Re: threat to free speech

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

The creation of a global civil society is proceeding even more rapidly. But
it is a deeply contradictory process.

 I favour the Gramscian view that civil society is an important arena for
struggle about which we should be optimistic. However it is nevertheless
bound by bourgeois, capitalist, constraints, and largely serves to
reproduce and perpetuate the existing exploitative and oppressive social order.

We will have to be even more vigilant about conventions of appropriate
discourse, which have in any case  increasingly been observed among the
network of lists "owned" by individual owners over the last five years. The
worrying report below confirms the direction we are having to go in anyway.

Freedom is the recognition of necessity and already if you do not have in
mind the conventions of the particular list you will either be ignored or
at worst expelled. None of us is in fact at this moment "free" to post
anything we like to say. We are all obliged to consider a whole number of
constraints.

We shall survive this development, and find ways to make the power
relations of the existing society more transparent and more ready for -
supercession - shall we say?

Nevertheless although I am very critical of what I see as ultra-leftism and
dogmatism, it is also true that the present environment is one almost like
the period of "legal marxism", where the pressure from state institutions
bends the debate towards reformism.

It is a highly contradictory process.

Chris Burford


At 31/05/02 20:10 -0700, you wrote:

> Sam Lanfranco posted this to the labor-l list.  Scary.
>
> From: "Benoit Tabaka" <benoit.tabaka@xxxxxxxxxx
>  Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 22:40:01 +0200
>
>  Declan,
>
>  A short piece of news from France. Yesterday, a french lower Court
> decided
>  for the first time in Europe that a webmaster is responsible for
> comments
>  published by Net surfers on unmoderated forums of its Internet site.
> This
>  webmaster was sued for libel.
>
>  This ruling sets a precedent whereby the webmaster (thus publisher) of
> a
>  website can be held responsible for what is published in an
> non-moderated
>  forum. This is the first step to the end for unmoderated online
> discussion
>  on french (and perhaps european) websites.
>
>  French décision :
>  http://www.foruminternet.org/documents/jurisprudence/lire.phtml?id=323
>
>  Best regards,
>
>  Benoît Tabaka
>
> --
>
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
>
> Tel. 530-898-5321
> E-Mail michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx