Date: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 11:37:05 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin-AT-utkux.utcc.utk.edu> Subject: Re: M-I: Re: fascism&freespeech Dave, I am trying to understand how anything you said refutes my arguments. I made the point you did, stressing how the attempt to force the state to censor the speech of authoritarians was a futile attempt at sanitizing capitalism (although I made that point in a single sentence). What your post amounts to is little more than a lecture on what we all already understand, that the bourgeoisie has made their specific needs appear to be general needs. Yeah, so? As for the line about anarchism, it is clear that while Marxists have historically had differences with anarchists regarding political practice, it is just as clear than there are striking parallels in assumptions and goals between the two philosophies. Marx was deeply influenced by continental libertarianism. Your crack about anarchism as "petty bourgeois" is a narrow-minded bit of regurgitated sloganeering with little relevance to the world we live in today. You elevate ancient sectarian battles to a lofty stature that perhaps they never deserved. I stand by my arguments in defense of freedom of speech and I support many of the tenets and goals of anarchism. I seen anarchism as a sister philosophy, and I view anarchists as people to work *with*, not against. I put that line in my post knowing the fire it would draw from people who would uncritically spew conventional Marxist-Leninist piety. And I reiterate, on these matters I still retain the social libertarianism of people like Noam Chomsky and C. Wright Mills. Mills was invited to the Soviet Union to speech before the state. They introduced him as a major American critic (his work *White Collar*, *The Power Elite*, and the critical *The Marxists*, were a major part of rekindling the Marxist and social libertarian movements in the US, and he was a diehard supporter of the Cuban revolution). Mills rose to toast the Soviets. He shocked them when he said, "to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published in the Soviet Union!" The point is obvious. The problem with these arguments against freedom of speech is that they fail to entertain the possibility that it might actually be in our class interests to preserve the freedoms the people have won under capitalism while destroying those barriers to freedom that still remain. Uncritical socialists may look at everything about bourgeois society and think it is evil and wish to transcend every aspect of it. So they destroy the good with the bad (at least that is what they appear to desire). Even simplistic dialectics sees the emergent society as a synthesis, not the total negation of the thesis. You see, Dave, if it is true that the freedoms are class specific, then it is just as true that our class might usefully adopt them. I always thought that it was bourgeois society that created the proletariat and opened the way for the liberation of humankind. So while it is true that rights are specific to social relations--this is a tautology!--this tautology has little bearing on the question of whether freedom of thought and speech is to be valued by the people. It is hard enough for the working class to find its forum without having to restrict the forums of others. I grant you this, it is a subtle position. Andrew Austin --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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