File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9706, message 397


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



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