Socialism and Freedom of Speech
The Freedom of Speech wars have reopened thanks to a letter released by several public figures of a wide variety of backgrounds and ideological opinions signed a letter condemning cancel culture and censorship in support of freedom of speech.
The letter itself should not be all that controversial, and I fully support it. I have agreements, disagreements, and indifference on several signatories of the letter. However, the message itself is quite good. The problem now is that this has sparked a huge backlash, especially among certain portions of the left which feel that they are being attacked by this letter denouncing cancel culture and censorship. I figured I would try to provide a simple and short answer for what I feel the correct socialist position is on the topic of freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech should be seen as one of the essential rights guaranteed from liberal democracies. In the United States we have one of the strongest protections of this due to the 1st Amendment. It is much preferable to the freedom of speech protections in much of Europe even. However, even in the United States freedom of speech tends to only truly be guaranteed for the bourgeoisie or those wealthy enough to survive any public backlash. The wealthy also have the most access to platforms to express their speech and this allows the majority of discussion to be within the bourgeois norms. The socialist position must be to expand these rights to the proletariat and not just the bourgeoisie. Everyone should have the right to speech and should not face extremely dire consequences for expressing an unpopular opinion. This brings us to the contradiction of why the left seems to be the loudest critics of this letter.
One of the main critiques I saw was that all the signatories are just wealthy intellectuals which want to be able to express their bad opinions without consequences. Well, even if this criticism is true it isn’t really an argument. It also doesn’t really provide a good reason as to why their opinions maybe should be up for censorship or to be deplatformed. It’s essentially designed to kill their argument against censorship without even considering it. Personally, I think many, maybe not all, of the signatories actually agree with myself and signed it exactly for the reasons that they would also like the average person to be protected from censorship and cancel culture. Framing the letter’s intentions as protecting the upper class interests is completely out of touch with reality where cancel culture and censorship affects the lower classes far more than anyone else. It’s just not a big enough story to make the news when Joe Bob gets fired for a Facebook post like it is when a major public figure does.
The socialist position on freedom of speech must protect the worker from losing their job or livelihood for their speech outside of the workplace. I firmly take the position that it should be illegal for an employer to fire a worker for speech they made outside of the workplace. This position will of course be met with many complaints. The most common will be “What if they said something particularly racist or bigoted?” My answer is still no. I do not think even racist or bigoted statements outside of the workplace should get someone fired from their job and lose their livelihood.
I’m sure some people reading this will now find that position repulsive and suggest I’m only trying to defend racists from the consequences of their speech. However, that’s not the point. My positions more simple. I do not trust any individual or body to be capable of being the grand inquisitor capable of deciding which speech is or isn’t appropriate to say outside of the workplace and someone keep their job. This includes even the most unanimously vile speech possible such as Holocaust denial or approving of the final solution. We always go to these positions because we assume public opinion will be on the correct moral side of these arguments. We almost never consider public opinion could be on the wrong side of this argument.
I make this point very clearly because history has shown us that public opinion or the mob cannot be trusted to be the moral authorities on issues. We don’t have to go too far back in history to even see this. McCarthyism had a horrible effect on many good people causing them to lose their jobs due to accusations of them being communists. In the case of the Danish drawing of Muhammad there were countries in which maybe a majority of people felt the artists deserved punishment simply for drawing a cartoon. In the 21st century USA we kind of seem to ignore that this is still a very real possibility. The majority opinion could take a very horrible position and have people fired and their livelihoods ruined for positions that we currently view as perfectly acceptable. To protect this, I take an absolutist position. I put the freedom of speech above my own personal judgement of opinions which are morally acceptable.
One important example of this already happening is how anti-israel or anti-zionist speech is already highly threatened by cancel culture and censorship. Steven Salaita is an anti-zionist activist whom is a victim of this cancel culture and it has had a horrible effect on his career. No matter your opinion on the Israel-Palestine conflict you cannot support silencing the opinion of anti-israel or anti-zionist voices. It seems that most woke leftists oppose zionism to one degree or another, but they still defend cancel culture. This example of it eating their own is the perfect example of why we cannot allow this. Eventually something that should not be seen as bigoted or cancel worthy will still get people fired from their jobs and lose their livelihood.
Sadly, many of the people I have seen bringing up Salaita’s case still don’t really believe in freedom of speech and even condemned the letter. It should surprise no one that these people are often of the tankie or post-colonial variety of leftist. They will denounce the American and Western calls for freedom of speech and against cancel culture as bourgeois while defending the extremely harsh and strict censorship of the former Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe or the current Communist Party of China. Even worse, some of them defend Islamist and Ba’athist regimes which literally have political dissidents killed on a regular basis. Salaita and other Palestinian activists are hurt by those which oppose freedom of speech and support dictatorships which deny it. To provide Salaita with the protections he deserves we must support full freedom of speech and protection for him and others voicing their opinions, even those we dislike. Paraphrasing Noam Chomsky, “It is easy to support freedom of speech for speech which we agree. Hitler and Stalin did that. It’s hard to support freedom of speech with those you disagree.” This is the test. We must even support freedom of speech to those we disagree.
Another argument which I have heard is that it would be me suggesting an infringement on speech by suggesting that it should be illegal for an employer to fire an individual for speech. This however isn’t a valid position. It’s also not a case of them arguing in favor of the speech rights of that employer, but rather their property rights. In fact, they are arguing for the right of the capitalist to run their petty dictatorship in which they are allowed to make the rules on acceptable speech. Whether the workers stay employed or keep their source of income is up to them obeying these acceptable speech norms.
As a socialist I am not concerned about the private property rights of an employer to run their petty dictatorship. I in fact would prefer to see the means of production become democratically owned by the workers themselves. However, until we achieve democratic ownership of the means of production I would like a legal protection of workers to prevent them from being fired by an employer for speech outside the workplace. It is very much worth remembering that many Libertarians opposed the Civil Rights Act for a very similar reason. They felt the government infringing on the business owner’s right to discriminate by race or other category was wrong. I think most of us agree that the Civil Rights Act was actually just and such expressions of racial discrimination by employers is wrong. I would only have this expanded to protect workers rights to speak outside the workplace.
The last argument that I have met is “What if their speech shows an inability for them to do their job?” This might be the strongest argument there is. However, it once again isn’t truly accurate. We have means of judging the performance and capability of workers to perform their jobs. I also agree in having some form of professional conduct policy within the workplace. These policies should be more than enough to measure whether or not someone is capable of performing their job. Their random public statement, social media post, or other outside of work statement should not really hold much weight on their ability to do so.
Now, the question next would be “What if a doctor said he was going to perform actions that could cause harm?” This may be the only valid scenario where some action must have to take place. Admittedly, this scenario would probably be so rare in practice I find it likely the person that asks this is using it almost as a Trojan Horse to provide more opportunities to limit the speech of workers. If however this extremely rare scenario does happen the procedure will have to be to investigate it and decide whether the words were serious. This could be seen as a threat of violence and that is one of the few exceptions to the current first amendment rights. If it is determined that it is serious and they genuinely do mean harm they would have to be removed from that position. However, I would support them to be provided with full unemployment benefits and preferably a transfer to a job in which they are no longer potentially posing harm to others.
In summary, I think the socialist position on freedom of speech must be as close to absolute as humanly possible. It also should be guaranteed to everyone and not just those which are wealthy. I understand that part of achieving this is also achieving truly material gains in labour rights as well as potentially overthrowing capitalism and establishing a socialist state in its place. I also want to be consistent and allow truly absolute freedom of speech in critique of this essay. If you have any problems with my arguments, please feel free to say so. If you just want to call me insults, have at it. Ad hominems are protected freedom of speech and shouldn’t be censored. Finally, even if I in the future make a hypocritical statement which doesn’t hold this absolutist position on freedom of speech please do use this essay against me. I want this position to be held above my fallible personal opinion.