Smeets was born in Cologne, Rhine Province, where he received his early musical training under the composer and pianist Ferdinand Hiller, to whom Robert Schumann dedicated his piano concerto. Ignaz Moscheles recognized his aptitude. Smeets had a long career as a teacher, conductor and composer, moving among musical posts in Germany: Mannheim (1862-1864), Koblenz (1865-1867), Sondershausen, (1867-1870), Berlin (1870-1872), and Bonn, where he spent 1873-78 working privately. At the height of his reputation he spent three seasons as conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society (1880-83). There he met his wife, Clara Tuczek. He taught composition at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik from 1890 until his retirement in 1910.

The third of Marx’s articles concerning freedom of the press in Prussia, entitled “On the Assembly of the Estates” , was published in the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Newspaper / RZ) on May 10, 1842. As the title indicates, Marx uses this entry to tie his discussion of the free press to a broader interrogation of the legitimacy of the Prussian Provincial Assemblies. His entry point for this interrogation is a speech made by a member of the knightly estate who viewed the royal edict pronounced in April of 1841, which authorized the publication of the Assemblies’ proceedings, as non-binding: “Let it be in the hands of the Provincial Assembly to make a wise use of the permission granted…. The extension of this permission could only result from inner conviction, but not from external influences.” (Marx’s emphasis). The knightly speaker goes on to suggest that the assembly should restrict the publication of its proceedings when that publication is deemed “purposeless or even harmful”.

Marx, of course, offers a different interpretation of the edict:

The province believes that the Provincial Assembly will be under its control only when the publication of the debates is no longer left to the arbitrary decision of the Assembly in its wisdom, but has become a legal necessity. We should have to call the new concession a new step backwards if it had to be interpreted in such a way that publication depends on an arbitrary decision by the Assembly of the Estates.

Marx is driving at the nature of political representation in general. He labels the knightly speaker’s position “medieval”, in that it “upholds the privilege of the estate against the rights of the province”. Once again, Marx is engaging the still coalescing ideological positions that arose, according to Wallerstein, in the 19th century. His attack on the “medieval” conservative position is launched via the medium of a liberal newspaper, though already there are hints of the more radical socialist position that he would, for better or worse, come to define. The liberal position, manifested in the US and French revolutions, viewed political representation as a right of (some of) the people. Marx points out that this conception is entirely absent from the knightly speaker’s framework:

Privileges of the estates are in no way rights of the province. On the contrary, the rights of the province cease when they become privileges of the estates. Thus the estates of the Middle Ages appropriated for themselves all the country’s constitutional rights and turned them into privileges against the country…. the rights of the Provincial Assembly are no longer rights of the province, but rights against the province… The influence of the province on its Assembly is characterised as something external to which the conviction of the Assembly of the Estates is contrasted as a delicate inner feeling…

Further below, Marx adds:

One must acknowledge the tact with which the speaker has perceived that by unabridged publication of its debates the Assembly would become a right of the province instead of a privilege of the Assembly of the Estates, that the Assembly, having become an immediate object of the public spirit, would have to decide to be a personification of the latter, and that, having been put in the light of the general consciousness, it would have to renounce its particular nature in favour of the general one.

Marx is pointing out, in other words, that the knightly speaker ignores entirely the assembly’s duty to represent the people of the province. He makes himself quite explicit on this point:

The Assembly of the Estates has a province to which the privilege of its activity extends, but the province has no estates through which it could itself be active. Of course, the province has the right, under prescribed conditions, to create these gods for itself, but as soon as they are created, it must, like a fetish worshipper, forget that these gods are its own handiwork…. We are confronted here with the peculiar spectacle, due perhaps to the nature of the Provincial Assembly, of the province having to fight not so much through its representatives as against them…. A representation which is divorced from the consciousness of those whom it represents is no representation.

While Marx seems correct in his indictment of the knightly speaker, we should note that he speaks only in broad terms of representation. As a result, he raises more questions than he answers. Nowhere does he suggest how an assembly, once selected (by whatever “prescribed conditions”), might go about personifying the “public spirit”. Why, in fact, does Marx assume that there exists anything like a singular “public spirit” or “general consciousness”? Is not the point of a representative system to adjudicate between the multiple spirits and consciousnesses that exist amongst a heterogeneous public?

To be clear, I am not saying that the Provincial Assembly of Estates as established in Prussia’s Rhine Province in 1842 was adequately enough composed to even begin carrying out this task. As Marx would argue convincingly later that year, the multiple restrictions on membership in any of the three estates, beginning with ownership of land, prohibited anything other than a partial representation of elite interests. Nonetheless, Marx seems to be appealing to a very idealistic model of representation in which the “spirit” of a people – or at least a class of people – can be intuited, articulated, and defended. This foreshadows, of course, his later socio-economic theorization of inter-class struggle, not to mention the (still ongoing) debates over the “proper” form of organization for political-economic decision-making that have hampered the socialist project.

That said, we should remember that Marx was all of 24 years old when he wrote these articles and that his primary focus was on the press, not the organizational structure of a representative democracy. We can hardly fault him for not being more precise regarding the latter issue. In fact, we should rather recognize that the close pairing of these two subjects suggests that Marx accepted, on a fundamental level, that the press plays a vital role in the determination and articulation of the “public spirit”. For example, whereas his series of articles on press freedom (especially the article under consideration here) touches on questions of political representation, his contemporaneous series of brief articles on representation (published in December 1842 under the title “On the Commission of the Estates in Prussia“) touches on issues of press freedom:

The conservative press, which continually reminds us that the view held by the critical press should be rejected as being merely an individual opinion and a distortion of reality, continually forgets that it itself is not the object in question, but only an opinion on that object, and that therefore to combat it is not always to combat that object. Every object that is made a matter for praise or blame in the press becomes a literary object, hence an object for literary discussion. What makes the press the most powerful lever for promoting culture and the intellectual education of the people is precisely the fact that it transforms the material struggle into an ideological struggle, the struggle of flesh and blood into a struggle of minds, the struggle of need, desire, empiricism into a struggle of theory, of reason, of form.

For Marx, the press ensures representation only when it is free, ie. when no outlet is deemed to have an a priori claim to validity. Only when all outlets are treated as participants in an open “struggle” for validity can a society begin to make any claims to having achieved political representation. As Marx says in the article under review here: “A truly political assembly flourishes only under the great protection of the public spirit, just as living things flourish only in the open air.” Here, at least, Marx’s equation of the “public spirit” with “open air” implies that he does not, in fact, view it as monolithic, but always a swirling mass of competing views that, at best, must play themselves out within the untidy space of a free press: “… why should precisely the free press be perfect?” Marx’s answer is that it should not. The imperfect, contested nature of the press is precisely what makes it free.

There are some other interesting points to draw out of this article. The first of these hinges on the knightly speaker’s rationalization for the desire to refrain from publishing the assembly’s proceedings. Marx quotes him at some length:

Just as it seems to him desirable that here in the Assembly there should be freedom of discussion and that an over-anxious weighing of words should be avoided, it seems to him equally necessary, in order to maintain this freedom of expression and this frankness of speech, that our words at the time should be judged only by those for whom they are intended…. From many years’ acquaintance, a good personal understanding has developed among most of us in spite of the most diverse views on various matters, a relationship which is inherited by newcomers. Precisely for that reason we are most of all able to appreciate the value of our words, and do so the more frankly as we allow ourselves to be less subject to external influences, which could only be useful if they came to us in the form of well-meaning counsel, but not in the form of a dogmatic judgment, of praise or blame, seeking to influence our personality through public opinion.

Here, the conservative appeal to tradition is laid bare: Though they affect the province as a whole, the proceedings of the assembly are intended only for those with “a good personal understanding” and only those with such an understanding should judge them. Moreover, the requisite personal understanding can only be acquired upon admittance to the assembly, which, as pointed out above, is restricted to elites. Though patently absurd in the Prussian Assembly’s case (at least to the degree that the assembly was meant to represent the people of the province), such arguments are still advanced today in relation to issues of secrecy. Witness, for example, the ongoing conroversy over the Wikileaks cables, in which the US State Department and its defenders have maintained that disclosure of the secret cables will diminish the effectiveness of its diplomatic corp by limiting its ability to communicate frankly. This line of argument, exemplified in the following extract from an article published by Foreign Policy magazine, echoes that of the knightly speaker quoted above:

[The cables] release will negatively affect the business of diplomacy conducted by America’s foreign-affairs professionals, inhibiting the candor, frank assessments, and policy recommendations that its decision-makers need. An ambassador in the field who is involved in providing the secretary of state and the president with sensitive insights in the course of delicate peace negotiations must have the confidence and trust in the system that what he is reporting in a cable will not be disclosed publicly. And embassies must be able to report candidly on the internal political situation in a given country without fear of unauthorized disclosure harming official state-to-state relations. Self-censorship by U.S. diplomats and intelligence personnel will diminish the country’s capacity to engage in foreign affairs immeasurably.

Similar arguments are advanced in favor of lawyer/client or doctor/patient privilege. Context is key, therefore, when balancing what one commentator has called, in reference to Wikileaks, “the irreconcilable values of secrecy and accountability”. In relation to a supposedly democratic representative assembly, arguing over that balance may strike us as quaint, but in the Rhine Province in 1842 the debate took place on the cutting edge of political thought. Perhaps one day we will find the Wikileaks debate just as quaint?

Finally, it’s worth noting a comment that Marx makes, seemingly in passing, regarding the medium vis-à-vis the message:

Indeed, can even daily, unabridged publication by printing be rightly called unabridged and public? Is there no abridgement in substituting the written for the spoken word, graphic systems for persons, action on paper for real action?

I’m not sure exactly what Marx intended here. Certainly there was no other medium available for feasibly conveying the proceedings of the assembling to a mass public, à la CSPAN. I suspect, therefore, that he meant to suggest that the Assembly should be open to reporters who could observe the various speakers and add context to verbatim transcripts. Such issues were hot topics at the time. For instance, the question of journalistic access to and verbatim reporting of congressional proceedings had long been the subject of considerable debate in the US and remained so in Marx’s time.  Nonetheless, we should recognize that the phrasing of Marx’s questions invite philosophical considerations that would not be foreign to 20th century luminaries like Marshall McLuhan or Jacques Derrida.

The Rhine Province (red) within the Kingdom of Prussia (blue).

Karl Marx’s second article for the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Newspaper / RZ) appeared three days after his first, on May 8, 1842. Entitled “Opponents of a Free Press“, the article continued Marx’s review of the proceedings of the previous year’s Rhine Province Assembly. Marx’s concern with press freedom resulted from his involvement with the oppositional Young Hegelians, as well as his budding career as a journalist.

He begins by noting that the Assembly’s debate on press freedom serves as a microcosm for it’s behavior in general:

For we find the specific estate spirit nowhere more clearly, decisively and fully expressed than in the debates on the press. This holds good especially of the opposition to freedom of the press, just as in general it is in opposition to a general freedom that the spirit of a definite sphere in society, the individual interest of a particular estate and its natural one-sidedness of character are expressed most bluntly and recklessly and, as it were, show their teeth.

The debates provide us with a polemic of the princely social estate against freedom of the press, a polemic of the knightly estate, and a polemic of the urban estate, so that it is not the individual, but the social estate that conducts the polemic. What mirror, therefore, could reflect the inner nature of the Assembly better than the debates on the press?

Here is the beginning of a class analysis that views whole strata of the population (the estates) as coherent entities, each participating in social debates as a unified interlocutor with a single voice. The speaker is never just “the individual”. For the remainder of the article, Marx occupies himself with the argument advanced by the aristocratic, or “princely”, estate.

The aristocrats purported “that freedom of the press and censorship are both evils” of which censorship was the lesser. This conviction was so strongly held in Germany, they claimed, “that the Federation too, issued laws on the subject, which Prussia joined in approving and observing”. Marx paraphrases their “diplomatic” argument as follows:

Every restriction of freedom is a factual, irrefutable proof that at one time those who held power were convinced that freedom must be restricted, and this conviction then serves as a guiding principle for later views.

Marx recognizes this appeal to Tradition as the 19th century Conservative position par excellence: “Yes, views change and develop, but society must guide that development by appealing to Tradition.” The RZ, of course, was a Liberal newspaper. I’m not sure to what degree the radical Socialist perspective even existed as a coherent ideology at that point. (I’m employing Wallerstein’s delineation of the three ideologies to emerge in the nineteenth century, alongside the social sciences and the social movements, as a product of the capitalist world-system.)

The aristocrats’ next move rivals the best of Orwellian doublespeak, as they declare State censorship to have protected the press from the vulgar excesses of a freedom, which would have acted as “shackles … on our true and nobler spiritual development”. Marx responds:

But what an illogical paradox to regard the censorship as a basis for improving our press! … The spiritual development of Germany has gone forward not owing to, but in spite of, the censorship.

He then goes on to insist that “in the period of strict observance of censorship from 1819 to 1830″ the bottom fell out of Germany’s cultural output:

The press had become vile, and one could only hesitate to say whether the lack of understanding exceeded the lack of character, and whether the absence of form exceeded the absence of content, or the reverse…. The sole literary field in which at that time the pulse of a living spirit could still be felt, the philosophical field, ceased to speak German, for German had ceased to be the language of thought.

The aristocrats’ final line of argument is to point to the ills of other nation-states that had instituted some form of press freedom. That Marx quickly disposes of this illogic is not surprising. The nature of his retorts, however, provides some insight into his developing views. The aristocrats dismiss press freedom in Holland as “unable to save the country from an oppressive national debt” and responsible for “bring[ing] about a revolution which resulted in the loss of half the country.” Marx dismisses the first barb for the absurdity that it is:

He blames the Dutch press, because of its historical development. It ought to have prevented the course of history, it ought to have saved Holland from an oppressive national debt! What an unhistorical demand! The Dutch press could not prevent the period of Louis XIV; the Dutch press could not prevent the English navy under Cromwell from rising to the first place in Europe; it could not cast a spell on the ocean which would have saved Holland from the painful role of being the arena of the warring continental powers; it was as little able as all the censors in Germany put together to annul Napoleon’s despotic decrees…. What a trivial way of behaving it is to abuse what is good for being some specific good and not all good at once, for being this particular good and not some other.

In response to the second accusation, that the free press incited revolution, Marx first points out that a free press is not a unified whole, but a multiplicity of voices. So which press – the reactionaries, the progressive, or some other – is responsible for the revolution? The more crucial point, however, is that it is nonsensical to view the press as causative in relation to revolution:

… the Belgian revolution appeared at first as a spiritual revolution, as a revolution of the press. The assertion that the press caused the Belgian revolution has no sense beyond that. But is that a matter for blame? Must the revolution at once assume a material form? Strike instead of speaking? The government can materialise a spiritual revolution; a material revolution must first spiritualise the government.

The Belgian revolution is a product of the Belgian spirit. So the press, too, the freest manifestation of the spirit in our day, has its share in the Belgian revolution. The Belgian press would not have been the Belgian press if it had stood aloof from the revolution, but equally the Belgian revolution would not have been Belgian if it had not been at the same time a revolution of the press. The Revolution of a people is total; that is, each sphere carries it out in its own way; why not also the press as the press?

The press in other words, is part and parcel of the revolutionary process. Marx’s characterization of the press as “the freest manifestation of the spirit in our day” is surely a reflection of his continuing entanglement with the Young Hegelians, but reveals the avante garde status that Marx accorded the press in relation to progress and revolution. Marx’s commitment to this belief is manifest in his labor as a journalist and editor.

Marx takes especial offense to the aristocratic attack against Switzerland, where press freedom had supposedly engendered a barbaric, irrational public sphere. Here is a quote from the aristocrats:

Finally, should it not be possible to find in Switzerland an Eldorado blessed by freedom of the press? Does one not think with disgust of the savage party quarrels carried on in the newspapers there, in which the parties, with a correct sense of their small degree of human dignity, are named after parts of an animal’s body, being divided into horn-men and claw-men, and have made themselves despised by all their neighbours on account of their boorish, abusive speeches!

Marx quickly points out the “Germano-centrism” of the argument:

The speaker finds fault with the Swiss press for adopting the “animal party names” of “horn-men and claw-men”, in short because it speaks in the Swiss language and to Swiss people, who live in a certain patriarchal harmony with oxen and cows. The press of this country is the press of precisely this country. There is nothing more to be said about it. At the same time, however, a free press transcends the limitations of a country’s particularism, as once again the Swiss press proves.

This is an interesting passage. Marx first appeals to the autonomy of the Swiss press, noting that it represents the Swiss people’s particular point of view and theirs only. This is a relativistic argument, however, and Marx seems to recognize the danger of this formulation: It potentially supports the entrenchment of national identities based on Tradition. That’s a Conservative argument that Marx didn’t want to make, so he tacked on a testament to the Swiss press’ “transcendence” of national “particularism” as a result of its freedom. Marx offers no evidence in support of this “proof”, however. He seems to want to have it both ways – national presses are inviolable expressions of the people’s sovereignty, yet they are also organs of progress that transcend the particularities of nations toward some perfect state of social expression. (Again, the teleological touch of the Young Hegelians.)

Marx’s identification of a free press with the people is clear:

What, therefore, was the accusation the speaker leveled against freedom of the press? That the defects of a nation are at the same time the defects of its press, that the press is the ruthless language and manifest image of the historical spirit of the people…. [the speaker] waged a polemic against the peoples and with noble dread repudiated freedom of the press as the tactless, indiscreet speech of the people addressed to itself.

What’s striking is the willingness with which Marx accepts the nation as the natural boundary of the public sphere and the free press as a national press. As Benedict Anderson made clear some 140 years later, this remained one of Marxism’s blind spots. Marx seems to have not fully grasped that national presses, even where free from censorship, were not a tool to amplify the popular voice. Rather, they shaped the popular into the national voice of an “imaginary community” that was always already in the service of the capitalist world-system.

Continue reading “the young Marx on press freedom”: part 3

Karl Marx

In 1842, the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhenish Newspaper / RZ) employed a 24 year old Karl Marx. In May, when he first appeared as a contributor, the RZ was an outlet for the pro-democratic, Liberal bourgeoisie of the Rhineland opposed to the authoritarian Prussian state. After Marx was promoted to an editor position in October, he pushed the paper in a more radically democratic direction, lending support to revolutionary and socialist ideas.

Heavy state censure marked Marx’s tenure and included the prohibition of his own work. Despite Marx’s resignation, the Prussian government ultimately shut down the RZ on March 31 of 1843. Given this context, it makes sense that much of Marx’s writing during that time concerned the Freedom of the Press.

Marx’s first article for the RZ, published on May 5, 1842, was entitled “Prussian Censorship” and written in response to a series of articles that ran in the official government paper Preussische Allgemeine Staats-Zeitung (Prussian General State Gazette). The articles editorialized that State censorship is necessary “in order to enlighten the public concerning the true intentions of the Government.” I don’t follow many of the references, but it’s clear that Marx thoroughly lambastes the PASZ position. It’s the last quarter of the article that most interests me, however.

Marx declares his intention to review the proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly, which had met from May 23 to July 25, 1841 in Düsseldorf. Provincial assemblies had been introduced in Prussia in 1823, and they brought together representatives of three “estates” – the aristocratic, town, and rural. The election system skewed toward landowners, meaning the aristocrats of Rhine Province held 278 of the 584 parliamentary votes, the towns estate 182, and the rural estate 124. With a 2/3 majority required to pass a resolution, the Assemblies were hardly democratic – even after discounting the fact that land ownership, among other conditions, was a requirement for membership in the estates. That mattered little, in any case, since:

The competency of the assemblies was restricted to questions of local economy and administration. They also had the right to express their desires on government bills submitted for discussion. They were largely powerless (“advisory”) however, could only summoned by the Prussian government, and then they were held in secret. [sic] (Marxists Internet Archive)

The Sixth Rhine Province Assembly, however, was the first to be held under the newly crowned King Wilhelm IV, who had pledged to convoke the Assemblies every two years and lift the veil of secrecy. He made good on the latter pledge with the Royal edict of April 30, 1841 that authorized the publication of the Assembly’s proceedings. Over a year later, Marx wrote:

The publication of the Assembly proceedings will only become a reality when they are treated as “public facts”, i.e., as subject-matter for the press.

This is a crucial clue to understanding Marx’s attitude toward the press. Marx defines “public facts” as information made available to the press. Furthermore, he identifies press review as the ontological basis for open government.

Marx concludes the article by suggesting that the Assembly’s defenders of press freedom were clearly at a disadvantage, since they had never experienced true freedom of the press and could therefore only argue from their heads, not their hearts:

Goethe once said that the painter succeeds only with a type of feminine beauty which he has loved in at least one living being. Freedom of the press, too, has its beauty — if not exactly a feminine one — which one must have loved to be able to defend it. If I truly love something, I feel that its existence is essential, that it is something which I need, without which my nature can have no full, satisfied, complete existence. The above-mentioned defenders of freedom of the press seem to enjoy a complete existence even in the absence of any freedom of the press.

It’s clear, in other words, that Marx felt as if none of the representatives were arguing for a robust set of truly democratic press freedoms. His reference to the necessity for public access to State information is an indication of where his dissatisfaction lay. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision, it remains a relevant point today.

continue reading “the young Marx on press freedom”: part 2, part 3