“The conception of the writer’s function which the young Marx worked out is worth recalling. “The writer”, he declared, “naturally must make money in order to live and write, but he should not under any circumstances live and write in order to make money. … The writer by no means looks on his work as a ‘means’. It is ‘an end in itself’ and so little a means in the eyes of himself and of others that if necessary he sacrifices his existence to the existence of his work. … ‘The first condition of the freedom of the press is that it is not a business activity”. It is more than ever fitting to use this statement against those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of ends foreign to itself, and prescribe, in the guise of so-called reasons of state, the themes of art. The free choice of these themes and the absence of all restrictions on the range of his exploitations – these are possessions which the artist has a right to claim as inalienable.” Leon Trotsky, Art and Revolution. Writings on Literature, Politics and Culture, 2009]