Rules of Censorship
Imagine the political spectrum plotted out on a graph, the two ends of the horizontal x-axis representing the left and the right, and the two ends of the vertical y-axis representing authoritarianism and libertarianism. The Overton Window is a small square around the centre of the graph over the origin that describes the range of views currently acceptable and tolerated by society, whilst excluding those that are considered radical or extreme. Its inventor, Joseph Overton, believed any political idea can be implemented even if it seems absolutely socially unacceptable at that moment — the only thing you need is the right strategy and enough time. For Overton, whether a political idea is feasible or not doesn’t depend on the beliefs of politicians, but rather on the range of socially acceptable ideas. Over time, the window can shrink or expand, occurring under the natural influence of public opinion and cultural change, or by premeditated manipulation. Politicians can manipulate the Overton Window to reduce ‘radical’ ideas, and maintain their own status quo.
Such is the case in regards to the Tories ban on Schools in England talking about anti-capitalist views in PSHE sessions. PSHE is, for those who haven’t been in school for a while, the sub-par replacement of Citizenship since it was scrapped by Gove and his cronies, and stands for ‘Personal, Social, Health and Economic’ education — so why should young people not be educated in other economic modules of running things? The guidelines dictate, “Schools should not under any circumstances use resources produced by organisations that take extreme political stances on matters. This is the case even if the material itself is not extreme, as the use of it could imply endorsement or support of the organisation.” So anti-capitalism is now listed as “an extreme political stance” equivalent to the desire to abolish democracy, anti-Semitism, racism, or a failure to condemn illegal activities. This censorship follows only a little while on from “Extinction Rebellion” — the hippy, middle-class, floral, non-violent climate activist group ,who could be seen dancing outside of Buckingham Palace — being labelled as “an extremist ideology” by the counter-terrorism police and being likened to far-right extremists, while Johnson did not condemn the far-right activists “protecting” the statues in Parliament Square by battering the police…who were also there to “protect” the statues (it’s like something out of a Monty Python sketch).
The censorship of anti-capitalism is a prime example of the Tories attempting to control and manipulate the Overton Window. “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum”, wrote Noam Chomsky in his ‘The Common Good’ (1998), “That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate.” Johnson is trying to limit the range of thought through ‘Cultural Hegemony’, an idea our students wouldn’t be able to even study as it comes from the Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci, who believed that the establishment class (the Tories in this case) use the dominance of cultural institutions in a society, such as schools and the Department for Education (DfE), to protect and perpetuate their power and control of that society. Gove recently gave the Ditchley Annual Lecture, where he opened with a quote from Gramsci, “The crisis consists precisely of the fact that the inherited is dying — and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. Whether Gove is just not at all self-aware, or is practicing Orwell’s ‘Doublethink’, he goes on to describe himself when explaining what he sees as stagnation of Government and its ability to make decisions for the benefit of the population, stating that Westminster has become a “looking-glass world” saturated with the influence of “the think tanks and lobbyists who…are socially rooted in assumptions which are inescapably metropolitan.” Maybe Gove is self-aware, possibly even self-conscious; the image of the 54 year old man getting on a stage to deprecate and degrade himself in front of an audience, explaining how he thinks he is the stagnation of the Government, it’d be funny if it weren’t true. And here we all were thinking Gove was the after dinner speaker, when really he’s just the clown.
Gramsci is most famous for his concept of Cultural Hegemony which he came up with in ‘The Prison Notebooks’, a long series of essays he wrote while imprisoned by the Italian Fascist Regime from 1926 to 1936. Essentially, to simplify Gramsci’s extremely complex idea, Cultural Hegemony is an agreement where the person agreeing doesn’t necessarily understand what it is they are agreeing to. Gramsci notes that this is done through ideas and he believed that controlling a person’s loyalty is the key to power. According to Gramsci, power comes from consent, and it originates in subtle types of agreement. People don’t control ideas but rather ideas control people, or to put it another way, people don’t wield power, power wields people. Gramsci suggested however that government’s can come up with certain ideas to control people and to gain their loyalty, and he said the only way to confront this is for the working class to become producers of culture, or as he put it, “organic intellectuals”. He acknowledged the working class must produce it’s own counter hegemonic struggle which directly challenges the dominant group of the day — this counter-hegemonic ideal would be socialism for the working classes, but now young people can’t even study it without being put on a watch list.
Linked to Gramsci’s ideas are that of German Philosopher Max Horkheimer, specifically Instrumental Rationality — the kind of reasoning we use to achieve a particular end — which played a key role in dominating people in the 20th Century, specifically under totalitarian regimes. Instrumental Rationality is dangerous because it doesn’t ask the bigger questions, a child in a classroom won’t be taught the alternative to capitalism, won’t ask why austerity happened, won’t ask whether there is a better way for things to be organised, but will simply accept their role as an exploited labourer. Horkheimer noted that modern society was fuelled by this flawed kind of rationality, always figuring out the fastest way to get somewhere, never asking whether it was worth it or why, it creates a whole society designed for one purpose — in the case of capitalism that one purpose is constant accumulation, but not for the poor, but for the already wealthy, the 1%, the Johnsons, Camerons, Goves, and Reese-Moggs of the world. Since Instrumental Rationality is only concerned with efficiency and/or usefulness, both nature and humanity become inputs in the assembly line of society, or as the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy dictates, “As we reduce our inner nature to instrumental functions, we lose any strong sense of self, and thus lack the inner substance in a manner that makes us, metaphorically, into nobodies.” When everyone is reduced to a use value, things get bad, and it is this reason Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno characterised the totalitarianism of the 1930s as the ultimate danger of the Instrumental Rationality that pervades our modern world. Horkheimer said, “What is usually indicated as a goal — the happiness of the individual, health, wealth — gains its significance exclusively from its functional potentiality.” In other words, the happiness of citizens is only significant as long as the capitalist regime keeps running.
New Zealand Chief Censor David Shanks in his Ted Talk last year, ‘When Censorship Becomes Necessary’ outlined three main rules. “Rule number one is: the State doesn’t get to make the calls. If you value democracy, you don’t let the State censor to suit itself.” He continues, “Rule number two is: put freedom first. If you don’t have to censor then don’t. Freedom of expression, freedom of speech, these are precious rights, they are critical rights, and censorship is a blunt instrument that can only limit those rights.” And finally, “Rule number three is: only censor to prevent or limit harm […] sometimes [censorship] must be applied when giving something free rein presents too big a risk to society.” And this is where contention arises — anti-capitalism is not a risk to society inherently, in fact, it might be the only thing to save humanity.
As Barrister Jessica Simor QC pointed out on Twitter, the government has on occasion not complied with the guidance itself, after it admitted the new Brexit bill would break international law, going against the 5th bullet point of the DfE’s guidelines, “a failure to condemn illegal activities”. People have been quick to point out that when we live in a society where children are more tech literate and savvy then ever, if they wanted to find anti-capitalist ideas they can easily access them, but also that the prohibition of such literature or resources would only make it more underground and even more extreme. Might this ban simply be a decoy from the fact that the British Government are literally breaking the law?
Capitalism is amazingly productive but it has two main flaws: the wealth of companies is built up by satisfying what are not the essential needs of human beings, but worse and more important, is that, in the process of continual accumulation and growth, it is systematically inclined to ignore the suffering of workers unless regularly prodded not to. In the case of the Tory government, you can prod it all you want, and they will still ignore the struggles of workers, will actively attempt to put more people into what is regularly known as ‘The State of Injury’ — where members of certain groups are allowed to live so long as they are useful, but denied status as fully sentient human beings, with their own rights and subjectivity. This isn’t at all a new concept, Capitalism has always been like this and has continued to be so over centuries.
In 1854, the British economy was the largest economy in the world, thanks to its enormous industries of cotton, shipbuilding, steel, and coal. Vast cities chewed up the countryside of the midlands and Northern England, merchants and the newly rich Capitalist class triumphed, we are just living in the aftermath of this in Britain, and it has increased in scale and severity. Dickens was Victorian England’s most passionate critic of unrest-ruined Capitalism. His novel ‘Hard Times’, set in the fictional town of Coketown, a version of Manchester, takes aim at the heartless Capitalists who abuse their workers and use their relentless Capitalist logic to blind them to their desecration of nature and human life. But that’s what’s changed, in the Industrial Revolution the ruling elite attempted to blind themselves from the suffering of those below them, but the Tories of today aren’t blind, nor do they want to be, they take a sadistic joy in watching human suffering and forcing people into poverty through austerity. Dickens wrote of Coketown “It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.” Dickens argued that Capitalism is evil because it encourages appalling conditions for the producers. Under the sway of Capitalist logic, Dickens believes, people will keep coming up with reasons why it is okay to leave people impoverished, to refuse to feed children in the middle of a pandemic, to let old people die in care homes. But this government doesn’t have a good reason, and it isn’t even going to attempt to excuse it, because they see no issue in what they are doing, in what capitalism has done to people across the world, and even how it has effected people in this country through austerity.
The Tories would love our young people to believe that there is no alternative to the capitalist regime, to willingly accept their place within the system, to pick up Instrumental Rationality and become the worker drones they need us to be, not questioning whether the system is fair or just, not even considering if there is an alternative — a world where we don’t have to exploit each other, a world where everyone has what they need to survive, a world where children don’t starve, where people don’t have to become homeless, where doctors and nurses don’t have to work themselves to exhaustion, where one perceives his fellow man as an equal. This is a government that wants to rule compassion, humanity, decency and even the tiniest understanding that the people around you are also human beings a crime. In 2013, while he was Mayor of London, Boris Johnson delivered the annual Margaret Thatcher lecture, where he said, “Inequality is essential.” This is a man who in that same lecture said “the spirt of envy” was a “valuable spur to economic activity”, calling for the “Gordon Gekkos of London” to display their greed to promote economic growth, claiming it is “futile to stamp out inequality”.
It seems to me that the Prime Minister was advocating for some sort of dystopic Darwinian nightmare of ‘survival of the fittest’ where we let the poor and infirmed die, where we burn people in social housing to death, or allow the elderly to die of a deadly virus in care homes (and then blame the care homes for it rather than accept any responsibility). See, in his work ‘The Descent of Man’ (published after his most famous work that outlined the theory of evolution by natural selection, ‘On the Origin of the Species’), Charles Darwin seemed to take the approach that the framework of society undermined the promise of natural selection. If natural selection allowed the fittest and most acclimatised to their environments to survive and prosper, why was society attempting to help the weakest to survive, via things like charity, or since Victorian times, the idea of the welfare state. Darwin argued in this work that if we wanted to prosper we should let the weak fall by the way side, or else we would degenerate. This is echoed in Johnson’s Thatcher Lecture, “Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85 while about 2% have an IQ above 130.” He proceeded to call for more to be done to help the 2%, the proverbial fittest, than the weaker 16%, stating, “violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth.”
This is a government tainted by the uncompassionate nature of capitalism, that would prefer to allow a record number of children in the UK live in Dickensian poverty than cut a banker’s bonus (Boris Johnson is rather famously quoted as saying on a Channel 4 interview, “I’m an exuberant defender of the banks.”), a government with people like Dominic Raab in it who believe, “The typical user of the food bank, is not someone who is languishing in poverty, it’s someone who has a cash flow problem episodically.”, a government that allows big businesses like Starbucks and Apple to pay virtually no tax when at least 120,000 children are without permanent homes (when they promised to make 200,000), and a government that under Theresa May said, “There isn’t a magic money tree … that suddenly provides for everything people want.” But it isn’t what people want, it’s what people need to survive. She’s right, there isn’t a magic money tree, because all the money that would be necessary to solve the issues brought about by capitalism are in the bank accounts of the Tories and their supporters, the bankers, the 151 billionaires in this country alone! Led by a man who can’t tell you the price of a loaf of bread, but can tell you the price of a bottle of champagne. The truth is that as much as they would like us to believe “We’re all in this together.” (George Osborne, Former Chancellor), we’re not, because they are making us into selfish, greedy people, who have to fight against each other and compete with each other to survive, a battle of all against all that is in the end entirely pointless because nobody wins except for the people on top, the 1%, the rich and elite.
That’s the most damning thing — the Tories are trying to convince the young people in our classrooms today that there must be a competition, that you must compete with your fellow man, but the truth is: you don’t. Or at least you wouldn’t if we lived in a more equitable society, but they are taking that option off the table by banning the future generation from even considering it. To reference Johnson’s Thatcher speech again, “It seems to me that though it would be wrong to persecute the rich, and madness to try and stifle wealth creation, and futile to stamp out inequality, we should only tolerate this wealth gap on two conditions. One, that we help those who genuinely cannot compete; and two, that we provide opportunity for those who can.”
So the Tories have grabbed the Overton Window and yanked it over to their side, but you know what reader, as mentioned in the beginning of this article, the Overton Window is controlled by public opinion, not the actions or manipulations of politicians. So keep educating yourselves, keep fighting against the capitalist regime that would see us all slaves to our Etonian overlords, and at the very least, try to educate yourself on the alternatives of capitalism — regardless of whether the DfE allows you to. Anyway, this article will probably be part of some Fahrenheit 451 book burning because I told you to end the capitalist regime, but oh well — if you really like it, share it around.
