To Charles and Yoshie (???), I'm swamped like we all are in e-mail, so allow me the right to be wrong on your positions re: free speech for fascists.
Now, as one recently, unsubbed from two lists, of explicitly marxist-leninist orientation (and no, I don't put either of you in that ethical/political box I've consigned the list poobahs there), I've always been curious as to the way either of you would interpret and reckon with the experience of the fSU, where the largest # of victims of the purges and GULAG camps were not, fascists (in Vishinsky's summation at the "Trial of Trotskyite, Fascist, Bukharinite Bloc of Rights" in was it '36 or '37, transformed into , "fascist hyenas.") but Old Bolsheviks, some whose experience in the Party went back to before the 1905 Revolution.
Since I'm a left social democrat wedded to ACLU first amendment fundamentalism, and in the view of some ultra-leftist oppenents an incurable Moron, Democrat, and Petty Bourgeois Liberal, I think that the left has much more to lose, than to gain by suppressing by legal means speech which shores up racist, fascist social structures and ideologies.
And we can see what a success the outlawing of racist speech was in the fSU and Eastern European regimes was by the re-emergence in the fSU and the former Yugoslavia, of virulent anti-semitism, and nationalist/ethnic particularism and hatred. And in the cases of the Serbian SSP of Milosevic in alliance for most of the 90's with the openly fascist Serbian Radical Party of Seselj, and the anti-semitism, Great Russian nationalist chauvinism of Zyuganov's Red-Brown Russian CP.
The radically undertheorized theory of the socialist state in Marx, only began to be rectified in the 60's and 70's by the works of Poulantzas, Miliband, O'Connor and the Kapitalistate collective, in the state theory debates on the capitalist and socialist state forms.
I think that illusory, quick fix solutions that appear more militant than they really are, and their underlying lack of faith in the ability of popular struggle to defeat fascist and racist speech and policies are naive and counter-productive. Appealing to state power, more likely to be used against us, in conditions of social and economic crisis, is a loser. And, not that I would have any great insight into the psychological roots, as well, of fascism, except for Wilhelm Reich and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in her work of a few yrs. ago published by Harvard Univ. Press, and the late 70's work of Michael Billig, compared to either of you, with your different subject positions from mine (struggling temp worker, gay, white male from suburban, liberal, middle class, Washington, D.C. suburbs in 70's. Neighbors voted for McGovern, Nixon, and George Wallace. Most anti-war neighbor, son of US Navy big-wig who had been on the USS Pueblo.)
Michael Pugliese