My previous post on this blog argued
against the very poorly resourced claims Moana Jackson made in the e-tangata magazine that ‘freedom of
speech’ is not a liberal, democratic value, but a shield for racism, bigotry
and hatred. What we have seen in the last week is this debate given a practical
test in the form of two key players in the ‘alternative-right’ or ‘alt-right’
movement, Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, in their bid to hold a speaking
event in Auckland. These two speakers had their event cancelled after a
decision made by Auckland mayor Phil Goff to block them from accessing any
council-operated venue, at which point the Bruce Mason Centre (the intended
venue) issued a press statement saying that for “health and safety reasons” the
event had been cancelled. A little gratuitous, one would think. But this action
from the state to censure a speaking tour had full support from the so-called
‘liberal left’. Their support demonstrates yet again that this constituency is
turning against both the liberal and leftist values they once held to become the
‘left wing’ of authoritarian reaction that supports capitalism and
state-sanctioned interference in the civic arena of debate.
These two positions, the liberal left and
alt-right, essentially structure the dominant mode of participating in politics
today – debates about ‘culture’ often broadly and erroneously conceived. In my
post on Moana Jackson I explained that he is part of an intellectual faction in
academia called ‘culturalism’ which insists on the primacy of ethnic group
belonging in one’s personal identity. It then tries to put a square peg in a
round hole by combining this with a liberal political programme of rights and
freedoms. Notably, culturalism never addresses in any systematic or meaningful
way the worldwide system of allocation of material resources, or the trajectory
of uneven economic development this system follows which gives rise to
extraordinary differences between ownership classes and labouring classes. It
jettisons these issues so it can talk about culture and the lack of strong
investment in traditions as being the problem for marginalised ethnic groups.
This utterly misguided phenomenon, which takes no account of the changes to
class composition along the lines of those ‘marginalised ethnic groups’ that
has taken place since the late twentieth century, is the ‘left’ wing of the
cultural debate.
The right wing of the cultural debate
accepts much of the claims that form the basis of the ‘left’ form of
culturalism. They also believe in the primacy of ethnic belonging, ‘culture’
and tradition. Commonly they are Europeans but not exclusively so; hence there
is a lot of just-as-unnecessary and stupefyingly off-base chit-chat about
‘European culture’ being ‘under threat’ and requiring some sort of ‘revival’.
Presumably, given the actions of many alt-right figures, what this ‘revival’
requires is a lot of racist caterwauling, making fun of ‘social justice
warriors’, and in some cases arguing for societal regressions to essentially
feudal systems of social organisation. The alt-right is not a homogeneous
phenomenon and has many forms – the ‘anarcho-capitalist’ form that Molyneux
represents is one, but Southern appears to represent the self-described
neo-Nazi element of the alt-right given the company she has been recently
keeping. But their biggest issue above all where they have almost complete
agreement on is immigration. They call for practically all immigration to be
stopped, and fierce border controls. The wall Trump has proposed to divide the
United States and Mexico is a good start. This position follows from the
culturalist view that people have different ‘cultures’, coupled with the idea
that they must not mix, like they have been allowed to do with the ‘liberal
projects’ of mass immigration and multiculturalism.
We can see, then, how the culturalism
supported by many elements of the liberal left actually goes some way to
complementing the beliefs of the alt-right. They are merely two permutations of
the same worldview that have only a second-order disagreement. The basis of
these two views is incorrect but widely held. It is the essentialist scenario
that instead of being part of a constantly changing human world that must be
acknowledged from the start to be wildly heterogeneous, we are born into a
discrete set of hypostatic cultural groups that usually carry ethnic or
national labels, like ‘European’ or ‘Nigerian’ or ‘Indian’ or ‘Mexican’ or
‘Scandinavian’ or ‘Māori’, or whatever else. These cultures all have traditions
that must be respected and honoured. This is a profoundly ahistorical view of
the world that freezes people’s understanding of different groups of others in
the present, and fails to take stock of how the entire history of the human
world has been shaped by ‘cultural’ exchange and also suppression of particular
elements through a long, protracted history of empire-building and
consolidation. There is also very little attempt made to explain what ‘culture’
actually is in this framework. More often than not reactionary inferences are
made to concepts like Volksgeist (national
spirit or national character) or indeed essentialist, Romantic reference to an
inner cultural ‘spirit’ (very common in ‘indigenous’ theories).
The debate on ‘culture’ and migration has
become an issue because of what Jonathan Friedman describes as the “dual
process” which motors the tendency towards what is often called
‘globalisation’. The first part of that process is the inexorable movement
towards an end to the old international political order dominated by one or two
‘central’ world powers. We now have a multipolar world order caused by the
political weakening of Western nation-states as well as the disintegration of the
Soviet Union. This is coupled with the constant political anxieties and
conflicts of many ‘weak’ postcolonial states. With this decentralisation comes
a re-emergence of national identities in those dehegemonised areas, which can
be seen particularly in the success of Eastern and Central European nationalist
movements and parties such as in Hungary and Poland. These movements are mostly
on the right of politics. With the political crises of many ‘weak’ states in
weaker areas of the world-system, particularly in African and Middle Eastern
nations, enormous waves of migration have occurred from those nations to the
old ‘centres’. This can be compared with the status of Eastern Asia that has
seen the opposite effect: a suppression of minority politics and a reinforcement
of national or regional identities.
The other aspect of this process, for
Friedman, is the “increased polarization between classes and a transformation
of the identities of the classes involved”. This occurs primarily in the old
centres of the world-system. The polarisation occurs between “increasing
cosmopolitanism among rising elites and increasing localism, nationalism, and
xenophobia among declining and increasingly marginalized classes”. We see this
happening in the United States where Hillary Clinton of the Democratic Party,
seemingly the figurehead of ‘anti-establishment’ opprobrium there, is ignorant
to the material plight of the working-class, having the audacity to lump them
into a “basket of deplorables” – and the ‘white’ (among other ‘racial’ group)
working-classes of the Rust Belt, who have lost considerable economic ground
thanks to deindustrialisation and capital flight from North America, supporting
Donald Trump and his anti-immigration policies for the presidency. It is
repeatedly insinuated by the Clinton faction of the Democrats, however, that
these groups in fact do not face ‘economic anxieties’ and this is just an
excuse for their ‘racism’ – which only confirms that they pay no attention (or
perhaps they don’t want to) to the changes in the capitalist economy going on
around them, that have widened inequalities as a result of their own party’s
economic policies.
The alt-right and the assortment of
European nationalist movements have seized the window of opportunity created by
this polarisation of classes, and sought to exploit it. These movements have
carried with them sections of the working classes that were formerly supporters
of social democratic parties. Hence, many social democratic parties in Europe
and North America are now experiencing a crisis of relevancy. The Socialist
Party in France is an almost non-existent presence in its national parliament.
The SDP in Germany is only hanging on as a junior coalition partner in Angela
Merkel’s right-wing government, virtually useless. Populists in Italy ousted
the Democratic Party government in a landslide victory; the latter has just 111
seats in a 630-seat Chamber of Deputies. The Liberal Party of Canada under
Justin Trudeau has been absolutely shambolic in government and will very likely
last just one term. This unprecedented scale of failure by social democratic
parties has been repeated across European and North American countries and
provinces. It is because they have all abandoned reformist projects to build up
a public welfare and social services state, and instead pursued a continuation
of capitalist austerity policies that are beneficial to the financial sector
and business but have widened class inequalities. It is no surprise that the
working classes have rejected such parties. But because of the activities of
these new right-wing groups, along with the abject failure of much of the Left
to respond with any coherent vision, political investments of the working class
have been diverted away from building resentment against the injustices of a
broken, pathetic and coiling economic system towards the scapegoating of a
pseudo-enemy in the immigrant or refugee.
The liberal left is the constituency that
still, with actual gusto, supports social-democratic parties despite their
long-held betrayal of the great reformist projects they once promised. The
liberal left can do this because it is largely a middle-class phenomenon that
has little or no connection to the working-class and views its growing
resentment of world elites and slanting towards xenophobia with complete
contempt. It can do this with virtually no contradiction to its political
outlook because it has abandoned any pretence of being ‘left-wing’ at all. The
primary condition of being on the political left is opposing social inequality
and supporting forms of class politics. The liberal left, however, has no form
of class analysis whatsoever that it cannot channel into a misguided analysis
of ‘ethnic’ inequality, gender inequality or anything else but straightforward class analysis. The liberal left is notionally
a separate constituency to what I call the ‘cultural Left’ or ‘culturalists’
(of Moana Jackson’s ilk), but they overlap significantly and have entered into
the cultural politics debate united, because of the liberal left’s penchant for
amplifying identity politics at the expense of class politics.
As a result of its political alliance with
the culturalists, not only does the liberal left betray the ‘left’ in its name,
but also the ‘liberal’ as well. The liberal left has bought into the
authoritarian strategy of censorship of any political group it does not like.
Its word for this is ‘no-platforming’ or ‘deplatforming’. This is because the
liberal left believes ‘hate speech’ should not have a platform. As I showed in
my piece on Moana Jackson, there is considerable latitude applied to what
constitutes ‘hate speech’, and there is nothing stopping that definition being
turned on its head by opponents, who can use state institutions to censor
things they also do not like or
present themselves as marginalised groups. This is what Israel Folau attempted
to do during the controversy surrounding his comments on gay people. He
presented his version of anti-homosexual Christianity as a ‘marginalised’
position, which received support from Destiny Church founder and serial
fraudster Brian Tamaki. When Southern and Molyneux announced they were coming
to New Zealand for their anti-immigration speaking tour, the liberal left
appealed to state institutions to interfere in the civic arena to get it
stopped. Little does the liberal left realise this is exactly what the
alt-right expect and want from them and it is a primary strategy of recruiting
new converts to their political cult.
With the liberal left betraying liberal
ideals of a democratic public sphere through their wanton use of state
interference at every turn, the alt-right has been able to present themselves
as arbiters of the right to freedom of speech. This, however, is even more
hypocritical and fake than the actions of the liberal left. The alt-right
supports freedom of speech for their own group, but wants to get liberal groups
banned and calls the police on people who turn up to their events and picket or
protest. They want the right to insult and mock others, but become ‘snowflakes’
themselves if they are ever insulted or mocked – see the hysteria surrounding
Michelle Wolf’s actually very funny speech at the White House Correspondents’
Dinner where she made a little bit of fun of Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sarah
Huckabee Sanders. They claim to support democratic values whilst advocating for
the forced deportation of migrants, and, in some cases, for their indefinite
detention or even murder (in the most extreme cases). Lauren Southern, for
example, took part in vessel operations of a right-wing extremist activist
group’s ship that aimed to thwart attempts to rescue Libyan migrants.
Horrifyingly, the right-wing group she participated in is called ‘Generation
Identitaire’ – the Identity Generation in French.
Neither of the two sides in the ‘cultural’
politics debate genuinely supports free speech. This is evidenced by the
actions that have been taken by key players on both of those sides.
Interestingly enough, key New Zealand politicians have actually indicated their
support for free speech. Winston Peters, the Acting Prime Minister, has done so
as well as the leader of the centre-right opposition National party. The Labour
party has largely avoided the issue; there is probably disagreement internally
on it. The only party that has declared opposition to free speech is the Green
party, increasingly becoming the central base of New Zealand’s identity-based
liberal left. Its co-leader, Marama Davidson, said she received death threats
from extreme-right activists. This is a key tactic of the extreme-right
whenever a challenge is made to them from any frontier of politics and it
demonstrates that they are in fact not committed to free speech at all as I
have already shown. What Davidson unfortunately does not realise is she has
inadvertently contributed to their cause. She has confirmed for sceptics
leaning towards the conspiratorial worldview of the alt-right that the ‘liberal
establishment’ does indeed silence the views of those it does not want to hear
and is uninterested in the sentiments of those classes experiencing profound
downward social mobility.
The socialist left’s position on this
issue should be to support free speech in this instance. Socialism is not a
political system that lies in opposition to the principles of liberalism and
democracy, but is in fact the realisation in full of those principles through
overcoming the contradictions that capitalism and servitude introduces to them.
Figures on the contemporary left like Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, and Glenn Greenwald
have written excellently against censorship. Karl Marx supported unequivocally
the right to freedom of speech, even if he did not approve of what was said in
any instance, evidenced in his youthful writings against the Prussian Censorship
law and his chastisement of the “silence which is observed in the European
press” regarding acts of cruelty and injustice committed by the English
government of his time.
What the alt-right preaches is disgusting.
Southern and Molyneux included. It is very often nonsensical and illogical. But
it is better to know full well what they do preach, rather than the confected,
performative guise they sprinkle over it when publicly questioned. We should
take up the challenge they often make to us, but do not themselves tend to
honour when asked, of debating and refuting their views in public. To that end
I condemn the liberal left for their reckless actions and support the ‘free
speech coalition’ – a very, politely put, ‘eclectic’ group of people, some of
whom have not always supported freedom of speech evenly in the past. Not only
must we be against censorship, we must be ready to debate the views we do not
like with a clear head. It is our responsibility we must pay to the next
generation, if nothing else. And we must reject the fatalistic narratives of
culturalism and identity politics in favour of a socialist politics of
equality, fraternity, and democracy.
