>>> furuhashi.1 at osu.edu 03/28/01 08:13PM >>>
No civil disobedience that involves symbolic destruction of properties -- from anarchists smashing corporate windows to religious leftists hammering on nuclear missile nose cones -- in times of so-called "peace"? Graffiti ("No More Prisons," etc.)? Flag-burning? Burning selective service registration forms? Defacing right-wing, corporate, & imperial state websites? Redirecting visitors from right-wing to left-wing websites automatically? Culture jamming in general? Sabotaging the work of scabs without assaulting scabs themselves (e.g., trashing an office building to sabotage the use of scabs when janitors are on strike)? And so on and so forth?
LBO-talkers defending Horowitz' "right" to place an ad ("free speech = money to advertise") are not unlike Medea Benjamin & Co. protecting the corporate windows of Nike, etc. from festive & youthful anarchist window-smashers.
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CB: I agree with Yoshie. For militant materialists, private property in the form of documents does not have some special philosophical or political or moral or economic class status. We do not fetishize documents.
I for one like the tactic used by the students who confiscated the copies of the ad. Those documents were no more worthy of respect than a bunch of junk advertising letters I get in the mail all the time. There is no harm to any political values by dumping same into the trash. It was a healthy expression of disrespect for private property, not only for racist expression.
The political apothesis of "free speech" or lets just say exaggerated reverence for it without balancing it with other major political values such as race emancipation , class struggle, etc. is not the philosophically or morally or politcally correct position, despite all the lingo from the paranoid wordsmiths. A bunch of paraphrases of Mr. Justice Brandeis is not the progressive assessment.
One of the fundamental themes of Marxist materialism,one of the most exquisite critical-self-critical insights of Marx ,the scribe, is to mark the association of most predominantly mental laborers, including scholars, with the ruling classes down through history. That generalization is not undone today in the USA.
Revolutionists have an array of tactics. At some point, we say we aren't talking anymore, we are fighting.
All hail the Brown students !