The Politics of Free Speech
Panel Discussion
1:00 PM - 3:30 PM CT
Room 107, Kent Lab, UChicago
1020 E 58th St, Chicago, IL 60637
Speakers:
Jack Weinberg is an environmental activist, former New Leftist, and is known for his role in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer based in England. His work has appeared in UnHerd, Sublation Magazine, Areo Magazine, Quillette and elsewhere.
Abdul Alkalimat is Professor of African-American Studies at UIC and author of Malcolm X for Beginners.
Carlos Garrido is a co-founder of Midwestern Marx and writer currently working on a serial anthology of American socialism.
Jack Ross is author of The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History and The Strange Death of American Exceptionalism.
"If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."
— Jefferson, First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1801)
“The government knows, and the bourgeoisie knows too, that the whole German workers' movement today is only tolerated, only survives, for as long as the government chooses. For as long as it serves the government's purpose for this movement to exist and for the bourgeois opposition to be faced with new, independent opponents, thus long will it tolerate this movement. From the moment that this movement turns the workers into an independent force, and thereby becomes a danger to the government, there will be an abrupt end to it all. The whole manner in which the men-of-Progress agitation in the press, associations and assemblies has been put down, should serve as a warning to the workers. The same laws, edicts and measures which were applied in that case, can be applied against them at any time and deal a lethal blow to their agitation; and they will be so applied as soon as this agitation becomes dangerous. It is of the greatest importance that the workers should be clear about this point, and do not fall prey to the same illusion as the bourgeoisie in the New Era, when it was similarly only tolerated but imagined it was already in the saddle. And if anyone should imagine the present government would free the press, the right of association and the right of assembly from their present fetters, he is clearly among those to whom there is no point in talking. And unless there is freedom of the press, the right of association and the right of assembly, no workers' movement is possible.”
— Engels, The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers' Party (1865)
From the Sedition Act of 1798 through the Sedition Act of 1918, the right to public speech has been tied to the politics of the state. Both acts were raised in recent prosecutions of Trump to bar him from candidacy. The 1798 Act was authorized under John Adams’ presidency as a means of prosecuting and convicting members of the Jeffersonian press for their support of the Jacobins in the French Revolution and their further criticism of the Adams administration; while the 1918 act was authorized under Wilson’s presidency as a means of prosecuting and convicting Socialist Party leader and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs for his speech in Canton, Ohio which called for turning the inter-imperialist war into a class-war. Meanwhile, today, the same Leftists calling to de-platform the Right are themselves called the Right and driven off campus.
What is the importance of civil liberties, especially freedom of speech, for the freedom of society?
Does society have the right to be wrong?
What made free speech a socialist cause? What is the relationship of socialism and civil liberties?
Why has the Left suppressed or supported free speech and what distinguishes its doing so from the Right's? In what way is free speech a concern for the Left? How is its concern distinguished from the Right?
