Yoshie writes:
On 11/7/06, Marvin Gandall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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.
Nor in mine.
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.
I would say the reason the working class "dictatorship" became the party
(and great leader) dictatorship had less to do with "the absence of a
coherent socialist theory of civil liberties" than that the socialist
revolutions occured in conditions of economic and cultural backwardness and
were constantly under military and economic threat from the more advanced
capitalist countries. It is not possible for societies under seige to remain
open societies for very long.
The classical Marxists did have a coherent political theory. They believed
in full freedom of expression for all individuals and parties who accepted
to operate within the new (much wider) boundries of working class socialist
democracy. They thought these boundries would increasingly expand as the old
classes, institutions, and habits under the proletarian dictatorship
disappeared. This was a realistic view for those who thought a workers'
democracy - of the kind was later briefly glimpsed in the Russian
revolutionary Soviets - would develop under much more favourable conditions.
In this sense, despite my reservations about the emphasis placed on it by
David and yourself, I do think the Bill of Rights and other
"bourgeois-democratic" acquisitions would be good building blocks for
genuine mass democracies if they were to make a revolutionary appearance in
the most developed societies. So long as capitalism remains the prevailing
mode in less developed societies in the Middle East and Latin America, these
democratic rights have a more contradictory two-sided character in that they
are necessary for mass participation but can also be used as instruments to
subvert social democratic aspirations.
