Alternatives to Repression
One of Marx’s key insights into ideology was his description not only of the way the classical political economists like Adam Smith get their economic analysis wrong, but how they get it wrong. It isn’t a question of making empirical or logical mistakes, but rather that Adam Smith and the others could only see things through a particular set of (socially produced) categories, which structured their interpretation of the facts. These categories - private property, the market, etc - were seen as eternal and unchanging, rather than the result of specific historical processes and subject to change.
When defenders of the standard (liberal) definition of intellectual freedom and neutrality charge IF critics with seeking to repress free speech, free expression, and free thought, I believe they are operating under the same constraints as the classical political economists. Because capitalist politics and social culture have always relied on repression as the main tool in the toolbox of social order (the construction of consent is itself obscured in an act of Freudian repression), the liberal defenders of the existing social order are unable to see any alternatives to repression from the left.
In a recent post on the “Heterodoxy in the Stacks” substack, Michael Dudley argued that a position I have often espoused (that libraries need to be explicit about taking a side) has authoritarian and repressive consequences:"
Would “taking sides” mean going beyond a symbolic public policy declaration on the library's website to, for example, altering the collections policy so that no book from the contrary view is ever purchased again? Would all existing books in the collection representing that perspective be discarded? Would all public speakers representing that point of view now be forbidden? Would patrons be informed that staff will no longer be assisting with research inquiries into that point of view? The implications would be absurd if they weren’t so chilling.
In the next paragraph, Dudley comes to the following conclusion:
But this ethos also assumes an ideological uniformity on the part of library staff: that they would all speak with one voice on these issues, which would surely not be the case, leading to internal resentments and antagonisms, or at the very least staff not daring to express themselves openly.
Dudley doesn’t seem to recognize that libraries already enforce ideological conformity on library staff, requiring that they speak with one voice on issues, which has led to internal resentments and antagonisms and staff not daring to express themselves openly. This was very clearly the case in public libraries around the transphobic speaker controversies in 2019, and we have internal library documents to prove it. So the ideologically pluralist library is a sham, a straw-figure that has never - can never, under current social circumstances - exist.
But more than that, as with all liberal commentators, Dudley can only see things through the lens of repression and authoritarianism. Because the main weapon of the feudal state was repression, when the class composition of the state became capitalist at the turn of the 18th century, it continued to use violent repression of workers and dissidents as its primary approach. The very repression that liberalism developed to challenge (in the name of capitalist industrialists and landowners) against the feudal aristocracy was deployed against workers and the poor, women and immigrants, from the moment the bourgeoisie became ascendent. This repression continues to this day, as women, people of colour, immigrants, Indigenous people, trans people, and a host of others, find themselves not embraced by multiculturalism - which was a cynical ploy by the Canadian government to maintain hegemony in the 1980s - but forced into second class citizenship in a country that cares only for profit, private property, and the maintenance of the violently repressive social order.
Because violent repression is all capitalist society has ever known, it is unsurprising that the left - who call for the abolition of capitalism - should be tarred with the same brush. But what the left proposes is true alternatives. We recognize, as the right does not, that people’s wants and desires come from somewhere - from their living conditions - and are not innate, individual characteristics. Their grievances come from the same place. In the early 19th century, as labour and anti-poverty resistance increased, and was faced with violent state repression (for example at the “Peterloo” massacre of unarmed civilians), some, like Earl Grey, asked why repression was the only resort, and no thought was given to actually addressing people’s grievances and alleviating their misery. In the House of Lords, Early Grey said that he
had heard strong observations on the progress of sedition and treason, and on the necessity of adopting measures of coercion calculated to avert the danger which threatened the country. But he had as yet heard no recommendation to avert the danger, by relieving the people from some part of the heavy burthens which oppressed them. […] The natural consequence of [a system of repression], when once begun, was, that it could not be stopped; discontents begot the necessity of force; the employment of force increased discontents: these would demand the exercise of new powers, till by degrees they would depart from all the principles of the constitution.
(Cited in Pauline Gregg, A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1760-1972, p. 94)
Speaking for myself, the program of the left has always been to remove the causes of discontent. Workers’ discontent arises from their exploitation, so communists seek to abolish the mechanism of that exploitation; women’s discontent arises from their oppression by patriarchy, so left-wing feminists seek to abolish the patriarchy. This applies, though, also to the people we set ourselves against: TERFs are transphobic because they are oppressed by the patriarchy and they see trans women as agents of that patriarchy; the solution is not to repress trans women further, but to abolish the patriarchy. White supremacists are discontent because they see their power and privilege taken away by non-whites; the solution is not to repress Black people, Indigenous people, or immigrants further, but to remove the root cause of this problem, by wiping out white supremacy.
The old saw goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is the situation of violent repression for liberals. Despite their pluralism, their toleration, their being “so broad minded they won’t even take their own side in an argument”, the only tool of social order they recognize is violent repression. So they can only conceive that single tactic for the left’s liberationist project.
One objection that will certainly be raised is that by changing the social order, changing the living conditions that lead to transphobia, racism, patriarchy, etc, we will be violating people’s views, opinions, desires, and intellectual freedom. But again, this is only the case if individuals are - as in liberalism - seen as independent and autonomous beings. Once you recognize that human beings - their desires and their grievances - are socially constructed, then the object of transformation is not “the individual” (requiring correction, coercion, or repression) but the social structures that produce individuals. If we cannot see ourselves as willing to change social structures, and thereby individuals, then we must accept the current social order, with all its inequality, pain, violence, and discrimination. Liberals will never say this openly (some on the right might) but this is the consequence of their unwillingness to explicitly state that, say, the violent repression of women and the violation of their bodily autonomy is wrong and must be abolished. Poverty is wrong and bad and must be abolished. Racism is bad and wrong and must be abolished. If being certain about those things is a problem, one has to wonder what it is that defenders of neutrality find uncertain about those positions.