Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Pulitzer winner and friend Anne Boyer wrote this on her blog recently:

For all toilers, from the hourly wage worker to the precariously employed freelancer to the salaried employee to the desperate job seeker, freedom of expression is always curtailed by the more noxious "freedom" of the "free" market. That is, we are "free" to sell our labor and we are "free" to be fired, replaced, spit out, thrown away, set "free" into a society in which profit defines all relations. We are, of course, also free to not sell our labor, which means for most people the freedom to give up the competition for survival (that is, the freedom to die). Even this horrible freedom of free labor can become more horrible in the racist and gendered machinations of our world, where unpaid labor and so-called surplus labor forces deepen the cruelty of capitalism’s life-extraction. This awful, deadly, false freedom is the only freedom of which much of the human earth can be certain right now.

This very simple state of things -- that as long as collective human needs are subordinated to inhuman profit no one can be free -- is the open secret of any conversation about free speech. The hypocrisy of omitting any mention of the inequalities that make speech truly unfree is glaring -- no letter demanding "tolerance" ever seems to be accompanied by a demand for a decent life for all. These calls for free speech don't even make a call for a moderate sort of proposal to make it illegal for bosses to fire workers at will or they forget even to ask for the small concession of universal health care not connected to work or income or spousal/familial status. Which is weird, of course, because making sure everyone has what they need to live would be the very best way to make certain that speech, opinion, expression, assembly, and thought could be free. Once that was taken care of, once no one had to bite their tongue for fear of losing housing, food, or health insurance, we could begin a robust and generative conversation about the boundaries of civil liberties.

Hanging out in the background of all this talk of freedom, too, is the constricting world economy, the massive loss of income and security by millions while the select few use the covid crisis as an opportunity to raid government coffers and stretch the stock market to fantastical heights, the ongoing forever wars, the egregious new border policies. Freedom now floods into the bank accounts of the billionaires and centa-millionaires, and the rest watch everything -- health, life, labor, dreams, opportunity, movement, the life of the very earth that is our home -- flood out. Remember this: all that you have lost and all that you will lose is going somewhere, to someone, and if you would like to know where, read the financial pages.

Further, the good, honest, admirable desire for "free expression" in this over-wrought stage of nearly-feudal capital has itself become a source of profit for these few. Having engineered platforms which invite the rest of us to share our feelings, opinions, and connections so that these might be turned into data and sold, then having, through these platforms, programmed the algorithms for addictive impact, a small group of would-be monopolists gild the toilets of their doomsday bunkers with the hard work of our brave or insipid or clever or shocking takes. What we so often think we are doing online when we are being free is instead working for free. The lowest thing of all low things is that these algorithms are perfected to make us miserable, triggered, paranoid, set against each other, alienated from our senses, our bodies, our proportion, deprived of the full potential and complexity of our thought, even deprived of the full capacity to remember or forget. Even for those who try to be careful not to fully trust their subjectivities to the tech-lords, thought can begin to take the form of the on-screen box that has been provided for us to fill, surveillance perched on every “like” button.

Daaaaaaamn, Anne Boyer severely otm

yup

Most of the time I have no idea what people are talking about when they talk about 'capitalism' tbh.

Usually I just assume it's about America and move on.

new board description

capitalism is when spotify gives joe rogan $100 million

there are books about capitalism and everything

It’s the system where you have to sell your labor to capital, or die

iiuc

*and die

i will say in capitalism's defence that i haven't come across a system of economic distribution that's conquered mortality

no other monster has been this successful at eating up life through work/dispossession/incarceration/enslavement/war/genocide/ecocide on such global industrial scales before

had anyone asked the congolese child miners this conversation depends on for their take on this whole cancel culture business? seems you have to have capital in the first place to be at risk of cancellation, extracted from others who are always cancelled already

no letter demanding "tolerance" ever seems to be accompanied by a demand for a decent life for all. These calls for free speech don't even make a call for a moderate sort of proposal to make it illegal for bosses to fire workers at will

This, by one of the signatories of the Harper's letter, was published a day before the letter was, and was one of the first articles published on a site affiliated with a number of the other signatories:
https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-better-remedy-for-cancel-culture

Look, I just reposted it because I thought she brought up some good points. Did the letter mention ending at-will employment? No. Lol the woman teaches full time and just won the Pulitzer

Like it was published on her blog.

So sure, some of these people might bring up points she would have them bring up.

That doesn't mean she's full of shit, and it certainly doesn't mean the letter signatories aren't full of shit. Because they definitely are.

the anne boyer piece was good and i'm glad you shared it here

seconded

Good stuff on the thread (and the thread within) on how liberals have lost it big in the UK.

associating around this point and thread a bit.... I think one of the ways in which 'liberalism' is kind of debased at the moment is the idea (which you see everywhere) that key liberal values include the assumption of good faith and consensus-oriented debate https://t.co/c7Hf5XUZQm

— Lafargue (@Lafargue) August 8, 2020

good thread, yes

*yawn*

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/aug/12/nick-cave-political-correctness-bad-religion-run-amuck-cancel-culture

I'm sure his concern for redemption and mercy has nothing to do with Warren Ellis.

Different Warren Ellis. His concerns with "political correctness" have to do with him being a 62-year-old Australian man.

oops, I always thought they were the same guy and he wrote comics as a sideline

er, I guess music would be the sideline actually

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html#click=https://t.co/QFoFx1Yly6

And then they came for Adolph Reed

jfc

this guy has been moving right for a while

academics, pundits, celebs who live in fear of their increasing irrelevance know at least there’s a receptive market for this kind of shit atm so they’re pretty much engineering their own cancellations for it

Lol at “moving right”

You are a straw man come to life

I haven't followed his entire career but his form of class politics seems pretty conservative & he seems relatively unbothered by his popularity on the white supremacist social democratic left

Who exactly is the white supremacist left? I can’t tell what is your Personal hyperbole and what is existing tankie dogma

no hyperbole & tankies have called me a liberal/trot/fascist/CIA plant too many times for me to be accused of being one

I mean the leftists who use the (v selective) criticism of identity to reduce class struggle to an ironically particular nationalist reformist agenda & dismiss action against the colonial state, capital, patriarchy etc as a betrayal of this. If this isn't an accurate interpretation Reed he certainly leaves it open enough for every fan of his I've encountered to run with it

also lol he cancelled his own fucking speech

Yeah, Left summarizes a lot of the criticisms of Reed that I've heard from other scholars.

I dunno, Reed seems to be in pretty much the same place as Bernie/Jacobin/etc. Saying that he's the John McWhorter or Glenn Loury is a fantastically huge stretch. Also, is there any cancelling incident that won't be handwaved away on this thread? Signs point to No.

jacobin has published enough genocide deniers, antisemites, misogynists, cop lovers & red-brown adjacent shitheads over the years that it's hard to make a clear cut distinction

the whole concept of cancellation is the problem here- as I said before it seems to depend on having capital to lose in the first place- those without are automatically deemed cancelled by the anti-cancel-culture brigade itself. this entire moral panic is a bunch of celebrities, pundits, adademics & social climbers terrified of the prospect of their own irrelevance as social/cultural/political/moral authorities & of being treated like they treat everyone else without the institutional protection they currently receive

there are countless people who are "cancelled" in the sense of being silenced for who they are or what they do or say but they don't get op eds in major publications to whine about it or have rich & famous mates to rally round them so they're irrelevant as victims. in fact it's them who are most accused of cancellation if they speak out of turn to their social betters

^^^

Jacobin is quite literally socialism lite for middle-class white kids who don't want to think about their racism because it makes them uncomfortable.

I know an editor there, and her social media posts essentially accusing Black people of "not knowing what's good for them" when Bernie was still in the race were so abhorrent I blocked her.

The answer is yes, we will always hand wave

I like reed, his ideas aren't really that in-step with dsa types ideas so this controversy is unsurprising. Storm in a demitasse sums it up p well

is reed actually "moving right" or is the popular discourse of the past ~5 years just providing him many more opportunities to reiterate

I think that ideas of intersectionality have taken off, and rightly so, and so those who reduce problems to class are viewed as hopeless ideologues by a lot of younger people...and perhaps also by those of us who teach the Combahee River Collective and Crenshaw's work, too.

this is true but has included a lot of clueless or cynical appropriation of the language from various political & corporate interests which has given more life to this part of the left by appearing to confirm all their suspicions. that class politics can & has frequently been co-opted in similar ways seems mostly uninteresting or incomprehensible to them

I've been accused of class reductionism & identity politics many times from different crowds, sometimes for the same position. one thing that would help would be if everyone acknowledged how slippery all these terms have become & how many agendas they can serve- even the good critiques of either are used to give cover to a lot of bullshit

I know an editor there, and her social media posts essentially accusing Black people of "not knowing what's good for them" when Bernie was still in the race were so abhorrent I blocked her.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table),

Can we get a name for this person, and something more than a paraphrase?

I don't think its necessarily doing any good to throw these terms around without referring exactly who we're speaking about and what it is they've done. those who reduce problems to class are viewed as hopeless ideologues by a lot of younger people is really quite vague, this is what leads to talking at cross purposes

The attempted cancelation of Alex Morse is an issue. I'm not sure how close that has come to working