Freedom & National Security (was Re: The heart of a leftist/Last time)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Jul 13 22:38:00 PDT 2000


Brad wrote:


>>>Immediate potential recall and replacement of representatives?
>>>Freedom of the press
>>
>>This is one of several parts at
>><http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1840/free-press/index.htm>
>>. This one's at
>><http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1840/free-press/ch04.htm>:
>>
>>Rheinische Zeitung
>>No. 132, Supplement
>>May 12 1842
>>
>>Karl Marx
>>On Freedom of the Press
>
>Doug! You know as well as I do that re-epistemological break
>young-Hegelian bourgeois-rights-loving stuff doesn't count...

I don't think Marx ever thought that free speech was undesirable. Instead, he began to ask such questions as, "what are material conditions for freedom?" For instance, material conditions that give rise to the rhetoric of national security are antithetical to freedoms of many kinds. For instance, freedom of information is unavailable in the United States due to the National Security State's desire to classify information, and this lack of freedom of information destroys democracy, as it did in the USSR.

Yoshie



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