Libertarianism and the Philosophy of “Human Rights”
A Reply to Jonathan Greenfield
RöT Feder
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • April-May 1992 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 1, No. 5 (pp. 19-22) | ||
| • August 27, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
1. When Mr. Greenfield Talks . . .
It may at first appear puzzling that the only points Mr. Greenfield seems able to grasp from my response to his first letter (in A.O. #3) is that I believe him to be a stooge of the S.U. administration and that I am against free speech. To the first charge I am surely guilty, and unless Mr. Greenfield is attempting to lull the S.U. administration into a false sense of security, I will stand by that assessment. Contrary to his claims, however, I do not attack Mr. Greenfield through “thinly veiled assertions,” “rationalizations,” or “perversions,” but through a direct and unambiguous critique of the effects of the application of libertarian conceptions of society to the problems that face those of us who struggle on the left to transform both campus life and society in general. My interest, then, is finally not with Mr. Greenfield, and it is for this reason that I find his second charge a more useful one to respond to. He is quite correct that I do not believe in “free-speech” in the vulgar abstract sense in which libertarians—of both the liberal and conservative variety—use that term. This is because free-speech does not exist for the dispossessed and oppressed people of this country (i.e., those most in need of being able to meaningfully exercise their civil liberties) in anything like an effective form: that is, specifically, a form in which they can adequately address (and redress) the conditions of their existence.
Another way to put this is that while, formally, we are all free to say most things, we are not free to express these things in ways which effectively alter the conditions under which we live if such conditions are necessary to the reproduction of bourgeois society. Think for a moment about African Americans living on the South Side who insist that the disproportionately high Black infant mortality rate in Syracuse is due to systemic racism. What would happen were these same African Americans to attempt to remedy this situation by commandeering Crouse-Irving Memorial Hospital and altering its facilities to meet the needs of the communities on the South Side? They would quickly find the limits of their freedom at the end of the barrel of a police officer’s assault rifle. Without the means to set into motion practices suggested in speech, those who are most effectively disenfranchised by our society are barred from meaningful participation in social and political life: their civil liberties, in other words, offer them “Freedom” in a form that, like a luxury commodity, cannot be afforded.
This is, in fact, doubly the case since it appears from the vantage point of bourgeois society that civil liberties, of themselves, are enough to guarantee people a “political voice.” Think how often the very presence (or even promise) of freedom of speech is offered in mainstream media accounts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as irrefutable proof of their political freedom. Freedom, however, cannot be so easily legislated, for its preconditions can only be produced out of the “realm of necessity,” and these preconditions simply do not exist for most people within bourgeois society. So while in one sense I oppose merely formal notions of free-speech, I am wholeheartedly for producing conditions under which speech may be freely and effectively exercised by those most in need of access to political and social life. By concentrating on civil liberties in this way, well-intentioned libertarians like Mr. Greenfield attempt to remedy violations of the civil liberties of individuals on an ad hoc basis, as if they were exceptions to the rule (at least potentially) of bourgeois democracy rather than being absolutely necessary to its functioning and reproduction. Such an approach precludes arriving at actual solutions to the problem of the ways in which marginalized members of society are systematically silenced.
Speech, as a form of social practice which impinges upon the practices of others—including their ability to speak in a given form—is always in this sense delimited: that is, it is not free from all constraints. Even more than this, not all speech is equally effective, and so while the scream of a welfare mother for health care for her children may pass without a ripple of response, the whisper of a supreme court justice overturning a woman’s right to choose abortion may thunder across the political landscape. Further, as I suggested in “White Fraternities in Civil Society,” (A.O. #2), those who are privileged by the system do not necessarily even have to speak to have their interests advanced. Whites do not have to shout racist slogans to benefit from racism (a lesson that David Duke has apparently learned well). The task, then, is not to “maintain” our right to free-speech, but to transform social relations so that our ability to speak allows us to fully participate in the social and political life of our society. Within the bounds of capitalism, and most especially in the anguished decay of imperial American late capitalism, this is not possible for the overwhelming majority.
2. Libertarianism and the Problem of the Individual in Society
Mr. Greenfield cannot afford to recognize the distinction between “free” and “effective” speech; in such circumstances free speech threatens to become an end in itself. As a civil libertarian he believes that the greatest amount of freedom can be maintained for all citizens through a principled protection of the civil liberties granted us under the Constitution and in its hastily appended Bill of Rights (freedom of speech, assembly, worship, etc.). As such he accepts (more or less) the basic principles and premises of a bourgeois conception of social relations formulated during the ascendant—and most self- confident—moment of the development of bourgeois society. In this conception society is composed of autonomous individuals possessing self-evident moral rights to “life, liberty, and property.” The State is—or at least was at one time—a rational and voluntary union made by the people to uphold these rights. A good society is one in which individuals are free to privately exercise their will without undue interference from the scrutiny of society as a whole. In this conception freedom is conceived in terms of lack of restraint rather than in terms of actually existing freedoms.
Within bourgeois social theory the principle problem of society is the extent to which collective interests and decisions override or impinge upon the natural proclivities of individuals. It is generally on these grounds that libertarians are antagonistic to the State, even as the State is seen as a necessary evil. This tension finds its formative representation in the tension between the Constitution (an outline of State powers) and the Bill of Rights (a list of individual entitlements). This is all despite the fact that the “founding fathers” were often well aware of their real political motives in speaking so often of liberty: that is, to secure for themselves “a more perfect union.” For them this meant one in which the necessary prerequisite for the generation of their wealth, private property, would be protected from the meddling interests of the masses: as one “founding father” put it, so that their interests would be safe from “the dangerous influence of those multitudes [or the “scum,” in the words of another] without property & without principle.”
This anxiety over the vulnerability of the individual in a “democratic” society (where “majority rules”) is continuously reenacted in the TV shows, movies, and books of popular culture. The fourth Star Trek movie, The Voyage Home (the one in which Scotty exclaims, “Aye, Captain, there be whales here!”), is an attempt to resolve this anxiety. In it, Captain Kirk—that most exemplary of all benevolent bourgeois leaders—explains to a perplexed First Officer Spock why the crew of the Enterprise rashly risked their own lives in a desperate but successful attempt to save Spock’s life in the preceding movie. Kirk smugly explains that part of what it means to be human is, in times of crisis, to elevate the needs of the one over the needs of the many. For the ultra-logical Vulcan this formula doesn’t compute at first because it is “illogical”: but it is one he will have to internalize, regardless of its (ir)rationality, if he is to be truly a part of the crew.
The implication is that the Star Trek mode of being reflects human nature, and that those who attempt to stifle or circumvent that nature will be alienated from human society. What is encoded in such productions is the fear of the bourgeois individual faced with popular pressure to allocate the resources of society according to general human needs rather than the needs of a small privileged class. And in The Voyage Home, indeed, it is only by having saved the elite Star Fleet officer Spock that all earthly society can be saved, for only he can make the best navigational guesses (intuitive guessing is also apparently ineffably human) as they journey backward and forward through time. So too Bush, in his attempts to cut the capital gains tax, posits the captain of industry as the savior of bourgeois society. Attempts to redistribute superprofits made through the exploitation of labor are unacceptable because they violate the American entrepreneurial spirit (and ultimately, human nature). It was this which prompted Bush to testily assert that attempts to “hit” the big guy always end up hurting the little guy.
Libertarianism, like much poor science fiction, is simultaneously utopian and nostalgic. It is utopian in that it looks to produce a bourgeois society without contradictions, one that delivers on its most basic promises of freedom and opportunity. It is nostalgic in that it looks backward, not as anarchism does to an imaginary aristocratic (that is to say, feudal) order, but to an imaginary moment in the development of bourgeois society before its prolonged period of decay. It “remembers” a moment in the development of capitalism before its internal dynamic closed off the possibility for social mobility and relative freedom from State intervention in the “free marketplace” of laissez-faire capitalism. It takes this moment in an idealized form, as offering maximal civil freedoms without undo government interference, and assumes the feasibility of its extension throughout the entire history of the development of capitalism.
It is from such roots that we now hear ad nauseum the ready equation of capitalism and freedom in the wake of “the fall of communism.” Simultaneous with such celebrations, is a widespread anxiety over the collectivizing tendency of a State which governs—not to fulfill general needs and interests—but to reproduce capitalist relations of domination. The conflict between this tendency and the more pressing need (from the viewpoint of the capitalist class) to reprivatize the economy and social services, has given rise to many bourgeois responses, from the relatively progressive libertarianism of Mr. Greenfield and the ACLU, to the massive attacks on socialized human services and unionism of the “Reagan revolution,” to the reactionary libertarianism of rightist anti-government cliques like the survivalists and neo-nazis.
3. The Fetishization of “Human Rights”
Libertarian philosophy proceeds with the presumption that “human rights” are intrinsic to a self-evident and moral “human nature” (a nature abstracted from its interconnections with social relations). It was using these ideological grounds that the American ruling class—having been endowed by their creator “with certain inalienable rights” which had been violated by the King of England—declared its independence. It is with this understanding that libertarians posit rights and freedoms as ideals which, in the corrupting milieu of actual society, are “deviated” from (though, as I hope to show these lapses of democracy are not “deviations,” but are intrinsic to bourgeois society). This explains, in part, why the ACLU functions largely as a watchdog organization, intercepting such deviations and setting them to right, rather than as an organization set on transforming social relations altogether. This tendency to take bourgeois society “at its word,” then, marks the “conservative” (reformist) aspect of libertarian practice.
The role of the State according to this conception of society, then, is nothing more than to secure and guarantee these rights. It was in part on these ideological grounds that the “Reagan revolution” was carried out—in the name of “small” and “hands-off” government—even though the Reagan administration oversaw the largest buildup of repressive governmental apparatuses in U.S. history, amassing the largest debt in the history of the world. These apparatuses were used to effect a massive and sweeping redistribution of wealth from the poor to the wealthy. This redistribution was carried out by attacking the collective gains of the social struggles of the 1960s (the last spurt of capitalist expansion) in order to check the rapidly falling rate of profit in the heartland of imperialism in the current (and irreversible?) long wave of capitalist decline. While this attack concentrated at first on breaking unions, rolling back wages, and stripping the social safety net—and led to the unbridled speculation that culminated in the S&L crisis and BCCI—it now mounts an intensifying campaign to break down the advances of progressive forces in American universities through direct attacks like pc-bashing as we;; as through their recuperation via liberal “technologies” like multicultural-ism.
One might think that this is another instance, following Mr. Greenfield’s suggestion in his first letter (see A.O. #3), where a good theory was used by Reagan and his epigones improperly and opportunistically and thus should not be discounted because of it. The state-sponsored terrorism of Reaganism was launched under the cover of an anti-”big government” ideological offensive, and in the name of freedom (as is pc-bashing). This contradiction points toward a fundamental contradiction of liberal social theory, and more importantly of bourgeois society, in which the State is seen as a neutral “public” instrument guaranteeing civil rights, and at the same time is used to pursue the consolidation of “private” power (i.e., the power of the capitalist class). The dilemma of how to understand and justify this state of affairs was shared by the men who “framed” the Constitution. The Constitution outlines the powers of the State and its separation of these powers into executive, legislative, and judicial branches. It was widely feared among such men that the State might “overstep” its powers and interfere with their rights as “private” citizens, that is, with their right to conduct their affairs as they might see fit. In this state of anxiety, and amid the clamor for equality among the small farmers and petty tradesmen (those with a bit of private property), the Bill of Rights was appended to the Constitution to protect the rights of the “individual” from the State. Libertarians continue to share this distrust of the State, even as it is absolutely necessary to the reproduction of bourgeois class rule.
4. The Mystification of “Public” and “Private”
So how does the State—as a neutral administrative organ of society, and a voluntary union of the people instituted to guarantee their civil liberties—become such a threat to freedom? The solution to this riddle may be approached through an examination of the relation of “public” and “private” in bourgeois society. The “framers” of the Constitution were interested in protecting the rights and freedoms of people like themselves: that is, white men of sufficient wealth and property (the emergent bourgeois class). Their affairs were to be “private”: that is, not subject to the “public” scrutiny of the State (or the laboring majority). This would only be a problem for them if the State were “usurped” by “the masses.” Madison’s famous “Federalist Paper #10” argues that while a representative government will check the power of minority factions, only when power is separated and dispersed will there be an assurance that a majority faction could be neutralized. The signers of the Constitution were quite clear that it was the majority without property which posed the greatest threat to their privileges. It was that hero of bourgeois democracy, John Adams, who argued that because those men “who are wholly destitute of property, are also too little acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent on other men to have a will of their own,” they must not be allowed to meddle in affairs of State. Such men would not respect the prerogatives of those who had private property—that is, of those who had control of the means of production.
The Bill of Rights was to guarantee the maintenance of private power against the State, should the State fall into the hands of “the people.” What this meant in practice was keeping the State apparatuses out of the hands of the vast majority. It was easy to generate widespread popular support for this solution to the problem of freedom because bourgeois revolutions (like that of the United States) are made possible in part by a popular distrust of the (feudal) State. Once this private power is organized by the bourgeoisie and directed against the majority of the population, the relatively disorganized resistance of the majority cannot brake the consolidation of the bourgeois order. Thus the revolutionary leadership during the American revolution was distrustful of the common people, but had to organize, mobilize, and arm them (excluding slaves, American Indians, and women, whom they did not dare arm) to fight the British without risking that they might take the power of governance into their own hands. While there were numerous attempts to do just that, the common soldiers were successfully demobilized after the victory. The Constitution and Bill of Rights formalized the victory of the bourgeois revolution over not only English capital with its vestiges of the feudal order, but over the mass of people as well.
This was accomplished in part by the formalization of the constitutional rights protecting “private” interests. Thus we have the right to free speech, but not to effective speech . . . the right to free association, but not to real participation in government . . . and we are protected as private citizens from the government by “constitutional guarantees”—in principle though generally not in practice—but we are not protected from the private power of corporations, either as employees or as citizens. In fact, because corporations are treated as individuals by the State, they are largely protected from public scrutiny. Remember how much public pressure was required before Dow/Corning could be forced to give up its internal documents demonstrating the unreasonable health risks that follow from silicone breast implant surgery. This fetishization of privacy makes it difficult for most people to recognize the effects that follow from the fact that corporations are not—and cannot be, as capitalist institutions which function through the impetus of competition—publicly accountable.
5. Private Rights and Private Property
It is only when rights are located in the human nature of autonomous individuals that the State can be considered a voluntary union formed by people who already possess these abstract and self- evident rights. They can do so because the newly formed society corresponds to their already constituted human or moral nature. How do we explain why it is that this leads always to the freedom of a select few, and the often severe curtailment of freedom for the many? This is because libertarian political philosophy takes the private property owner, abstracted from his historical and social relations, as the free individual (the only individual, in fact, of the time who could in any useful sense be considered free). It is only the private property owner, for example, who can be trusted to make decisions which protect the rights of the capitalist class: principally the right to exploit the labor of others for personal profit and the right to exercise, as a class, hegemony over bourgeois society in order to reproduce the means of production of their wealth.
Private property is that form of property used to generate wealth, whether through the collection of rents or the more direct exploitation of labor. Within bourgeois philosophies like libertarianism “private” property is conflated with “individual” property (that property which is used or consumed by individuals in the course of reproducing their lives). It is through this conflation that private rights appear to be the guarantor of egalitarian democracy, when in fact they have as their very basis the private property form itself. Thus the individual with rights in bourgeois society is the individual who controls private property: this is, in fact, the occluded content of libertarian, and indeed all liberal, discourse. Thus the individual right to speak freely (and, implicitly, effectively) is accorded first and foremost to the individual as a member of the capitalist class, that is as an individual whose power is not that of an individual, but of a class which holds a monopoly over the means of production of commodities in capitalist society. And it is because of this monopoly—which is also largely a monopoly over the media—that the owner of private property can appear as an individual “like everyone else.”
This mystification of “private” and “public” within bourgeois society is reproduced more or less spontaneously precisely because capitalist relations produce the overwhelming majority of individuals so that they appear to themselves both as the sole possessors of their own labor power and as autonomous consumers who may freely choose which commodities to buy. While for a fortunate few the right to “privacy” enables them to use private property as a way of exploiting the labor of others, for most of the rest the right to privacy gives them “control” over only their “private” experience and idiosyncratic preferences (preferably exercised as consumers of commodities). It is perhaps only at moments like that characterized by the present presidential election—with its protest votes, its “insurgency” candidates (i.e., “insiders” posing as “outsiders”), and high voter disparticipation—when it is more than ever apparent that it is not “we the people” who steer the ship of state; it is not we who have the institutional power to determine how our society is administered (what gets produced, who produces it, under what conditions, how it is distributed, who to, and so on). To understand this problem we must finally turn to the question of the State within bourgeois society.
6. The Distrust of the State
What is the relation between the private property form of production (capitalism) and the bourgeois State? I earlier remarked that the “framers” held a contradictory view of the State: it was, on the one hand, a neutral apparatus for the administration of general human interests, and, on the other, a potential threat to those rights (what we now see are the rights of the private property owner) should it be usurped by an unscrupulous faction (what we now see would mean women, people of color, lesbians and gays, workers, etc.). What is hidden in this contradiction and its attendant anxiety is the reality of the State in bourgeois society as the most concentrated and formalized apparatus of class domination for the purpose of administering, reproducing and extending where possible capitalist relations of production. The State is that apparatus of bourgeois society which has been abstracted from society (giving it the appearance of neutrality) precisely so that the competitive private concerns of individual capitalists can most effectively be synthesized into policies generally of benefit to the most powerful sectors of the capitalist class. As such it is the single most powerful weapon of the bourgeois class, geared not simply to administer bourgeois society, but to secure the best terms for the national bourgeoisie and to mediate social struggles in their interests.
As an instrument of class domination the State cannot guarantee the rights it purports to uphold for everyone equally: despite claims symbolized by icons of bourgeois society like the blind lady justice. Neither can it work equally in the interests of all: the interest of the exploiter of labor and the exploited laborer are irreconcilable for as long as the relationship of exploitation persists (that is, for as long as capitalism exists). But the capitalist class cannot rule by itself, and must in fact rely upon the work of others in the reproduction of bourgeois society. These others (administrators, politicians, intellectuals, generals, police, judges, technicians, etc.) are also drawn into the task of ruling, and their interests are represented to varying degrees in the operations of the State. As such the State is able and finds it necessary to extend its “civil rights” to others in varying degrees—including those rights it extends to marginalized groups which have engaged successfully in political struggle—but only to the extent that it does not interfere with its role in administering the reproduction of class society.
The Black Panther Party discovered this limitation when trying to provide an alternative circuit of social administration within largely poor urban black communities, setting up health clinics, public transportation, and citizen police patrols. These attempts were met with a massive retaliation by the FBI aimed at destroying the Black Panther Party and rendering ineffective its prominent members. In the end the federal government assassinated 28 of its leaders and imprisoned hundreds more, some of whom remain in prison to this day. Where possible, however, bourgeois society—and particularly that form of it which exists now in late capitalism—depends upon the kind of relatively mobile and pluralistic population that such rights (however limited they are in practice for most people) help to make possible.
It is this abstraction of the private property owner from social relations which allows not only for the abstraction of human nature and the State from civil society, but it also of rights in general from society. This abstraction of rights is the precondition for libertarian political practice. Another way of putting this is to say that libertarians fetishize free speech by abstracting speech from its material conditions of existence, from its relationships to other social practices, and to the apparatuses of bourgeois institutions. This gap in the libertarian view of the social is nowhere more obvious than in the remarks of Nadine Strossen, quoted by Mr. Greenfield, in which she claims that “[p]sychological studies reveal that whenever there is an attempt to censor speech, the censored speech—for that very reason—becomes more appealing to many people” (emphasis added). This seems to suggest that psychological processes operate without regard to any definite content, as mere abstractions. In such a case there should be little difference between the attractiveness of the censored slogans “all power to the worker’s councils” and “don’t worry, be happy” during a revolutionary uprising. Speech, in other words, does not arise out of abstract psychologies or as an expression of ineluctable human rights: rather speech is an historical and social practice used to express, mediate, and secure human needs.
7. Beyond the Politics of Rights
Free speech, elevated to a political or moral principle—like all such bourgeois rights—is abstracted from the conditions which might make it possible for individuals (and, most especially, marginalized groups representing needs not met within current social relations) to “speak freely,” in great part by neglecting to demand that they be able to connect speech to other social practices in ways which are capable of transforming the very conditions under which they might speak in the future. A right which is a right in principle but not in practice is of course no right at all. Mr. Greenfield’s insistence on free-speech for all as a constitutionally guaranteed right is both admirable to the extent that it wants to make good on the promises made by bourgeois society, and naive (and indeed reactionary) to the extent that in not recognizing the limits of speech as a social practice it helps to reproduce already existing relations.
This fetishization of abstract rights leads—when applied evenly to the real world of class society—to uneven (that is, to both progressive and reactionary) results. Because libertarian philosophy merely reproduces the contradictions of bourgeois ideology, both in trying to make good on the claims of bourgeois social theory, and choking on the instances where bourgeois society denies such freedoms, leads libertarians to alternatively act progressively and reactionarily in relation to the development of social events. The ACLU may, for instance, uphold the rights of fascists to speak, without questioning the relationship between what fascists say (and what they do) and their silencing of those who would challenge the institutional racism which underpins social relations in the United States.
We might take the women’s movement as a case in point. The women’s movement, taken as a whole, is composed of many different tendencies which reflect the different positions of women in society. As such, it embraces overlapping and contradictory practices. We can gauge the character of libertarian discourse by observing its effects in the political cauldron within which women wage their protracted struggle for reproductive freedom. Many of the speakers at the April 5th march on Washington, for instance, grounded this freedom, either wholly or in part, within the general protection of the “right to privacy” granted by the Constitution. This is not of itself bad since it is necessary to argue that women require protection from a State which is heavily invested in maintaining patriarchal relations of use to it. Indeed, important battles have been won under the slogans of “a woman’s right to choose” and “get out of my womb”: but unless the tactical battle for “rights” within bourgeois society is understood as part of a more coherent long-term strategy to transform patriarchal (and necessarily, capitalist) relations, many problems arise.
The argument for “women’s rights”—conceived within and against the limits of a social theory of an abstract and atomistic equality—is exceedingly vulnerable to reversal through the same logic: in the call to protect the rights of the unborn, or the demand that the “father” have what amounts to the right to veto a “mother’s” reproductive choice. “Operation Rescue” succeeds far more on these grounds than through their more visible “moral” incantations. The progressive tendencies of the women’s movement do not remain within a libertarian logic, however, since the argument for women’s rights entails the demand for the rights of a marginalized collectivity. In this case rights are no longer seen as strictly the “private” concern of individuals, but a “public” concern of the vast majority of women.
In the most radical currents of the women’s movement, then, the struggle for “the right to choose” is understood to be a tactical battle which takes the form of a transitional demand: here reproductive freedom is understood to be only one of many necessary steps toward the securement of social and political equality beyond the limits of the private property form. The struggle for federally funded abortion on demand—so that it will not only be “women of means” who can afford a safe abortion—is fought in acknowledgement of this. It involves the recognition that the empowerment of women is inexorably linked to the socialization (and not the privatization) of both the costs and the responsibilities of reproduction. Thus this transitional demand is soon followed by others which call for the socialization of what has been known within in bourgeois society as “motherhood”: this necessarily involves a critique of the nuclear family as a patriarchal institution corresponding to the private property form and currently indispensable to the reproduction of capitalist society. Such an orientation cannot—and does not wish to—avoid the question of revolution.
8. Libertarians on the Eve of Revolution
We might finally ask Mr. Greenfield if he can imagine a more expansive realm of human freedom than that offered in the current social order. Because libertarians begin with the autonomous individual possessing self-evident rights, human freedom cannot be adequately understood as a product of human labor and struggle in history. The concept of revolution is, thus, a troubling one for them. It is much easier to contemplate the gradual reform of society through the principles of universal suffrage and civil liberties. It is only on such terms that libertarians can insist on the right to “privacy,” which in capitalism is ultimately the right for a small minority of individuals (as a class) to exploit the labor of the vast majority without public scrutiny. Ultimately these protections are acceptable to petty-bourgeois libertarians because they are enough to secure for them the fruits of bourgeois democracy. It is not enough for the rest of humanity.
If Mr. Greenfield is a stooge of the administration, the ACLU is sadly a stooge of bourgeois society (as are such well-intentioned consumer advocates as Ralph Nader). They ultimately serve to position individuals within the boundaries of bourgeois society. We are told to struggle toward the ideal of a democratic society, even as such struggles valorize and reproduce the social relations of which we have been victims in the first place. (Here we might also locate MTV’s attempt to “rock the vote” and H. Ross Perot’s “quixotic” populist presidential campaign to reclaim bourgeois society from the politicians.) It is also true, however, that the ACLU is not simply a stooge of bourgeois society. In trying to keep the government to its word it can also frustrate (but only that) the State’s efforts to fulfill its real mandate. Within bourgeois society it becomes necessary for oppressed and exploited groups to demand their “right to privacy”: which is ultimately a demand not for “privacy” from society in general, but from the scrutiny and control of the State and their oppressors.
If the ACLU is to break from the interests of bourgeois society, it will have to exceed its policy in defense of civil rights (i.e., not simply give it up) with a more basic policy which sees beyond this society based on private property, to one based on the collective ownership of the means of production. It is worth noting that, otherwise, at a time of revolution when the expropriators are expropriated, the ACLU will have to side with the counter-revolution and chide the revolutionaries their break with bourgeois decorum. Happily, the fate of such a revolution will depend little on which side of the barricades we find Mr. Greenfield.
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