Socialism and the “free speech” question
Contents
- The free speech question
- Tactics of mass organizing
- The force of reason
- Dialectics and socialist politics
- Evil
- Fight the right
- We do not think alone
Appendix 1: Free speech in the socialist tradition
- Karl Marx, from “On the Freedom of the Press”, 1842
- Lenin, from “The Democratic Tasks of the Revolutionary Proletariat”, 1906
- Rosa Luxemburg, from “Riot and Revolution: Speech by Rosa Luxemburg on Trial for Inciting to Riot”, 1906
- J. Louis Engdahl, “The War Censor Arrives in America”, 1915
- J. Louis Engdahl, from “Speech to the Court at the Time of Sentencing”, February 20, 1919.
- Eugene Debs, from “Debs Calls the Jury of the People to Try Indiana Governor”, 1922
- Leon Trotsky, from “Freedom of the Press and the Working Class”, August 1938
Appendix 2: Daryl Davis videos
The free speech question
I am unconditionally in favor of free speech for all, a position that has been difficult to sustain lately. I hope comrades can hear me out before rushing to judgment, and will be willing to discuss the matter with civility if they disagree.
I also absolutely affirm the right to self-defense, and the right of the working class to arm and defend themselves, and encourage socialists to help organize, educate, and train working and oppressed people for community self-defense.
To be clear, I don’t think either of these positions is really a choice. People have these rights whether we like it or not.
It is the US government, not me, not anti-fa, not the Socialist Party that “allows free speech”. Only the US government is in a position to compel people not to engage in certain kinds of speech.
As private citizens, groups, and organizations, we do not get to decide what is allowed in society. We can decide what is allowed in our own voluntary associations, but in society at large, no one is answerable to us.
You can, of course, try to compel people not to engage in certain kinds of speech, but that is illegal. Even threatening violence to prevent someone else from saying or doing something can amount to a crime in certain contexts.
Regardless of legality, violently preventing someone from saying something does not curtail their freedom. You are not disallowing them from speaking, because they are not accountable to you. They are still allowed to do whatever you’re trying to stop them from doing, whereas you are doing something you’re not allowed to do. Thus, not only can the state compel you not to do it or to stop doing it and punish you for doing it, the person you assault is then allowed to physically compel you to stop out of self-defense.
It would be a grave mistake to call for the capitalist state to curtail the freedom of certain people to speak, or for people to say certain things. Empowering the state to repress citizens in anyway will blow up in our faces. The ruling class will have a direct interest in repressing the socialist movement if we ever becoming a meaningful threat to their power, and they will seek to do so by any legitimate means before they risk undermining their own legitimacy by illegally repressing us.
If the state de-legitimates itself in the eyes of the citizens when there is a mass socialist party openly contending for power, it will potentially create a revolutionary situation. If, however, we are complicit in establishing laws used to repress us, not only will this not threaten the legitimacy of the state power, it will undermine our own legitimacy as leaders of the working class movement for so stupidly entrapping ourselves.
Anti-fa does not and cannot remove the freedom of Nazis to speak no matter how many people they punch. To the extent that they restrict themselves to protest and self-defense, they are not really trying to disallow Nazi speech, even if they think that’s what they’re doing. To do that, they would have to be campaigning for an amendment to the First Amendment, or else trying to overthrow the US government by force. They clearly aren’t doing either of those things.
What they are doing is trying to dissuade that speech. This is not a trivial distinction. They are trying to convince these Nazis not to hold public demonstrations, and more generally, not to publicize their views at all. They are also trying to convince people in society at large not to hold or voice such views.
Tactics of mass organizing
So how effective is this as a tactic? Does it convince Nazis not to hold public demonstrations? It does seem to be doing that, at least for now. It probably is not discouraging them from finding other ways to disseminate their views, for example through flyering, internet, etc. It probably is not making them less interested in committing acts of violence, and potentially driving them to focus more on this path.
It also probably is doing nothing to convince them to change their minds. It almost certainly is only making them angrier, more resentful, more convinced of their hateful views, and more motivated to take action, since just peacefully assembling is off the table.
You may think it’s absurd to try to change a Nazi’s mind. I’m not so sure. I recommend you read up about Daryl Davis if you think so. He has convinced more than 200 KKK members to quit and renounce white supremacy. I’ve appended some videos about his work below.
I’m not saying it would be fruitful to try to do this with actual Nazis or Klan-members, but he demonstrates something very important: when you relate to other people as human beings, it’s very hard for them to hate you. It’s very hard for them to sustain assumptions about you, and it’s much easier to persuade them of your views.
My real concern is less with Nazis themselves — I’m not really interested in making the effort with people that far gone — but with the kinds of people that get called Nazis without considering themselves Nazis; that get called racist, sexist, anti-trans, anti-Islam, etc, whether or not they explicitly endorse those sorts of views. There are a lot of people out there that we need to organize who hold views or are willing to say things that most of us would find “problematic”.
When I was in college, “problematic” was a good thing. To be problematic was to be something to explore and understand, a space of possibility, a puzzle to be worked through and resolved. Now it seems to be a way of denouncing people. While I understand not all comrades are up to this sort of task, or at least can only manage it in certain limited contexts, I think instead of condemning, “calling out”, shunning, shaming, and labeling people fascists and Nazis and hateful bigots, we should be trying to figure out how to change their minds, and in the process, win them over to our cause. Their real enemy is capitalism, not their fellow workers, and its our responsibility to help them understand that.
The question is, how do you persuade people? Argument alone is only a small part, although a very important part. It is important to be extremely well-versed in rhetoric and dialectic, arts that most of us never learn because they just don’t teach this stuff any more. Likewise with the history of our movement, and the broader revolutionary history of which it’s a part. It is essential to develop a lot of experience, to get a lot of practice, to use every opportunity you have to develop these skills in yourself, and at the same time, to develop organizing relationships with people within your reach, no matter how different their views are at first.
Beyond that, to really influence them, you have to develop concrete, substantial, organic relationships, relationships motivated by a material impetus for all parties, in which everyone has a meaningful stake, a meaningful say, a meaningful role, in which they are treated with respect, validated, depended upon, educated, developed as human beings. We have to find ways to develop these kinds of relationships, both bilaterally with other individuals, and between groups through regular association and organization.
It is within these kinds of relationships that people begin to shed the narrow views that develop out of isolation, frustration, impotence, and alienation. It is within these kinds of relationships that you begin to win people to socialism, by showing them that this is what the socialist movement is, this is what it does. We must show them why they should want to be socialists, to be part of this movement.
Obviously we should not be wasting much or any time trying to develop such relationships with committed political enemies of our cause, and certainly least of all scum like Nazis. But a hell of a lot of people get called Nazis these days, people who don’t call themselves Nazis, who hate Nazis and everything they stand for, who may hold repugnant views but who are not committed enemies of socialism, and hence, not yet lost. Really, they are only lost if we give up on them.
As for anti-fa, if comrades want to focus on protesting Nazi and other right-wing demonstrations, fine, but as long as they are waving the red flag, I’d better be free to voice my opinions about it. I recommend very strongly against engaging in any kind of aggression, and to restrict violent confrontation to a defensive measure. Provoking violent conflict makes us look completely disreputable to the vast majority of the people we want to organize. So does wearing balaclavas.
We are trying to win the masses over to our cause. We have to give them reasons to want to join us, to want to listen to us, to want to treat us like human beings, to want to take up our cause as their own. We have to win them, and we certainly should not be trying to lose them, to further alienate them, to freak them out, to reinforce existing negative assumptions about our movement and our ideas. I think comrades should make an effort to present, clearly, plainly, soberly, patiently, what exactly we believe is wrong with their worldview, what ours is, and why it is superior not only to the worst idea in the world (Nazism) but also the best that is already out there (liberalism).
Shunning and shaming other comrades or potential comrades for differences of opinion is a deeply poisonous and dangerous behavior for our movement, which is more fragile now than it has ever been. This very well be the last chance humanity has to take up the socialist cause.
The force of reason
Freedom of speech is the most powerful weapon we have at our disposal, and our most precious legacy. The first amendment by all rights belongs to the party of Debs, which claimed and protected this right against the very government charged with its unconditional recognition.
Debs himself said, “Without free speech there is no progress, and the people stagnate. Better a thousandfold the abuse than the denial of free speech, for the abuse lasts but a day, while denial destroys the life of a nation.”
We alone can uphold this legacy today. We fail to do so at our peril. In forsaking this legacy, we join the camp of the reaction.
The far right can not benefit from this freedom, but only from its suppression. They have no ideas to communicate; only ignorance and resentment that must be thrust into the light of day in order to be effectively combatted.
If we deny our enemies the right to speak, they have no other means of expressing their views than through violence, a field in which they, the champions of barbarity, have the natural advantage.
Our natural advantage lies in the realm of ideas, in which there should be no contest. If we are not confident in the superiority of our ideas, which are really the only ideas, then we are truly lost. If we don’t aspire to disarm hateful ideas with reason, we have renounced our revolutionary mission.
Revolutionaries fight the speech we revile by proclaiming as clearly and consistently as possible what we are fighting for and why everyone should join us, and by revealing the ignorance and resentment on which reactionary views are based by engaging those who hold them in vigorous debate. True reactionaries are vehemently opposed to debate, interested instead in violently suppressing opposition. Their intellectual apologists are useful idiots.
If people are unwilling or unable to listen to reason, it can only be because they are overwhelmed by their material circumstances. Of course we cannot pursue our goals by means of reason alone. We must aid working class people in taking control of their material circumstances, such that the exercise of reason becomes an indispensable part of life for them.
At present, the working class is largely deprived of the need to engage the world rationally. At work their reason atrophies to the extent that they lack control over the labor process. At home they are enjoined to indulge in creature comforts rather than exercising their higher capacities.
People attracted to fascist ideas are people who desperately want radical change, but who fail to find it because they don’t understand that the root of the problem is man himself. Fascism is ultimately conservative and reactionary: it fails to draw the radical conclusions of the discontents it mobilizes, instead fixating on false problems and false solutions.
This fixation reflects a dearth of reason: people can only be attracted to it because they have not been provoked to think. At worst, they may have grown adapted to this fixation, willing to defend themselves against countervailing ideas by any means necessary.
Fascists are people who have been thoroughly mutilated by capitalism. They may never be won over to our cause, but that is no reason not to fight them with the most potent weapon possible: not protest, not violence, but TRUTH.
There is, in my eyes, no contradiction between arguing with our ideological opponents and taking our message to the masses.
As Rosa Luxemburg said, “No coarser insult, no baser aspersion, can be thrown against the workers than the claim that theoretical controversies are only for intellectuals.”
We should clearly, patiently, resolutely, charitably, and incessantly challenge the ideas of our enemies before the public. The masses are hungry to understand the world. They want to consider different ideas, to weigh them by their merits, and to make up their own minds. If we fail to present our position consistently and broadly we are abandoning the battlefield of public opinion to our enemies.
That said, fascist ideas are hardly ideas at all. They are nothing but a grotesque parody of our own ideas created by the most vile opponents of the revolution. For that matter, they have hardly any defenders at all, and those defenders rarely ever manage to get a public hearing themselves. We must challenge them — not by brute force, which serves only to strengthen their case, but by reasoned debate, where the advantage is all ours. Their ridiculous ideas fall apart under even the slightest scrutiny, certainly when cast in the radiant light of our own.
So-called “liberals” and the more mainstream elements of the right (including much of what gets called the “alt-right”) do enjoy a constant public hearing in all spheres of society. They must be consistently challenged wherever we can manage to do so, because their ideas are no more coherent than the far right.
That is certainly not to say that our struggle is a purely ideological one. We must aid working class people in taking control of their material circumstances, such that the exercise of reason becomes an indispensable part of life for them. But a great part of this involves engaging those people at the level of ideas, and challenging the hegemony of the ideas of the ruling class at every opportunity.
Every opportunity to challenge the ruling ideas and voice our own is a potential site of political contestation, and we abdicate our duty if we fail to seize every opportunity we can.
Dialectics and socialist politics
There’s a deeper reason why so many leftists are so hostile to the notion of challenging the right on the plane of ideas: many of us have little or no confidence in our ability to articulate our ideas persuasively to a mass audience. Many of us, if we are honest, would admit we are deeply confused about our own tradition and its evident failure thus far.
Rebuilding that confidence will be necessary if we are to ever go beyond our present infantile phase. That confidence can only develop by coming to grips with the whole of this tradition and its failures by seeking to learn its lessons. We will only discover those lessons by making history concretely relevant through the practical effort to reconstitute a mass working class movement for socialism.
The point of debate is to reveal the advocate of the opposed position to be incapable of consistently advocating that position. Debate requires the art of dialectic, and this art is not only no longer taught, it is actively and continuously defamed and disparaged in the academy. That’s why we have a generation of people who are largely incapable of effectively arguing with each other, and who lack the confidence to even try.
It is difficult to write about dialectics for the same reason it is difficult to convey motion in a painting. It requires a subtle art to fool the eye into seeing movement in a static image, and to fool the reader into grasping the movement of thought in a static phrase.
No position is ever completely wrong, but every position is only a one-sided perspective on reality. The trick is not to get stuck on any given position, but to understand how to move between them, and to understand the dynamics of their relations with each other.
Every position is a limited way of thinking about the world, with limited validity and limited use. The trick is to understand that validity and use, but also the limits, and to know how to move beyond those limits by moving beyond the initial perspective to a more encompassing perspective, that includes other positions that were formerly excluded and opposed.
To think dialectically, you have to see how all the different perspectives fit together into a coherent whole, a totality that is also a living process of which you are part, and which you play a role in actively constituting with your thought and action.
Most intellectuals are products of an educational system ruled by the counter-revolution. It functions to curb the revolutionary force of thought, binding it with the gilded chains of professionalism and specialization. They are trained to think undialectically, which is difficult to do, because dialectical thinking actually comes naturally, if fitfully.
There are good people working in academia here and there, but even the well-intentioned have had reactionary ideas deeply inculcated through a lifetime of education and conformity to professional expectations. Moreover, they need these reactionary ideas to make sense of the reactionary world to which they’ve had to adapt.
For example, many are taught that liberalism and socialism are distinct, opposed, hostile to one another. We are taught to think of liberalism as “individualist” and socialism as “collectivist”. We are taught to oppose liberty to equality, cynical utilitarianism to domineering moralism.
Yet Robert Owen drew heavily on liberal and utilitarian ideas in formulating his “new view of society”, which became the basis of the proletarian socialist movement in England. His intention was to organize society such that individuals would enjoy a maximum of liberty.
Socialism and communism became intertwined not because the former involved the subordination of the individual to the collective, but because in a society of maximally free individuals, the good of each individual would coincide with the good of the collective: each would recognize their interest in the freedom of all.
As Marx puts it, “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
Socialism, and Marxism too, could be understood as descendants of liberalism, as ideologies developed through extrapolation of its principles — not a priori, but in the course of the historical development of society. Such extrapolation can, but does not always, produce bifurcation, yielding a new and different species that nonetheless retains certain essential traits of its predecessor.
Marxism both is and is not a form of liberalism, both maintaining and breaking continuity with it. The question is, what is the nature of the break and why did it occur? For Marx, the problem liberalism addressed changed after the industrial revolution, in which bourgeois society was undermined from within, becoming “capitalism”, the “capitalist mode of production”: bourgeois social relations were contradicted by the industrial forces of production that developed within them.
Socialism sought to free these forces — the forces of human activity enriched by cooperation, socialization, science and technology — to burst through the shell in which they gestated. Yet socialism would remain a stunted liberalism so long as it failed to grasp what this would require.
For Marx, capitalism is the contradiction of bourgeois social relations: bourgeois society is revealed to really be the “capitalist mode of production”, the contradiction of bourgeois social relations by the industrial forces of production. Socialism would be the resolution of that contradiction on the basis of bourgeois social relations, through bourgeois right, through “labor”, in the self-emancipation of the working class. It would overcome capitalism on the basis of capitalism, to use Lenin’s phrase.
Some “Marxists” regard liberal “individualism” as counter-revolutionary and immoral for placing self-interest at the center of concern. But what’s wrong with being self-centered? The counter-revolution does not value free individuality, but is motivated by the fear of freedom, the fear of revolution producing a society of free individuals.
The counter-revolution is skeptical and pessimistic about the ability of individuals to freely conduct their own affairs, to associate and cooperate peaceably with their fellows. The counter-revolution is driven by the perfectly natural conservative tendency of all living things to preserve themselves. It is the tendency of the established society to preserve itself. And it should try to preserve itself.
The problem with capitalism is that it has made it impossible for bourgeois society to preserve itself, which is why crises always recur, and why its revolutionary overthrow is necessary. But the drive to self-preservation can be expressed in collectivistic forms, and indeed it tends to default to collectivism. We do not live in an individualistic society, we live in a profoundly homogeneous, restrictive, authoritarian, and conformist society.
In such a society, “individualism” can be nothing but the narcissism of the wounded ego, which is focused excessively on itself as a cry for help from others, because it is dependent, unable to stand on its own. Socialism is neither individualistic in this sense, nor collectivistic, but the dialectical articulation of individuality and collectivity in a developmental dynamic, continuing this dynamic from liberalism but under changed conditions. The change does not shift the balance one way or the other, but expands the liberty of both to the point of transcending the distinction between them.
Evil
Evil people exist. They have evil thoughts, evil opinions, evil aspirations. Yet even the most wretched evil contains a lamentable validity: it expresses the rage and despair that accumulates in the hearts of people who can no longer hope for universal emancipation.
If you prevent them from stating those thoughts, opinions, and aspirations publicly, you force them to hide those views, to insulate themselves from public criticism and scrutiny, to retreat into the shadows, the shunning further stoking their resentment against society.
In other words, silencing them in public will drive them deeper into the swamp from which their hateful attitudes emerged in the first place. Whereas allowing them to voice their opinions publicly will force them to consider what they can say, what they should say, what they want to say, in order to maintain their public relations.
If such people find it socially acceptable to voice evil opinions, they will probably do so. We absolutely should be doing whatever we can to stem the social pathologies that lend evil ideas enough popularity to give them a place in public life.
But coercing them out of existence is not possible. Coercion only makes it worse, leading that evil to learn it must forget about any possibility of enjoying a public, civil life, and instead must return violence with violence to destroy its oppressor.
That’s the secret. Evil is born out of oppression, out of the hatred oppression generates — not only in the soul of the oppressor, but also the soul of the oppressed. Oppression can not cure it, but only further aggravate it. You cannot oppress oppression out of existence, and evil ideas are only the rationalization of the hateful sentiments bred by oppressive circumstances.
Some are so deeply swallowed up by their hate and its rational expression in evil ideas that they will never be recovered, and will even be driven to violence regardless of efforts to neutralize them civilly. That’s life. People do horrible things to each other every day, all over the world, sometimes with the help of ideas justifying that horror, sometimes for no explicit reason at all.
That’s the world we live in. You can’t coerce it out of existence, and you aren’t even trying to address the real problem if you focus obsessively on the most morbid, but also most marginal of its symptoms.
It is good for hateful passions to sublimate into evil ideas. Ideas are not people. Having an evil idea does not make you an evil person. It is doing evil that makes you an evil person, and people don’t do evil because of their ideas. People themselves, not their ideas, are responsible for their actions. Having and expressing an evil idea is a way of working out hateful passions in the realm of reason.
Such ideas must be met with resistance and ruthlessly combated in that realm, so that they might not need to fall back upon the realm of force, redoubling the damage that produced them. If we do not treat even the worst as human beings, and give them the opportunity to freely work through erroneous ideas, we should not be surprised when they act like beasts.
I would prefer to give frustrated, angsty, rebellious young people better radical ideas than those of the racists and other creeps than to try to stomp out those lines of thinking. People will still think that way even if you try to suppress it, they’ll just do it where you don’t see it, and where no one is checking them with counter-argument.
We must assume that people are capable of thinking rationally. That is the proper revolutionary perspective, whereas reactionaries assume the masses are incapable of rationally managing their own lives.
That certainly isn’t to say they’re immune to irrational impulses. That’s why we must organize to better mediate the influence of those impulses, helping people free themselves from their oppressive circumstances. We must make evil ideas a barrier to their own self-interest by showing them something better is possible and inviting them to be part of it.
Fight the right
I am all for taking decisive, violent action to suppress counter-revolution. Every Marxist understands the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Yet we will never get there by pretending we already are.
Really, all street-fighting with Nazis accomplishes is to whip liberals up into a frenzy, guaranteeing our own marginalization while securing ever more right-wing law-and-order style political rhetoric and action from the capitalist party.
The only way to “fight the right” is to out organize them. They can only offer people romanticized barbarism. We can offer them the future: freedom beyond what we can even imagine at present. They only have a chance of winning support where we fail to offer people what they really need and want. The apparent “rise of fascism” does not make socialism necessary, but the failure of socialists to lead does make something like fascism inevitable.
This requires recognizing that the right is not just white male identitarians. It includes all defenders of capitalism, and all opponents of proletarian socialist revolution. The leadership of the right is not the KKK and the Aryan Brotherhood but the two factions of the capitalist party, Republican and Democrat.
We must not reduce socialism to opposition to the right. The right defines itself in opposition to the left, in opposition to universal human emancipation. We do not need to oppose them to defeat them, we need only to show people what we stand for. Between our vision and theirs, there is no contest. But if our vision is reduced to the negation of their vision, we concede everything from the outset.
We do not think alone
How do you convince someone to question their assumptions? You can try to engage them in an intellectual argument, refuting their position or posing a superior alternative, but this sort of thing has obvious limits, both in terms of who is sensitive to it and how effective it is.
Our perspectives are formed through experience and reflection on that experience, not intellectual arguments taken in abstraction. To lead someone to challenge their assumptions, you have to lead them to have experiences that make such critical and potentially radical thinking necessary. And you have to encourage them to reflect, helping them think through what this experience has meant and what it might mean.
We do not think alone, we think through our relations with others: through communication, organization, and cooperative activity. Individual perspectives — assumptions, concerns, needs, desires, beliefs, opinions — are always shaped by our social relations, especially those relations in which we trust, on which we depend, and for which we’re responsible.
To move people, we have to give them a new experience: the experience of a working class movement for socialism. We have to show them something that unsettles their basic assumptions, rather than simply challenging these assumptions abstractly, at the level of ideas. We have to develop relations of trust, interdependence, and mutual responsibility with the people we seek to move by involving them in concrete organized activity, and by leading them in this activity as socialists, explicitly doing this work as a means to the end of building the working class into an organized force capable of leading socialist revolution.
We have to show people what socialism is. Socialism will be whatever we make of it.
Appendix 1: Free speech in the socialist tradition
Karl Marx, from “On the Freedom of the Press”, 1842
The censorship holds us all in subjection, just as under a despotic regime all are equal, if not in value, then in absence of value; that kind of freedom of the press seeks to introduce oligarchy in the sphere of intellectual life. The censorship declares that an author is at most inconvenient, unsuitable within the bounds of its realm. That kind of freedom of the press claims to anticipate world history, to know in advance the voice of the people, which hitherto has been the sole judge as to which writer has “authority” and which is “without authority”. Whereas Solon did not venture to judge a man until after his life was over, after his death, this view presumes to judge a writer even before his birth.
The press is the most general way by which individuals can communicate their intellectual being. It knows no respect for persons, but only respect for intelligence. Do you want ability for intellectual communication to be determined officially by special external signs? What I cannot be for others, I am not and cannot be for myself. If I am not allowed to be a spiritual force for others, then I have no right to be a spiritual force for myself; and do you want to give certain individuals the privilege of being spiritual forces? just as everyone learns to read and write, so everyone must have the right to read and write.
For whom, then, is the division of writers into “authorised” and “unauthorised” intended? Obviously not for the truly authorised, for they can make their influence felt without that. Is it therefore for the “unauthorised” who want to protect themselves and impress others by means of an external privilege?…
Whenever one form of freedom is rejected, freedom in general is rejected and henceforth can have only a semblance of existence, since the sphere in which absence of freedom is dominant becomes a matter of pure chance. Absence of freedom is the rule and freedom an exception, a fortuitous and arbitrary occurrence. There can, therefore, be nothing wronger than to think that when it is a question of a particular form of existence of freedom, it is a particular question. It is the general question within a particular sphere. Freedom remains freedom whether it finds expression in printer’s ink, in property, in the conscience, or in a political assembly. But the loyal friend of freedom whose sense of honour would be offended by the mere fact that he had to vote on the question whether *freedom was to be or not to be* — this friend becomes perplexed when confronted with the peculiar material form in which freedom appears. He fails to recognise the genus in the species; because of the press, he forgets about freedom, he believes he is judging something whose essence is alien to him, and he condemns his own essence. Thus the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly condemned itself by passing sentence on freedom of the press.
The highly sage, practical bureaucrats who secretly and unjustifiably think of themselves in the way that Pericles openly and rightly boasted of himself: “I am a man who is the equal of anyone both in knowing the needs of the state and in the art of expounding them” — these hereditary leaseholders of political intelligence will shrug their shoulders and remark with oracular good breeding that the defenders of freedom of the press are wasting their efforts, for a mild censorship is better than a harsh freedom of the press. We reply to them with the words of the Spartans Sperthias and Bulis to the Persian satrap Hydarnes:
“Hydames, you have not equally weighed each side in your advice to us. For you have tried the one which you advise, the other has remained untried by you. You know what it means to be a slave, but you have never yet tried freedom, to know whether it is sweet or not. For if you had tried it, you would have advised us to fight for it, not merely with spears, but also with axes.”
Lenin, from “The Democratic Tasks of the Revolutionary Proletariat”, 1906
The [Russian] Social Democratic Party, as the conscious exponent of the working-class movement, aims at the complete liberation of the toiling masses from every form of oppression and exploitation. The achievement of this objective — the abolition of private property in the means of production and the creation of the socialist society — calls for a very high development of the productive forces of capitalism and a high degree of organisation of the working class. The full development of the productive forces in modern bourgeois society, a broad, free, and open class struggle, and the political education, training, and rallying of the masses of the proletariat are inconceivable without political freedom. Therefore it has always been the aim of the class-conscious proletariat to wage a determined struggle for complete political freedom and the democratic revolution.
The proletariat is not alone in setting this task before itself. The bourgeoisie, too, needs political freedom. The enlightened members of the propertied classes hung out the banner of liberty long ago; the revolutionary intelligentsia, which comes mainly from these classes, has fought heroically for freedom. But the bourgeoisie as a whole is incapable of waging a determined struggle against the autocracy; it fears to lose in this struggle its property which binds it to the existing order; it fears an all-too revolutionary action of the workers, who will not stop at the democratic revolution but will aspire to the socialist revolution; it fears a complete break with officialdom, with the bureaucracy, whose interests are bound up by a thousand ties with the interests of the propertied classes. For this reason the bourgeois struggle for liberty is notoriously timorous, inconsistent, and half-hearted. One of the tasks of the proletariat is to prod the bourgeoisie on, to raise before the whole people slogans calling for a complete democratic revolution, to start working boldly and independently for the realisation of these slogans — in a word, to be the vanguard, to take the lead in the struggle for the liberty of the whole people.
Rosa Luxemburg, from “Riot and Revolution: Speech by Rosa Luxemburg on Trial for Inciting to Riot”, 1906
It has been said that the most aggravating moment in my charge is the fact that in my speech I alluded so frequently to the Russian Revolution [of 1905]. But one cannot help observing that the Russian Revolution is the first great historical experiment with the weapon of the General Strike and that every serious-minded social student, even if he happens to be a bourgeois scholar, must turn to the Russian Revolution for the purpose of gaining practical knowledge.
A further point mentioned was the composition of the audience, whom I am accused of having incited to the use of physical force. Why, I did not even speak at a public meeting, but at the Socialist Congress; I spoke therefore to an assembly of men, who comprised a selected number of the enlightened workers of Germany. Hence I think it a really enormous under-estimation of the political maturity and intelligence of the Socialist Propagandists to believe that they could by an inflammatory speech so easily be incited to the use of physical force. Such an aspersion amounts decidedly to a tremendous under-estimation of the enlightening and elevating intellectual influences which 40 years of Socialist propaganda have produced in the ranks of the German working class. And I say openly that I should and could have used the identical expressions even at a public meeting without having caused the remotest idea of using physical force in the minds of the workers. Why, has the German Proletariat not proved sufficiently during the last few decades how completely it has attained its political maturity, how capable it is to control its passions in face of the meanest of provocations to riot. And the workers are provoked to rebellion daily not only by words but by deeds.
Do you believe that masses of people could be incited to use physical force against the ruling class merely by a few words on the Revolution, when you consider that these same masses kept their temper admirably all the time the capitalist class enforced their anti-Socialist law, their penal servitude enactment directed against free speech and press, their measures for increasing working-class starvation and, last but not least, their Bill for smashing up the workers’ economic organisation? I am surprised that the Public Prosecutor has not, instead of prosecuting me, brought to book the originators of those laws and Bills, for these deeds are apt to stir up immensely the propertyless masses and would most certainly lead to physical force excesses if — yes, if it were not for Socialism’s enlightening and elevating influence.
The Public Prosecutor opined that I completely repudiate the revolutionary character of my Jena speech. That is a great error. I have spoken in a revolutionary strain and I always speak in a revolutionary way, seeing that our entire Socialist propaganda is revolutionary; but not in the sense so peculiarly interpreted by the Public Prosecutor, who ascribes the Hamburg street riots to the revolutionary effect of Socialist agitation; but in the sense that we aim at a basic revolution of the present social order. And I do not even deny that in that process physical force may well become necessary.
But I, together with my Party, take up the standpoint that the initiative for using physical force proceeds always from the ruling class, a standpoint that was so ably made clear by our great teacher, Frederick Engels, who in 1892 wrote in the columns of the Neue Zeit:
“The Bourgeois have very frequently suggested to us that we should under any circumstances abandon the use of revolutionary methods and remain within the limits of the law now that the exceptional Socialist law has been dropped and the common law has again been made accessible to all, even to Socialists! We regret being unable to oblige the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie by taking that hint and hasten to remind them that at this very moment it is not us who destroy ‘the legal means’. No, on the contrary, they — the bourgeois — are doing propaganda work for us so effectively that we should be fools were we to interfere with them whilst they are making such wonderful progress. There is evidently some justification for the question whether it will indeed not be the bourgeois and their government who will violate laws and rights, in order to demolish us by physical force. We are prepared to wait. In the meantime ‘kindly have the first shot, gentlemen of the bourgeoisie!’ They will no doubt fire the first shot. One fine morning the German bourgeois and their Government will grow tired of watching with folded arms the overflowing river of Socialism, and they will take recourse to lawlessness, to physical force. What will be the use of it? Physical force may repress a small section of the people in a limited district, but the power has still to be discovered that is capable of annihilating a Party of two or three million persons spread over a very large country. The counter-revolution, a momentary overpowering of the workers, may perhaps delay the triumph of Socialism for a few years, but only that it may finally prevail so much more completely and definitely.”
This is our conception. And now in conclusion I ask you to acquit me; not because I am afraid of the imprisonment to which you may treat me. If it is a question of enduring the punishment meted out to us by the ruling class for our convictions, every Socialist submits to it with the greatest indifference. But I ask you to acquit me, because my conviction would be an injustice and would cause aggravation in Socialist circles.
J. Louis Engdahl, “The War Censor Arrives in America”, 1915
The War Censor has arrived in America. That great power of darkness that stops up the human brain, while the human body goes ignorant to the slaughter, has started its work in the United States. If it had not been for the War Censor the duped millions of Europe would at least know why and for whom they were fighting and dying. If they had been permitted to receive this information from the Socialist press of Europe, the great world war might never have taken place.
Even in peace times, the War Censor is busy in Europe. He is always at work in Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and other countries. Socialist papers are suppressed and Socialist speakers are imprisoned because they dare fight militarism and war.
Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg go to prison for declaring war on the war god. Russian Socialists go to Siberia. The dungeons everywhere are hungry for Socialist anti-militarists. The War Censor must keep the world in darkness and the people in ignorance.
When the world war broke out the War Censor took command wherever the printed word appeared or the spoken word was uttered. Only thoughts pleasing to the god of war were permitted to see the light of day or be heard by living men. This war censorship still grips the nations at war.
The American Socialist will always fight for the greatest freedom of speech and press possible, so that all may be able to voice their views on war and militarism. The American Socialist may not always agree with everything that is said. Sometimes it may radically disagree. But we will always declare that the War Censor has no place in the United States. The War Censor is out of place in a republic. He has no place or function in a democracy.
We are not at war. There is no danger of an immediate war. That makes the crime of the postal officials in barring Jack London’s utterances from the mails so much the more reprehensible. This is a matter that should be taken up by Congress immediately it meets next month.
If the United States government, through its postal department, can censor the utterances of Jack London in times of peace, what can it not do, or what may it not do, in time of war or threatening war?…
Does the Democratic administration intend to maintain this majority by gagging the utterances of the American people? We hope not. Perhaps those directing the Democratic administration will soon realize the unwisdom of even barring Jack London’s article, “A Good Soldier,” from the mails. But The American Socialist does not intend to go to sleep on the job. It will fight to the end any attempt to suppress free speech and a free press. The War Censor at work will make it easier for the militarists to ride rough shod over the wishes of the American people and turn the United States into a military nation and thus take the quickest road leading to war and a duplication of the slaughter now raging in Europe.
DRIVE THE WAR CENSOR FROM AMERICA!
J. Louis Engdahl, from “Speech to the Court at the Time of Sentencing”, February 20, 1919.
My mind could not conceive, during the early months of 1917, how a nation where less than one-half of one percent of the people own and control nine-tenths of the wealth, and struggling for more, could possibly wage a war “to make the world safe for democracy.” The history of all ages has taught that the one-half of one percent have always, bitterly, with every means at their disposal, fought making the nations fit abiding places for the 99 and one-half percent. History will repeat itself and show that while the workers of Europe were overthrowing Kings, Emperors, Kaisers, and Tsars, 13 reigning families with an annual income ranging from $2.5 million to $60 million were tightening their already powerful grip upon the government and industry of the United States of America. Who is there that dares deny it?…
Throughout the centuries we have always had a passing social system sitting in judgment on a new and dawning order of society. Yet, in all this passage of time, there has not been conceived a system of justice by which an old order can judge a new without blindness, prejudice, and hostility. The capitalist system has shown itself just as blind, prejudiced, and hostile as all its predecessors. Ancient barbarism was not less brutal in its war of self-preservation against the coming of Christianity, than is the futile struggle of capitalism against the rapid approach of Socialism.
As editor of The American Socialist and as a member of the Socialist Party, I sought to do my part in preparing for and hastening the dawn of Socialism — social, industrial, and political democracy for all peoples. I based my right, and the right of my comrades, to legally and peacefully struggle toward this end, on that part of “The Declaration of Independence — 1776” which reads:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
Another bulwark of this right is to be found in the First Article of the Bill of Rights of the National Constitution, which reads in part:
“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
When our revolutionary forefathers took the power to abridge liberty out of the hands of Congress, it certainly did not lodge that power with courts and juries. To maintain itself in power in this country, the profit system, operating through the national government, swept aside the lofty ideals of the Declaration of Independence, and dethroned the guarantees of the National Constitution.
For the time being extreme intolerance has usurped the places of these ideals and guarantees. This usurpation made possible the suppression of Socialist publications, among them The American Socialist. The inevitable sequel was my indictment, trial, and conviction, with my comrades, as in so many other cases, for having sought to enjoy the rights of free men while struggling to bring about the third great change in our nation’s progress toward higher ideals — its third revolution.
We, who are before this court today for sentence, find comfort in knowing that the crimes charged against us were those also visited upon America’s revolutionary fathers of 1776, who dared declare their political independence of England’s king, and who had the hardihood to fight for it through seven bitter years of supreme sacrifice. This was the nation’s first revolution and it ended victoriously.
Eugene Debs, from “Debs Calls the Jury of the People to Try Indiana Governor”, 1922
The constitution says, “Congress shall make no law abridging free speech.” Congress has made such a law, the President signed it, and the court sustained it. Who were the traitors?
Without free speech there is no progress, and the people stagnate. Better a thousandfold the abuse than the denial of free speech, for the abuse lasts but a day, while denial destroys the life of a nation…
Moreover, a lip service offered to Christian virtue is tremendously discounted by an attitude fundamentally hostile to it. And what of the boasted patriotism which is nothing but antagonism to essential liberty? “Thou dost take my house when thou dost take the prop that sustains it.”
It must be evident to you, ladies and gentlemen, that our imperialism is destroying the Americanism that was expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights of the Constitution, and is building on its ruins a plutocratic despotism. The punishment of those who protest simply shows the way we are going, and marks the distance we have gone to a violent death full of the spoils and blood of mankind.
Leon Trotsky, from “Freedom of the Press and the Working Class”, August 1938
Theory, as well as historic experience, testify that any restriction to democracy in bourgeois society, is eventually directed against the proletariat, just as taxes eventually fall on the shoulders of the proletariat. Bourgeois democracy is usable by the proletariat only insofar as it opens the way for the development of the class struggle. Consequently, any workers “leader” who arms the bourgeois state with special means to control public opinion in general, and the press in particular, is a traitor. In the last analysis, the accentuation of class struggle will force bourgeois of all shades, to conclude a pact: to accept special legislation, and every kind of restrictive measures, and measures of “democratic” censorship against the working class. Those who have not yet realised this, should leave the ranks of the working class.
“But sometimes” — will object certain “friends” of the Soviet Union — “the dictatorship of the proletariat is obliged to resort to exceptional measures, especially against the reactionary press”
To this we reply: First, this objection equates a workers’ state with a bourgeois state. Although Mexico is a semi-colonial country, it is at the same time a bourgeois state, definitely not a workers’ state. But even from the point of view of the interests of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the interdiction or censorship of bourgeois papers is not at all a matter of “program” or “principle”, nor an ideal situation.
Once victorious, the proletariat may find itself forced, for a period of time, to take special measures against the bourgeoisie, if the bourgeoisie adopts an attitude of open revolt against the workers’ state. In this case, restrictions to the freedom of the press go hand in hand with all other measures used in preparation for a civil war. When forced to use artillery and aviation against the enemy we will obviously not tolerate this same enemy maintaining his own centers of information and propaganda inside the camp of the armed proletariat. Nevertheless, even in this case, if exceptional measures are prolonged long enough to create a permanent situation, then they carry the danger of going out of control and, giving a political monopoly to the workers’ bureaucracy, becoming a source of its degeneration.
We have before us a living example of such a dynamic, with the hated suppression of the freedom of expression and of the press in the Soviet Union. And this has nothing to do with the interests of the dictatorship of the proletariat. On the contrary, it helps protect the interests of the new caste in power against the attacks of the workers’ and peasants’ opposition. This highly bonapartist Moscow bureaucracy is currently aped by Messrs. Lombardo Toledano and co. who confuse their personal careers with the interests of socialism.
The real tasks of the workers’ state do not consist in policing public opinion, but in freeing it from the yoke of capital. This can only be done by placing the means of production — which includes the production of information — in the hands of society in its entirety. Once this essential step towards socialism has been taken, all currents of opinion which have not taken arms against the dictatorship of the proletariat must be able to express themselves freely. It is the duty of the workers’ state to put in their hands, to all according to their numeric importance, the technical means necessary for this, printing presses, paper, means of transportation. One of the principal causes of the degeneration of the state machine is the monopolisation of the press by the Stalinist bureaucracy which risks to transform all the gains of the October revolution to a pile of ruins.