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

[Michael Hoover]

> Brad wrote:
> >>>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?"  
> Yoshie

Marx opposed state press censorship throughout his life although he didn't
write much about it after indictment on several counts related to writing 
and editorship of *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* in 1848-49.  By that time he 
was not defender of press freedom per se, but proponent (as speech to the 
court in one of his trials indicates) of militant press that would expose 
injustice and assist in destroying existing order.  Later, he wrote bit 
about bourgeois press distortions of working class, and, in couple of 
reports to First International, of efforts to prohibit working class press 
freedoms.  Michael Hoover (who has now three times posted this to list)