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 ^^^^ CB; I know I am dodging the question to an extent, but socialist philosophy is no worse than bourgeois philosophy on this. The U.S. Constitution has no better philosophy than the Cuban or Soviet Constitutions. Also, at the level of philosophy or ideology, words, the socialist constitutions improve on bourgeois constitutions in guaranteeing a right to a work and material life, which should be recognized as a civil liberty. This is a fundamental philosophical and ideological superiority of socialism over capitalism. At the level of practice, liberalist civil liberties are no more coherent or of service to the masses than socialist civil liberties practices. You concede too much to the practice of actually existing and existed liberal systems, which are dictatorships of the bourgeois and really the dictatorship of the bourgeois partisans. See my review of the fraud of the U.S. freedom of speech in another post, for example. Speech that challenged bourgeois dictatorship in the history of the U.S. was found not to have 1st Amendment protection and was suppressed as long as it had a real chance of changing the bourgeois dictatorship. Similarly with speech that sought to challenge proletarian dicatatorships, it's just that the socialist states were more honest and upfront about not challenging the socialist state power. Similarly with press freedom, which is controlled by the bourgeois dictatorship through ownership of the presses directly, just as effective as the way the proletarian dictatorships control it. Similarly with the right to bear arms, by which the bourgeois state retains a dominance of the most powerful weapons. But the 2nd Amendment doesn't create a realistic opportunity for individuals to challenge the U.S. or individual state powers. In Cuba, small arms are in the hands of masses as much as in the U.S. with "big guns" controlled by the state. With respect to due process and trial rights, under the bourgeois dictatorship or that of its parties, rights vary according to how much money one has. The flaws in this area under the proletarian dictatorship, or that of its party, are somewhat different but no more egregious. All in all ,if we acknowledge the liberal system as really the dictatorship of the bourgeois ,its elite politicians and state officers, we will see that actually existing and existed socialism have been adequate philosophical ,ideological and practical alternatives to liberalism.
