Freedom of Speech

[MKS]

Should freedom of speech be limited during and after the revolution? That is to say not altogether abolished with censorshio (like China and the USSR did) but should there be a limit on who we allow to excerise such freedom?

For example;
Pro-Capitalists, should they be allowed to distribute propoganda and allowed to give public speeches?

Isnt any limitation of free speech the act of a Centralized Power structre that moves to restirct the people and not liberate them?

[More Fire for the People]

In a socialist society there must be a democratic dictatorship of the people, that is a form of government marked by proletarian and peasant democracy coupled with freedom of speech of the working-classes. The flip side of this is the dictatorship aspect which censors counter-revolutionary forces like capitalist groups and figures.

[Decolonize The Left]

I don't know about censoring anyone besides neo-Nazis or the like who spout the destruction of a type of people.

Being an anarchist and advocating the most freedom for everyone, I think pro-capitalists should be allowed to talk without censorship. Remember that if the people (for themselves) revolt against the capitalist system, these people (the capitalists) will be regarded for the system the are advocating, and exploitative and corrupt system of wage-slavery.

In a true revolution, the people will have evolved from capitalism, and it will be considered a past, and failed, form of economy.

-- August

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

No free speech for reactionaries, period.

[Ownthink]

Originally posted by [email protected] 12 2005, 07:27 PM
I don't know about censoring anyone besides neo-Nazis or the like who spout the destruction of a type of people.

Being an anarchist and advocating the most freedom for everyone, I think pro-capitalists should be allowed to talk without censorship. Remember that if the people (for themselves) revolt against the capitalist system, these people (the capitalists) will be regarded for the system the are advocating, and exploitative and corrupt system of wage-slavery.

In a true revolution, the people will have evolved from capitalism, and it will be considered a past, and failed, form of economy.

-- August
I agree, this would just piss people off against Capitalism even more. Capitalists should have freedom to express their opinion. We don't want iron fist ruling here, people.


I think we should restrict people advocating racism and hate upon basis of race, sexual preference, uncontrollable factors, lifestyle choices, etc (Neo-Nazis, KKK, etc). That, I would be all for.

[MKS]

No free speech for reactionaries, period.

What if a post-revolutionary society is not perfect right away, there are some troubles and it seems the revolution was loosing support in certain sectors of society? (I’m sure this has happened in Russia, Cuba, China etc). If certain groups of people, out of fear, begin to write and speak out against the revolution or just certain aspects of the revolution are they to be treated as reactionaries? If they think the Capitalist model was more stable than the "chaos" of a post-revolutionary society, should they be censored? Or should their grievances and criticism be welcomed, because they too are a part of the Revolution.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Which "certain sectors?"

There are alot of things to go into here, and since this thread is rehashing a topic that's been discussed so many times before here, I'll quote some things redstar has said that are correct:

"
It's very naive to think that any social order will have or even could have "absolute" freedom of speech.

There are things that may be spoken of and things that may not be spoken of in every social order.

The difference between capitalism and post-capitalist society in this regard is who decides what is permitted and what is prohibited.

The capitalist class makes that decision now; the working class will make that decision after the revolution.

I know what I think it should decide; but the actual decision belongs to the class.

I can guarantee you this -- it will prohibit some kinds of speech. So the only discussion that makes any "real world sense" is what should be permitted and what should not be permitted."

"it's very naive, as I noted earlier, to think that "freedom of speech" exists now. It most definitely does not.

There is a long history in capitalist countries of revolutionaries being imprisoned or even killed for expressing their views in public.

Whenever the ruling class feels threatened (even if the threat is marginal or nonexistent), "free speech" goes in the trash!

They are serious about staying in power; we must also be serious about keeping them down once we get them down."

"Impractical? Well, that depends on what particular kind of speech that you want to repress and in what particular medium?

Taking Rush Limbaugh off the air is easy.

Censoring the internet is difficult.

Spying on people's personal conversations is impossible.

So, we do take Rush off the air...along with all his counterparts.

We watch the internet for reactionary sites and, if they become significant, take them down.

And we leave people to have their personal conversations unmolested."

http://redstar2000papers.com/theory.php?su...rt_from=&ucat=& (http://redstar2000papers.com/theory.php?subaction=showfull&id=1118373842&archive=&cnshow=headlines&start_from=&ucat=&)

[MKS]

The freedom of speech debate is very nessecary, personal liberty should be at the forefront of eqaltarian idealogy. Many Marxists disregard the "human nature" argument, but are quick to react to the the propostiion of complete free speech due to the liklieness of "reactionary" elements trying to seduce the populous back to Capitalism. Why are Marxist so afraid of free speech, if they know thier revolutionary ideas are solid and that the masses will oly benefit from them, why do they fear the perversion of ideas? They are afraid that people will revert back to the familiar. They are afraid of the mans nature to revert to the familiar.
It's unfair to label all Marxist in this way so I will limit them to Marxist-Leninists (or vanguardists). The Vanguard is not afraid that the people will return to the "old ways" but that they will loose power over the people.



Which "certain sectors?"

communities, individuals, not organized by anything except proximity. Like a sector of this population is Socialist etc.. Sector is just a word to mean a percentage.


As much as I appreciate RedStar2000's insight, it shows me that some people on this forum are incapiable of forming their own thoughts and are quick to fall in line with someone else's. RedSatr is right, complete free-speech never existed, and that is exactly my point. We act just like the Cappies and Imperialists when we limit a man/woman to speak. We become oppressors, and when the oppression is questioned we simply say; well the Cappies did it. Which to me is a complete cop-out.

Freedom of speech, ideas and communication in any form should not be hindered. The people will decide what is best for them, we will decide what we should and should not hear or see.

[Vanguard1917]

No free speech for reactionaries, period.

Banning reactionary ideas is not the same thing as defeating those ideas. When you sweep dirt under the carpet, it doesn't make your house clean.

For example, the SWP in Britain has being campaigning for years for the government to ban the far-right British National Party: "No Platform for Racists". This is a strategy that i'm fully against. It encourages a climate of silence at a time when we desperately need a fully open and unrestricted debate on the state of our society.

So i say that we should fully reject ALL calls to restrict free speech - whether for fascist scum, Islamic fundamentalists, racists, homophobes, or whoever. Free speech - no ifs, no buts.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Right. Let's also have "democratic" elections and allow the Neo-Nazi parties and Christian Fascists to run for election.


As much as I appreciate RedStar2000's insight, it shows me that some people on this forum are incapiable of forming their own thoughts and are quick to fall in line with someone else's.

Right, because Redstarr was the first to come up with this idea...

Pay attention to my first post: "There are alot of things to go into here, and since this thread is rehashing a topic that's been discussed so many times before here, I'll quote some things redstar has said that are correct:"

[MKS]

Right. Let's also have "democratic" elections and allow the Neo-Nazi parties and Christian Fascists to run for election.

We should have deomcracy in a post-revolutionary society. Direct Democracy is a bedrock of equality. Understand that I said Direct Democracy and not Representative. The People will decide what actions to take concerning certain issues.




Pay attention to my first post: "There are alot of things to go into here, and since this thread is rehashing a topic that's been discussed so many times before here, I'll quote some things redstar has said that are correct:"

Cant you promote your own ideas on the issue? Why do you think redstar is correct?

Can’t you reply to the fact that censorship is oppression and any oppression should not be allowed in any egalitarian society?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

We should have deomcracy in a post-revolutionary society. Direct Democracy is a bedrock of equality. Understand that I said Direct Democracy and not Representative. The People will decide what actions to take concerning certain issues.

Which people? Racists are people. So are fascists and capitalists.


Cant you promote your own ideas on the issue?

My ideas here are the same as redstars, thus the post.


Why do you think redstar is correct?

Because what he says come from a correct analysis of material history.


Can’t you reply to the fact that censorship is oppression and any oppression should not be allowed in any egalitarian society?

See first post. "No free speech for reactionaries, period."

The society created in a revolution is not immediately egilitarian. It has markings of the society it came from. This is basic stuff. The point of socialism (the dictatorship of the proletariat) IS oppression. Oppression of the former oppressors. That's how you get an egalitarian society.

[restin256]

Once we get socialism up and running, and prove that it's a valid system, the "Revolutionary Capitalists" will have nothing to say for themselves. If they try to, people can brush them off as inane, citing the historical failures of capitalism.

[KC]

Once we get socialism up and running

Socialism is not the answer.

Nobody should be censored. If the majority truly wants the revolution to take place, then it will. The counterrevolution will be ineffective.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

When's that going happen?

[KC]

When's that going happen?

When it's ready to.

[Decolonize The Left]

Oppression of the former oppressors. That's how you get an egalitarian society.

This is contradictory. You cannot say oppression=equality.


Socialism is not the answer.

Nobody should be censored. If the majority truly wants the revolution to take place, then it will. The counterrevolution will be ineffective.

Bingo.

-- August

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

This is contradictory. You cannot say oppression=equality.

Listen, I'm not saying anything new. This is a basic tennets of communist theory.

All states are the organized oppression of one or more classes by another class. The workers state (dictatorship of the proletariat) is the organized oppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat. That's how it works.

Class antagonisms don't magically disappear.


Bingo.

See that guy in your avatar? Know what he said about "If the majority truly wants the revolution to take place, then it will?"

He said, "The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall."

It's rather disappointing to me that so many on this site have idealist illusions about what a revolution is really about.

[LSD]

All states are the organized oppression of one or more classes by another class.

More fundamentally, all states are the organized oppression of people by other people. Whch is why the state is an inherently coercive institution and must be abolished.

A "workers'" state is utopian self-delusion. No state can ever liberate, it itself is what we must liberate ourselves from!


Class antagonisms don't magically disappear.

Of course not, but the way to precipitate their eventual disappearance is not to legitamize and bolster them by censoring dissenting views.

The best way to help a capitalist counterrevolution is to demonstrate the very "red tryanny" capitalists are so afraid of.

You want to demolish capitalist ideas? Then demolish capitalist ideas ...it's really not that difficult to do. Preventing those ideas from being publically discussed, however, doesn't defeat them, it doesn't even put them "out of mind", it just lets them fester and grow in what you would call "personal conversations".

All that censorship and suppression does it delegitamize "workers" government, lend credence to counterrevolutionary claims, and, in all likelyhood, prevent a good deal of potentialy useful discourse and stagnate social progression.

Pamphlets won't destroy communism, but oppression will.


See that guy in your avatar? Know what he said about "If the majority truly wants the revolution to take place, then it will?"

As I recall, he also "swore before a picture of old and mourned Comrade Stalin".

It was the 1950s and he's one man. Who cares?


It's rather disappointing to me that so many on this site have idealist illusions about what a revolution is really about.

What's idealistic is believing that a small band of "merry men" vanguardists can cause a revolution whenever they feel like.

Revolution is a social phenomenon created by material conditions. It happens when it happens. The most useful thing we can do right now is attempt to determine what the conditions that lead to revolution are and experiment with measuring and manipulating them if possible.

For example, one thing we have learned is that arranging ourselves in small rigid cult-like groups of "vanguardists" does jack-shit to increase revolutionary tendency.

But I guess no one told old Bobby Avakian. <_<

[MikeSchafer]

Free speech must be unconditional and available for all. If somebody is spouting counterrevolutionary propaganda, then they should be allowed to continue. Reason and logic will conquer flawed ideas. Why should the government be able to control what comes out of anybody&#39;s mouth?

Furthermore, criticism is vital for any government to improve. If leaders don&#39;t listen to the population, even their detractors, then they won&#39;t realize how they can improve.

"Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you&#39;re in favor of free speech, then you&#39;re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you&#39;re not in favor of free speech." - Noam Chomsky

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Sometimes I think the name of this board should be changed to www.bourgeoisliberals.com

:lol:


Of course not, but the way to precipitate their eventual disappearance is not to legitamize and bolstor them by censoring dissenting views.

Who said anything about censoring dissenting views. I said reactionary views. If you have a better idea how we can progress on the path towards socialism, that&#39;s great. Production or distribution ideas? Great&#33; Ideas on how capitalism can be restored?? NO&#33;


The best way to help a capitalist counterrevolution is to demonstrate the very "red tryanny" capitalists are so afraid of.

Capitalists should be affraid. If they&#39;re not, you&#39;re doing something wrong&#33;


You want to demolish capitalist ideas? Then demolish capitalist ideas ...it&#39;s really not that difficult to do. Preventing those ideas from being publically discussed, however, doesn&#39;t defeat them, it doesn&#39;t even put them "out of mind", it just lets them fester and grow in what you would call "personal conversations".

If a revolution has occured, I guess that there has already been "public discussion" of capitalism, and the ills inheirant too it, otherwise how would there have been a revolution. So if we&#39;ve agreed on creating a socialist society, why do we need capitalist ideas? How can they help us progress? The decission in post-revolutionary society has already been made, we don&#39;t want capitalism. We don&#39;t want reaction.


All that censorship and suppression does it deligitamize "workers" government,

In the eyes of who?

Are you saying if a socialist coutry allowed a neo-Nazi party to emerge and hold rallies in the middle of the capital that would somehow legitamize them?? To who?


lend credence to counterrevolutionary claims,

Which claims would those be? That capitalists and reactionaries are suppressed in socialist society? Those claims are correct. No one has to worry except capitalists and reactionaries, and as a communist, I could give a fuck less about them.


and in all likelyhood prevent useful discourse and stagnate social progression.

How can reactionary views possibly be useful?


Pamphlets won&#39;t destroy communism, but oppression will.

In communism classes don&#39;t exist, so there&#39;s obviously no suppression of classes. In communism workers would most likely simply refuse to print reactionary nonsense, etc.

But, I&#39;m not talking about communism. I&#39;m talking about post-revolutionary society, while class antagonisms still exist.


More fundamentally, all states are the organized oppression of people by other people. Whch is why the state is an inherently coercive institution and must be abolished.

Idealist. You&#39;re making the anarchist mistake of seperating the state from material reality, ie. class society.

The bourgeois state must be abolished, and a workers state created. Otherwise you won&#39;t abolish capitalism.


A "workers&#39;" state is utopian self-delusion.

But the idea that a majority of the working class will gain conciousness, overthrow capitalism, and immediately move on too create a classless, stateless society where everyone is completely "free" (especially in bourgeois sense) to do what they please isn&#39;t.


No state can ever liberate, it itself is what we must liberate ourselves from&#33;

Let me know how that works out.


Revolution is a social phenomenon created by material conditions.

Right. That continues throughout. So when an armed guerrilla group emerges, they did so because of material conditions for their emergence existed.


As I recall, he also "swore before a picture of old and mourned Comrade Stalin".

It was the 1950s and he&#39;s one man. Who cares?

You obviously missed the point.

The guys posting things that go directly against what the guy in his avatar said. See the irony?


For example, one thing we have learned is that arranginng ourselves in small rigid cult-like groups of "vanguardists" does jack-shit to increase revolutionary tendency.

So what happened in Cuba, Nicaragua, China, Vietnam, etc?

And who said anything about small rigid cult-like groups? Who&#39;s advocating that?

I&#39;m not even arguing that a vanguard, in the Leninst sense, is the right tactic in every situation. I don&#39;t think it is in the first world. But even were a "spontaneous" revolution to emerge in the first world, leaders would emerge with it.


Free speech must be unconditional and available for all.

Says who? What is this based on?


If somebody is spouting counterrevolutionary propaganda, then they should be allowed to continue.

Why?

And should preachers be allowed to preach on street corners?


Reason and logic will conquer flawed ideas.

When? They don&#39;t now. Most people believe in god.


Furthermore, criticism is vital for any government to improve. If leaders don&#39;t listen to the population, even their detractors, then they won&#39;t realize how they can improve.

Right. Who said anything about banning criticism? I said no free speech for reactionaries.


"Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you&#39;re in favor of free speech, then you&#39;re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you&#39;re not in favor of free speech." - Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky also said people should vote for Kerry.. :lol:

And was pointed out in the redstar quote, "It&#39;s very naive to think that any social order will have or even could have "absolute" freedom of speech."

[PRC-UTE]

Originally posted by Lysergic Acid [email protected] 13 2005, 07:58 PM

All states are the organized oppression of one or more classes by another class.

More fundamentally, all states are the organized oppression of people by other people. Whch is why the state is an inherently coercive institution and must be abolished.

A "workers&#39;" state is utopian self-delusion. No state can ever liberate, it itself is what we must liberate ourselves from&#33;
So now we find out that the Paris Commune was self delusion.

I think there is some ambiguity about what the &#39;state&#39; is. The paradigm of anarcho-syndicalism, relying on direct democracy and workers councils, is what some Communists would define as a state. The Marxist slogan that &#39;the liberation of the workers must be the job of the workers&#39; describes this theory better.



Class antagonisms don&#39;t magically disappear.

Of course not, but the way to precipitate their eventual disappearance is not to legitamize and bolster them by censoring dissenting views.

The best way to help a capitalist counterrevolution is to demonstrate the very "red tryanny" capitalists are so afraid of.

You want to demolish capitalist ideas? Then demolish capitalist ideas ...it&#39;s really not that difficult to do. Preventing those ideas from being publically discussed, however, doesn&#39;t defeat them, it doesn&#39;t even put them "out of mind", it just lets them fester and grow in what you would call "personal conversations".

Preventing an idea from being publically discussed is so far the only historically proven way to defeat an idea. The more media time reactionaries get, the more their ideas have spread. I also think that future societies will define issues differently. I think the gut reaction of someone living in a far more equal society to someone promoting wage slavery will be the same reaction we have to people promoting slavery today. . . revulsion.


All that censorship and suppression does it delegitamize "workers" government, lend credence to counterrevolutionary claims, and, in all likelyhood, prevent a good deal of potentialy useful discourse and stagnate social progression.

It will make the communist idea delegitamised to whom?

You&#39;re never going to win certain people over and I&#39;m wondering why you care so much about their opinion.

[MikeSchafer]

Repression of speech is immature and futile. All it does is signifying that an individual or society is unwilling to question their beliefs. If socialism is as great as we all think it is, then let the people embrace it. People will think the same thing of a capitalist on a corner as we do of those nuts holding signs saying "the End is Near&#33;" on a street corner. A few might be dumb enough to believe what they are saying, but this amount is negligible.

For me personally, it all comes down to this: why should any other human being decide what can come out of my mouth. If a woman has domain over her uterus, then I damn well have the right to use my mouth in any way I deem appropriate.

[PRC-UTE]

On a more fundamental level, how will reactionaries be able to air their views?

What collective/soviet/ commune or syndicate would willingly publish their trash? Especially as the consciousness of the people, reflecting their liberated material conditions, will look upon reactionary ideas with horror. They will regard religious nuts the way we do flim flam men, and advocates of wage slavery the way we regard racial slavery.

If reactionaries even posess a way to publish their views, perhaps the revolution isn&#39;t even complete&#33;


What&#39;s idealistic is believing that a small band of "merry men" vanguardists can cause a revolution whenever they feel like.


I see that most of the advocates of &#39;free speech&#39; are actually attacking the idea of the vanguard . . . a different topic alltogether.

Very odd, too. Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, for example, didn&#39;t swallow any of this nonsense. They violently suppressed the church and killed priests&#33;

Obviously, not enough.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

@Mikeschafer: How about replying to my actual post?

[LSD]

Who said anything about censoring dissenting views. I said reactionary views.

In a progressive society, all reactionary views are by definition "disenting".

Not all dissenting views are reactionary, of course, but that&#39;s really not the issue. This isn&#39;t about the nature of reaction, it&#39;s about the nature of optics and the nature of power.

Once you give the state, even a "workers" state, the kind of power you&#39;re advocating, it really doesn&#39;t matter if the view in question is reactionary or not. It just matters whether or not it can be made to look reactionary.

Critisisms of the way that the State-run People&#39;s Potato Commune is being managed may be completely valid, but if they go against the interests of the People&#39;s Commissar for Potato Farming, they&#39;ll be labeld "reactionary" faster than you can say Stalinism.

Power is intrinsically oppressive. Power over fundamental matters of personal liberty only more so.

Granting anyone the authority to decided what is and what is not allowable speech is one of the gravest mistake a society can make.


If you have a better idea how we can progress on the path towards socialism, that&#39;s great. Production or distribution ideas? Great&#33; Ideas on how capitalism can be restored?? NO&#33;

Because that line is so easy to draw? :lol:

Sorry, but life is far more grey than that.


Capitalists should be affraid. If they&#39;re not, you&#39;re doing something wrong&#33;

You&#39;re missing my point. The thing that capitalists are afraid of is something that we all should be afraid of, namely the subversion of individual rights.

Now we here know that communism is the ultimate expression of human freedom, but to the capitalist mind, communism represents the exploitation of the individual for the sake of the "state".

The best way to play into their hands politically, is to affirm everything they&#39;re claiming and lock them up for advocating capitalism.


So if we&#39;ve agreed on creating a socialist society, why do we need capitalist ideas? How can they help us progress?

We don&#39;t and they don&#39;t ...but that&#39;s not the point.

We don&#39;t "need" archie comics either ...but we shouldn&#39;t throw people in jail for printing them.

There&#39;s a vast difference between what we "don&#39;t need" and what should be made criminal. The former is a very long list, the latter a very short one.


In the eyes of who?

The general populace, thinking individuals, concerned citizens.

Any post-revolutionary society will be an acutely politicized one. One that is rather cynnical of power and suspicious of "bosses". Oppress them, take away their speech, and you&#39;ll see a "counter"-revolution the next day.


Are you saying if a socialist coutry allowed a neo-Nazi party to emerge and hold rallies in the middle of the capital that would somehow legitamize them??

No, I&#39;m saying that if it prevented it, it would delegitamize it.

Unfortunately, legitimacy is not a two-way street.


Which claims would those be?

That communism is intrinsically oppressive; that communists want to control everything; that communism means state-control and an end to personal liberties.


How can reactionary views possibly be useful?

Because "reactionary" is such a beautifully nebulous term.

It is more than likely that views which could be labeled as "reactionary" are indeed useful, they just happen to contradict some dogma of the "people&#39;s" government of the day.

Again, no one is infallible and no one is "qualified" to identify reaction. It is the nature of suppression that the good is suppressed along with the bad.

This is not a price that a progressive society should be willing to pay, especially when the benneftis of suppression are so demonstrably few.


In communism workers would most likely simply refuse to print reactionary nonsense, etc.

Which has a whole set of other problems related to the nature of production and personal motivation. I had a long several page discussion with redstar on this, if you&#39;d care to have a look (http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?showtopic=36091&view=findpost&p=1291879168). What it comes down to is that, in the end, production must be impersonal, that means that workers cannot "refuse" to print something that they disagree with.


But, I&#39;m not talking about communism. I&#39;m talking about post-revolutionary society, while class antagonisms still exist.

Post-revolution society is communism, albeit an early variant of it.

We have to set up the institutions of communism immediately, because gradualism simply doesn&#39;t work.

Power doesn&#39;t "wither away", it persists itself. The only way to eliminate power relationships is to eliminate power relationships ...from the beginning.


But the idea that a majority of the working class will gain conciousness, overthrow capitalism, and immediately move on too create a classless, stateless society where everyone is completely "free" (especially in bourgeois sense) to do what they please isn&#39;t.

No, it is as well, but that&#39;s not at all what I, or anyone else with sense, is advocating.

Of course communism is a process, the question here is whether suppression and censorsip should be a part of that process. Whether it helps or hinders in the development of sustained communism.


Let me know how that works out.

&#39;Cause the track record for Leninism is so damn good. :rolleyes:


So what happened in Cuba, Nicaragua, China, Vietnam, etc?

Material conditions.


And should preachers be allowed to preach on street corners?

Yes.


When? They don&#39;t now. Most people believe in god.

Less so than a hundred years ago, and less then than a hundred years before that.

Reason is winning, it&#39;s just taking time.


Right. Who said anything about banning criticism? I said no free speech for reactionaries.

In the state-socialism, "reactionary" is just another word for unpopular.


Preventing an idea from being publically discussed is so far the only historically proven way to defeat an idea.

Really?

Remind me again who&#39;s preventing Aristotlianism from being discussed.


I think there is some ambiguity about what the &#39;state&#39; is.

I&#39;m defining the state as a distinct institutional body with a subject monopoly on force.


I think the gut reaction of someone living in a far more equal society to someone promoting wage slavery will be the same reaction we have to people promoting slavery today. . . revulsion.

I would certainly hope so&#33;

Disgust, anger, pitty, shock; all are to be expected. The question is how should one behave after feeling these emotions?

Should one respond? Highlight the gross errors of the reaction in question? Should they illustrate the flaws and identify the illogic so that no one is convinced?

Or should they call up their logal People&#39;s Deputy and have the piece suppressed?

Maybe the People&#39;s Commisar on Internal Security and General Welbeing can send down some People&#39;s Socialist Red Peace Army soldiers down to close the printer down.

Tell me, which do you think is more likely to produce a benneficial result, rationed argumentation or oppressive force?


On a more fundamental level, how will reactionaries be able to air their views?

Newsletter, website, good-old fashioned protest?

In a communist society, there is no practical method of suppressing speech that does not nescessitate either statist institutionalization or mimanagment and gross inequality, neither of which is conducive to a sustainable society.

see Free Speech: Should there be limits? (http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?showtopic=36091&view=findpost&p=1291879168) or better yet, Freedom of the Press (http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?showtopic=28463&st=20).

[codyvo]

I know I haven&#39;t been active lately, but why do we always have this free speech debate? It is pretty simple, free speech is (or should be) a basic human right for all people regardless of class, race, gender etc. If we had a true dictatorship of the proletariat, then wouldn&#39;t they become the upper class, and after the revolutionary spirit is lost they will become the bourgeois oppressors. If you don&#39;t listen to the opposition then you are a stubborn, ignorant, asshole.

[MKS]

I know I haven&#39;t been active lately, but why do we always have this free speech debate?

For one simple reason. To highlight the vast differences of opinion on this subject. Freedom of speech or expression should be complete and unhindered.

More importantly, the "left" needs cohesion, there has to be a uniform goal. Now some may say the real goal is the destruction of Imperial Capitalism and the creation of a classless society. Sounds cut and dry, but clearly it is not. How can a free society exist without freedom? One "communist" promotes suppression of ideas and communication, while others accept the proposition of complete free speech irregardless of subject or content. One "communist" points to Cuba, China, and Vietnam as examples of successful revolutionary nations, nothing could be further from the truth regarding China and Vietnam, Cuba has made some progress but is quickly collapsing under the direction of the Party. These two factions of thought are important to address because nothing will be achieved if we cannot move as one united front. There must be a time to say this is what we stand for, this is what we will fight and if necessary die for. I do not want to fight for one thing and when the battles are won be fighting each other.

It is time to put away the antiquated models of Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Three men who have done much more harm than good. It is time to step away from the old dogmatism of Marx and Engles and try to build new theories and ideals that could build upon what they started. Communism fails not because of the people, but because of the people who assume leadership and assume power. People who assume it is thier responsibility to censor one group or another fail the people and fail the true reason and meaning for revolutionary change. To create freedom for all mankind.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

In a progressive society, all reactionary views are by definition "disenting".

Not all dissenting views are reactionary, of course, but that&#39;s really not the issue.

That&#39;s exactly the issue.


This isn&#39;t about the nature of reaction, it&#39;s about the nature of optics and the nature of power.

I&#39;m getting tired of this argument. "Power corrupts, blah blah." Let&#39;s abolish all power and all pick flowers and live in decentralized communes where we read poetry to each other and wear hemp pants.

This is the real world. This is where we live. The capitalists have power. We need to take it. Only after we take it and class antagonisms are eliminated can there exist a society without power as such for any meaningful period of time.

As I&#39;ve pointed out time and time again, in class-divided society a state will exist, the only question is who controls it.


Once you give the state, even a "workers" state, the kind of power you&#39;re advocating, it really doesn&#39;t matter if the view in question is reactionary or not. It just matters whether or not it can be made to look reactionary.

You&#39;re once again making the anarchist mistake of elevating the state above material reality (class society). If I&#39;m advocating giving power to a workers state, what am I advocating? Giving power to the workers&#33;


Critisisms of the way that the State-run People&#39;s Potato Commune is being managed may be completely valid, but if they go against the interests of the People&#39;s Commissar for Potato Farming, they&#39;ll be labeld "reactionary" faster than you can say Stalinism.

Labeled by who? Who said the "Commissar" gets the power to "label" anything? Who said a "commissar" would exist??



Power is intrinsically oppressive.

Right. We need it to oppress the capitalists, or capitalism can never be abolished.


Power over fundamental matters of personal liberty, only more so.

What are you talking about specifically here? Are you familiar with the term "bourgeois right?"


Granting anyone the authority to decided what is and what is not allowable speech is one of the gravest mistake a society can make.

All authority to the working class


Because that line is so easy to draw?

Sorry, but life is far more grey than that.

Right. Are we going to make mistakes? Yes. Will some ideas probably be suppressed that shouldn&#39;t be? Probably. But, what&#39;s the alternative? Allowing the restoration of capitalism?

If ideas are correct, they will eventually emerge, and that&#39;s historical facts. Look at all the things the church tried to suppress that we know about now.


You&#39;re missing my point. The thing that capitalists are afraid of is something that we all should be afraid of, namely the subversion of individual rights.

What "individual rights?" Be specific. Are you talking about bourgeois right?


Now we here know that communism is the ultimate expression of human freedom, but to the capitalist mind, communism represents the exploitation of the individual for the sake of the "state".

I think capitalists have a better understanding of sociaism than alot of people here, ie. that they will be suppressed and abolished.


The best way to play into their hands politically, is to affirm everything they&#39;re claiming and lock them up for advocating capitalism.

The best, and only way to get rid of them (and class divided society) is the dictatorship of the proletariat.


We don&#39;t and they don&#39;t ...but that&#39;s not the point.

We don&#39;t "need" archie comics either ...but we shouldn&#39;t throw people in jail for printing them.

Good response. :rolleyes:

The point I was making is that if a revolution has happened, then it has already been agreed that we&#39;re going to transcend capitalism. We&#39;re done with it.

Let&#39;s use your "example." If everyone in a priting shop decided that they weren&#39;t going to print any more archie comics, should a person be given the opportunity and time to argue for printing archies comics everyday after the decision was made?


The general populace, thinking individuals, concerned citizens.

Any post-revolutionary society will be an acutely politicized one. One that is rather cynnical of power and suspicious of "bosses". Oppress them, take away their speech, and you&#39;ll see a "counter"-revolution the next day.

Oppress who? I&#39;m talking about oppressing the capitalists and reactionaries.. you know, the ones who are already counter revolutionary&#33; Are you scared of making them more counter revolutionary?? :lol:


No, I&#39;m saying that if it prevented it, it would delegitamize it.

In the eyes of who?? I guarantee a state that didn&#39;t allow free speech to the KKK would be very legitimate in the eyes of Blacks, Latinos, etc.

Why would a working class that just fought to take power allow a platform to the people they just took power from??


Unfortunately, legitimacy is not a two-way street.

I&#39;m not worried about having "legitimacy" in the eyes of the capitalists. A revolutionary working class won&#39;t be either.


That communism is intrinsically oppressive; that communists want to control everything; that communism means state-control and and end to personal liberties.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is the suppression of the capitalists by the working class. The working class does want to control everything.


Because "reactionary" is such a beautifully nebulous term.

It is more than likely that views which could be labeled as "reactionary" are indeed useful, they just happen to contradict some dogma of the "people&#39;s" government of the day.

Again, no one is infallible and no one is "qualified" to identify reaction. It is the nature of suppression that the good is suppressed along with the bad.

No one is qualified, but a working class in power is "qualified." May they get overzealous? See above.


This is not a price that a progressive society should be willing to pay, especially when the benneftis of suppression are so demonstrably few.

Yeah, I never really cared for that whole abolition of capitalism, class society, and wage slavery anyway.. :rolleyes:


Which has a whole set of other problems realted to the nature of production and personal motivation. I had a long several page discussion with redstar on this, if you&#39;d care to have a look. What it comes down to is that, in the end, production must be impersonal, that means that workers cannot "refuse" to print something that they disagree with.

Of course they can.


Post-revolution society is communism, albeit an early variant of it.

We have to set up the institutions of communism immediately, because gradualism simply doesn&#39;t work.

Power doesn&#39;t "wither away", it persists itself. The only way to eliminate power relationships is to eliminate power relationships ...from the beginning.

So you&#39;ve just bagged Marx outright?


No, it is as well, but that&#39;s not at all what I, or anyone else with sense, is advocating.

Of course communism is a process, the question here is whether suppression and censorsip should be a part of that process. Whether it helps or hinders in the development of sustained communism.

How do you reach classless society and the abolition of capitalism without the working class taking power and suppressing the capitalists.

Is the "battle of ideas" enough to eliminate the capitalist class?


&#39;Cause the track record for Leninism is so damn good. rolleyes.gif

I&#39;m not a "Leninist." But the track record is certainly better than whatever you&#39;re advocating.


Material conditions.

RIGHT&#33; The same material conditions that gave rise to the vanguards also gave them the ability to win...


Yes.

WOW


Less so than a hundred years ago, and less then than a hundred years before that.

Reason is winning, it&#39;s just taking time.

That&#39;s worthless. How does that help the billions of starving people in the world? What does that do for the 31 kids that die a minute from preventable disease? They should just wait it out right?


In the state-socialism, "reactionary" is just another word for unpopular.

In reality, reactionary has a specific meaning. I know I don&#39;t have to tell you what it is.


I&#39;m defining the state as a distinct institutional body with a subject monopoly on force.

In which one class rules over other classes. The state will always emerge in a class-divided society, no matter how much you oppose it.


I would certainly hope so&#33;

Disgust, anger, pitty, shock; all are to be expected. The question is how should one behave after feeling these emotions?

Should one respond? Highlight the gross errors of the reaction in question? Should they illustrate the flaws and identify the illogic so that no one is convinced?

Or should they call up their logal People&#39;s Deputy and have the piece suppressed?

Maybe the People&#39;s Commisar on Internal Security and General Welbeing can send down some People&#39;s Socialist Red Peace Army soldiers down to close the printer down.

Tell me, which do you think is more likely to produce a benneficial result, rationed argumentation or oppressive force?

Stop building up straw men just so you can knock them down and get "debate points." I wasn&#39;t advocating anything like that and you know it.


Newsletter, website, good-old fashioned protest?

Why should they be allowed resources to spread their bullshit?

Protests? They should be dealt with just like they are in Cuba. Large groups of citizens mobilize to confront the counter-revolutionaries.

In advanced countries today it&#39;s tradition for leftist parties to mobilize to show up at reactionary protests, parades, etc. to counter-protest and break them up by force. Should they stop doing that?


In a communist society, there is no practical method of suppressing speech that does not nescessitate either statist institutionalization or mimanagment and gross inequality, neither of which is conducive to a sustainable society.

See next:


see Free Speech: Should there be limits? or better yet, Freedom of the Press.

Seen them. Redstar pointed out something else correct here:

"If (1) the working class effectively controls access to all the media; and (2) the capitalist class is deprived of their wealth...making it impossible to hire people to spread their views; then you have effectively suppressed "free speech" for reactionaries...without ever saying that you&#39;re doing that.

I can live with that."


I know I haven&#39;t been active lately, but why do we always have this free speech debate?

Because alot of people on this site claim to uphold communism without understanding basic tennets of the theory it&#39;s based on and how those theories have been put in practice, and how it&#39;s played out.


It is pretty simple, free speech is (or should be) a basic human right for all people regardless of class, race, gender etc.

Right. We should give the neo-nazi party hours of time on television&#33;&#33; It&#39;s a basic human right&#33;&#33; :rolleyes:


If we had a true dictatorship of the proletariat, then wouldn&#39;t they become the upper class, and after the revolutionary spirit is lost they will become the bourgeois oppressors.

I don&#39;t even understand this part. But from what I&#39;m guessing you&#39;re asking if the working class in power (dictatorship of the proletariat) would become the rulling class? Of course&#33; That&#39;s what the dictatorship of the proletariat is&#33;

The working class has to be the rulling class to suppress the capitalists and progress on the communist road.


If you don&#39;t listen to the opposition then you are a stubborn, ignorant, asshole.

Sticks and stones. You either want workers to take power and stay in power, or you don&#39;t.

I can only wonder about people like you. You have Fidel in your avatar. Why? Fidel doesn&#39;t uphold free speech for reactionaries or capitalists. Why is he in your avatar?

[LSD]

That&#39;s exactly the issue.


In a perfect world in which all leaders are gallant and true and the "communist man" strides on his glorious red chariot, maybe, but not in this one.

If you create a "workers" state with the authority to prosecute "reaction", then it&#39;s that state that defined what exactly "reaction" is.

To think that it will never use that particular ability to serve its own institutional needs is hopelessly naive


I&#39;m getting tired of this argument. "Power corrupts, blah blah."

That doesn&#39;t make it any less true.

The reality is that granting any individual power over others is an inherently coercive and oppressive act. Furthermore it is pretty much guaranteed that that power will indeed corrupt.

Once a person has the ability to maniupalate and control others, he get&#39;s "accustomed" to it, furthermore it changes his mindset such that soon he begins to think that he&#39;s "deserving" of such control. It doesn&#39;t matter how altruistic he was going into it, once you make a master, you becomes a master.

And a master does not exist without slaves.


Let&#39;s abolish all power and all pick flowers and live in decentralized communes where we read poetry to each other and wear hemp pants.

"hemp pants"? :huh:


This is the real world. This is where we live. The capitalists have power. We need to take it.

Absolutely. The question is what do we do after having taken it?

Do we turn around and create the same hierarchical bureacracy that victimized us? Do we replicate the very methods of oppression that we so condemned?

The point that you&#39;re failing to realize is that this is not just about "reactionaries"&#33; Creating a state means that everyone is subject to the whims of that state and a state, by definition, is exclusive. It exsits as an institutional entity, regardless of any "checks" and/or "balances".

An elite group given power over others, even in the "name" of those others is functionaly indistinguishable from a social class, especially in a "socialist" state where the powers of that state are particularly vast.

Unless you empower the whole society, directly, the reemergence, or perhpaps I should say continuation, of class society is inevitable.

The state cannot end class antagonism because it itself is always representative of the rulling class be it bourgeois or bureaucratic or feudalist. It always representes the rulling elite. In "socialist" countries, it often constitutes that entire elite itself&#33;


As I&#39;ve pointed out time and time again, in class-divided society a state will exist, the only question is who controls it.

That&#39;s what&#39;s called an assertion, a fairly flimsy one at that.

There is no need for a state to suppress class antagonisms, the people themselves are more than capable of doing so. Maybe if the class ratio was more equal, you would have something approaching a case, but it isn&#39;t.

The capitalists are a vast minority. In a post-revolutionary context, their effective power will be marginal. There is no need for a complex infastructure to deal with them.

Will they "disappear"? Will their ideas? Of course not, but both they and their ideas can be dealt with effectively by the workers directly ...without the need, by the way, for oppressive censorship.

All that creating the kind of institutionalized system you propose accomplishes is hastening the restoration of capitalism, or at least some classist variant.

A state, you see, in any form creates elites. The state, after all, is itself an elite. By granting powers to government officials, you create a bureaucratic state in many ways more coercive that the bourgeois it replaces.

Why do you think the USSR and PRC went capitalist? Dumb chance?

Class society induces class society, and both Maoism and Leninism are nothing more than classism redressed.


You&#39;re once again making the anarchist mistake of elevating the state above material reality (class society). If I&#39;m advocating giving power to a workers state, what am I advocating? Giving power to the workers&#33;

No you&#39;re not, you&#39;re advocating giving it to a workers state, and entirely seperate thing.

A group and a body that claims to speak "in the name" of that group are not even remotely the same.


Labeled by who?

Whomever you designate has that responsibility.


Who said the "Commissar" gets the power to "label" anything? Who said a "commissar" would exist??

You did. By advocating the existance of a "socialist state", you nescessitated the existance of an organized government, an organized government requires division of labour and hierarchical positioning.

Surely you must realize this?


Right. Are we going to make mistakes? Yes. Will some ideas probably be suppressed that shouldn&#39;t be? Probably. But, what&#39;s the alternative? Allowing the restoration of capitalism?

No, allowing free speech.

Claiming that a capitalist restoration "must" flow from this is a logical fallacy of the highest order.

The alternative to suppression is freedom, allowing people to express themselves regardless of how "politic" what they are saying is; regardless of whether it meets the definition-of-the-day for "reactionary".

Will that lead to a good deal of crap being espoused? You&#39;re damn right. But it will also make a healthier society.


If ideas are correct, they will eventually emerge, and that&#39;s historical facts. Look at all the things the church tried to suppress that we know about now.

That&#39;s your model?

The midieval Catholic Church? :o

Let me tell you, that was probably the least reassuring thing you could possibly say&#33;

The Church&#39;s suppression held scientific progress in some areas for centuries. The truth eventually came out, yes, but at the cost of millions of lives.

It&#39;s a mistake that can never be repeated, and pointing to it as some sort of "vindication" for censorship is pure insanity.

Nothing lasts forever and of course no censorship is eternal, but the question is whether or not the suppression you advocate will lead to material losses and a degradation of the public debate in the here and now, and the answer is a definitive yes.

Whether or not this loss will be accounted for in hundreds or thousands of years is wholly irrelevent.

The suppression of ideas is wrong because it hurts us now, a sufficient justification to refrain for any harmful activity.


What "individual rights?" Be specific.

In this case, freedom of speech ...obviously.

If you want other examples of what constitutes an individual right, I would point to freedom of security of person and freedom to choice over oneself and freedom of privacy, etc...

In any case, this seems pointless, I&#39;m sure you know quite well what constitutes a right.


The best, and only way to get rid of them (and class divided society) is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Which means what?

A state apparatus? A "Supreme Soviet"? A government bureaucracy and standing army sworn to obey the "commander and chief"?

Sorry but creating new classes does not end class divisions.


Let&#39;s use your "example." If everyone in a priting shop decided that they weren&#39;t going to print any more archie comics, should a person be given the opportunity and time to argue for printing archies comics everyday after the decision was made?

I don&#39;t even understand your question.

Are you asking whether a worker at that shop should have the right to ask to print archies?

Well, of course, :unsure: doesn&#39;t that go without saying? What do you want, "iron discipline"?

Indeed, unless resources are bizarrely thin, I don&#39;t see why he shouldn&#39;t be allowed in his free time to print some of his own&#33; Certainly we all know that central planning doesn&#39;t work.


Oppress who? I&#39;m talking about oppressing the capitalists and reactionaries..

Oh, that clearly defined and easily identifiable bunch? :rolleyes:

Once again, reactionay is a term that can mean litterally anything.

For anyone who remembers the former Soviet Union, "reaction" seemed to be about as common as vodka. Everything was "reactionary". Trotsky was "reactionary" and then Stalin was "reactionary" and then Khruschev was "reactionary" annd in the middle there a couple of army officers and a whole bunch of Jews were "reactionary" too.

You see, in the end, "reactionary" means whatever those in power say it means. There&#39;s hardly a more nebulous word in the english language, nor one so ripe for abuse.

If you set up a political system in which an elite has the authority to censor that which is nominally "reactionary", you are effectively giving them a carte blanche to immediately suppress anything controversial; within a few years, anything dissenting; within a few decades, anything at all.

State power is oppressive by nature, it doesn&#39;t matter who&#39;s ostensibly holding the reins.

We&#39;ve had dozens of "workers&#39; states" in the past century, are you not at all phazed by the fact that not a single on of them has anything approaching freedom?

That not a single one has ever had true worker participation or democratic consulation?

Don&#39;t you think there might be a reason?


Why would a working class that just fought to take power allow a platform to the people they just took power from??

Because it&#39;s better than giving it to someone else.

Giving power to all means giving power to all, even the really disgusting types. But once you start divying up who ge&#39;s rights and who doesn&#39;t, who&#39;s "derserving" of that platform and who isn&#39;t, you&#39;ll see that that "worthy" list grows shorter and shorter until suddenly it&#39;s only the list-makers that populate it.

Setting up a coercive system to oppress class enemies is an ultimately self-defeating act. In the end, class enemies becomes state enemies. It&#39;s the nature of coercive power.

...it coerces.


Of course they can.

No they really can&#39;t.

There is simply no practical method of doing it.

The only solution I&#39;ve ever even seen presented, redstars, doesn&#39;t work. Giving individual workers collectivees the unilateral authority to decree who is and who isn&#39;t deserving of resources is oligarchical and socially suicidal.


So you&#39;ve just bagged Marx outright?

Some of it, yeah.

The man was mortal, after all. More than that he was writing 150 years ago. He made some very astute obervations, but he also made mistakes. The "socialist transition" was one of the more glaring ones.

Hegelian Dialectic "Materialism" was another,


How do you reach classless society and the abolition of capitalism without the working class taking power and suppressing the capitalists.

By taking power and suppressing the capitalists. It&#39;s called a revolution.

Once that revolution is completed and the former rulling classes disempowered, all members of the society who participate, regardless of former social status, are of equal standing and authority. No suppression, no state, no "dictators".

It&#39;s really not complicated.


I&#39;m not a "Leninist." But the track record is certainly better than whatever you&#39;re advocating.

Really? How so?

How&#39;s the USSR doing on its "road" to communism? How about the DPRK? How about the PRC? How about Vietnam?

Leninism seems to very good at "transitioning" to one and only one thing, capitalism.


RIGHT&#33; The same material conditions that gave rise to the vanguards also gave them the ability to win...

The "vanguardists" exploited pre-existing materialist conditions to attempt "communist" revolutions in societies that were not ready for them, we have seen the results.

It would have almost undoubtably had been better if they had allowed that society to progress normally.


That&#39;s worthless. How does that help the billions of starving people in the world? What does that do for the 31 kids that die a minute from preventable disease? They should just wait it out right?

And this has what to do with religion?

Ideas can be fought and ideas are being fought, but censorship is never the way to do it.


In reality, reactionary has a specific meaning. I know I don&#39;t have to tell you what it is.

Yes you do&#33;

Please, define "reactionary" in a way that every communist and potential communist will agree with. Explain what makes something "reaction" and something else "dissent". Describe a set of immutable laws by which we can judge ever single idea against.

I won&#39;t hold my breath.


Stop building up straw men just so you can knock them down and get "debate points." I wasn&#39;t advocating anything like that and you know it.

No?

Then what are you advocating? Clearly you don&#39;t want free speech so what do you propose be done to those who try? You said you don&#39;t want to allow preachers on the street ...so what happens when they try?

Suppression without force is a contradiction.


In advanced countries today it&#39;s tradition for leftist parties to mobilize to show up at reactionary protests, parades, etc. to counter-protest and break them up by force. Should they stop doing that?

Absolutely not&#33;


Because alot of people on this site claim to uphold communism without understanding basic tennets of the theory it&#39;s based on and how those theories have been put in practice.

"put in practice"? By whom&#33;?

Lenin? Mao? Castro? Trotsky? Kim? Stalin?

Communism has yet to be attained laregly because of people like you who claim to care about worker liberation but yet cling to nineteenth century notions about a benevolent state that cares for you and is never corrupt.

The only way for workers to liberate themselves is for them to liberate themselves. From capitalism, from the state, from you, from anyone who would claim to "lead" or "represent" them.

You want to string someone up on the lampposts? Forget the preachers, let&#39;s start with the "LEADERS".


Sticks and stones. You either want workers to take power and stay in power, or you don&#39;t.

And you want which one, again?

If you create a state, the state&#39;s in charge. Bam, no more worker power.

[PRC-UTE]

If you create a "workers" state with the authority to prosecute "reaction", then it&#39;s that state that defined what exactly "reaction" is.

To think that it will never use that particular ability to serve its own institutional needs is hopelessly naive


This discussion highlights sharply the difference between those who advocate the dictatorship of the proletariat (which, in my opinion, can only be weilded by the workers as a class, not a vanguard) and those who advocate essentially a left bourgeois/liberal society of &#39;personal freedom&#39;.

[Reds]

Who the PEOPLEwant band from free speech is who will be banned from speaking my I remined you that is the point of the revolution comrades.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

For some reason I thought you were a communist from your previous posts. My mistake.

I&#39;m tired of arguing against anarchism, and that&#39;s not what this thread is about, so I&#39;m just going to respond to a few points.

In a perfect world in which all leaders are gallant and true and the "communist man" strides on his glorious red chariot, maybe, but not in this one.

If you create a "workers" state with the authority to prosecute "reaction", then it&#39;s that state that defined what exactly "reaction" is.

To think that it will never use that particular ability to serve its own institutional needs is hopelessly naive


That doesn&#39;t make it any less true.

Right, all power corrupts. So the logical conclusion from that would be that the working class shouldn&#39;t have power either right? Because they will become corrupted.


The reality is that granting any individual power over others is an inherently coercive and oppressive act. Furthermore it is pretty much guaranteed that that power will indeed corrupt.

"Pretty much" eh? There are mechanisms to keep one person from getting too much power or staying in power too long. Just because every state claiming to be socialist didn&#39;t utilize them doesn&#39;t mean they don&#39;t exist.


Absolutely. The question is what do we do after having taken it?

Organize into a workers state or loose it.


Do we turn around and create the same hierarchical bureacracy that victimized us?

Right it was hierarchy, not the capitalists..


The point that you&#39;re failing to realize is that this is not just about "reactionaries"&#33; Creating a state means that everyone is subject to the whims of that state and a state, by definition, is exclusive. It exsits as an institutional entity, regardless of any "checks" and/or "balances".

Under a workers state, everyone is subject to the interests of the working class. I have no problem with that. That&#39;s socialism.


An elite group given power over others, even in the "name" of those others is functionaly indistinguishable from a social class, especially in a "socialist" state where the powers of that state are particularly vast.

Who said anything about an elite group given power over others? Do you have a straw man factory where you are?


Unless you empower the whole society, directly, the reemergence, or perhpaps I should say continuation, of class society is inevitable.

Once again you&#39;re abstractions are divorced from material reality. "The whole society" includes fascists and capitalists. They shouldn&#39;t be empowered. They should be suppressed.


The state cannot end class antagonism

Right, they disappear magically in the spontaneous, leaderless, revolution.


That&#39;s what&#39;s called an assertion, a fairly flimsy one at that.

Yeah, it&#39;s only based on historical fact. What was I thinking?


There is no need for a state to suppress class antagonisms, the people themselves are more than capable of doing so. Maybe if the class ratio was more equal, you would have something approaching a case, but it isn&#39;t.

What "people?" Fascists and capitalists are people.

"The workers themselves" organized = the workers state.


The capitalists are a vast minority. In a post-revolutionary context, their effective power will be marginal. There is no need for a complex infastructure to deal with them.

Right.. no worries&#33; :lol:


Why do you think the USSR and PRC went capitalist? Dumb chance?

Lack of workers control. The working class fell out of power. The USSR was also the first time it was ever tried. Did you expect them to get it perfect on the first try? Do you know how long it took capitialism to take hold?

Why do you think that Cuba hasn&#39;t "gone capitalist?" "Dumb chance?"


No you&#39;re not, you&#39;re advocating giving it to a workers state, and entirely seperate thing.

A workers state = the working class organized as the rulling class.


A group and a body that claims to speak "in the name" of that group are not even remotely the same.

Who advocated that? Wasn&#39;t me.

But you raise another point. Representatives have to exist, at least in some capacity. There are times when issues arise that need to be dealt with immediately, there&#39;s no time for debate and vote of the entire society. What then?


You did. By advocating the existance of a "socialist state", you nescessitated the existance of an organized government, an organized government requires division of labour and hierarchical positioning.

Surely you must realize this?

It all depends how it&#39;s organized. But yes there will be a division of labor. Some people are qualified to do work that others aren&#39;t. The cost of reproducing certain labor is more expensive than others, etc.

What do you propose to immediately abolish the division of labor?


No, allowing free speech.

Free speech in the abstract is meaningless.


Claiming that a capitalist restoration "must" flow from this is a logical fallacy of the highest order.

Not suppressing the capitalists might not lead to capitalist restoration -- at least for a period of time, but it certainly won&#39;t lead to communism.


It&#39;s a mistake that can never be repeated, and pointing to it as some sort of "vindication" for censorship is pure insanity.

That&#39;s not what I did, but okay.

My point is no matter how harsh censorship is, correct ideas will eventually appear (the church censorship illustrates this).


Nothing lasts forever and of course no censorship is eternal, but the question is whether or not the suppression you advocate will lead to material losses and a degradation of the public debate in the here and now, and the answer is a definitive yes.

Well if you say so, it must be true.


The suppression of ideas is wrong because it hurts us now, a sufficient justification to refrain for any harmful activity.

"Wrong?" In what sense? Are you making moral arguments now? Maybe I don&#39;t understand you.

Let me get this straight, the suppression of ideas like racism is "wrong," but allowing them to be spewed isn&#39;t?


In any case, this seems pointless, I&#39;m sure you know quite well what constitutes a right.

Seems like your advocating bourgeois right to me.


Which means what?

A state apparatus? A "Supreme Soviet"? A government bureaucracy and standing army sworn to obey the "commander and chief"?

Sorry but creating new classes does not end class divisions.

The working class organized as the rulling class. There is no other way to end class antagonisms.


I don&#39;t even understand your question.

Are you asking whether a worker at that shop should have the right to ask to print archies?

Well, of course, unsure.gif doesn&#39;t that go without saying? What do you want, "iron discipline"?

Indeed, unless resources are bizarrely thin, I don&#39;t see why he shouldn&#39;t be allowed in his free time to print some of his own&#33; Certainly we all know that central planning doesn&#39;t work.

You missed the point. Once the decision is made by the workers not to print it anymore, the decision is made. If it&#39;s open to debate again everyday, what was the point of making the original decision?


Oh, that clearly defined and easily identifiable bunch?

Capitalist and reactionary ideas can be identified, yes.

You never heard someone say something and thought, "that&#39;s reactionary&#33;" ??


If you set up a political system in which an elite has the authority to censor that which is nominally "reactionary", you are effectively giving them a carte blanche to immediately suppress anything controversial; within a few years, anything dissenting; within a few decades, anything at all.

Straw men fucking galore&#33; :lol: Who said anything about an elite??? I said the working class.


State power is oppressive by nature, it doesn&#39;t matter who&#39;s ostensibly holding the reins.

Exactly, the question is who&#39;s being oppressed. If the working class is in power it&#39;s obviously not being oppressed.

By your logic, everyone is oppressed under every state. So that would mean that the bourgeoisie is oppressed under capitalism :lol:


We&#39;ve had dozens of "workers&#39; states" in the past century, are you not at all phazed by the fact that not a single on of them has anything approaching freedom?

"Freedom" in what sense? Are you talking about bourgeois right again?


That not a single one has ever had true worker participation or democratic consulation?

Wrong. See: The Republic of Cuba.


Giving power to all means giving power to all, even the really disgusting types.

You&#39;re fighting so "all" can have power? Not me, I&#39;m fighting so the working class can have power.


But once you start divying up who ge&#39;s rights and who doesn&#39;t, who&#39;s "derserving" of that platform and who isn&#39;t, you&#39;ll see that that "worthy" list grows shorter and shorter until suddenly it&#39;s only the list-makers that populate it.

As long as the working class is making the list, I&#39;m fine with that.


Setting up a coercive system to oppress class enemies is an ultimately self-defeating act. In the end, class enemies becomes state enemies. It&#39;s the nature of coercive power.

It&#39;s called the dictatorship of the proletariat and it&#39;s how we eliminate class antagonisms.


There is simply no practical method of doing it.

Sure there is, and it&#39;s been presented to you. Just because you don&#39;t accept it as practical doesn&#39;t mean that it isn&#39;t.


Some of it, yeah.

Looks like you&#39;ve bagged all major parts to me. I&#39;m not even sure if you uphold class struggle.


By taking power and suppressing the capitalists. It&#39;s called a revolution.

Suppressing them how? What is the organization of the working class if it&#39;s not a state ? How do you fend off imperialist invadors? Those that try to restore capitalism?


Once that revolution is completed and the former rulling classes disempowered, all members of the society who participate, regardless of former social status, are of equal standing and authority. No suppression, no state, no "dictators".

Yes, this is called communism. It takes time and material conditions to reach it. You can&#39;t go immediately from revolution to communism.


Really? How so?

Leninism. The working class has taken power, and in many cases held onto it for substainial amount of time (46 years in Cuba).

vs.

Anarchism. The working class has never taken power for any substanial period of time.


How&#39;s the USSR doing on its "road" to communism? How about the DPRK? How about the PRC? How about Vietnam?

How long did it take capitalism to take hold? Our class has made mistakes. We learn from them.

And as long as huge imperialist powers exist and capitalism is the primary social order in the world, communism will never exist.


The "vanguardists" exploited pre-existing materialist conditions to attempt "communist" revolutions in societies that were not ready for them, we have seen the results.

You&#39;re ignoring the fact that they couldn&#39;t have emerged unless material conditions allowed it. That was my original point.


It would have almost undoubtably had been better if they had allowed that society to progress normally.

Right. Cuba should have stayed under Batista so it could be a colony with 40% unemployment rate, where half the population couldn&#39;t read and a large portion of the female population sold their ass to mafia scum and imperialist soldiers&#33;


And this has what to do with religion?

Ideas can be fought and ideas are being fought, but censorship is never the way to do it.

You said revolution will happen when it&#39;s ready. And I said that billions of people can&#39;t afford to wait.


Then what are you advocating? Clearly you don&#39;t want free speech so what do you propose be done to those who try?

They should be refused the opportunity. No access to TV, radio, or internet. If they try to start rallies, organize volunteer groups to show up and suppress them.


You said you don&#39;t want to allow preachers on the street ...so what happens when they try?

That&#39;s not my choice, it will be the choice of the working class that&#39;s in power. If it were my choice however, execution.


Suppression without force is a contradiction.

Not neccissarily. What force is involved with refusing to give reactionaries and capitalists time on the TV, Radio, and space on the internet?


Absolutely not&#33;

This goes against everything you&#39;re saying&#33;&#33;

You said everyone should have freedom of speech. So then, leftists shouldn&#39;t try to suppress fascists, right?


"put in practice"? By whom&#33;?

The working class, everytime it&#39;s taken power. They made mistakes. We learn from them.


Communism has yet to be attained laregly because of people like you who claim to care about worker liberation but yet cling to nineteenth century notions about a benevolent state that cares for you and is never corrupt.

Oh really? And here I though it was material conditions&#33; :rolleyes:


The only way for workers to liberate themselves is for them to liberate themselves. From capitalism, from the state, from you, from anyone who would claim to "lead" or "represent" them.

*Rereads thread* Where did I claim I wanted to lead anyone again? Oh that&#39;s right, I didn&#39;t. You fetish with "leaders" is rediculous.

If anarchists spent as much time opposing capitalism as they did hierarchy and leaders maybe they would have accomplished something by now. Maybe, but probably not.


You want to string someone up on the lampposts? Forget the preachers, let&#39;s start with the "LEADERS".

Right, because Ho Chi Minh was much more detrimental to the workers and peasants interests than the pope. :rolleyes:


And you want which one, again?

Workes power. In a way that is practical and can actually occur.

Give me a call when your spontaneous leaderless revolution that immediate abolishes class anatagonisms kicks in.


If you create a state, the state&#39;s in charge. Bam, no more worker power.

BAM, more abstractions.

Have you bagged the existance of classes to? You don&#39;t think they exist, or they just aren&#39;t important?

A workers state is the organization of workers as the rulling class. Under, a workers state, the workers are in charge.

[LSD]

For some reason I thought you were a communist from your previous posts. My mistake.

I&#39;m a communist in that I advocate the creation of a communist society. I am not a communist in that I reject Marx&#39;s "plan" for achieving said society.

But since labels are generally meaningless anyway, feel free to call me what you wish.


Right, all power corrupts. So the logical conclusion from that would be that the working class shouldn&#39;t have power either right? Because they will become corrupted.

The logical conclusion is that no individual should have any authority above any other individual. It&#39;s called equality.

A state, by definition, cannot be equal. Institutional government is inherently hierarchical. It is fundamentally the rule of an elite, regardless of the espouses "legitimacy" of that elite, be it through bourgeois election or "dictatorship of the proletariat".

No group, no matter how big or small, has the right to exert authority over those external to that group. A society must make majoritarian decisions that reflect all effected members.


"Pretty much" eh? There are mechanisms to keep one person from getting too much power or staying in power too long. Just because every state claiming to be socialist didn&#39;t utilize them doesn&#39;t mean they don&#39;t exist.

It&#39;s not that "every state didn&#39;t utlize them", it&#39;s that not a single one did.

There is not a single example in the myriad of "socialist" states that have exists of a government that was actually accountable to its people, that was actually democratically responsible.

I refuse to accept that this is a pure accident of history.


Under a workers state, everyone is subject to the interests of the working class.

Again, no, it&#39;s subject to the state.


Who said anything about an elite group given power over others?

I am getting sick of repeating this, but that&#39;s what a state is.


Once again you&#39;re abstractions are divorced from material reality. "The whole society" includes fascists and capitalists. They shouldn&#39;t be empowered. They should be suppressed.

Their material interests should be suppressed, their social ambitions should be suppressed, they however should not be suppressed. That is, any attempt at fascism or capitalism must be vigorously fought, but if they participate in society and don&#39;t attempt to undermine it, they are equally deserving of all social elements as everyone else.

All members of society must be equal unless action is taken by a member to forfeit this position. You only persist class arangements by maintaining what will quickly become functionaly defunct lines.

Classes, you see, will evolve in post-revolulutionary society. Despite all your talk of suppressing the capitalists, a question that you have failed to address thus far is what is a "capitalist" in post-revolutionary society?

Once capitalism as an economic system is abolished, participating in capitalism is functionaly impossible, as is owning the means of production, as is possessing capital. All the distinguishing socio-economic measures of class relationship are effectively eliminated.

Certainly capitalist ideologues will persists, but for all intents and purposes as a functional class, the bourgeoisie will no longer exist.

So how do you "suppress" a class that does not exist?

How do you even identify who makes up this class? Does the former CEO who now works as a CPU maker? Does the former factory manager who now works the machines?

Since post-revolutionary society requires that all participants participate as workers, there are no non-workers. This means that, from a class perspective, the whole society is working class, it has to be&#33;

No other class could possibly exist&#33; I mean what would be its role? What would it do?

Unfortunately, the answer is rule. The fact is that while such a society would indeed be entirely working class, as long as a distinct state exists, the group that composes the government is in a definitively differnent socio-economic dynamic from the rest.

They don&#39;t provide labour, they provide "managment"; they "lead". Inevitably, this leads to the formation of a distinct bureaucratic rulling class.


Why do you think that Cuba hasn&#39;t "gone capitalist?" "Dumb chance?"

Who&#39;s to say they haven&#39;t?

Cuba today has a massive black market, a thriving multi-teer economy, wages, markets, and unequal remuneration for equal labour time.

For all intents and purposes it&#39;s just a social-democracy without the democracy part.


Who advocated that? Wasn&#39;t me.

But you raise another point. Representatives have to exist, at least in some capacity.

:lol:

I trust you appreciate the irony in proposing elite leadership directly under the sentence denying that you propose elite leadership.

Look, again, a state is by definition an elite group. It is, by definition composed of a small number of members who make the actual decisions, possibly in "consultatiion" with the general population but usually simply "in its name".

The "transitional socialist state" as always described by ardent Marxists is one of classical government, typically representative of some sort, but often not.

Indeed, Leninists often dismiss representation and believe that the "Vanguard party" is intrinsically evolved enough to "speak for the workers" without the need for consulation.

So far, you have not outlined your specific views on the subject. So, since it&#39;s relevent here, what are they?

Flat out, what kind of government is the "transitional socialist state" you advocate?



Free speech in the abstract is meaningless.

Who&#39;s talking abstract?

Free speech means that each individual in society should have an equal access to the means of replication and, independently, an unhindered ability to promulgate their ideas regardless of the nature of those ideas or of the person spreading them..


My point is no matter how harsh censorship is, correct ideas will eventually appear (the church censorship illustrates this).

And my point is that that doesn&#39;t matter.

If censorship delays the emergence of an idea by centuries or even decades then it has done harm, and you have yet to establish that such censorship does any good that even comes close to coutnerbalancing this harm.


"Wrong?" In what sense? Are you making moral arguments now? Maybe I don&#39;t understand you.

Wrong in the sense that it is demonstrably objectively detrimental to society and to the individuals in said society.


Let me get this straight, the suppression of ideas like racism is "wrong," but allowing them to be spewed isn&#39;t?

That&#39;s correct. Society is not hurt by a free flow of ideas, even disgusting ones. They are fairly easy to refute and bringing them into the open allows for the addressing of issues that society often likes to "sweep under the rug".

Suppression, on the other hand, cuts off the discussion. It externalistically dictates what can and what cannot be spoken of and in doing so it, inevitably, prevents potentially valuable and useful ideas from being heard.


Seems like your advocating bourgeois right to me.

Seems like you&#39;ve failed to define that term.

Is the right to personal safety "bourgeois"? Is the right to personal privacy?


The working class organized as the rulling class. There is no other way to end class antagonisms.

And, again, what is the "working class" in a post-revolutionary context?

How exactly is membership determined?

If every member of society is working the every member is working class and this "transitional state" of yours is just bourgeois republicanism "done right".

Sorry, but that&#39;s not revolutionary to me&#33;


You missed the point. Once the decision is made by the workers not to print it anymore, the decision is made.

What?

That makes absolutely no sense. You&#39;re saying that once a decision is made, it can never be reconsidered?

What nonsense&#33;


If it&#39;s open to debate again everyday, what was the point of making the original decision?

Because it seemed right at the time. But if new information is discovered or new arguments made, of course the issue should be reconsidred. Humans do make mistakes. Being willing to understand, acknowledge, and reverse them is one of the fundamental nescessities of a progressive society.


Capitalist and reactionary ideas can be identified, yes.

You never heard someone say something and thought, "that&#39;s reactionary&#33;" ??

Sure I have, but I wouldn&#39;t trust my judgement to be absolute, and I would never deem that I have the right to suppress those things which I reacted to as "reactionary"&#33;

Again, no one has devised an objective measure of "reaction". This means that, ultimately, it&#39;s going to be up to some group of people to sit around a table and decide what the people can and what the people can&#39;t handle.

In your model, it will be probably be a state agency of some sort doing this, yes?


Straw men fucking galore&#33; Who said anything about an elite??? I said the working class.

No, you said the "dictatorship of the proletariat", which, practically, means some sort of state organization acting on the "behalf" of the proletariat.

A group which, incidently, is functionaly indistinct.


Exactly, the question is who&#39;s being oppressed. If the working class is in power it&#39;s obviously not being oppressed.

Obviously, but the problem is that in any state system, the working class is not in power ...the state is.


"Freedom" in what sense? Are you talking about bourgeois right again?

I don&#39;t know. Care to actually define your terms?


Sure there is, and it&#39;s been presented to you. Just because you don&#39;t accept it as practical doesn&#39;t mean that it isn&#39;t.

No, it&#39;s impractical for the many reasons I laid out in the thread I linked to.

I&#39;m not going to repeat them here because redstar isn&#39;t here to defend himself, and because they&#39;re irrelevent to our discussion as redstar and I were discussing a communist society and not a "socialist" one.

If you would like to, however, feel free to browse that topic.


Yes, this is called communism. It takes time and material conditions to reach it. You can&#39;t go immediately from revolution to communism.

Of course not, but creating a new state "along the way" doesn&#39;t help.

It will take time, and it will take effort, and we will inevitable get things wrong in the trying, but the way to go about it is to aim from the beginning for a communist society not a "transitional" power dynamic.


Leninism. The working class has taken power, and in many cases held onto it for substainial amount of time (46 years in Cuba).

Bullshit.

The working class never had power in the USSR. Never.

I suppose you could argue that from 1917 to 1918, they had a fair degree of autonomy and even exerted serious control in several important areas. But certainly from the forming of the official USSR onwards, the Russian working class was powerless.

As for Cuba, the working class exerts no authority. Castro acts on their "behalf", often benevolently, I&#39;ll grant you, but unaccountably nonetheless.


How long did it take capitalism to take hold?.

The real question is how long did it take classes to take hold. While capitalism was held off for 70 years, the bureaucratic elite structure emerged almost instantanetously.


Right. Cuba should have stayed under Batista so it could be a colony with 40% unemployment rate, where half the population couldn&#39;t read and a large portion of the female population sold their ass to mafia scum and imperialist soldiers&#33;

Of course not. The Cuban revolution was a material and social nescessity, I never denied that, the question is, following the revolution, should they have allowed Cuba to socially evolve or attempt to graft communism upon a third world nation?

Unfortunately, they followed the latter. What they should have done was establish an independent bourgeois capitalist social-democracy; develop independent markets and self-sufficiency. Effectively, of course, that&#39;s where they&#39;re headed anyways. But if they had pursued independent capitalism more directly, it almost certainly would have been less painful.

Jumping from feudal dependency to "socialist transition" simply doesn&#39;t work.


They should be refused the opportunity. No access to TV, radio, or internet.

And who makes these decisions?

That is, first of all who judges what is reactionary, and second of all who enforces the ban?

Is it up to the individual stations and publishing firms or is it a government edict?

If a particular radio station&#39;s workers believe that a certain host is progressively critical but the government believes her to be reactionary, who has the final say?


That&#39;s not my choice, it will be the choice of the working class that&#39;s in power. If it were my choice however, execution.

How magnanimous of you.


This goes against everything you&#39;re saying&#33;&#33;

You said everyone should have freedom of speech. So then, leftists shouldn&#39;t try to suppress fascists, right?

A counter-protest is not suppression, both sides are getting they&#39;re messages across.

Condemnation is not suppression; vitriolic critisism is not suppression, screaming is not suppression; counterprograming is not suppression; personal attacks and blatant insults are not suppression.

Suppression is suppression&#33;


Right, because Ho Chi Minh was much more detrimental to the workers and peasants interests than the pope.

They were both detrimental in their own way, but I&#39;m in a conciliatory mood. How about we split the diff and hang &#39;em both?


Have you bagged the existance of classes to? You don&#39;t think they exist, or they just aren&#39;t important?

Classes exist and they are important.

But classes are also resiliant and maleable. They evolve and they reproduce.

Eliminating the bourgeois is not sufficient, unless the means of oppression themselves are eliminated then the emergence of a new rulling class is unavoidable.

[codyvo]

Originally posted by [email protected] 13 2005, 11:03 PM

I don&#39;t even understand this part. But from what I&#39;m guessing you&#39;re asking if the working class in power (dictatorship of the proletariat) would become the rulling class? Of course&#33; That&#39;s what the dictatorship of the proletariat is&#33;

The working class has to be the rulling class to suppress the capitalists and progress on the communist road.

What happens after a few generations pass and the children of the proletariat are born into power and the children of the bourgeois are born into oppression will another reolution have to occur? And wouldn&#39;t this revolution stunt all the progress made by the first revolution? And, hypothetically, couldn&#39;t this lead to an endless cycle of war?

Also, to answer your question, I have Fidel Castro in my avatar because I admire many, not all, of the things he has done. He has virtually eliminated the issue of class, not made one class more powerful than another.

[bur372]

doing A speech on this (slander to be precise but I will probably end up doing it about freedom of speech)

One of my friends had a good idea about freedo mof speech.

Freedom of speech unless it infriges on the freedom or human right of another individual

e.g you could say I hate all the jews but you couldn&#39;t say kill all of the jews. As this would infrige the right to life (and live without fear).

[Le People]

As anti capitalists, we stand firm agiainst the parasitic ideal of capitalism. Liberty is by definition the right to do what ever the hell you want as long as it does not hinder your fellow man. Capitalism is anti liberty and to limit free speech is an inherent contradiction of the true spirit of anti-capitalism.(I would like to annouce that I am no longer a Trot or anything else in the sect thing,so I&#39;m from here on out describeing myself as an anti capitalist with liberal Age of Enlightenment Ideals.)

[LibertyOrDeath]

I want all you guys to pay real close attention to what CompaneroDeLibertad has been saying here. And I want you to do this because he&#39;s being honest about communism&#33;

Lose your stupid delusions, people -- the only reason to restrict free speach is to retain power. That&#39;s it. Anybody who tells you different is selling you a pile of crap. Tyranny is tyranny is tyranny, period.

What blows my mind about so many of you people is that on the one hand, you whine and cry about the tyranny of the cappies, and then turn right around on the other hand and go rabidly orgasmic over the prospect of getting to be the tyrant for a while. Hypocrites&#33;

Do you guys want liberty? Do you really want freedom from oppression and equal opportunity for all men? Do you really want a social order where the governing body answers directly to the average Joe? Then here&#39;s what you do: you write a document that is a charter creating a government that is comprised of representatives who are elected by the people. You give these elected officials term limits. And if they act contrary to the desires of the people, then you oust their butts and vote in new representatives. And in the mean time, you recognize each citizen&#39;s right to arm himself against tyranny, so that if/when the elected representative government ever decides not to abide by its charter and represent the expressed interests of the people, the armed masses can chose to kill them all and elect an entirely new one.

Oh, wait -- we already have that. It&#39;s called the Constitution for the United States of America, which includes the Second Ammendment ([i]"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.") The only time this government fails to protect equality and liberty is when we the people fail to keep it constrained to its charter.

Don&#39;t you people get it? Trading one tyrant for another is so foolish. Wake up, get your heads out of the cloud of failed theories and conjecture, and take responsibility for yourselves. Do you want to do better? Then work harder. Do you want some government to magically create equality? Dream on, loser.

[Le People]

Originally posted by [email protected] 25 2005, 09:30 AM
Do you really want a social order where the governing body answers directly to the average Joe?
No, I want the average joe to be the governing body.

[tatu]

Originally posted by [email protected] 13 2005, 01:44 AM

No free speech for reactionaries, period.

Banning reactionary ideas is not the same thing as defeating those ideas. When you sweep dirt under the carpet, it doesn&#39;t make your house clean.

For example, the SWP in Britain has being campaigning for years for the government to ban the far-right British National Party: "No Platform for Racists". This is a strategy that i&#39;m fully against. It encourages a climate of silence at a time when we desperately need a fully open and unrestricted debate on the state of our society.

So i say that we should fully reject ALL calls to restrict free speech - whether for fascist scum, Islamic fundamentalists, racists, homophobes, or whoever. Free speech - no ifs, no buts.
I agree with MKS and Vanguard1917. We should have an open, democratic and public debate in regards to conflicting ideologies. If we are to have faith in our fellow humans, and we know that the Marxist ideology is a concrete, strong ideology then we have nothing to worry about. We all know that the fascists have no claim; they have no strong ideas that will benefit ALL people within modern day society. It’s about time that the left stopped whinging about the right; it’s about time that the left informed the proletariat why right wing ideas are defeatist and negative.



Why are Marxist so afraid of free speech, if they know thier revolutionary ideas are solid and that the masses will oly benefit from them, why do they fear the perversion of ideas? They are afraid that people will revert back to the familiar.

This is a similar question to what I would like to ask many religious people.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

No free speech for reactionaries, period.

[Axel1917]

Given that their arugments would hold no water, just as they do now, it would not really be necssary (or productive) to censor capitalist counterrevolutionary currents and such. If they take action, they will be crushed by the masses.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Originally posted by [email protected] 28 2005, 04:38 PM
Given that their arugments would hold no water, just as they do now, it would not really be necssary (or productive) to censor capitalist counterrevolutionary currents and such. If they take action, they will be crushed by the masses.
But at the same time, I doubt that many people would be pleased that resources are being spent on reactionary crap. Such wastefulness should be prevented.

[Le People]

We should allow the reactionaries to speak, just as liberals allow fascists to speak. It&#39;s always good to know what stupidty is when you here about it in the paper. The reactionaries will become village idots,not taken seriously and die on their own accord.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

But WHY should we waste time and resources publishing views of people we don&#39;t agree with?

Please answer me this; in the event that a reactionary newspaper starts up, would you have their printing press replaced if it was smashed by a bunch of angry progressives?

Really, we have no obligation to respect the views of those who would reverse everything we fought for.

[Le People]

If state authorities do the smashing, then I would be against it. If an angry crowd of proles did it, I would be for it. When the people themselves drowns the voice of the bourgise, then the revolution is complete. It&#39;s not going to happen over night. That was stalin&#39;s mistake (among scores of others) that wreacked the USSR.

[PRC-UTE]

Originally posted by NoXion+Sep 28 2005, 09:27 PM--> (NoXion @ Sep 28 2005, 09:27 PM)
[email protected] 28 2005, 04:38 PM
Given that their arugments would hold no water, just as they do now, it would not really be necssary (or productive) to censor capitalist counterrevolutionary currents and such. If they take action, they will be crushed by the masses.
But at the same time, I doubt that many people would be pleased that resources are being spent on reactionary crap. Such wastefulness should be prevented. [/b]
Exactly. What commune would willingly publish right wing crap, and what other communes would provide them with raw materials and other necessities.