“The bourgeois, who is quite sober and prosaic when his own interests are at stake, tries to use in literature the same criterion which he applies to sugar, leather and bristle. He considers freedom of the press as a ‘thing’, and this is contrary to its character. «In order to defend a particular freedom, to say nothing of comprehending it, I must grasp its essential characteristics rather than its external relations. Is a press true to its character, does it act in accordance with the nobility of its nature, ‘is it free’, when it degrades itself to the level of a trade? A writer naturally must earn money in order to be able to live and write, but under no circumstances must he live and write in order to earn money.
“When Beranger sang:
Je ne vis que pour faire des chansons
Si vous o’ôtez ma place Monseigneur,
Je ferai des chansons pour vivre”
The Writer’, continued Marx, ‘in no wise considers his work a ‘means’. It is ‘end in itself’, so little is a means for him and for others that be sacrifices ‘his’ existence to ‘its’ existence, when necessary; and like a religious preacher, in another sense, he applies the principle: “Obey God rather than men” to the men among whom he is himself confined with his human needs and desires. On the hand I should like to see a tailor from whom I had ordered a Parisian frock-coat bring me a Roman toga, under the pretext that it better fulfils the eternal law of beauty! ‘The freedom of the press consists primarily in not being a trade’. The write who degrades it by making it a material means deserves, as punishment for this inner slavery, outer slavery – censorship; or rather his existence is already his punishment’ (56)»” (pag 51-52) Mikhail Lifshitz, ‘The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx’, Pluto press, London, 1973] [(56) ‘Debatten über Pressfreiheit’ (Debates on the Freedom of the Press), Mega, I, I/1 p: 222-223]
