A New Direction

For a Left Beyond Censorship and Control

The real radical cure of censorship would be its abolition; for the institution is bad, and institutions are mightier than men.

Karl Marx, “Comments on The Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction” 1842

If there is one demon the left must expel it is the tendency to censor and control. But this exorcism of censorship cannot be achieved with liberal free speech bromides, public debates and bans on gatekeeping, although such actions would be welcome. Marx developed the view early on his career as a journalist that the bourgeois public sphere, precisely in its complicity with state censorship protocols, ended up resembling a superstitious, anti-enlightenment space where liberal intellectuals effectively became gatekeepers for the demands of the state and capital. Marx’s insights into censorship identify the core of censorship in a détente between the state and capital, wherein the state can be understood like an onion in which after you peel each layer there is no substantial center other than the interests of capital.

After facing censorship that forced his newspaper to be shut down, the early Marx became adamant that censorship must be abolished. Marx does not share this position with the liberal tradition, figures like Kant favored the existence of censorship and Rousseau argued that a minimal degree of censorship is necessary. For Marx, censorship results in a narrow, market-driven cycle wherein:

“The government hears only its own voice, it knows it hears only its own voice, and yet hangs on to the illusion that it hears the voice of the people; and it demands that the people likewise hang on to this illusion. On its part, therefore, the people sink partly into political superstition, partly into political skepticism, or, withdrawn from political life, they become a privatized rabble [Privatpöbel].”¹

The ideals of freedom of the press become effectively unrealizable for workers and the masses because when censorship dominates the public this results in superstition and irrationalism. Marx writes that “in the essence of censorship lies a basic defect which no law can correct” and this defect leads to a total crisis of civic education. It irreparably harms the possibility of the intellectual to convey social reality. The liberal intellectual cannot propagate a vision of collective social reality when they are beholden to the private whims of capital backed up by the state.

Marx is clear that the worker’s movement must rival bourgeois intellectuals by staking down a different foothold on social reality that has become obscured and made superstitious by complicity with censorship. This is why Marx would insist that journals subtract their complicity with the bourgeois state, i.e., the interest of the Marxist journal must set itself the task of conveying social reality because we cannot rely on bourgeois intellectuals to dispense with an adequate account of social reality. Their complicity with censorship made them into “pseudoliberals” in Marx’s view.

But climates of censorship are not only a bourgeois or modern phenomenon, as I have written about in Leo Strauss’s conception of persecution and self-censorship, he argues that all philosophical thought is propelled to new insight and dynamism in contexts that are censorial and this is borne out by his study of major philosophers from Maimonides, Ibn Sina to Spinoza, they each persisted despite climates of immense censorship.

“Saturn Devouring His Son” by Francisco Goya, 1823.

Censorship on the left today is still very much driven by the détente that Marx saw arise between the private whims of capital and the state. But today this tendency has become ultra-market driven and I want to lay out some of the main contours of censorship on the left and where it comes from. Firstly, censorship today follows a blind market logic of rivalry and competition, its real motivation is influence and control. It is most often led by subcultures and cliques that interact with and gain traction from private liberal institutions from the university to the Democratic Party. The censorship tactics on the left are pernicious and most often they are secretive, they aim to delegitimize and to degrade perceived enemies not in an effort to truly combat the enemies ideas but in an effort to gain public favor for themselves. We can identify this as liberal censorship because it is aligned with the material and class interests of liberal institutions but it has abandoned all pretense to liberal ideals of enlightened reason, debate and disagreement.

Secondly, we must not confuse left-liberal market censorship with state censorship in which external agents intervene (typically without anyones knowledge) to censor content, shadow ban users on social media, or attempt to steer and distort the organic direction of left action and discourse. And nor should we confuse left-liberal censorship with good old fashioned direct censorship by a figure of authority. The latter type is more common than you might think. I have witnessed and experienced all three forms of censorship and I am convinced that they form what I call the “censorship complex” and despite Strauss’s warnings, it must be abolished.

The Pettiness of Left-Liberal Censorship

I recently received an invitation from Conrad Hamilton to write the Foreword to a new book called Flowers for Marx, a book that was canceled by Punctum Books just a few months before it was slated to be published. The logic of this particular cancellation incidentally goes back to one of the reasons cited for Kamala Harris losing the 2024 presidential election, namely, her refusal to appear on the “Joe Rogan Experience.” One of the authors in the collection Ben Burgis appeared on Joe Rogan and he and Matt McManus, one of the other authors also write for Compact Magazine. Punctum’s decision to cancel this book is due to these guilt-by-association ties, it is not even based on the content of their ideas and thought.

This pseudoliberal position reveals nothing less than the tyranny of the private academy and its commitment to censorial practices. Its deeper motivations are market driven, it is concerned with image maintenance, reputation management and purity testing which makes its rationale somewhere between spontaneous narcissistic censorship and private state censorship, even though they do not have any state power. Both McManus and Burgis write for Compact Magazine but their views are clearly far afield from the conservative positions the magazine is known for. In fact, both Burgis and McManus have made their intentions clear that they write at this publication out of an interest to shift its readership towards a democratic socialist viewpoint. I often disagree with both Burgis and McManus’ liberal socialism, Rawlsian Marxism and G.A. Cohen fusions with Marx but by no means do I think that they should be censored. Our public sphere is better with them making their cases and publishing their views, if they are censored that would only harm the cause of socialism.

The rationale of this cancellation strikes me as primarily based on a guilt-by-association logic which is connected distantly to the ‘no-platforming’ tactic practiced widely on the left today. Initially, this was a far left anti-fascist tactic that originated with Trotskyists and anarchists in the 1970s to combat the far right on campuses.² But when it comes down to it, Punctum’s decision to cancel the book doesn’t truly have a compelling reason and we shouldn’t beat our heads against the wall in attempting to understand their reasoning.

So let’s take a step out to get a wider vantage point. Market driven censorship is primarily about basic market competition dynamics imposed from the professional spaces of the NGO workplace and the university onto the public spaces of the left. It is driven by anxiety over austerity across public service institutions and labor instability. The professional need to please bosses and superiors is transposed onto the public sphere, it makes these spaces into a huge venting machine for petty professional rivalries and this in turn makes for a cruel and intolerant culture on the left. It is driven fundamentally by what Mark Fisher once called the “privatization of the left” wherein the left public sphere ends up mirroring the same zero-sum game logics of elimination of competition and scorched earth postures to perceived enemies in everyday business and capitalist culture. In the censorship complex on the left, all pretense to reason has been abandoned. The left appears to itself and to others as monstrous, like Saturn eating his son, or two siblings pulling their hair out.

Paternalism and the Censorship Complex

As a young journalist, Marx saw the public sphere of his time as fundamentally anarchic just like today’s public sphere. This anarchism of the public is due to liberal intellectuals embrace of censorship and the erosion of capital throughout all pores of social life. Adherence to censorial practices are harmful in Marx’s eyes not only because they control the writing of a thinker but they control “what is in the mind of the person acting,” they “are nothing but positive sanctions of lawlessness…”³ In the eyes of the censor, Marx argues, the writer does not exist and the censor works as the law punishing transgressors not for what they write but for what they do not do. Marx discovers the guilt-by-association tactic that is deployed by today’s left-liberals as a natural outcome of the move to censor in the first place. This is why liberal censorship points to a much deeper degradation of intellectual life, it produces gatekeepers to enforce censorship and the censors then take it upon themselves to uphold prohibitions on free thought. This gatekeeping controls the very possibility of thought before any writing or discussion has even occurred.

“As the people must look on free writings as lawless, they get used to thinking that what is lawless is free, that freedom is lawless, and that what is legal is unfree. Thus censorship kills public spirit.”⁴

Censorship and gatekeeping shut down thought as such. It perverts the masses conception of freedom because it distorts freedom to be fundamentally anarchic and lawless. The censorship complex presupposes that the masses are effectively infantile, that their maturity and enlightenment is not dependent on the independence of their minds, it refuses the basic enlightenment notion that exposure to ideas that might challenge the worker could ever change the mind of the worker.

Punctum’s decision to adhere to guilt-by-association cancel culture was afforded by the shelter that the private university offers their publication. Institutions that shelter the left from public scrutiny only contribute to the degradation of the left and this causes the entire worldview of the left to become obscure. The left needs to get out of such privatized and particularistic positions which are only allowed to persist by the support offered by private elite institutions from colleges and universities to the Democratic Party.

The Internet is owned and designed by sadistic billionaires, it is surveilled by the state in ways that make Althusser’s distinction between the repressive and the ideological state apparatus fundamentally blurred. It stokes a competitive rivalry amongst us. Being online invites us to exhibit our cruelest and most sadistic tendencies. But this is already baked into capitalism. Juliet Mitchell has developed a concept to describe the ways that political power subject us to a condition of ‘sibling rivalry’ in which the period of childhood lingers on beyond the household and permeates liberal institutions. This rivalrous spirit bleeds into the behavior of interaction on the Internet. The comfort of the Internet permits us to project our anxieties over employment precarity onto each other and rival one another as siblings in a paternalist capture that we disavow.

Without debate and intellectual critique on the left these forces of rivalry will overrun the left. As I have recently written, the Internet is the site where people are forging their political learning and this is why these tactics of cancellation through guilt-by-association lead to out and out control and direct gatekeeping. People take it upon themselves to enforce who is permitted to speak to who on the left and this is done often without a clear injunction from on high. Gatekeeping is done according to paternalism with private liberal institutions that stoke a sibling rivalry amongst the left that is meant to stoke chaos, anarchy, affective confusion and cancelations.

The Breakdown in Left-Liberal Gatekeeping

I believe that there is a correlation between the censorial, intolerant and cruel left and the decline in the popularity of leftist books and ideas. For example, the publisher for my second book Repeater Books has recently suspended commissions as it assess the future viability of the imprint. According to my conversation with the current owner of the press, Repeater has accrued losses of approximately £200,000 annually in recent years. While Repeater Books will likely and hopefully survive this financial crisis, behind the scenes of the press there have been reports of highly censorial practices, certain authors—whom I will not name—have reported experiences of blatant sabotage of their book after it was published, refusal to promote their work and refusal by the press to connect them to reviewers at other presses. I have no interest in divulging the details of this behavior as I believe it is more important that authors speak in their own voice. To make this an issue about the actions of individuals takes away from the ideological consistency of this behavior as a wider left-liberal tendency which is why it is better to debate the ideas that underpin this gatekeeping and censorship than it is to personalize it. Moreover, Repeater Books has changed its staffing in recent months and the censorial tendencies are no longer an issue.

I was always a bit of a tough figure for the liberal-left current within and outside of Repeater Books to handle. I am not a trans-critical or pro-terf Marxist and yet they have still sought to take a censorial approach to me because I am open to debating rightwing tendencies on the left. It is an odd paternalistic logic at work here. They do not trust me to debate tendencies that they themselves do not agree with. I believe that I am difficult for the left-liberal tactic of censorship through guilt-by-association because my views have been consistent: I have insisted on de-politicizing the debates about trans rights from liberal culture war capture while remaining in solidarity with trans comrades.⁵ My experience with the trans community has been similar to my experience with most other communities, it is internally fractured along class lines and working class trans comrades tend to have important differences from trans leaders at the vanguard of the movement within elite liberal institutions.

Elite liberal institutions have a tendency to give shelter to left-liberal censorial practices as we saw with Punctum and Repeater. It is this pattern that has led me to realize the importance of class independence from the ideological capture of elite institutions. But even though I do not fit into a clear ‘dissident’ or ‘rightwing’ box—I in fact reject both positions—this has not prevented left-liberals from attempting to fit me into these boxes. It has also made me into something of a test case as to the utter absurdity of guilt-by-association cancelation. The outcome of such tactics, as far as I see it, have mostly revealed this tactic to be misleading and cruel, founded on the same superstition that Marx found firsthand in his early years as a journalist.

The guilt-by-association tactic continually portrayed me as in line with tendencies on the left that I am not aligned with. So instead of going along with rightwing ideas on the left—and let me add that this imposition onto people typically does force them to move the right—for me it became clear that I have to address people that I am not permitted to debate despite facing cancelation for doing so. When ideas of pro-imperialist chauvinism are suppressed and people are told not to debate them this only gives these ideas a foothold. This is why I was motivated to debate Chris Cutrone despite a long-standing boycott on engagement with the Platypus Affiliated Society from the time of Occupy Wall Street over 12 years ago! Things have changed dramatically since this boycott in 2013 and the reality is that Sublation Media has become a major hub of leftwing thought on the American Marxist left. To force writers and thinkers or anyone to boycott them entirely is disastrous for public morale and spirit on the left and it only foments a tense rivalrous dynamic on the left. This is exactly what liberal institutions want, but it has to be overcome. Sublation has also become a Platypus-centered ideological project which means that in the eyes of many left-liberals, anyone associated with Sublation will be boxed into that same narrow dissident Marxist point of view.

But this is not how people on the left operate, especially young people, we are all in a constant process of ideological change, irrespective of our education. We are driven to explore ideas and we should be invited to change our minds. We live in times of both ideological incoherence and intellectual conformity and the censorship complex is responsible for this contradiction because it permits ideas to go untested and censored. We are not allowed to even be trusted to stand on our own two feet and speak our minds. This was a core point that I raised in my debate with Cutrone, which is that even a major scholar such as Gerald Horne is open to changing his mind about how he theorizes fascism. This was what I experienced when I interviewed Horne and introduced the concept of Bonapartism. But for Cutrone, Horne is fixed: he is a Black Nationalist anti-Marxist. I found this view along with Cutrone’s views on pro-imperialism and pro-Trump rightwing Bonapartism to be deeply problematic. But I decided to not give way to an exaggerated outrage over these positions. It is after all difficult to separate what is a troll from what is a true conviction with Cutrone, see the Greenland and Gaza articles in Compact to see what I mean! To exaggerate or get emotional would only fulfill the same dopamine chaos of the bourgeois public sphere which wants us engaged in vicious cancel culture and scorched earth elimination of one another. Only through discussion and debate could Chris’ presumptuous take on Horne be revealed as rigid, just as it was only through discussion with Horne that his own willingness to see Marxism in a different way could come about.

The censorship complex, as Marx understood it firsthand, wants to shut down this process of political education. The truth is that liberal institutions want a divided left, they want us to sadistically ape the same practices of Silicon Valley platforms like X, the liberals want us to continue with backbiting, ruthless competition and rivalry. A left turned against itself like siblings in rivalrous outrage is a gift to the Democrats. It allows us to be good children and them to be good parents. Every few years we might be granted a favor from mom and dad. What the liberals fear is a broad socialist left in solidarity with itself and the interests of the working class. Establishment liberals want to fit anyone in proximity to dissident anti-woke leftism such as Chris Cutrone or Catherine Liu as all the same. But this is a misnomer. Our ideological commitments are not uniform and they are not always formed around gurus, Internet warlords or parasocial cult leaders. We must learn to avoid the anti-social tendencies establishment liberals impose on the left.

For a Left Beyond Censorship and Control

To combat this liberal complicity with censorship and anti-social leftism we do not need to kowtow to the culture war framing of social antagonism. We need serious analysis of class antagonism and how it envelops all spheres of social life. In the time of Second International Marxism many of the great Marxist thinkers warned against relying on false dualisms in accounting for social reality in capitalism. This is a problem that stems from the embrace of neo-Kantianism which orders the world according to a split between appearances and things. Such false dualisms mutatis mutandis must also be rejected in our understanding of the left and its main tendencies.

In many ways, Repeater Books is important for the left today because they represent this dualism which Mark Fisher also embodied, namely the dualism that states that the left is split between a class-first Marxism and a Deleuzian left-liberalism. The only way to address this dualism is not to condescend to it as sacrosanct and immutably true, rather, the only way to approach this dualism is by overcoming it, i.e., by doing what Fisher attempted to do but never succeeded in achieving. We have to attempt to incorporate a left that discards all pretenses to rivalry in the name of solidarity and strength. But while we attempt to do this we may discover differences over strategy that prevent such solidarity, we may see the persistence of class divides that make such solidarity fundamentally unbridgeable, we may discover that ultimately this divide is not be synthesizable. That may be true. But the only way to determine if it is true is by moving beyond censorial control practices that obscure this difference and block the development of a left that can truly arrive at intellectual difference.

I have just finished a long essay where I develop this argument much further for the forthcoming book Flowers for Marx. We can’t only rely on Marx’s approach when coming to a fuller understanding of the censorship complex which is why I turn to Kafka, to Strauss, and to psychoanalysis. I argue that Kant articulates what becomes an enduring form of liberal censorship whereby the power to regulate speech is ceded to the sovereign ‘in the name of liberalism,’ and that Marx needed to break with this to fully formulate and adhere to the standpoint of the proletariat. Strauss and Kafka help us to understand the constancy of censorship and the degree to which it propels original thought. Psychoanalysis offers the theory of the superego and provides an account of the internal and external mediations of censorship, and how it can be overcome at a collective level.

I detect a great ruse of history in the censorship complex. How is it possible, for example, that Deleuze and Guattari (a former Trotskyist) assaulted the repressive bourgeois institutions and Stalinist bureaucracy that had become censorial only to witness many left-liberal Deleuzians practice some of the very same censorial practices that their master originally railed against? Let me be clear, Deleuze is not in favor of censorship, it is the contradictory application of Deleuze’s praxis to a social context that has fundamentally changed from the times of his Anti-Oedipus series that results in a censorial posture.

Hegel once remarked in his lectures on the Philosophy of Right that social contract theory had become effectively co-opted by reactionary philosophers and this led him to completely re-theorize it. Forms of practice lose their edge and need to be re-thought. As I have mentioned countless times, Deleuze himself saw that ultra-liberalism had enveloped the left by the time of the 1990s and this caused him to advocate moving away from the ultra-libertine Anti-Oedipal practice that sees fascism in everything, as embedded in micro-politics and everyday life.

Today, left-Deleuzian thought seems to only propel a censorial leftism that refuses to see the project of the left as a solidarity project, and which relies on a theory of fascism and reaction that effectively eschews political education for workers. The 1970s outdated Deleuzian conception of fascism fuses with the ostensible logic of liberal censorship and ends up arguing that rightwing ideas—and here by rightwing ideas they can include thinkers that critique the left such as Christopher Lasch—are harmful to the marginalized and vulnerable and must thereby be combated. The presupposition at work here is that anyone in the vicinity of exposure to ideas that challenge the left will be succumb to these ideas and they must be shamed and ridiculed for even entertaining a debate with those ideas. Market-driven left-liberal censorship must end. It is a form of practice that takes the worker to be an infant who cannot think for themselves. We can do better, and we must do better, not only for the sake of intellectual discourse but for the sake of all workers and for the sake of the future of the left.

1. Draper, Hal, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Vol. I State and Bureaucracy (1977, New York: Monthly Review Press): 36.

2. The most comprehensive book albeit a largely non-critical analysis of no-platforming can be found in Evan Smith’s No Platform A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech (2020, London: Routledge Press)

3. Draper, Hal, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Vol. I State and Bureaucracy (1977, New York: Monthly Review Press): 39 - 40

4. Ibid, 38

5. It was my decision to not publish a critical discussion with Nina Power in 2023 that pitted me in the crosshairs of the censorship complex. At the time I believed what I was told by numerous members of the trans community to not platform Nina due to her ties to the far right and neo-fascist groups. I don’t regret supporting the trans community at that moment however I do think that no-platforming has serious limitations as I have tried to suggest in this reflection. I regret not advocating to my trans comrades at the time that I was highly critical of Compact Magazine in my discussion with Power and that it would have been a good idea to share a video where a strong pushback, not consent, is displayed. But at the time, the guilt-by-association logic was inescapable. I can only hope that we find a new way to conduct public debates where discussion and disagreement does not signal consent on fundamental worldviews or outlooks.