Why Jonathan Chait Is Wrong About Marxism, Liberalism and Free Speech [View all]

http://inthesetimes.com/article/19007/jonathan-chait-marxism-liberalism-free-speech-jacobin

Take, for example, individual rights like rights to free expression. The Marxist argument isn’t that free expression is a bad thing; the argument is that liberals have an anemic, purely formal understanding of free speech rights that ignores the fact that, in practice, the ability to make one’s voice heard in public debates is extremely unequally distributed.

After all, on paper Donald Trump and I both have the same formal, liberal right to free speech. But in practice, Trump’s immense wealth grants him orders of magnitude greater ability to express his views in public.

For the classical liberal, the wealthy media mogul who owns newspapers and TV stations has the same free speech rights as the janitor who cleans his office. For Marxists, this absurdity reveals a fatal flaw at the core of liberal politics: it’s not possible to realize ideals of democratic self-rule, freedom and equality within a system based on radical class inequality.

To their credit, modern American liberals have since moved on from the earlier, classical liberal denial that capitalism is built on class inequality—modern liberals in the United States, for instance, embrace some elements of the welfare state and view the labor movement in a generally positive light whereas this would have been anathema to earlier liberal forebearers. But this shift to the left must be seen for what it really is: an attempt to shore up an uninspiring and limited political project by co-opting programmatic demands from the socialist movement, including Marxism.