Especially since the 2016 presidential election, the Left has been itching for a wedge issue to open the door to government regulation and control of the marketplace for ideas—i.e., to reign in freedom of speech. Remember “fake news” and the pressure on social media companies like Facebook and Google to police its content (with the implied threat that if they don’t do it, the politicians will)? Another wedge to statist control of speech has been proposed by academic Fredrik DeBoer for the Washington Post. In Corporations are cracking down on free speech inside the office – and Out, DeBoer criticizes the practice of some companies (and other employers) to enforce speech codes not only within its workplace but also “cracking down on their workers’ expression outside of it.” “This trend,” he says, “even extends to academia.”
Most of these people [who are fired] said something that I find, to varying degrees, wrong or unhelpful. Some of it was outright offensive. But none of it deserves firing, because none of it happened in the workplace or had anything to do with work. Rather, each of these people was let go because of statements or gestures they made outside of their working duties. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways that private employers can constitute a grave threat to our free speech rights — and expose a conflict between genuine freedom and capitalism.
There is a reason that, rather than letting legal codes alone protect expression, liberal societies rely on a robust norm of free speech. The basic processes of democracy require that we all feel free to disagree with one another in the public sphere; without such a norm, it’s impossible to deliberate as democracy requires. To abandon that norm is to give up the means by which people in democracies make decisions. When that norm has been abandoned, such as in the McCarthy era, we have considered it an injustice, and for good reason. The American Civil Liberties Union, lately a proud public challenger of President Trump and his travel bans, puts the point succinctly: “Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups.” Yet thinkers on the left and the right have failed, in many cases, to grapple with this.
First, DeBoer and the ACLU are wrong to blur the distinction between government and private pressure groups. There is no “conflict between genuine freedom and capitalism.” That blurring, not genuinely private pressure groups, corporations, or colleges, is the real threat to free speech.
Take corporations. A private company cannot stop you from speaking. It can only set rules or “speech codes” pertaining to the company, not throughout society. It can contractually obligate its employees to refrain from certain types of expression, and the employee or prospective employee can voluntarily decide whether to go to work for the company, or not. The company can only set rules pertaining to people who voluntarily decide to associate with it. In contrast, a government has a legal monopoly on the use of physical force. It is the institution that, unlike private individuals and their businesses and other associations, can compel, by threat of fines or imprisonment, obedience to its edicts through laws that impact everyone.
Granted, companies and other private institutions can step over a moral line from time to time. But firing the employee is all it can do. What the company cannot do is compel by physical force, or threat thereof, obedience to its edicts outside of the organization.
And freedom provides a means of causing a change in the company’s policies. If it’s policies become too severe, it will find it harder to attract and keep workers, leading it to reign in its “censorship” both inside and outside the workplace to remain competitive. Or outside activists can expose the repugnant policy to public scrutiny, putting public pressure on the company to change its policies on speech if it so chooses.
But I works both ways. Neither can these outside agitators, even if right, force the company to change. With good reason: Freedom of speech is a vital part of intellectual freedom, and that freedom means not only the right to speak without government impediment. It means no one may be compelled by government to sanction ideas or rhetoric it disagrees with. The right to free speech does not include speaking at others’ expense or property. In a free society, force is banned as a means of settling differences—which means, the company may not force its speech codes on society in general, and neither can private pressure groups force their version of acceptable speech on all companies.
That some companies fire employees for political speech or opinions may not always be moral. But the firing does not infringe on the employee’s rights, either. It’s not a free speech issue. It’s a freedom of association property rights issue. Companies have right to fire for whatever reason, just as employees have a right to quit for any reason (consistent with prior employment contracts). Just as an employee has a right not to work for or quit a company whose code of conduct policy he disagrees with, so a company has a right not to hire (or to fire) an employee who doesn’t agree or comply with its policy. A company is a voluntary association owned by people, and the company’s rights extend from the individual rights of the individual owner[s]. If a company does not want to endorse certain ideas, it has a right not to have employees on its payroll that express those ideas. These rights may or may not always lead to good company policy. But the First Amendment and the principle of rights sanctions it. There is no threat to free speech.
DeBoer agrees that employers may rightfully require workers to comply with company speech and conduct policy when engaged in their working duties, but draws a line where workplace duties end. This is dangerous, especially so given DeBoer’s proposed solution. The idea that the free speech rights of individuals are violated or threatened by rules of businesses they voluntarily join is a dangerous premise, and DeBoer’s shocking solution proves it:
The left has argued that the fickle turns of the market inevitably erode freedom. Karl Marx and his followers famously said that only through radical egalitarianism in material and social terms could the Enlightenment ideal of personal freedom be fully realized. Today’s left-leaning thinkers have echoed this sentiment, pointing to the highly regimented conditions of workers on factory floors and in white-collar offices as proof that capitalist enterprise curtails freedom rather than protects it. The political science professor Corey Robin, in particular, has made a career out of demonstrating that the tyrannies that most consistently afflict ordinary Americans are workplace tyrannies, part of what he calls the “private life of power.” Progressives who are pleased when businesses discipline workers’ illiberal speech have lost this essential thread of leftism, arguing that if the government isn’t the one enforcing speech codes, then there are no threats to free speech. This is clearly wrong. [My emphasis]
A only institution that can effect a “radical egalitarianism in material and social terms” is the government, through its law-making powers—the power of the gun. A government with such unrestricted power to egalitarianism a population is a totalitarian state with full power to enforce state-approved codes of conduct, including speech codes. Marxism in practice proves it. As Mao ZeDong famously observed, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, [and] only with guns can the whole world be transformed.” Political power—force—is the nature of Marxian socialism. Economic power—that is, capitalism—grows out of voluntarism.
Transforming the whole world is what Marx had in mind. Marxism seeks to overturn human nature—the natural fact that human beings are metaphysically unequal in myriad attributes, and who individually must act selfishly in accordance to his individual attributes and rational judgement in order to survive and thrive—and transform the human world around its utopian radical egalitarian vision. Despite Marx’s nod to the Enlightenment, Marxism seeks to replace the Enlightenment free society that allows individual flourishing according to individual attributes and effort with a colony of altruistic drones completely devoid of intelligent individuality and diversity save for the “personal freedom” of spoiled childlike whim worship. This obedient collectivized anthill, which systematically kills the source of material production—achievement through self-interested individual initiative and aspiration for personal advancement—would somehow supply all with their material needs.
It’s a thoroughly utopian fantasy, which is why this transformation would be achieved the only way it can be—by perpetual application of political force and violence to prevent anyone from rising and distinguishing himself apart from the collective; that is, to effect a “radical egalitarianism in material and social terms.” Marx understood this, which is why perpetual violent revolution is explicitly advocated and deliberately built into the DNA of Marxism—which in turn explains why the Marxist utopian dream, in practice, always leads to rivers of blood and the spiritual deadness of state-enforced intellectual, economic, and social uniformity. Anyone who pokes his head above the sea of uniformity, and thus achieves unequal status, must be cut down by any means. To the Enlightenment, freedom means governmentally unfettered action to work and trade. To Marx, freedom means escape from the responsibility to provide through work and trade for one’s own needs that life and his nature imposes on human beings.
This—government dictates based on Marxist utopian egalitarianism—is the evil that DeBoer says is the answer to the “problem” of alleged corporate threats free speech, as well as the threat to personal “freedom” he sees in freedom of association, freedom of conscience, and private property rights. DeBoer calls for an attack on freedom and prosperity masquerading as freedom and prosperity. Don’t buy DeBoer’s Orwellian “Slavery is Freedom” inversion. Companies that act unfairly but otherwise don’t violate individual free speech rights should be opposed through free speech, not government edicts. Keep government out of the intellectual sphere. Anyone who thinks it’s bad to be restricted by his bosses’ speech codes should consider what it would be like to live under egalitarian Marxian totalitarianism, where getting fired is the least of your worries. Hundreds of millions of people have already learned the hard way, through concentration camp incarceration, mass genocidal murder, and the stale hopelessness of life under government-enforced material and social equality.
To be sure, there is apparently a regressive trend of corporations restricting expression of “wrong” ideas beyond what is required of its productive mission, often in response to pressure from Leftist activist outside groups (consider the fired Google employee). That is a problem. The Daily Caller’s Scott Greer documents this disturbing trend in Corporations Remain The Biggest Threat To Free Speech (though I don’t agree with his premise). The anti-free speech trend in academia, given its educational mission, is even more disturbing, and should be strenuously opposed. We should not ignore the suffocating effect of this on public discourse and debate.
But the solution is private protest, pressure, and education, not surrendering our own free speech to government-enforced speech codes, which would signal the end of intellectual freedom by putting government in charge of deciding which ideas are acceptable and which aren’t. Don’t give the statists that wedge. The ACLU has done some fine work defending free speech. But it is dead wrong to equate government censorship with private “censorship” (really, pseudo-censorship). The first is broad and backed by force. The second is narrow and lacks any physical coercion. Political correctness is a horrendous attempt at private censorship, and it can do real damage to honest discussion. Imagine if it were backed by law. That’s what could happen if government begins setting speech codes.
The Left is slowly becoming more brazen in trying to resurrect Marxism. Remember the deadly
record of Marxian tyranny in practice—and the uplifting record of the freedom of capitalism’s alleged “workplace tyrannies.” There is no “conflict between genuine freedom and capitalism.” Genuine freedom and capitalism are synonymous. Marxian socialism versus Americanism: That is really the fundamental choice.
Related Reading:
Related Viewing:
"Why Marxism?" An Evening at FEE with C. Bradley Thompson—Foundation for Economic Education
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