Mindspring censorship; abortion

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon Feb 8 13:53:30 PST 1999


Charles Brown wrote:


>Millions are listening to the bourgeois ideologists who are as or more
>dogmatic and rigid than Marxists, so I'm not sure it's dogmatism and
>rigidity that stops millions from listening. There's a lot of fake
>openmindedness and "democracy" in bourgeois culture, but really it is
>extremely dogmatic and rigid, tight mind control.

That it is. I'm thinking exactly this as I'm forcing my way through George Soros' tome to review it for LBO. Soros goes on & on about the virtues of The Open Society, but it's clear that his open society will still be starkly hierarchialized by class. It's open and free in exactly the way that Marx mocked in that passage I quoted this morning. But the genius of bourgeois society - esp American society - is that it *looks* open and free. It's ideology is so much a part of us that we don't even recognize it. The "market" does a better job censoring what we read and see than any government ever could, because you can't point to someone with scissors cutting stories out of the paper, and for that reason, so much of it looks credible.

Doug



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