Gordon Fitch wrote:
>
> > [clip]
> Charles Brown:
> > CB: [clip] Have you studied the
> > history of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions on the First
> > Amendment ? The history of the FBI's use of paralegal terror
> > to control speech ?
>
> I'm asking you why you want to encourage and legitimate
> this sort of thing. The bourgeois State should be abolished,
> not employed, especially not to posture about its noble
> protection of the rights of minorities and historical
> truth.
This whole debate [including the preceding threads on Horowitz, Brown U, etc] is being conducted on too metaphysical a level, as though the universe were a tightly interlocked texture of Platonic forms, with the slightest change snowballing unstoppably through the whole. Someone bizrrely seemed to think that to approve of stealing one leaflet was to abolish the first amendment and plunge the world into eternal chaos.
It is simply impossible to maintain an absolute right of free speech, or to hold that any one limitation on free speech necessitates further limitations. Nonsense.
In principle then, Charles clearly is clearly correct, and arguments with him have to be more centered on specific issues, not on the sanctity of freedom of speech under all circumstances _or_ on the abstract evil of the bourgeois state. As to the latter, sure we 'should' abolish it, but that I'm afraid is going to be a rather messy process, and in the U.S. we have yet to get beyond the very first steps in that process. In the meantime we need its procedures and institutions for a number of things.
We are dealing here with racist speech. Such speech would necessarily be suppressed _within_ a revolutionary movement, and should be suppressed within any mass movement for progressive reforms. Racist speech is scab speech. (Obviously extra-legal or even illegal methods would be required since one does not run to the bourgeois state to maintain the internal discipline of a mass movement.) And as such movements grew, one feature of their practice which would both symbolize _and_ materially contribute to growth would be to make racist speech increasingly more difficult in society as a whole. As a random example: It should (under the hypothesized future status of the movement) become easy to identify barbershops in which no racist jokes would be told -- one could identify them by their unbroken windows. And it goes without saying that racist speech would be suppressed in a revolutionary state. These arguments _have no relationship_ to the abstract question of free speech. "Free speech" in the abstract never has existed, does not exist, and never will exist. We can have a general rule of thumb (which is all the first amendment is really) but the meaning of that rule of thumb has to be continually established and reestablished through various political and social processes or struggles.
On the specific question of racist hate speech I still think (with a qualification discussed below) that Charles is wrong, but not because prohibition of it would be a violation of freedom of speech or in any way threaten the abstract principle of free speech. I think that _under present circumstances_, given the actual makeup of the criminal justice system from the squad car to the supreme court, such laws would be in fact used to suppress attacks on racists and other pigs (such as the Chicago PD, the Cook County States Attorney's office, etc).
The qualification: Under present conditions no such law is going to be passed. The political processes (the mass struggle) which would bring changed conditions about might also create a situation in which such a law would not be misused or in which such misuse itself would be encountered by massive resistance. Hence we cannot reject in principle the desirability of an anti-hate speech law. We can object I think to most 'reforms' that are, as it were, handed to us on a platter, as a result of wheeling-and-dealing within the present structure. Campaign finance reform, for example, if it comes about will almost certainly be an utter disaster for the left.
Carrol