Marx on Freedom of the Press

At first it is startling to find freedom of the press subsumed under freedom of doing business. Yet, we must not condemn the views of the speaker out of hand. Rembrandt painted the mother of God as a Dutch peasant woman, and whgy should not our speaker paint freedom in an image that is immediate and familiar to him?...

To defend or even understand the freedom of a domain, i must grasp its essential charachter rather than its extrinsic connections. But is a press true to its own charachter, does it behave in accord with the nobility of its nature, is the press free, when it demeans itself a business.? A writer must of course earn a living to exist and be able to write, but he must in no sense exist and write so as to earn a living.

When Beranger sings

Je ne vis, que pour fairee des chansons,

Si vous m'otez ma place, Monseigneur,

Je ferai des chansons pour vivre.

There is an ironic avowal in this threat: the poet falls from his domain, as soon as his poetry becomes but a means.

In no sense does the writer regard his work as means. They are ends in themselves.; so little are they means for him and others that, whrn necessary, he sacrafices his existence to theirs, and like the preacher of religion, though in another way, he takes his principle: "God is to be obeyed before men." He himself with his human needs and desires is included among these men. Nonetheless, suppose that I have ordered a Parisian frock coat from a tailor, and he brings me a Roman toga because it is more in accord with the eternal law of Beauty! The first freedom of the press consists in its not being business. The writer who debases it to a material means deserves a punishment of his intrinsic lack of freedom, the extrinsic lack of freedom, censorship; better yet, his existence is already punishment.

Better that the whole world should be destroyed and perish utterly than that a free man should refrain from one act to which his nature moves him.