by Carl Barjer
Matter is the precondition of mind's possibility; and vice versa. As Marx well knew, the Bible was a balm, with a god made up by men to make life more tolerable. In the beginning was the word of men, with which they wrote god into mental existence; 'He' resides exclusively in the minds of the men who created 'Him'.
Marx was right about some stuff, wrong about others; but his work is shot through with honest endeavour. Communism was to come at the end of a process that would've dissolved corporations and withered away the state.
Marx adamantly, explicitly supported press freedom. What later came to be called 'Communism' perverted Marx's ideas.
What Marx knew, and we're seeing today, is that capitalists, when left to their devices, will create a system where power and wealth becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
'The World’s 8 Richest Men Are Now as Wealthy as Half the World’s Population'
http://fortune.com/2017/01/16/world-richest-men-income-equality/
That means a small minority enjoy considerable freedom, while a large majority are constrained, restrained, chained. One thing Marx failed to foresee, is how major a role debt would come to play in later stage 'capitalism'. Most of the masses are enslaved by new masters: mortgages, credit owners, loan sharks, etc.
Big bank takes little bank; the latter's now suborned to the former.
Marx's support for "press freedom" was principled and practical. As subsequent revolutions showed, unless you take the people with you - by educating and freeing them to achieve class consciousness - the a 'socialist' state will soon become as oppressive as the one it replaced.
EVERY society that attempted a premature and violent revolution, soon abandoned Marx's ideas, and imposed new variants on age old forms of oppression. Monarchs, aristos and priests were replaced by 'strongmen', tyrants and dictators. Instead of 'dictatorship' of the proletariat, new elites were formed to dictate to, and reimpose oppression over, the proles.
Marx opposed property. Communal living means everything is there for everyone to enjoy, as and when they need it. They are collectively and individually free; the one facilitates the other. For 'socialism' to transform into 'communism', the state (and the oppression that goes with it) must whither away
'Communism' refers to a post state, communal society, where people collectively make use of the products of their work; and control the means they collectively produce goods and services with.
'Corporatism' refers to control by certain groups, in their interests, at the expense of society in general.
Bourgeois 'capitalism' refers to control of the means of production by a minority, who own property.
All isms are impossible, in a sense; such is the nature of ideals. But those who used the term 'Communism' in reference to their regimes, abused it absolutely.
'Corporatism' was established as a reaction, and opposition, to supposed 'Communism' and 'socialism'.
'In the last half of the 19th century people of the working class in Europe were beginning to show interest in the ideas of socialism and syndicalism. Some members of the intelligentsia, particularly the Catholic intelligentsia, decided to formulate an alternative to socialism which would emphasise social justice without the radical solution of the abolition of private property. The result was called Corporatism.
'The basic idea of corporatism is that the society and economy of a country should be organised into major interest groups (sometimes called corporations) and representatives of those interest groups settle any problems through negotiation and joint agreement. In contrast to a market economy, which operates through competition, a corporate economic works through collective bargaining..
'Under corporatism the labour force and management in an industry belong to an industrial organisation. The representatives of labour and management settle wage issues through collective negotiation. While this was the theory in practice the corporatist states were largely ruled according to the dictates of the supreme leader.'
Examples: 'Fascist' Italy, Nazi Germany, Franco's Spain, Peron's Argentina, New Deal USA (under Roosevelt).
“Freedom of the press… is a kind of beauty, which one must have loved to be able to defend. It is something which I love truly, whose existence I feel to be essential, to be necessary to me so that without it I cannot live at peace, or live a full life”.
But does this follow?
“ Hence we not only opposed censorship of the workers’ and radical press, but would also have ‘made objections no less earnestly’ to bans on the reactionary, monarchist and anti-Semitic press. “
The press, for Marx, was to be of the people, for the people, by the people. Most of what masquerades as the press today would be rejected as a mockery of the term. To quote Lenin:
““Freedom of the press” … is a deception while the best printing presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply, and cynically, the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example.
“The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to DEPRIVE CAPITAL OF THE POSSIBILITY OF HIRING WRITERS, BUYING UP PUBLISHING HOUSES AND HIRING NEWSPAPERS. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed.
"In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion.
“In this respect. too, the defenders of ‘pure democracy’ prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement.
“Genuine freedom and equality will be embodied in the system which the communists are building and in which there will be no opportunity for amassing wealth at the expense of others, no objective opportunities for putting the press under the direct or indirect power of money, and no impediments in the way of any working man (or groups of working men, in any numbers) for enjoying and practising equal rights in the use of public printing presses and public stocks of paper.””
In a Marx/Lenin sense, what we mostly have in the UK is a press more akin to a capitalist state-controlled one, than a free one. It needs replacing, rather than regulating. Creating a free press would require proactive, revolutionary and sustained effort.
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