A Leftist, Materialist Proposal for Strengthening Substantive Free Expression

I offer three broad ideas: (1) Decommodify speech; (2) Decouple social viability and expressive rights from employment and social status; (3) Reinforce the expressive value of formal political acts.

A. Context. Critics of Cancel Culture are distressed. They say that Critics of Critics of Cancel Culture don’t care about free speech. We hate free speech apparently! You can tell because we dismiss their arguments… with our speech!

I do dismiss the Harper's Letter because it’s vague and platitude-laden. The ideologically diverse cast of signers shows not the value of free speech, but, absent application or context, how easy it is to affirm a platitude.

But dismissal alone doesn’t get us very far. I agree that some people are wrongfully losing their jobs for expressing their opinions. And I think people on the left should take that seriously (we do, in fact!) and work to correct it.

I disagree with the framing of the Harper's Letter, as well, insofar I think the focus of free speech should not be on cultural institutions and their elites but on the poor, marginal, and vulnerable.

The main victims of infringements on free expression are not columnists, editors, and professors but economically precarious and socially marginal people. And the censored comments are not always directly or explicitly political.

For example, I am concerned about the transwoman who is fired for too sharply correcting her coworkers when they misgender her. That to me is a far more substantial free speech issue than James Bennet’s resignation.

With that in mind, I offer a constructive and concrete proposal. I make three suggestions. None are about affirming platitudes or personal transformation. They are all about changing existing laws, policies, and institutions. They are about the material conditions of speech.

B. Proposed Actions. (1) Decommodify speech; (2) Decouple social viability and expressive rights from employment and social status; (3) Reinforce the expressive value of formal political acts.

(1) Decommodify Speech: We must reconsider the material conditions that make it possible for people to speak. When speech is a commodity, only the affluent will be able to afford it, and they will spend it to protect their own power and social status.

To guard against this, we should decommodify speech. We must radically democratize the conditions from which people speak and ensure that access to expression cannot be bought and sold. I suggest the following policies:

a. Regulate existing infrastructures of expression, including traditional media and emergent social media, as public utilities. Facebook and Twitter, Fox News and the New York Times, should be accountable to the public good, and not just to shareholders.

a.2 Alter the corporate charters of those utilities to ensure that workers and the public have ample representation on governing boards.

b. Socialize institutions of knowledge production. Increase investments in public schools. Abolish student debt and make all public higher education free. Dramatically increase funding for basic scientific research.

b.2 Weaken and socialize intellectual property rights. Ideas and knowledge that further human flourishing should be effectively socialized. Subsidize their production and amplify their circulation.

b.3 Alter the charters of all universities, public and private, to ensure that all workers, faculty, staff, and students have ample representation on governing boards.

b.4 Fund public child care, mandate robust parental leave, and institute universal public pre-K to ensure better gender and class equity in knowledge production.

c. Fund programs that seek to support, develop, and credential writers, scientists, researchers, journalists, artists, and intellectuals who come from marginalized, underrepresented, and dispossessed backgrounds.

d. Fund or socialize new media outlets. Provide more financial support for the arts and humanities, as well as grants to sustain new publishing outlets, venues, and platforms. Create a capacious and well-funded public infrastructure for expression.

e. Overturn Citizens United (or amend the constitution) and end the formal legal conflation of speech and money.

(2) Decouple social viability and expressive rights from employment and social status: Where basic social viability depends on employment, and employment rights are weak, no worker will ever be able to speak freely to their boss or a customer.

Some incidents filed under “cancel culture” involve large portions of the public using their expressive abilities to criticize the conduct of workers. But it was *employers* who responded by firing the offending worker.

What makes such maneuvers powerful but potentially abusive is that they exploit (and harden) the class inequality between boss and worker and depend upon (and sometimes exhort) the profit-motive of the employer. Moreover, if they misfire the harm is dire and irreversible.

Rather than curbing, implicitly or explicitly, the expressive rights of the public, their right to criticize bad conduct and boycott bad actors, we can mitigate abusive cases by narrowing that class inequality and mitigating the harm associated with loss of employment.

At the same time, the shape of state power and the functioning of racial capitalism means that BIPOC and undocumented immigrants have the weakest effective rights to expression, which no platitude will correct.

Not only may the exercise of an expressive right result in sanction from employers, it may also result in direct state violence, incarceration, and deportation. This is intolerable and unacceptable. I suggest the following policies:

a. End at will employment. Employers should only be able to fire with cause. That cause must be related to the completion of a workers’ responsibilities and reasons for termination should be concrete and proximate to those responsibilities.

a.2 Workers should have notice and an opportunity for correction. Termination should be reviewable and reversible by a neutral third party.

b. Strengthen and expand unionization. Guarantee worker and union representation on all corporate boards and in relevant governance structures. End Open Shop Laws. Provide public support to worker-owned cooperatives.

b.2 Increase access to financial resources for underrepresented and marginal communities.

c. Sever basic social viability from employment status. Fund robust public programs to guarantee all people sustenance, lodging, healthcare, and education.

c.2 Explicitly: provide high quality, single-payer universal health care for all people. Include funding for universal and accessible mental health care.

c.3 Invest in a capacious physical infrastructure that guarantees all people, regardless of income or physical capacity, the ability to navigate our social world.

c.4 Provide a universal basic income, universal basic wealth and/or a guarantee of employment.

c.5 Fund reparations programs to address intergenerational wealth inequalities caused by previous injustice, including slavery, settler colonialism, and racial apartheid.

d. Demilitarize and defund the police. Speaking to the police should never get you killed. Responses to BLM protestors show that organized, racist state violence is the most pressing threat to free expression.

e. Radically reduce incarceration. Incarcerated people have diminished formal expressive rights and virtually nonexistent functional expressive rights.

f. Abolish ICE and offer immediate naturalization and citizenship to all immigrants.

(3) Reaffirm the expressive value of formal political acts: When people feel they have no agency to hold the powerful accountable they may settle for exercising power over the vulnerable and weak instead.

Some amount of the rancor and viciousness of recent politics is related to that sense of exhausted agency. People are angry and vindictive, to an extent, because they feel like their agency is blunted and they want to feel like they have power over something, anything.

Electoralism alone is a weak tonic, but the dysfunction of the formal structures of American democracy contributes profoundly to that general feeling. That feeling, rightly or wrongly, is expressed by both the right and the left and by many still who consider themselves neither.

Voting cannot and will not cure everything, but it is a profound problem in a democracy when people feel that their vote does not mean anything. Voting isn't *just* an expressive act, but it is (or should be) a profoundly expressive act, nevertheless.

In other words, we must find a way to reinforce the expressive value of political acts--to make people feel like their political acts are meaningful and can hold powerful people accountable. I suggest the following policies:

a. Pass a constitutional amendment establishing a federal voting right. Nationalize election procedures and make election day a federal holiday. In addition, mandate universally accessible electronic and vote-by-mail.

a.1 Ensure that such an amendment forbids voting policies with discriminatory effects (contra discriminatory intents) and that district boundaries, at the municipal, state, and federal level, are controlled by nonpartisan bodies.

b. Abolish the electoral college and the senate. Radically increase the size of the House of Representatives. Adopt large multi-member districts with proportional representation and instant run-off voting procedures.

c. Make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states.

d. Restrict and eliminate campaign donations (see 1.e.). Create robust public campaign financing.

C. Conclusion. These suggested policies are not exhaustive. You may not agree with all of them. I am not an expert on all of the issues that these policies address and other, sounder policies may well exist. Please propose them and correct me where I am mistaken.

However, this proposal intends to reorient the debate away from platitudes and into the direction of articulating what material policies might protect expressive rights that reinforce robust human flourishing for as many people as possible.

A sincere effort to safeguard expressive rights should not center on the rightness or wrongness of lofty articulations of grand principle. Many people will willingly agree to vague abstractions denuded of context and particularity. Fewer will invest resources in freeing speech.

For those who will invest in platitudes that protect their own cultural status but refuse to invest in the infrastructures and resources that are relevant to the expressive rights of the vast majority of the population, some contempt, or at least ridicule, is warranted.

Everyone loves a free lunch. And we all love free speech. . . as long as it is our own and comes without a cost. I do not believe these proposals are without cost and they are not, primarily, for professors.

I think this great and sometimes grave costliness is worth it, however. And, admitting it is costly is both honest and proves its value: freeing expression for all is worth great investment.

Fin.