Censorship, self or imposed, is only part of the problem. The real problem is that in the quest for intellectual respectability and the desire to "communicate" require one to position oneself starting in the mainstream and gradually and gently work toward dissent, to avoid being dismissed outright as irrational or plain stupid. So its not even that we do not dare say what we really think, we don't even dare think too differently. Not to get us back to the Mao debate (and why not? that is the proof), one reason that Mao Zedong Thought can be subjected to parody or ridicule is precisely that its basic starting points are generally beyond the pale of reasonable discourse in respectable society. It is the "there you go again" syndrome which in this era carries great persuasiveness. If one gets on a TV talk show, even a show as intelligent as Charlie Rose's, or Nightline, and asserts that capitalism creates more poverty than wealth by the very nature of its distributive system, one would have lost the audience before one finishes one's sentence. That essentially was the key issue of the Cultural Revolution in China or the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Mao realized by the mid 60's that capitalism cannot be defeated by economic rationalization but only by a cultural revolution. On that level, there is little freedom anywhere on earth at this moment in history. We are at the height of a global Thermidorian Reaction.
Henry
Michael Perelman wrote:
> Doug, if LBO were effective in mobilizing socialist activity, you could not
> write what you did. Just as if I were to do a good enough job teaching Marx, I
> would be gone in a moment.
>
> Fortunately, for the ruling class, self-censorship does a better job than heavy
> handed government censorship -- a point that Chomsky makes very effectively.
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > Oh come now Charles. I'm not likely to get arrested for publishing LBO, and
> > you're not likely to get arrested for anything you post to this list. We
> > may get ignored, harassed, whatever, but we do have considerable freedom of
> > speech. That was not true of the USSR. I know there are all kinds of
> > constraints on our media, lots of subtle forms of censorship, but our
> > formal guarantees of freedom of speech are still worth something.
>
> --
>
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
> Chico, CA 95929
> 530-898-5321
> fax 530-898-5901