-----Original Message----- From: "Khumalo, Sandile (S)" <[email protected]> Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 09:54:34 To: <[email protected]> Subject:
What might Marx have made of the government's moves to institute the
Protection of Information Bill in SA today?
JOHN HIGGINS: Censorship and Karl Marx
Free press needed to shatter the state's 'arrogant illusion'
Published: 2010/08/06 07:07:22 AM
WITH this striking image - "a people's statute book is its bible of
freedom" - a young journalist reminded the public of the threat to
democracy posed by new censorship laws introduced in 19th- century
Germany.
Against him stood politicians, who argued that the new censorship
mechanisms - described of course as intended to improve press freedom -
were "a lesser evil than the excesses of the press"; others who
"repudiated freedom of the press as tactless, indiscreet speech"; and
still others who, though personally "disposed in favour of freedom of
the press", couldn't allow themselves to demonstrate public support for
it on account of their "feelings of dependence" on the government of the
day.
The main problem with censorship, the journalist argued, is that it
makes critical thinking on social issues "a monopoly of the government".
Without press freedom, "state reason" becomes the only basis for the
understanding of the social and economic moment; the "government's
understanding" alone then sets the terms and conditions for public
debate. "The essence of the censorship in general," argued our young
author, "is based on the arrogant imaginary idea that the state has of
its officials."
According to the author, press freedom is essential to puncturing this
arrogant illusion by making the actual workings of the state - its
successes and failings - accessible to the public. Only through such
openness can a society enjoy the benefits of the full public debate that
is democracy in action.
A free press is a central institution in the creation and maintenance of
a deliberative democracy, the democratic space in which "rulers and
ruled alike have the opportunity of criticising their principles and
demands, no longer in a relation of subordination, but on terms of
equality as citizens".
The press, wrote our young journalist, is "the ubiquitous vigilant eye
of a people's soul"; it provides the truly public space in which social
and political struggles can be articulated and debated, and with a
consequently much better chance of their being understood and resolved.
Without a free press, there is little hope of meeting the challenges set
by difficult and changing economic circumstances, or developing the
active democracy necessary to counter the deep structures of
disempowerment left by the authoritarian and corrupt former regime.
Such arguments still constitute the classic grounds for the defence of
press freedom, particularly so in relation to the reporting of
government action and policy.
Who was it that put these arguments forward in the face of the new
government's censorship measures in 1840s Germany? It was none other
than Karl Marx.
Marx is not usually thought of as one of the great defenders of a free
press, whether by those for, against, or now merely indifferent to the
dogmas associated with Orthodox Marxism. Yet there can be no doubt that
the young Marx's passionate defence of press freedom in the Germany of
his day can be considered as the real starting point of his career as a
critical thinker and political activist, one never afraid to speak the
truth to power and to use the press to do so.
Indeed, if we cast aside the Cold War spectacles that focus us on the
strangely inert and restricted figure of Marx as the "founder of
Marxism", there emerges the much more lively and contradictory figure of
Marx as one of the 19th century's greatest journalists and public
intellectuals. Gifted with a sharp and satiric pen, spurred on by an
insatiable curiosity for the facts, endowed with a formidable analytic
and intellectual resources and fired by a desire to speak for the
working classes and to see the establishment of a better society, Marx
was the very model of a public intellectual. For Marx, a free press, and
the public space of debate it enabled, was an indispensable component of
the democratic society to come.
Though Orthodox or Canonical Marxism frames Marx as, above all, the
author of works such as Capital and (with Friedrich Engels) The
Communist Manifesto, these works had - at least in his own lifetime -
little effect beyond his immediate circle. In terms of public
recognition and visibility, Marx was better known to the world as a
radical journalist. His constantly provocative writings tirelessly
articulated a case for the working classes, criticised the received
ideas of the economic and political understanding of the day, and
fearlessly satirised and excoriated the most powerful politicians and
financiers of his time. Issues of censorship remained close to his heart
throughout his life.
Marx's very first publication was, in fact, an article on the new
censorship laws of 1841. Commissioned for a German journal, which proved
too scared of the new laws to publish it, it appeared only a year later
in the radical Swiss journal, Anekdota. In his first job as contributor
and then editor for the Rhenish Gazette, he wrote six articles
specifically on press freedom. Under his editorship, the newspaper's
circulation almost quadrupled, from 885 in 1841 to 3500 by March 1843,
when official censorship closed the paper down, despite his strategic
withdrawal as editor in January of that year.
"It is impossible for me to write under Prussian censorship or to live
in the Prussian atmosphere ... the very air here turns one into a serf",
he wrote to Arnold Ruge, his friend and soon to be collaborator on a new
journal, the German-French Yearbook (1843). This they started after
leaving Germany for Paris in the autumn of 1843. It lasted for only one
double issue, but by no means exhausted Marx's journalistic endeavours.
With the uprisings of 1848, he returned to Germany to start the New
Rhenish Gazette, although this was suppressed less than a year later and
Marx was expelled from Germany in May 1849. Between 1852 and 1862, he
contributed about 350 articles to the New York Daily Tribune, one of the
great newspapers of its time, as well as writing for papers such as Die
Presse and The People's Paper.
Indeed, the moment of Marx's greatest public visibility was as the
author of a famous pamphlet on the Paris Commune of 1870, The Civil War
in France. The first English edition of 3000 copies was sold out within
two weeks, and two further reprints sold out in the next two months. Now
known as the "Red Doctor", Marx achieved the acme of journalistic
success: from writing about the news, he became the news, and was
interviewed as a public figure by several British and US newspapers. To
any objective observer, Marx in his time was most visible as an activist
journalist; public intellectual number one.
What might Marx have made of the government's moves to institute the
Protection of Information Bill in SA today?
Very likely he would have brought to bear the insight that powered both
his journalism and the profound research into historical and theoretical
understanding that do, in fact, make the great contradictory and
unfinished project of Capital his key work for later generations. This
was the simple recognition that "private interest cannot bear the light
of public knowledge and debate".
Today, as in 1841, he might well have remarked that "government hears
only its own voice, it knows that it hears only its own voice, yet it
harbours the illusion that it hears the voice of the people, and it
demands that the people, too, should itself harbour this illusion". For
Marx, as for us, the task of a free press is to constantly shatter that
illusion.
- Higgins is Andrew W Mellon Professor in Archives and Public Culture at
the University of Cape Town. His study of Marx will be published by
Routledge next year.
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