ON REVOLUTIONARY FREEDOM
Morin, Edgar
The case of Republica [the Portuguese socialist paper taken over by the Communists and MFAJ is not simply a revelation of the internal conflicts affecting the destiny of the Portuguese...
...Appropriation of control by a 336 STANLEY PLASTRIK ruling elite reduces the majority of citizens to carrying out purely routine tasks...
...Divine Right monarchy caused God to speak through its mouth...
...The control over information that is invoked to construct a true socialism is precisely that which permits the construction of a pseudosocialism and, at the same time, to conceal the reality...
...If in the U.S.S.R...
...We are the more receptive to this model of thought since it harmonizes with the notion, carved on our school benches, that the French Revolution of 1789, when in danger, saved itself by the Reign of Terror...
...Freedom of the press is both a screen and an arm of the counterrevolution...
...EDGAR MORIN PORTUGAL'S DANGLING REVOLUTION 337...
...It is not just the intellectual's fetish, or a luxury of a revived liberal...
...We tend to believe too often that information originates in "superstructures" and in "formal freedoms" that are secondary in relation to real freedoms...
...All repression of information becomes an oppression of society...
...The case of Republica [the Portuguese socialist paper taken over by the Communists and MFAJ is not simply a revelation of the internal conflicts affecting the destiny of the Portuguese revolution...
...Without that, socialism turns into its opposite, becomes the socialism of "His Master's Voice...
...given, finally, that the stifling of dissonant voices and of multiple sources of information ineluctably leads to the establishment of a monopoly of information, that is, an official truth always defined by those in power, two questions are raised: • Does not invoking a revolutionary emergency in order to sacrifice freedom of the press cover up, in fact, the setting up of a permanent structure...
...Otherwise, not only are we not prepared to emerge from one of the greatest tragedies of history, but we are ready to begin it all over again...
...Freedom of expression that is uncontrolled by the powers that be does more than satisfy the decadent whims of the bourgeois intelligentsia...
...Hence, the problem of freedom of information becomes central...
...If the objective of a socialist society is to constitute a society without classes, thus liquidating class antagonisms, it can be animated only by the play of oppositions, of contradictions, of antagonisms at the level of ideas and information...
...In addition, — given the absence of any model of democratic socialism...
...This same appropriation makes it possible to offer the appearance of an emancipated people rather than the reality of a people deprived of all means of competitive elections in the factory, in the municipality, in the electoral district, in the nation...
...We must also inquire into the relations between the structure of information and the structure of society under a bureaucratic regime...
...It is also a revelation of our own capacity to analyze and pinpoint, politically and sociologically, the problem of freedom of the press...
...What is its model...
...This paradox can easily be "resolved" through a way of thinking whose logic goes as follows: 1. Freedom of the press is a "formal freedom" and, during the development of the revolution, it becomes a superficial luxury for bourgeois intellectuals...
...To understand this relationship we must link what the term "information" signifies in the language of the press with what it signifies in the sciences of organization that have issued from cybernetics...
...Thus, the democratic and libertarian organization of information is a key problem for a socialist society...
...In an organism, the "genetic code" commands both development and survival...
...At the moment we know there are hesitations and uncertainties...
...All particularist domination masks itself behind a universal principle...
...The commanding relationship of information over energy in the domain of physics is reproduced in the sociological relationship of exploiter to exploited...
...The monopolist capitalization of information by a single apparatus is, in fact, the peak of monopolistic capitalism...
...The notion that we must pay for the acquisition of a bit of equality by the loss of freedom must be denounced as a reactionary myth...
...We know now that science can only exist because it establishes a milieu of researchers in which confrontation of antagonistic theories and exercise of freedom are possible...
...the bourgeoisie caused man to speak...
...It is subordinate to the winning of real freedoms for the toiling masses...
...Freedom prevents not the proletarian from eating, but the tyrant from sleeping...
...Will we be capable of a policy and practice of revolutionary freedom...
...3. If a conflict develops between freedom of the press and the development of the revolution, .the latter can progress only at the expense of the former, which increasingly becomes the bearer of reaction...
...2. In the unfolding of the revolutionary process freedom of the press becomes a danger, since large numbers of people are still subject to the old, dominant ideology...
...If freedom of the press is limited or falsified in bourgeois societies, the problem in a socialist society is not to annul but to enlarge it...
...Does not the idea of self-defense of the revolutionary process from reactionary intoxication conceal, actually, the propagation of a new intoxication, using the word "revolution" as a cover...
...The problem of freedom of the press presents us with a paradox...
...These variants have their origin in the social organization forged in the U.S.S.R...
...In human societies, information thus understood covers the rules, the norms, the things forbidden, the know-how, the knowledge, including information of the press—that is, everything touching upon control and command...
...In a machine, information is the "program" that commands the flow of energy...
...Thus, monopolization of information by a minority corresponds not only to a monopolization of power but to generalized enslavement...
...Many of those for whom freedom of the press is both an absolute good and a progressive demand, if it concerns a fascist or reactionary regime, consider this same freedom a subordinate good and a reactionary danger when it concerns a revolutionary process...
...this prevents the natural tendency toward dogmatism from transforming science into its opposite...
...If the revolution moves ahead at the price of smothering the press, it turns its back upon the hope of an original, Portuguese form of socialism and, with less and less originality, steers toward a monotonous model of bureaucratic socialism...
...This statement appeared in Nouvel Observateur, June 30 1975, and is reprinted with permission...
...In this sense, to control information is to control that which controls, to command that which commands, to formulate that which gives form...
...given the organizational virulence of the apparatus model...
...There do exist different variants of bureaucratic socialism whose common trait is the hegemony of a single apparatus that tends to concentrate all power in its hands, beginning with power over information...
...Whither Portugal...
...But we also know that nowhere in the world is there a model for democratic socialism...
...Hence the first problem that must be posed is that of the development of the Portuguese revolution itself...
...Similarly, society can find its truth only through confrontations...
...A cleavage "revolution/reaction" is automatically set up over this question, and those who defend a piece of paper rather than thinking about how to feed a famished people and how to teach the alphabet to an illiterate population are cast upon the garbage heap of history...
...From this point on, any protest against an attack upon freedom of the press is necessarily seen as expressing an attitude of moderation, of slowing down the revolution—even a counterrevolutionary attitude...
...But the Terror of 1793 had value and meaning only in a situation of extreme emergency and peril for a revolution the first of whose three precepts was "Liberty...
...class domination and an exploitation of man by man has been reinstituted, this power is based upon an elitist and hierarchical appropriation of the means of information by the Party...
...It is a problem for the organization of society...
...It is clear that, in the first instance, this implied the silence of God and, in the second, the silence of man...
...From which follows a radical, implacable, distressing yet reassuring conclusion: If there is a loss of freedoms that must be considered formal, there is no progress in freedoms that can be considered real...
...between the years 1917 and 1937 when the concentration of all power in the hands of the Party apparatus was brought to perfection...
...One of the first conditions for such a society is plurality of the sources of information...
...The apparatus of sham Marxism causes the people to speak through its mouth, but it is clear to carry through this ventriloquist operation it must silence the people...
...It is a socalled progressive society without the right to strike, with internal passports, swollen police controls, "Gulag Archipelago...
...A very serious gap in sociological theories, bourgeois or Marxist, prevents us from grasping the profound relationship between the organization of information and the organization of society...
...This was the great discovery of the Polish and Hungarian intellectuals in 1956-57, of the Czechoslovakian intellectuals in 1968, when they realized that the freedom of expression to which they aspired corresponded to the needs of the workers and peasants...
Vol. 22 • September 1975 • No. 4
