Weekly Worker 613 Thursday February 23 2006 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Class struggle in the press

Unlike the SWP, Karl Marx upheld the right of even the most reactionary rightwinger to publish their views, says Eddie Ford. Communists are not afraid of the “free competition of ideas”

The Socialist Workers Party has made it more than clear that free speech should apply neither to “the Nazis” nor to people who “insult” islam (and christianity or Sikhism as well?). In fact, comrade Alex Callinicos sternly reminds us, freedom of speech is not an absolute - “Everyone acknowledges that there are limits to it”, he confidently declares (‘Freedom to spread hate’ Socialist Worker February 11).

Comrade Callinicos thinks that calling islam a “vicious, wicked faith” ought to have been enough for Leeds crown court to put the British National Party’s Nick Griffin and Mark Collett behind bars - and I am sure it will wholeheartedly approve of an Austrian court’s action in jailing rightwing author David Irving for holocaust-denial.

Communists hold to an entirely different perspective. Unlike the frighteningly cynical SWP, we do not think that the bourgeois state or courts - whether in Leeds or Vienna - can be trusted, nor are they somehow potential ‘anti-fascist’ allies. Yes, the likes of Nick Griffin and Mark Collett - not to mention David Irving - are contemptible wretches. But the bourgeois state would just as easily use ‘anti-fascist’ or ‘holocaust denial’-type laws and powers against the working class and the left as it would against the BNP.

Communists are resolute and consistent defenders of free speech - which is not, of course, the same as shouting ‘fire!’ in a crowded cinema or allowing individuals (or groups) clearly hell-bent on encouraging murder or social mayhem just to carry on without sanction or penalty. In this sense it is correct to say that freedom of speech is not an absolute. But, of course, those that are attempting to disassociate themselves from the principle of free speech - such as comrade Callinicos, for example - disingenuously, and quite deliberately, suggest there is such an equivalence, hence freeing them to advocate or posit “limits” and restrictions on free speech and freedom in general.

This is dangerous reasoning. We want the working class to have access to the most advanced ideas possible - whether it be in the arts, science, politics or whatever. Only through the open clash of different and contending viewpoints can this come about. In real life, as opposed to the arid realm of dogma, truth often comes in unusual forms - sometimes wonderful, sometime ugly.

Which brings us naturally back to the oddball - and distinctly ugly - David Irving. For Marxists it is an uncontroversial notion that merely because a scientist or historian has a generally reactionary, or even obnoxious, world view, that does not automatically invalidate the results of his or her research - some of which may have been the product of many years of painstaking and possibly ground-breaking work, and thus has the potential to enrich and advance the collective knowledge of all of humanity. Or do the ‘politically correct’ left - like our SWP comrades - believe that in the realm of ideas all the really important disputes have more or less been settled and therefore it is just a question of ‘hitting the streets’ and ‘making a difference’?

Either democratic politics means the open circulation and clash of different contending views or it is nothing. And tragically, for the SWP - or at least its current leadership - democratic politics is an object of scorn, or guilty embarrassment.

So it should come as no great surprise to regular readers of the Weekly Worker that we orthodox communists do not call for the banning of ‘dangerous’ or ‘offensive’ opinions. After all means determine ends. For instance, a state ban on the British National Party, or the state imprisonment of rightwing historians, does not promote or advance the struggle for socialism - it actually does the exact opposite. A well trodden pathway in the 20th century perhaps, but not one we should seek to go down again.

Many of the arguments or prejudices being peddled nowadays by those in the SWP hierarchy and elsewhere would have been wearisomely familiar to Karl Marx - who remained for his entire political life a “democratic extremist”, to use the words of the outstanding Marxist scholar, Hal Draper (not that, of course, we necessarily agree with every position Draper took on contemporaneous political issues).

In other words, Marx was a steadfast defender of the right to free speech and intellectual freedom and remained so from his days as a radical democratic journalist (or ‘left’ liberal) on the Rheinische Zeitung in the early 1840s to his penning of the Critique of the Gotha programme and beyond. This is just a simple statement of fact - one that would need Irving-style ‘revisionism’ to refute - though legions of academic hacks have attempted to do so, of course, whether from the stance of conventional bourgeois liberalism or Stalinism.

Of course, during the early 1840s we see Marx’s transformation from “a radical-democratic liberal into a revolutionary-democratic communist” (H Draper Karl Marx’s theory of revolution Vol 1 1977, p31). Yes, Marx came to reject the narrow political horizons of mere political radicalism. But the vital point to stress here is the continuity of his thought - he remained an uncompromising or “extremist” democrat right to the day he died.

Hence when Marx in 1842 called his own viewpoint “real liberalism”, as opposed to the “self-styled liberalism” of the existing opposition in the German diet (parliament), we should not regard this sentiment as merely an antiquated expression of his ‘pre-Marxist’ past - youthful and romantic excesses which the ‘mature’ or ‘old’ Marx dumped with embarrassment on his road to ‘pure’ scientific communism (the sort of self-serving nonsense associated with Louis Althusser). Communists should grasp the democratic essence of Marx’s comment, which leads him to state that “real liberalism” strives for “a completely new, deeper, more thoroughly developed and freer political form corresponding to the consciousness of the people” (K Marx CW Vol 1, p388). It is not for nothing that scientific socialism has been described as the bastard child of radical liberalism. Communism is impregnated with the politics of democracy from head to toe.

Marx’s heroic battles as a journalist and subsequently editor of Rheinische Zeitung against the Prussian state and its iniquitous censorship laws reverberate with contemporary relevance - and make reading Socialist Worker a slightly shaming experience (or ought to for SWP members). The first duty of a truth-seeker, proclaimed Marx, is “to make directly for the truth without looking right or left ... Won’t I forget the heart of the matter if it is more important that I speak in the prescribed form?” (my emphasis ibid p9-10).

Political correctness is not a new phenomenon then. Of course, stressed Marx, freedom of the press is “not a perfect thing itself”- it is not the “all-in-all” of the matter, and if we in the Weekly Worker were really promoting a ‘publish and be damned’ ethos (as some allege) we would be deserving of stinging criticism. But of course we do no such thing, as any fair-minded or non-sectarian person would acknowledge.

In other words, an open and free press cannot guarantee ‘freedom’ - ie, freedom from all inaccuracies, mistakes and distortions. But by dragging the grand affairs of the body politic into the limelight, the Weekly Worker is struggling to make democracy itself “a real, living spirit, as opposed to a ghostly presence”, as Marx put it (H Draper Marx’s theory of revolution Vol 1, New York 1977, p31).

Openness activates and enhances the “public mind”, to use Marx’s phrase. The role of the Weekly Worker is precisely to hold a mirror up to the SWP, Respect, etc - to make them accountable for their actions and words. In turn the Weekly Worker itself is open to scrutiny and criticism, and hence to correction or amendment. This is an inherently educative - and profoundly political - process. What a stark contrast to most of the left press, with its anodyne formulations and ideological monolithicism, specifically designed to preclude an honest and frank political discussion.

Indeed, a morbid fear of politics seems to permeate these dispiriting publications. But, as Marx emphasised, without a free, open and courageous press how can you ever know what is true and what is false? The Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984 was well aware of this. So too were the bureaucrats in Stalin’s Soviet Union - and still are in Castro’s Cuba or Kim Il-Jong’s North Korea. The dismal history of Trotskyism also demonstrates what the lack of an open press can to do to a political movement.

Freedom by definition, however, means the freedom to disagree - and, what is more, the freedom to disagree without fear of reprisal or censure. Marx repeated this theme over and over again - as did Rosa Luxemburg. Naturally, this is an alien sentiment to those who are bureaucrats by instinct - the “public mind” must be regulated and “limits” must be imposed on it, as Alex Callinicos will eagerly tell you.

Naturally, the bureaucratic mind loves to do nothing more than impose a straitjacket on human thought. But, as Marx vividly wrote, “You marvel at the delightful diversity, the inexhaustible riches of nature. You do not ask the rose to smell like violet; but the richest of all, the mind, is supposed to exist in only a single manner? I am humorous, but the law orders people to write seriously. I am bold, but the law commands my style to be restrained. Grey on grey is the sole colour of freedom, the authorised one” (ibid pp4-6).

Alarmingly, it does seem that the SWP more and more hankers for the rules laid down by the Prussian state and which Marx so bitterly fought - just as we today must fight the government’s racial and religious hatred legislation and oppose all blasphemy laws. For Marx, the bureaucrats’ regulations only allowed for what they considered a “serious and restrained pursuit of truth” - only opinions and views which were “well-intentioned in tendency” were to be permitted. “The jurisdiction of suspicion” ruled supreme, as Marx said.

Marx also regularly noted that the deputies in the Prussian diet strongly objected to the regular publishing of their proceedings - they obviously regarded the assembly as their own private property and not as a body which enshrines the right of the people to representation. The cold stare of public scrutiny is indeed unsettling for those who think of themselves as the physical, and natural, incarnation of the ‘public spirit’ (or the working class) - and hence beyond criticism. How much better if the Weekly Worker refrained from detailing the weakness and foibles of the current SWP-Respect project and its nakedly opportunist dumping of “shibboleths” like gay and women’s rights, open borders, free speech, etc.

Marx’s comments on the Paris Commune are a sharp rejoinder to the left’s morbid fear of openness: “The Commune did not pretend to infallibility, the invariable attribute of all governments of the old stamp. It published its doings and sayings, it initiated the public into all its shortcomings” (K Marx The civil war in France Peking 1966, p80).

This, of course, can be extremely embarrassing at times, if not downright infuriating. Who positively wants to have their “shortcomings” paraded? But the long-term interests of the workers’ movement demand it. Marx wrote: “Keep in mind that you could not enjoy the advantages of a free press without tolerating its inconveniences. You could not pluck the rose without its thorns! And what do you lose in losing a free press? A free press is the omnipresent open eye of the popular spirit ... It is the merciless confessional that a people makes to itself, and it is well known that confession has the power to redeem. It is the intellectual mirror in which a people beholds itself, and self-examination is the first condition of wisdom” (K Marx CW Vol 1, p405 and pp60-61).

The “merciless confessional” of an open communist press is the only means to build a healthy and strong workers’ movement which can reflect upon itself. The only alternative is to keep the movement like a “person swaddled in a cradle all his life, for as soon as he learns to walk he also learns to fall, and it is only through falling that he learns to walk. But if we all remain children in swaddling clothes, who is to swaddle us? If we all lie in a cradle, who is to cradle us? If we are all in jail, who is to be the jail warden?” (ibid p49).

Unfortunately, we know that the SWP and others comrades in our movement think that workers must be “swaddled” - ie, protected from ‘bad’ ideas. Self-evidently, Socialist Worker’s call for Irving’s books to be banned from public libraries is depressingly symptomatic of the “jail warden” spirit - and, communists fear that amongst the SWP-Respect tops there is evidence of the presence of frustrated jail wardens.

Needless to say, such authoritarianism was utterly alien to the ‘libertarian’ Marx. Shocking news though it may be to the likes of the SWP, he stoutly defended freedom of speech for reactionary views and opinions, arguing: “It goes without saying we would have made objections no less earnestly against banning the Elberfelder Zeitung, the Hamburger Correspondent, and the Koblentz Rhein- und-Moselzeitung [conservative-monarchist-clerical newspapers - EF], for the juridical position is not altered by the moral character of the individual case, let alone its political and religious views.” Marx adds that freedom of the press is shorn of rights “as soon as its existence is made dependent on its opinions. To this day there exists no code of opinion and no law court of opinions” (ibid p157).

Here, it is also worth reminding our comrades in the SWP that many of the opinions expounded in rightist publications like Elberfelder Zeitung would now be classified as racist and deeply anti-semitic - probably quite rightly, bearing in mind that today the terms ‘racist’ or ‘anti-semitic’ are flung about in a quite casual manner. But did that faze Marx? No, of course not - and nor should it trouble any publication claiming to be Marxist or communist.

Engels made a vital point on freedom of speech. In March 1849 the Prussian crown unleashed a new wave of attacks on the freedom of the press. Engels belligerently stated in response: “Freedom of the press, the free competition of ideas - this means giving free rein to the class struggle in the field of the press” (ibid p38).

That is, in the struggle of freely competing ideas, the reactionary and backward will eventually lose out. Defending the democratic right of free speech - even for Irving or Griffin - does not amount, as has been cretinously suggested, to a “qualified defence” of them, let alone mean you are ‘objectively’ pro-Nazi. The most effective way to counter and defeat their reactionary ideas is to follow Engels’ advice and wage ruthless “class struggle in the field of the press”. Comrades, what is there to be afraid of? You have nothing to lose but your chains.

To insist on book-bans, censorship, state prohibitions, the outlawing of “insults” to islam, etc indicates that some comrades on the left can only imagine the workers as a slave class, to be permanently “swaddled” from complex issues and backward opinions - a class whose minds have to be made up for them - either by George Galloway, the ‘new look’ Socialist Worker or bourgeois bureaucrats and judges. Definitely not a universal ruling class. Or a class even vaguely capable of challenging or confronting the bourgeoisie.

Well, this is most certainly not the vision of the Weekly Worker and the CPGB - more the nightmare of Socialist Worker. We communists have more faith in the working class and the politics of consistent democracy. Unlike the philistines, we gain constant inspiration from Marx and Engels. Attacking the “party functionaries” who wanted to stifle Marx’s criticism of the SPD (his Critique of the Gotha programme was suppressed by the “socialist bosses” for 16 years), Engels famously quipped: “It is indeed a brilliant idea to put German socialist science, after its liberation from Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws, under new anti-socialist laws to be manufactured and carried out by the Social Democratic Party authorities themselves. For the rest, it is ordained that trees shall not grow into the sky” (Letter to Karl Kautsky - February 23 1891).

And Engels exclaimed: “If we dare not say this [the criticism of the Gotha programme] openly today, then when?” This is the spirit that animates the Weekly Worker and the CPGB - criticise everything “openly today”, rather than closed and “restrained” rebukes years down the line.

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