Book Banning as a Marketing Strategy in Capitalism

I

There was a book that was essentially purged from all the markets in society around 2017 in America. If you are familiar with recent history, this is around the time of the rise of the Alt-Right and the Charlottesville protests and riots. The book is known as The Turner Diaries. It was easily available leading up to those moments. You could actually find a copy of the official audiobook for free on youtube. It disappeared shortly afterward.

The content makes clear why.

The book opens with a far-left government taking control of America. They claim that because laws against murder and rape have a disparate impact against black people, they are racist—and so they abolish them. As a result, crime runs rampant; the book operates on the added assumption that black people are inherently violent in everything they do. This triggers a white nationalist revolution, where the white population seeks liberation, not just from black people, but also from the government, and of course, from the Jews that control the whole of society, and more. There are numerous marked moments in this book, like one during the major second act disaster, where a jewish man is reporting on the catastrophic failure of the white militants, only to start frothing at the mouth with excitement in the process. There is also the noted "day of the rope," where all of the white traitor women who have lain with black men are lynched on mass. Naturally, this is treated as justice. The book ends with the white militants succeeding in exterminating the entire planet of all non white people.

This is not the kind of book you can just find anywhere. The supply is low, and not many are willing to host it. Except recently. I did find someone who did their own complete audiobook reading of the book (or it looks that way), and it's up on youtube in that form now. The odds of that, however.

II

What is the point of this?

In recent years, we have been hearing quite a bit about banned books. There are whole lists of books that have been banned or at least challenged in America, at least according to some people. At bookstores, you can even find banned book displays, where you can purchase books that people don't want you to read.

In many respects, there is a political backdrop to this. When you look the books over, what you find is that they are often books that are removed from reading lists in schools, or books that have been removed from the children's section in libraries. Or at least, they have been removed from school libraries that are targeted toward children. This is important to specify because the challenging and removal of these books does not necessarily entail their not being read. In fact, the people challenging them may differ on their motives, but what matters is that they don't want them read . . . yet. Moving a book from the children's section to the adult section merely restricts the child's access to the book. And from what I can tell, most people can agree that a smut book belongs in the adult section. Most people agree with this kind of restriction already, for some books. Yet, many of those same people just want to brush off the objections of sexualization when it becomes politically convenient.

Further, removing books from reading lists also seems to be fraught with complications. When I was growing up, my junior year teacher assigned our class the book Common Sense . . . by Glenn Beck. Not Thomas Paine. Glenn Beck. This was controversial, to say the least. And not among conservatives. And I don't imagine people would be all that enthusiastic if a book by Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro were assigned for reading in high school. Are these objections instances of "book banning?" Like the above, where a book is simply being moved from the kids section to the adult section, taking a book off of the reading list seems to be a bit too limited in its approach to be considered "banning." People certainly would not call it banning if it were done to books they objected to. Not only that, but removing a book from a reading list doesn't take away its accessibility, but its position of privilege. By being on a reading list, it is essentially on a pedestal—and taking it off of the list is taking off of that pedestal, nothing more. Most fundamentally, it presupposes a default position. Who gets to decide which books are assigned as a default? The objector is inherently treated as an aberration to that default position.

I don't want to get too into the weeds, here. What matters is that the current scare about book banning is primarily predicated on objections to books in children's libraries, which we already agree should be limited in terms of content, and is predicated on objections to books on reading lists, which are a matter of privilege, not accessibility. The political angle cuts through all of this.

III

Enter, the banned book displays. In our political climate, the objections to books being taught or allowed in schools has led to a backlash in the form of banned book displays. If you go to bookstores around the country, you will find many of them. Nothing galvanizes the American spirit more than someone telling them that they can't do something. And within all of this is a certain irony that seems to be lost on everyone . . . except for me?

Book banning seems to have become a marketing strategy for selling books in our capitalist system. Maybe you can call it the Streisand Effect. Maybe it's more complicated than that, given that most of these "banning" attempts have to do with what children have access to, and with reading lists. Either way, even as people are raising the alarm about the supposed reality of books being banned, we have bookstores across the nation making bank on banned book displays. Quite simply, there is no reality to the banning of these books. Not only that, but it is quite literally the opposite. Consumerist ideology and the capitalist system have appropriated people's naive fears of book banning to make a profit, producing the exact opposite effect.

Comparing these books to The Turner Diaries that I mentioned in the beginning of the post should give you a good example of what it means to actually ban a book. The Turner Diaries was actually banned, and this is because it is actually difficult to acquire. The only reason you can get an audiobook today is because someone just so happened to read the full text for themselves on youtube. Part of the reason for this is obvious. No one wants to be the one who defended The Turner Diaries. Even the guy who created the audiobook put up a disclaimer. And be honest: are you still suspicious?

IV

This is how books are actually banned. Through societal consensus. Power is always somewhat decentralized, and this is the fundamental fallacy of most political analyses. They always try to find one locus of power, usually the state, and say it all flows from there. But this is false. Power springs forth from culture, which is spread out among the minds of the people. If this culture is shared amongst enough people amongst enough institutions, it allows for widespread control of society without any coordination that is explicit. There is the state, but also the mainstream media, social media, the academy, lower education, entertainment, and even private institutions like bookstores.

Our culture as a whole operates as a unified whole according to common assumptions, so when there is pushback in the realm of lower education, bookstores can respond in that fight, not simply because they are in a conspiracy with education in any way, but because there is a common ideology. And this ideology is not simply anti-book banning, but usually of the left wing variety. Now, The Turner Diaries is extreme for either side, for obvious reasons, yet the fact that it falls outside the shared ideological framework of our society, both left and right, explains why there was no correcting mechanism in place to ensure that it was actually being shelved in bookstores, despite attempts to suppress it.

If there is a consensus among society that a book is not worth reading, then it will be much easier to ban. If not, then it will likely backfire.

V

So, because of the nature of the economic system we live in, the slogan "banned books" has now been appropriated as a mechanism for making a profit. If you want to sell books, get your book "banned." Assuming the right people agree with you, of course.

Video: https://youtu.be/8k4dpMJOVzI