New Totalitarian Era": An Interview with Ajamu Baraka

By Ann Garrison

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

In this interview for Pacifica Radio’s series on “Covid, Race, and Democracy,” Ajamu Baraka warns of a new era of totalitarian neoliberalism.

Ann Garrison: On January 20, we saw Joe Biden carry on about “unity” behind seven-foot fences topped with razor wire and 25,000 plus National Guard troops deployed . One friend of mine said that this pointed to an irony deficiency. Is there anything you'd like to say about it? 

Ajamu Baraka: Well, I think it is ironic, but it's quite understandable that the kinds of activities that the US has been involved in promoting and supporting globally—undermining democracies, subverting states, undermining and destroying any semblance of the rule of law—have basically come back to haunt them. You have a militant movement in the US partially inspired by the inability of the state and the system to address their material interests and to look at their concerns regarding their own understanding of democracy and its deficiencies. They feel like they lack space to articulate those views, and they’ve decided to engage in militant actions to make sure that their voices are heard, and they believe that they are upholding democracy.

And their experience with the state made them feel justified in advancing their concerns about democracy in violent forms. The state has demonstrated to them that the way you defend democracy is through state violence. So they were taking their defense into their own hands and bringing it right back to the center of empire. Some of us call that blowback. 

AG: For the past four years, liberals on the coasts have excoriated the white working class in the middle of the country, whom they perceive to be deplorable Trump supporters. Do you think that this is helpful? 

AB: No. Not only is it not helpful, it is inaccurate and it has helped to create the narrative that many of these forces have embraced; that is the centerpiece of their grievances. They believe that liberals and the liberal order have not addressed their needs, their interests. They believe that the economic elites are only out for themselves and that therefore they needed to rally behind Trump, a billionaire who claimed that he understood their interests and would fight for them because nobody else was.

So this characterization of them as deplorables, and as either Nazis or Nazi-like, is not only not helpful but also contradictory in the sense that those folks who level those charges still have not been able to explain why the Trump presidency happened.

For example, some nine million people who voted for Trump in 2016 had voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Liberals can't explain why, after four years of constant anti-Trump rhetoric, the Trump forces expanded their ranks by another 11 million voters. So this is something in play that's a little bit more sophisticated than these people just being deplorables or Nazis. And that something has to be interrogated. It has to be extracted. It has to be understood if you're going to have a politics to counter it. And right now the liberals have not understood where these elements are coming from because they have basically painted those 75 million people as a monolith of deplorables.

The neoliberals have constructed a politics that is going to result in a continuation of the same conditions, politically and economically, that created what they pretend to be most opposed to—the Trump movement. So this is the failure of imagination, the failure of critical analysis, the embracing of illusions that has characterized much of the politics in the US for a couple of decades now. And we see the consequences of that with us every day. 

AG: In the 48 hours after Biden became president, Israel bombed Syria, killing a family of four, a US convoy of trucks crossed into Syria to steal oil yet again, a double suicide bombing in Baghdad killed 32 people and Foreign Affairs, the journal of the US Council on Foreign Relations, published a piece with the headline “Th e  M yth of a  R esponsible  W ithdrawal from Afghanistan ,” which said, “the Biden administration should accept that there is no feasible middle way for a responsible withdrawal.” What do you think is next? 

AB: The continuation of policies that have resulted in the US being bogged down in Afghanistan for two decades, policies that will ensure that the wars that the US is involved in will continue. There will be a continuation of the commitment to US global full-spectrum dominance. In other words, violence is still at the center of the neoliberal project. And they intend to reintroduce that instrument under the Biden administration.

There were reports leading up to the election that Democratic Party-associated elements were secretly suggesting to the Afghan authorities that they would not have to worry about a peace process being executed once Joe Biden came to power. And they made the argument using some of the same terms and framework that we saw in that article in Foreign Affairs, that the US had a responsibility to remain in Afghanistan. And so they will fully prepare to undermine whatever progress was made for extracting US forces from that territory.

So we're not surprised to see the kind of elements that Biden has brought to his administration. These people were part of the Obama Administration, and they are committed to the US national security strategy, which is attempting to maintain US global hegemony using the instrument that they believe they are dependent on now, which is in fact global violence. 

AG: Yesterday, I signed a petition to Twitter to restore @real Donald Trump , the Twitter account of the 45th president of the United States. I didn't share the petition on my social media pages because I didn't want to have to fend off a lot of cancel culture, but I had enough faith in Pacifica to think I wouldn't get kicked off the air for sharing it in the broadcast version of this conversation. What do you think of Twitter’s suspension of Trump and 70,000  more accounts that they said were linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory? 

AB: I think it was quite troubling. I understand the disgust, the revulsion people have to Donald Trump. We know who Donald Trump is. He's a sociopath, he's a white supremacist. He’s despicable, but Donald Trump is, in fact, America. Donald Trump represents the kind of attitude and the kinds of values that made the US settler state what it is today.

So, this notion on the part of the liberals that he is some kind of aberration is completely ridiculous. In fact, it's ahistorical, but because of the disgust and because of the very serious legitimation crisis the US is facing, and the concern that neoliberal politicians have with the possibility of a return of Donald Trump, they have used the incident on January 6th as their opportunity to not only target Donald Trump as a person, but to target his “movement,” to undermine an above ground, legal political tendency, a tendency that generated 75 million votes.

If they can move against Donald Trump and make a connection between his speech and what occurred on January 6 in order to justify a permanent ban on someone who was the President of the United States with 88 million followers, then arbitrarily take down these other accounts that they say are “conspiratorial,” and if people then cheer because they hate Donald Trump, we are seeing a monumental mistake being made by liberals who think that this state is their friend, and that this state will get rid of Donald Trump, but somehow be able to maintain a commitment to civil liberties.

No, they are in fact conditioning the public to accept the constraints of civil liberties, or to have faith in private capitalist entities to determine what is acceptable speech and information that can be disseminated.

I believe they are, in essence, setting up the kind of dystopia that we see in science fiction movies, where you have corporate interests that have a complete and total control over every aspect of our lives. And of course, complete and total control over the ideals that are disseminated in those kinds of totalitarian society.

So, this is a quite troubling and even more troubling because so many people don't recognize that it’s dangerous. But it's quite slick because, like you said, you don't want to share your petition because you know people would go crazy if you said in public that you believe that Donald Trump's rights have been violated. So, this is a quite dangerous moment because what we see, in my opinion, is the hegemony of irrationality.

AG: Neoliberal militarists are comparing the Capital Riot to 9/11 and using it to justify the further militarization of Washington DC and Biden's domestic terrorism bill . At the same time, he has appointed infamous militarist Susan Rice to a new position, Director of Domestic Policy. Who do you think will become domestic targets during the Biden-Harris years? 

AB: Anyone who is involved in oppositional politics, including those elements that are part of the Black Lives Matter movement, and anyone else who questions US colonial policies. Anyone who will advance sharp analysis of the capitalist state, who will question some of its dominant ideals, who might even suggest that police forces should be withdrawn from certain neighborhoods. And anyone who would advocate better relations with the so-called adversaries of the US, like the Chinese and the Russians.

There’s no telling what is going to be seen as acceptable speech and political practice because we are entering a new totalitarian era. So I think anybody who is in opposition to the hegemony of the neoliberal project is at some point over the next few years going to experience the heavy hand of the state.

Let me just say this about the state that we've been talking about. People say that these Big Tech entities—Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, etcetera—are private corporations, and that therefore they have no obligation to protect free speech rights: We need to make a correction. These entities are of course private, but the essence of neoliberalism is the spinning off of elements of the state that are public to private entities. So what we have with these Big Tech companies is, in fact, the spinning off of the function of speech monitoring and massive surveillance to these private companies.

These companies are in fact, from my point of view, part of the ideological state apparatus. They are part of the state, just like the private corporate media is part of the state. So we have to expand our understanding of what we refer to as the state. 

AG: A lot of people are frightened, particularly Black, Brown, and Jewish people, and most likely Asians now given all the bipartisan China-bashing underway. People, especially in these communities, have good reason to be frightened. And a lot of people are using the word fascist as they have for the past four years. But you've warned that neoliberal fascism will also get worse. Could you tell us what you mean by neoliberal fascism? 

AB: Well, first let me say that it's quite understandable, and we should be quite concerned about some of the more hardcore elements that we associate with the traditional right, who are quite capable and seem to be committed to using various methods to advance their political project. We saw some of those elements in the Capitol on January 6. So it's understandable that we be concerned with that, but I've been warning people also that we should be more concerned with the neoliberal elements that control the state and did even during the time that Donald Trump was occupying the executive branch. We have to remind ourselves, or at least come to the understanding, that neoliberalism is a right-wing ideology. It is a right-wing set of policies, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, so-called free trade, austerity, and reductions in government spending, all to empower the private sector and diminish the public sector. Neoliberalism has to be connected to its essence, which is neoliberal capitalism.

The turn to neoliberalism was born out of an act of violence. A neoliberal capitalist project was imposed on the people of Chile after the assault and the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973. So this is a right-wing, violent phenomenon. Okay? Now it's been able to dress itself up in the garb of state respectability, but it is a rightist tendency. And so that right-wing, neoliberal, totalitarian element is the element that is now constricting the range of acceptable political activity. They are the ones that re-introduced McCarthyism, McCarthyism 2.0. They are the ones that are now moving to smash this political opposition in the form of the Trump movement. They are the  ones that have allowed the FBI to create first, the Black identity extremist category to target us and to modify that with another term but the same objective—to target and undermine Black radical political opposition. So I've been making the argument that while we have been watching the theatrics of Donald Trump, the neoliberal state has been systematically conditioning the people to accept a new kind of totalitarianism. We've always had totalitarianism, but this is a new kind that will, they believe, ensure the continuation of their dominance. 

And I'm suggesting to people that, even though we hate Donald Trump and the traditional right, we are in a position now where we have to defend their traditional bourgeois rights as well as our own, and not allow the acceptable space of political, ideological opposition to be reduced.

We know that the state will reconcile with the right. Their real opposition and the basis for a potential cross class united front is opposition to socialists and communists, those of us on the left. And we on the left we are the real targets of this settler political state. So we've been trying to warn people to be vigilant and not allow themselves to be manipulated by these very powerful forces. And it's very difficult because they control all of the major means of communications and thought dissemination. But we've got to, to the extent that we can, present an alternative perspective so that we can build the kind of opposition we have to build if we're going to survive this critical period. 

AG: So it sounds like you think there's more we can do than duck and cover. 

AB: We have to. Those of us who have been part of the Black Liberation Movement, we have survived because we have resisted, and we also have survived because we know that we have been through the worst. You see, this thing referred to as fascism is nothing new for us, a colonized people, people who have been enslaved. It has typically been called fascism only when white people do certain things to other white people.

When the Nazis were studying, how they were going to construct laws in Germany, they were studying the apartheid system in the US. The Germans practiced building concentration camps in their murderous assault on the territory today referred to as Namibia. So it's when these policies of brutality, of systematic violence, of rape, when they are moved from the periphery, from the colonial periphery to the Global North, that's when they become Hitlerist, the ultimate expression of violence. 

King Leopold II in the Congo? That’s written off. It's not something that’s important, even though 10 million African people lost their lives. And we don't quantify the level of irrational violence, but we do say that we have an experience with this kind of irrational violence. And so we know we have to resist. And so we know that Donald Trump is not the worst US president. We know that things can in fact get worse. And what we do and have done is to prepare our forces, to resist, and to try to provide leadership to other resistors. Because we know even though it will get more difficult, we know that we are still on the right side of history. And there are enough people of conscience in this country who believe that we can build a new, better world. We believe that once we can organize ourselves, even though it may be difficult for a while, we have a real possibility of not only surviving, but also transforming this backward society.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC). He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. He was recently awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shim award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize  for promoting peace through her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. Please help support her work on Patreo n . She can be reached on Twitter @AnnGarrison  and at ann(at)anngarrison(dot)com.

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.