On Mon, 14 Nov 2011, Eric Beck wrote:
> I thought Robin's piece was unbearably smug. "I think you are shit, but
> I'll heroically defend your right to be shit" is not my favorite genre,
> with its disavowal of any sort of actual position.
Eric, I think you really must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed with this piece.
> And then what he proceeds to say about "private" repression vs. "public"
> repression is a masterpiece in liberal hair-splitting.
This just isn't true.
Let's go back to the article and keep to its main thread:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011111013422670424.html
which is about getting fired. Natasha Lennard got fired for her political views and there is nothing in the bill of rights that protects her -- or anyone else for that matter. It's totally legal and always has been.
That is really only point Robin is making in this very short article: that getting fired for your views is a form of repression that is enormously pervasive; that it has always played a huge role in cowing people in America from expressing themselves; and that given how pervasive it is, it's remarkable how little it's ever mentioned. (When people talk about repression under communism, not being able to practice your profession always plays a huge role. When we discuss the US or Europe, not so much. One gets the general impression by default that that's a problem we don't have here. But we do.)
In short, he's saying that what happened to Lennard is the rule, not the exception. And that's it's a very big rule.
I think he's totally right, and I can't imagine that you disagree with him.
It is also not a truism. I think he's completely right about how under-emphacized it is, and how most people regard what happened to Lennard as a weird freak accident.
Most of the article is an illustration of how this mechanism of repression through fear of losing your job has had a lot of causal effect in making people in large numbers toe the line in various eras of US history. And also how this mechanism often gets overlooked because other forms operating in sync with it are more spectacularly awful. But that it always plays a huge role. Just as it is playing today.
The last paragraph of Corey's piece, which in passing equates libertarians and anarchists, as both overestimating the state as the source of repression, is just an op-ed wrap up. I can perfectly understand how a left anarchist could justifiably hate that equation, and hate that argument. And there are certainly many perfectly good replies to that argument. (To start with, lots of modern anarchism, like that espoused by Lennard at that talk, emphasizes that it is against hierarchy everywhere, in every setting, and that all forms are equally important to root out. And however one might fault that view, it's certainly not a view that implies that the removal of the state solves everything. One could even argue it makes private repression central than competing currents of thought.)
But again, that last paragraph is just a rhetorical wrap up to tie 1200 words up in a bow. To pounce on the bow is unfair to the article. It's not at all Corey's thesis here, which is about the enormous repressive power of firing people for their political views, which is totally and completely legal. And a pillar of the repressive system, although almost never mentioned as such.
Michael