By Saswat Pattanayak
“How do you express your views so freely if you consider American society unfree? Why are you so disdainful of American policies, while the country provides you with utmost freedom of speech? If you were in North Korea or Cuba, could you enjoy similar freedom to criticize their political systems? Should you not remain grateful to American power for the freedoms you enjoy?”
I am often asked such fundamental questions which lead me to reflect. In my quest, I gladly discover that I am not alone. Indeed, the American way of life, suffused with capitalistic onslaughts, is criticized across globe; and yet its harshest opponents reside within: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Bob McChesney, Michael Moore, Amy Goodman, Ralph Nader, to name a few. I too have wondered, how do they express their resentments against the empire so freely? Despite their staunch oppositions, how do they end up becoming prime time celebrities and bestselling authors? Likewise, the country’s leading media houses are liberal and are oftentimes, anti-establishment. Finally, today, the country’s first black president claims to represent a multicultural melting pot society where his advocacies through free speech have won him the most coveted position in the world.
So, have the class demands really melted? Is the individual freedom of speech then one of the grandest contradictions of Americana which Karl Marx probably missed?
To overcome my apprehensions, I try to hear what the American liberal pundits have to offer. To my astonishment, each one confirms that indeed despite flawed foreign policies, America is the free-est country in the world. They immediately analyze the merits in the conclusions that the holy Fathers of the Nation had reached. Most progressives convince me that America’s source of strength in the world is its free press. The First Amendment is unique in the world. Free speech in America is most protected among all nations. And yes, I am reassured that I would be persecuted in Cuba for speaking out against Castro, whereas in the United States, I could freely speak out against the President without fear.
And yet, I am not convinced. I am not at ease realizing that an individual freedom to speak out against the power must necessarily be granted by the very power that he/she needs to remain in conflict with until social justice prevails. I am not comfortable accepting a proposition that I must necessarily equate Cuban socialist society with American capitalism and must fundamentally oppose Castro in order to proclaim my radical roots. How does any conformance with progressive planning lessen one’s self-worth is beyond my grasp. And how a continuous situation of confrontational debate permitted within liberal framework and engaged in by white liberal scholars as an exclusive conversation among themselves, enhances human dignity also remains a mystery to me.
What the famous liberal professors do not admit is that freedom of speech, thus granted by a hegemonist power structure, is neither necessary nor sufficient criterion for democratic life. So long as oppressed people everywhere are not free, privileged people with exclusive freedom of speech must not be heralded as torchbearers of any radical movement. What the liberal intellectuals do not admit is the fact that the free speech at campuses of MIT and Harvard cannot simply be compared with the quality of free speech enjoyed by residents of Bronx or Prince Georges County. What the liberals who claim America as the most free country in the world often forget is that free speech can be enjoyed only by those who can afford it; that freedom of press belongs to those that own it.
More importantly, what most liberals forget in their myopic mapping of future paths, if any, is that freedom of speech, inclusive of all anarchist preachings, does not eliminate exploitations; and that the neoliberal setups require the rhetoric of free speech to infuse a moral sense of superiority in their drives to civilize the savages - to imperialize the hungry who have heard it enough. The working class demands are still for land, peace and bread. Not to witness corporate press indulge in freestyle mud-slinging.
American freedom of speech which is being replicated across the globe in the name of democracy has major contradictions. It confuses social equality with individual liberty by arguing that protecting speech is protecting minorities, whereas most minorities are oppressed because of the free press instruments owned by the corporate majority that go unregulated in promoting profit sphere, not public sphere. As a result of which, torture deaths of at least 107 “illegal immigrants” inside American prisons since 2003 could never become a news. It could not be, because these people or their working class American relatives did not really enjoy the First Amendment, which whereas claims that the Congress cannot prohibit one from expressing opinions, does not say about establishment of provisions and means using which everyone shall have equal rights to free speech.
Free speech, like free market, is often cited as available on competitive basis, although it is never explained how a healthy competition can ever exist in a society where one class of people exclusively own another. It is lost on the purveyors and connoisseurs of luxurious free speech that like capitalism itself, free speech by its foundation must necessarily lead to monopolies. And that, Marx indeed had not missed the contradiction when he proposed that, “the first freedom of the press consists in its not being a profit venture.”