“For the bourgeoisie, freedom of the press meant freedom for the rich to publish and for the capitalists to control the newspapers, a practice which in all countries, including even the freest, produced a corrupt press.”
____
V. I. Lenin, “Draft Resolution On Freedom Of The Press”
When the bourgeois liberal west discuses “free speech” and their love for “free expression” this must be understood to be a totem of capitalist and libertarian beliefs and modes of production. The publishing industries, be they print media, visual art, plastic art, film art etc are controlled by capital and its consumption and proliferation are organized around concerns for the maintenance and glorification of bourgeois capitalist systems. There has never been a point in the history of the west were all ideas, all art, all forms of expression, have been totally free to be sold, manufactured, shared, displayed, or discussed. Bourgeois (and if one goes farther back, noble) white men have controlled what is meant by “art” and “expression” and “freedom” for the entirety of the existence of capitalist hegemony in the west: what is offensive, what is obscene, what is educational, what is puerile, what is edifying, and what is merely junk. Priority has always been given to forms of expression that celebrate white male sexual appetites, philosophical concerns, capitalist views on the market and society, and understanding of race, gender, and religion.
The west has often used its outsourcing of censorship to the private capitalist industries that control of the means of production, thereby freeing themselves to condemn the “authoritarian” attempts at censorship or material analysis of art and media in non-western or non-liberal democratic systems. This dichotomy is itself based on the ridiculous assumption that western liberal “Democracies” do not use the government to “censor” material. What is plainly censorship, of leftist, non-cis heterosexual, feminist, anti-imperialist, anti-liberal art and expression, in the interest of bourgeois capitalist values is posited as the a priori standard of “basic human decency” in expression. Phrased another way this framework utilizes those ever dreaded and powerful forms of privilege known as “common sense” and “community standards”, which are of course completely based around the values of the class that controls the means of production in society.
There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor can their ever be, an absolutely free marketplace of ideas that allows for absolute license in artistic expression and display of the products thereof. The interests of the class which controls the means of productions in society will always be prioritized, for their material maintenance and expansion sits upon the bedrock of human expression and ideas that shape, inspire, propagate, and refine ideology and praxis. Under a dictatorship of the proletariat, vaunted “common sense” and “community standards” would be reoriented towards the goal of liberating the proletarian classes, and more importantly, perpetuating and maintaining the liberation of the proletariat beyond the revolutionary moment.
For the concept and term to have any coherent meaning or applicability or value in a socialist system, complete freedom of speech and expression needs to be analyzed and defined in material terms. If forms of expression conflict with the survival and safety of the proletariat i.e. the speech empowers reaction, advocates for reactionary violence, glorifies reactionaries, then it must be censored. Censorship, is not simply some unaccountable bureaucrat putting a big black mark over a passage or, god forbid, burning a book or painting, it is a critical analysis, by party & society and comrades, of a piece and its meaning, its intention, and who it intends to attack or marginalize, if anyone. A proletarian form of censorship might take the form of restriction of free access to violent and hateful material to adults, to researchers, independent and associated with institutions of higher learning, or kept within the bounds of a public library. Official party and proletarian council responses to and analysis of content should be encouraged, and authors held responsible for demonstrable and harmful material outcomes of the use of their art and expression. I don’t think violently antisemitic, racist, misogynistic, pedophilic, or material pushing for capitalist or reactionary control of society, should have a de facto unrestricted place in an open artistic marketplace.
People who are against non-liberal ideas of free expression, forms of proletarian critique and censorship, often posit “yeah, but what about great, but problematic, literature like de Sade, Anais Nin, Miller etc etc”. Well, of course society has an interest in preserving ideas and literature, even those that can be seen as disgusting or offensive, but the context in which this material is consumed and produced and made available in public must be a matter of proletarian concern. There is a vast middle ground to be surveyed and debated and utilized, between openly selling violent porn & fascist propaganda without restriction or commentary, and the brutal, anti-intellectual, bourgeois morality based destruction of art by an absolutist Nazi regime. It would benefit the movement for revolutionary emancipation of the proletariat to begin exploring new ideas and conceptions of free expression and censorship.
L'Ennemi 