>>> "rc-am" <rcollins at netlink.com.au> 10/21/99 01:40AM >>>
chaz wrote:
>Yes, Marx is making part of the liberal analysis on this. The U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Brandeis used the metaphor of releasing noxious doctrine to
the light of day rather than burying it. This is the metaphor of mold,
which grows out of the sun and dies in the sun.<
i don't think so. marx argued that censorship makes what is censored apprear mystical and important. in our language, desirable. this is quite different to a liberal conception of the law i would think which assumes rational discussion hence the need to bring reason to bear 'in the light of day'. ie., liberalism assumes that laws negate, stop x from happening. hence the liberal idea of minimising laws in order to attain the most freedoms. marx's argument is quite different. laws which seek to negate x are in fact productive, positive. this is why, once again, i think marx's arguments need to be taken seriously if the intention is to limit and do away with hate speech.
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Charles: Well, Brandeis was a liberal. He is saying , as you say in part, that the best way to combat noxious doctrine is to shine the light of reason on it by bringing it out in the open to be combated by virtuous ideas. But I think Marx's issue is another side of this same liberal argument. In other words, if you bring the bad ideas out in the open , their badness ( and undesirability) will be shown by the contrast and combat with good ideas. If you force them into hiding , then their badness doesn't get exposed, and, basically, some people will , like little children, be interested in them because of curiosity about "forbidden fruit" . There is a sort of a Garden of Eden psychoanalytic model going on.
However, my idea would not be that Nazi and KKK ideas would be hidden from the public. Bring them out in the open , but dead, not attached to any people who believe them. Demystify them completely by exposing their reality. They would be part of everyone's education, like Medieval torture chambers in museums - examples, from history of what not to do. Nazi and KKK ideas should be preserved, dead, in the thought museums, just as the small pox virus shouldn't be forgotten, but its DNA and structure preserved on paper (not alive) and taught to every future generation as a warning.
But we don't have to have actual Medieval Star Chamber torturers alive and well , believing the ideas of the Medieval church to keep from forgetting those important errors of history.
> Charles: Ok, but do you want to read enough to pass a bar exam ?<
if i want legal advice or representation, i'd see a lawyer. if i want to understand the laws which are affecting a particular issue, i'd read the laws. eg., the govt is about to put through another raft of industrial relations laws. many unions have been handing out not just copies of their analysis but also of the actual laws to their members -- we're talking unions ranging from building workers to nurses, and we're also talking about those unions which have the most committed membership. other unions tend to simply rely solely on their bevvy of lawyers to steer a campaign against the new laws in the courts and through the tribunals -- these unions tend to have a much more passive membership. i'd say the ways in which these various unions treat their members and make assumptions about what they are or not interested in reading has a significant effect on whether those members will be at all interested in mobilising against these laws.
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Charles: I have no problem with all of this. Sounds good to me.
If I need philosophical representation on a Kantian issue , I'll see you or Yoshie.
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> But, still I am troubled by your emphasis on not trusting or at least
down playing interaction between the readers/writiers, the social
dimension of the scholarship. There has to be a unity of the opposites of
individual reading and group study, but I'd see socialist scholarship as a
major shift away from individualist study toward group study. The bourgeois
concepts of "cheating" , "copycats" , intellectual
property/copyright/plagerism would be whithering away in the Marxist
style.<
sure all of that might well be a good thing. but if you think i was individualising the task of reading, you're mistaken. i both said that any reading is conditioned by the circumstances in which such a reading takes place (eg, the questions that are asked of a text are hardly individual question, etc) and i drew attention to one of the ways in which presenting oneself as the one who is capable of reading and drawing up lists of prescribed readings is precisely a way of individualising (distinguishing) oneself: either in the sense of distinguishing between 'others' who are, apparently, as incapable of reading critically as 'we' are capable of resisting being affected by what we read, or in the sense of a fairly standard pretense to know beyond the ideology in which others remain mired in. just because such presentations are often made in the name of collectivism doesn't mean the aim is really collective, since it's fairly obvious that such a positioning does not countenance disagreement except in order to relegate it to the realm of ideology or false consciousness or 'muddled thinking'.
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Charles: No, I wouldn't say it is fairly obvious. Those who say read Kant are also positioning themselves to draw up lists of who to read. I don't see my proposal for collective reading and division of labor in study as any coverup for the type of elitism you hypothesize. Nope.
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> the left cannot remain silent about rightwing racism, and the form of
their statements must be "legal", otherwise the left subjects itself to
threat for advocating illegality. This is one of the lessons from
McCarthyism in the U.S. The left cannot just hand the government a stick
to beat them with by making openly illegal proposals, such as vigilante
violence against rightwing racists. The form of "legal"left proposals is
forced on the left by this dilemma.<
perhaps. but i think you're putting the cart before the horse. the govt can beat the left only insofar as the left is marginalised. this has nothing to do with whether or not we propose illegal measures.
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Charles: Nothing to do with it ? It is unrealistic to fail to see some of the Left's marginalization as due to illegalization and illegitimization by the government and the establishment. Now it is true that this is put on the Left falsely, i.e. even when it doesn't make illegal proposals. But at any rate, many people did not and do not join communist parties because of the stigamitization of illegality /illegitimacy. It contributes to marginalization.
So, formulating our programs and proposals in legal terms may be some defense against this. The bourgeoisie will always lie and misrepresent on us, though.
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under the censorship laws it is an offence to advocate anything illegal, but whether or not such illegalities will be prosectuted depends on things other than the sheer law. on vigilantism, no i wouldn't argue this at all. but i would argue that people have a right to defend themselves against attacks. and whether or not a self-defense charge can be brought and sustained depends on the poltical climate, not the other way round. the left was isolated during mcarthyism in the US i suspect not because it advocated illegality but because the right was successful in depicting communists as 'foreign infiltrators', unamerican, etc.
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Charles: In mccarthyism, the bourgeoisie and establishment also claimed that the Communist Party sought to overthrow the government "by force and violence" ( as well as agency of a foreign government). I don't know if it would have been possible to avoid that heinous, undemocratic assault by the "Dems and Repubs" on the Communists. I am merely using hindsight and trying to learn from trial and error ( and I do mean they had trials). Suppose the Communist Party had emphasized an elaborated LEGAL process of socialist revolution in the U.S. in all of its programmatic documents. Specifically, ( and this was said some) that the REVOLUTION means the vast majority of the people vote for and want socialism. In other words, an exaggerated statement of a legal and peaceful revolutionary transition. We know that Marxism does propose this, but recognizes that the bourgeois may resort to violence, and Marxism , in that case, supports self-defense. But given that the latter caveat was use! d against us in the 40's and 30's, why not overemphasize the legal theory of "we aim to win the overwhelming majority in a fair and square , legal electoral struggle". Our program is a whole , eminently legal list of Constitutional Amendments and proposed new laws, eminently legal under the American system.
So, the whole wrapping ourselves in laws and legal proposals is not indifference to your general critique that legal proposals imply reliance on the bourgeois state, but it is an effort to deal with the dilemma that U.S. historical experience shows we were slaughtered "legally" not so much physically annihilated as in Indonesia or Iran. I am not sure where Australia falls on this historically.
> Charles: Interesting. That's a concrete difference between here and
there. Your liberals should talk to our ACLU. On second thought, lets not
encourage liberals to talk to each other.<
our liberals are generally of the statist variety -- spinning into crypto-fascism at the slightest provocation, since they already assume the role of the state is to remove barriers (to trade, communication, production, etc), their relationship to capital is always deregulatory, but their relationship to workers is authoritarian. perhaps that's because aust started as a penal colony.
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Charles: I see. I wondered about whether the "iron cage" sociological metaphor rings truer to some there because of that.
Anyway, I can see that your skepticism about emphasizing the right to work may have more validity for Australia based on , perhaps, greater Australian experience with prison labor, although we did have slavery.
CB