Karl Marx:
On Freedom of the Press - an Excerpt
From the standpoint of the idea, it is self-evident that freedom of the press has a justification quite different from that of censorship because it is itself an embodiment of the idea, an embodiment of freedom, a positive good, whereas censorship is an embodiment of unfreedom, the polemic of a world outlook of semblance against the world outlook of essence; it has a merely negative nature.
….But does not freedom of the press exist in the land of censorship? The press in general is a realization of human freedom. Consequently, where there is a press there is freedom of the press.
True, in the land of censorship the state has no freedom of the press, but one organ of the state has it, viz., the government. Apart from the fact that official government documents enjoy perfect freedom of the press, does not the censor exercise daily an unconditional freedom of the press, if not directly, then indirectly?
Writers are, as it were, his secretaries. When the secretary does not express the opinion of his chief, the latter strikes out the botch. Hence the censorship makes the press…
Freedom is so much the essence of man that even its opponents implement it while combating its reality; they want to appropriate for, themselves as a most precious ornament what they have rejected as an ornament of human nature.
No man combats freedom; at most he combats the freedom of others. Hence every kind of freedom has always existed, only at one time as a special privilege, at another as a universal right.
The question has now for the first time been given a consistent meaning. It is not a question whether freedom of the press ought to exist, for it always exists. The question is whether freedom of the press is a privilege of particular individuals or whether it is a privilege of the human mind. The question is whether a right of one side ought to be a wrong for the other side. The question is whether "freedom of the mind" has more right than "freedom against the mind".
If, however, the "free press" and "freedom of the press" as the realization of "universal freedom" are to be rejected, then this applies still more to censorship and the censored press as the realization of a special freedom, for how can the species be good if the genus is bad? If the speaker were consistent he would have to reject not the free press, but the press as a whole. According to him, the press would only be good if it were not a product of freedom, i.e., not a human product. Hence in general only animals or gods would have the right to a press.
Or ought we perhaps — the speaker dare not say it outright — to suppose divine inspiration of the government and of the speaker himself?
If a private person boasts of divine inspiration, there is only one speaker in our society who can refute him officially, viz., the psychiatrist.
English history, however, has sufficiently well demonstrated how the assertion of divine inspiration from above gives rise to the counter-assertion of divine inspiration from below; Charles I went to the scaffold as the result of divine inspiration from below…
Under the frames of mind of the bad press he includes "pride, which recognizes no authority in church and state", "envy", which preaches abolition of the aristocracy, and other things, which we shall deal with later. For the time being, let us be satisfied with the question: Whence does the speaker know that this isolated element is the good? If the universal powers of life are bad and we have heard that the bad is omnipotent, that it is what influences the masses, what or who has still any right to claim to be good? The arrogant assertion is this: my individuality is the good, those few individuals who are in accord with my individuality are the good, and the wicked, bad press refuses to recognize it. The bad press!
If one wants to speak of two kinds of press, the distinction between them must be drawn from the nature of the press itself, not from considerations lying outside it. The censored press or the free press, one of these two must be the good or the bad press. The debate turns precisely on whether the censored press or the free press is good or bad, i.e., whether it is in the nature of the press to have a free or un-free existence. To make the bad press a refutation of the free press is to maintain that the free press is bad and the censored press good, which is precisely what had to be proved.
Base frames of mind, personal intrigues, infamies, occur alike in the censored and the free press. Therefore the generic difference between them is not that they produce individual products of this or that kind; flowers grow also in swamps. We are concerned here with the essence, the inner character, which distinguishes the censored from the free press.
A free press that is bad does not correspond to its essence. The censored press with its hypocrisy, its lack of character, its eunuch's language, its dog-like tail-wagging, merely realizes the inner conditions of its essential nature.
The censored press remains bad even when it turns out good products, for these products are good only insofar as they represent the free press within the censored press, and insofar as it is not in their character to be products of the censored press. The free press remains good even when it produces bad products, for the latter are deviations from the essential nature of the free press. A eunuch remains a bad human being even when he has a good voice. Nature remains good even when she produces monstrosities.
The essence of the free press is the characterful, rational, moral essence of freedom. The character of the censored press is the characterless monster of unfreedom; it is a civilized monster, a perfumed abortion.
Or does it still need to be proved that freedom of the press is in accord with the essence of the press, whereas censorship contradicts it? Is it not self-evident that external barriers to a spiritual life are not part of the inner nature of this life, that they deny this life and do not affirm it?
In order really to justify censorship, the speaker would have had to prove that censorship is part of the essence of freedom of the press; instead he proves that freedom is not part of man's essence. He rejects the whole genus in order to obtain one good species, for is not freedom after all the generic essence of all spiritual existence, and therefore of the press as well? In order to abolish the possibility of evil, he abolishes the possibility of good and realizes evil, for only that which is a realization of freedom can be humanly good…
Censorship does not abolish the struggle, it makes it one-sided, it converts an open struggle into a hidden one, it converts a struggle over principles into a struggle of principle without power against power without principle. The true censorship, based on the very essence of freedom of the press, is criticism. This is the tribunal which freedom of the press gives rise to of itself. Censorship is criticism as a monopoly of the government. But does not criticism lose its rational character if it is not open but secret, if it is not theoretical but practical, if it is not above parties but itself a party, if it operates not with the sharp knife of reason but with the blunt scissors of arbitrariness, if it only exercises criticism but will not submit to it, if it disavows itself during its realization, and, finally, if it is so uncritical as to mistake an individual person for universal wisdom, peremptory orders for rational statements, ink spots for patches of sunlight, the crooked deletions of the censor for mathematical constructions, and crude force for decisive arguments?
During our exposal, we have shown how the fantastic, unctuous, soft-hearted mysticism of the speaker turns into the hard-heartedness of pettifogging mental pragmatism and into the narrow mindedness of an unprincipled empirical calculation. ..
Montesquieu has already taught us that despotism is more convenient to apply than legality and Machiavelli asserts that for princes the bad has better consequences than the good. Therefore, if we do not want to confirm the old Jesuitical maxim that a good end — and we doubt even the goodness of the end — justifies bad means, we have above all to investigate whether censorship by its essence is a good means.
The speaker is right in calling the censorship law a preventive measure, it is a precautionary measure of the police against freedom, but he is wrong in calling the press law a repressive measure. It is the rule of freedom itself which makes itself the yardstick of its own exceptions. The censorship measure is not a law. The press law is not a measure.
In the press law, freedom punishes. In the censorship law, freedom is punished. The censorship law is a law of suspicion against freedom. The press law is a vote of confidence which freedom gives itself. The press law punishes the abuse of freedom. The censorship law punishes freedom as an abuse. It treats freedom as a criminal, or is it not regarded in every sphere as a degrading punishment to be under police supervision? The censorship law has only the form of a law. The press law is a real law.
The press law is a real law because it is the positive existence of freedom. It regards freedom as the normal state of the press, the press as the mode of existence of freedom, and hence only comes into conflict with a press offence as an exception that contravenes its own rules and therefore annuls itself. Freedom of the press asserts itself as a press law, against attacks on freedom of the press itself, i.e., against press offences. The press law declares freedom to be inherent in the nature of the criminal. Hence what he has done against freedom he has done against himself and this self-injury appears to him as a punishment in which he sees a recognition of his freedom.
The press law, therefore, is far from being a repressive measure against freedom of the press, a mere means of preventing the repetition of a crime through fear of punishment. On the contrary, the absence of press legislation must be regarded as an exclusion of freedom of the press from the sphere of legal freedom, for legally recognized freedom exists in the state as law. Laws are in no way repressive measures against freedom, any more than the law of gravity is a repressive measure against motion, because while, as the law of gravitation, it governs the eternal motions of the celestial bodies, as the law of falling it kills me if I violate it and want to dance in the air. Laws are rather the positive, clear, universal norms in which freedom has acquired an impersonal, theoretical existence independent of the arbitrariness of the individual. A statute-book is a people's bible of freedom.
Therefore the press law is the legal recognition of freedom of the press. It constitutes right, because it is the positive existence of freedom. It must therefore exist, even if it is never put into application, as in North America, whereas censorship, like slavery, can never become lawful, even if it exists a thousand times over as a law.
There are no actual preventive laws. Law prevents only as a command. It only becomes effective law when it is infringed, for it is true law only when in it the unconscious natural law of freedom has become conscious state law. Where the law is real law, i.e., a form of existence of freedom, it is the real existence of freedom for man. Laws therefore, cannot prevent a man's actions, for they are indeed the inner laws of life of his action itself, the conscious reflections of his life. Hence law withdraws into the background in the face of man's life as a life of freedom, and only when his actual behavior has shown that he has ceased to obey the natural law of freedom does law in the form of state law compel him to be free, just as the laws of physics confront me as something alien only when my life has ceased to be the life of these laws, when it has been struck by illness. Hence a preventive law is a meaningless contradiction.
You think it wrong to put birds in cages. Is not the cage a preventive measure against birds of prey, bullets and storms? You think it barbaric to blind nightingales, but it does not seem to you meaningless at all barbaric to put out the eyes of the press with the sharp pens of the censorship. You regard it as despotic to cut a free person's hair against his will, but the censorship daily cuts into the flesh of thinking people and allows only bodies without hearts, submissive bodies which show no reaction, to pass as healthy!
Rheinische Zeitung
No. 132, Supplement
May 12, 1842
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