On 11/7/06, Marvin Gandall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
David S. wrote:
>> I think you are unnecessarily confusing issues. For instance,
>> you may be right that the Supreme Court justices may decide
>> a case based upon prevailing political conditions, but that is a
>> different point than if you want to discuss how a political order
>> should deal with dissent, the case law is an excellent place to
>> start.
Yoshie F. wrote:
> It is certainly possible that socialists can learn much from the case
> law in the USA. But socialists first need to figure out what our
> philosophy of justice in particular and political philosophy in
> general is.
==========================
The jurisprudence will tell you less how to protect dissent than how to
limit it, as I suggested.
Constitutions and laws - and the political and legal philosophy on which
they rest - are never an adequate defence against the abuse of power in
societies and organizations, including on the left.
No, but ideology matters. Marx said that "The weapon of criticism
cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force
must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a
material force as soon as it has gripped the masses." On this he was
not wrong, imho.
The absence of a coherent socialist theory of civil liberties under
the socialist state has meant that those who wish to advance civil
liberties under a socialist state, having become dissatisfied with the
dictatorship of the proletariat (which has been the same as the
dictatorship of the party in the history of actually and formerly
existing socialist states), have mostly turned to (political and
economic) liberalism, to the detriment of the masses. To be sure,
that is in part because of the class backgrounds (mainly middle
strata) of those who assumed the intellectual leadership in struggle
for civil liberties under socialist states as well as the global
hegemony of liberalism, but that is also due to the fact that there
has been no coherent socialist alternative to liberalism on civil
liberties at the level of philosophy.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
