Google’s Firing of James Damore is Political Violence
I’ll state a bias of mine up front. I will always have a soft spot for people who have a difficult time “getting with the program”. Whenever two conditions are met, my hackles get raised: (1) When a question becomes “settled” or a course decided upon, and (2) when material consequences are introduced for failing to enthusiastically support that conclusion. The combination of these two features in any association or society indicates that the question itself has been settled by force, and that such a fait accompli can only be maintained by force. That means it wasn’t settled fully by reason. Settling a question by force means assent has been compelled by treating people as less than persons, by not treating them as self-responsible, creative agents free to reach their own conclusions, by treating them like mere matter. This is an act of iconoclasm.
Most of the time when there is a controversy surrounding someone who has been subject to material consequences for expressing an idea or opinion, I instinctively side with that person. This is certainly personal for me, but I think it’s still the right instinct to have.
Today, the big controversy over such a case surrounds a now-former Google employee named James Damore. He wrote and circulated an internal memo expressing concern that hiring standards are being sacrificed in the name of hiring a more diverse workforce, and stating that differences in the proportion of men and women in certain fields, such as engineering, may be at least in part attributable to factors not 100% environmental. This is a big postmodern no-no, of course. As a result, he was fired from the company.
Damore may be absolutely wrong in every assertion he made. He may be completely correct. He may have said some things that were true and some things that were false. He may have been motivated by the best of intentions, or perhaps he could only have said such things because he is literally Satan. It doesn’t matter.
The punishment in cases like these never fits the actual crime. Was it foolish to circulate the memo in a 21st Century corporate organization? Yes. Was the result predicable? Yes. Did the memo for which he was fired deprive anyone of their material livelihood? No. Was he deprived of the means of his material livelihood for circulating it? Yes.

Firing someone in an economy suffering from a lack of full employment — a lack that constitutes a feature, not a bug — is not a mere exercise of freedom of association. Being unemployed in 21st Century America is not comparable with being unemployed in Finland. Failure to find employment, and failure to be born into a family or have friends with significant financial means will result, ultimately, in being homeless and exposed to the natural elements. It will mean eating or receiving medical treatment only as a result of the charity of others. Losing your health insurance because you were fired is not a trial matter if you live in The Greatest Nation on Earth™.
Sure, there are all manner of “lesser” jobs that are easier to get into than working at Google. A job at Google is by no means a right. There are not, however, enough jobs for everyone. In deciding at the Congressional level to leave slack economic resources, including labor, idle, the United States has not only accepted but legislated a non-zero level of unemployment. There are a few reasons for this. One is the enclosure of land and nature, which means newcomers into this world have no choice but to pay others for the privilege of partaking of existence. Another is the failure of government as a sovereign issuer of money to spend sufficiently to employ idle resources, such as labor, essentially because of a misconception that we still operate on the gold standard. This means that under the present legal regime there is a permanent class of people whose entire existence is contingent on the willingness of others to sustain them. This is the “reserve army of capital”, the people in line to take your job should you step out of line, and you’d better watch your back because they will always outbid you, accepting lower wages, longer hours, and fewer benefits than what you get. Why? Because anything is always better than nothing.
I’d never say there are no circumstances in which an employee should be fired. If he or she threatens someone else in the organization, firing is absolutely justified. If he or she isn’t pulling his or her weight, that jeopardizes the livelihood of all the other employees, and firing is justified. Exploiting a relationship of power for personal gain would be another fully understandable reason for termination. “Creating a hostile work environment” by circulating a memo with an unpopular sociological thesis doesn’t fit the bill.
Am I literally claiming James Damore is going to starve on the street because he got fired from Google for writing an ill-considered internal memo? No. I’m saying the reason he won’t is reducible to the fact that other people (family or friends) are likely to offer enough charity to support him and/or the fact that he likely has a strong enough résumé to get some other job. Were neither of these the case, would he deserve to become homeless and starve because he wrote a memo?
Insofar as enterprises are capable of wielding this sort of power over people, either materially sustaining them or casting them into outer darkness to subsist on charity, they are de facto political authorities administering law. They decide matters of justice, judge disputes, and administer punishment for violations. The only difference between the private law administered by enterprises and the public law administered by the state is the latter at least flatters us with the formality of the popular vote.
It seems to me there are one of two conditions that should be met before we accept employers as arbiters of legal sanction for acts of speech. Either ensure that the unemployed are more or less guaranteed not to be homeless, starve, or lack medical care, or subject the decision to fire workers to the participatory, democratic vote of all workers potentially affected by that power. The only course that marches us squarely away from, rather than into, the gaping maw of the late capitalist living nightmare we’ve been busily creating for ourselves, is to demand nothing less than both.
