my lib friend condemns existing socialist states because of their state repression of counter-revolutionaries:
he complains about the lack of civil liberties. when I pressed him on whether the emancipation of the poor is more important, he said that he refuses to compromise on giving everyone full civil liberties and due process.
I personally think civil liberties are good, but are a secondary concern to emancipating the poor. and due process can be implemented in time, I'm not against it. Finally, fascists do not deserve civil liberties and I fully condone repression against them.
https://twitter.com/DerenicByrd/status/1295202365536997376
You watch this fucking video and tell me we have "civil liberties" in the US. No, liberties here are just vaporware for rich libs to cope to. They exist purely in the imagination of a shackled fool, and only because they don't dare to exercise their liberties. If you don't live in the US it barely matters; this style of policing is spreading like cancer.
It reminds me of what someone said about crime (I am paraphrasing from memory): "Anything can be a crime. You raise your voice? That's verbal abuse. Harassment. Jail. A kid throws a toy across the room? Criminal property damage. Attempted assault. Jail." We have enough laws that you're nearly always guilty of something -- it is an indefensible state of affairs and no place to condemn socialist states from.
Maybe your friend is aware that the liberty situation isn't great in the US. But generally, someone concerned over 'civil liberties' is probably privileged and ignorant enough to not grapple with the fact that most people in the US don't have any de facto.
What about countries with actual civil liberties like New Zealand and Norway? Can the people there criticize AES states for their lack of civil liberties?
Didn't they make guns basically illegal in New Zealand? And the same for Norway? And both places have the same problems with cops and protesters, it's just not as obvious because people don't protest as often in those countries.
As mentioned in this thread, point out that civil liberties don't really exist in the US either. The police slaughter a thousand people a year here and face no repercussions. Police can brutalize protestors simply by declaring an assembly unlawful. Journalists get thrown in jail here if they leak from the government inappropriately. The US has a pre-trial detention (what an Orwellian term) system larger than most socialist/socialist-ish states carceral systems. The US prison system is worse than what's existed in any socialist state prior.
I don't think it's wrong to refuse to compromise on full civil liberties and due process, and those are points where existing socialist states can and should be criticized. Abolishing civil liberties is not a precondition for emancipating the poor. It's absolutely wrong, however, to pretend the US has anything resembling civil liberties.
I think I read a comment from someone here a few months ago telling of a conversation with a Vietnamese or Chinese comrade on a similar subject. They were asked how they felt about the free speech people enjoyed in the US and they said that the way Americans that were so proud of their free speech and treated it like a gift from God used it was just to call the president the n word and to be horrible to others without consequences. Meanwhile the people of the US didn't have the liberties to live in their own house, to have healthcare, an education, or all the other things their government guaranteed them in their country. So while it would be great to have the right to freely criticize their government, it's definitely nowhere near as important as having the freedom to live a decent life regardless of what family you were born to. Another good point people are bringing up here is that civil liberties in America are fictional anyway, and vanish away the second you pose a threat to capital. And yes, above all, show him the clip of Parenti's yellow lecture where he talks about liberals crying out for the civil liberties of the fascists in Cuba after the revolution.
Reject the premise that there is an inherent trade-off.
The necessity of cracking down on counterrevolutionaries is historically contingent and grounded in very real material concerns directly related to your friend's "free speech" country constantly exporting violence, funding death squads, funding color revolutions, and so on, against countries struggling to maintain their basic autonomy.
Ask you friend why those "civil liberties" took a haircut after 9/11 and haven't been restored. Ask them what they think would happen if their country was actually facing existential threats, not the exaggerated horseshit used to push military aggression, and what would happen if that threat remained, just as a hegemonic power attempting to subjugate all others economically rather than with a direct hot war on their country. Would those civil liberties be restored?
And of course, as others have mentioned, Western civil liberties fetishization requires walling off whole categories of material reality where you do not actually have those or related liberties. The dominance of capital is the default in their minds, so of course there possibly of being fired for speaking your mind on Facebook does not register as censorship for them, even though it's functionally the same as losing your state-run business job for nakedly criticizing the head of state. Though of course, in the former case you could end up homeless within months whereas in the latter housing has tended to be guaranteed. And naturally, civil liberties fetishization fails to answer the question of what purpose and power it gives you, instead appealing to an incomplete and abstract idea of freedom. You can give a toddler the freedom to say whatever they want within their playpen, but they are still not in control of their own bodies or destinies at that point. Such Western Chauvinists jerk themselves off to the fact that they can swear at Trump on Facebook in the safety of the imperial core without cops harassing them (not always true btw), but what power or freedom is that, exactly? What did you actually gain? Did you organize something? Was one of your problems solved? Of course not: you're free to vent in your complete powerlessness, just like that toddler.
Civil liberties are worth no more than the paper they're written on. These motherfuckers snap their fingers, deem an assembly "unlawful," and beat the shit out of the public all the time.
Civil liberties mean nothing unless you make enough money to keep a lawyer's family fed and their dock fees paid. And at that point, you're really only exercising the power inherent in wealth itself. You only win when you have enough resources at your disposal to make prosecution prohibitively burdensome. The civil liberties schtick is just window dressing.
If your law is "exploiters go to gulag," you can absolutely have due process
Restricting the freedom of fascists safeguards the freedom of everyone else.
Couching freedom quote in lib language: on maslow pyramid of needs, food and shelter are more important than political life. Having millions people living with fuller stomach is more important that ten thousands people right to launch coups. Obviously they’ll say that fuller stomach flows from these liberties, but it’s just not true.
Civil liberties in imperial core means you can go marching against some policy, and the policy would still get implemented (iraq war, palestine, Trump shit). In global south such marches would get weapons from usaid (if they are pro-privatization ofc).
I’m not a fan of state repression and prefer some mediation by whatever force is there, but fundamentally there is large difference between vulnerable countries and countries in the west connected to imperialism. If protestors want sanctions ended by selling your state-enterprises, what is there to mediate?
I usually just focus on our lack of civil liberties despite them being supposedly sacred. You can absolutely string together some tweets that get your door kicked in by the government which is usually the type of thing they're talking about. Nsa spying on the whole planet even allies. And on that note what we do to civil liberties of people in other countries. Millions dead to project our ideology on the world. No regard for democratic elections. Using literal starvation as a tactic of war. Dystopian surveillance, black sites, chemical weapons... you get the idea those things can't exist while respecting civil liberties or human rights.
With that record of outright hostility from the US do the seemingly harsh policies of other countries make sense? Idk sometimes it works. I don't really try to convince them 'china good' or whatever because it's easy to get caught up on some specific example they heard in propaganda and can't be moved on.
A look at history shows that any political or economic system when under threat resorts to these kinds of crackdowns.
Whether it’s the USSR, or Pinochet’s Chile, or the US.
That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good, but it isn’t something unique to communist systems.It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.
Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
:bugs-stalin:
The people of the west do not have civil liberties in the way your friend is thinking, we ultimately have to restrict ourselves to the views of capital in public to be hirable / socially accepted
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54CeL2z9yrs
i like this video, although I disagree with Zizek's conclusion. The "illusion" of civil liberties (postmodern father) that exist now is preferable to the outright and clear repression of civil liberties
paradox of tolerance /thread
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Also a good way of looking at this:
"Tolerance" has always been shorthand that means specifically tolerating people for who they essentially are - not just tolerating anything and everything in the entire universe that ever happens, carte blanche
"I am tolerant and that includes the sawdust I just inhaled. I must not cough because I am tolerant. That's what people meant when they were ending slavery"
