Hal Draper Quotes
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But English history has demonstrated well enough how the assertion of divine inspiration from above evokes the counterassertion of divine inspiration from below, and Charles I mounted the scaffold by virtue of divine inspiration from below.
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The broad use of state in Hegelese presents translation problems. Marx’s early formulations, in the Hegelian spirit, often come close to counterposing the state concept (the ideal state) against what we would now understand by the term.
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More specific material relating to the bourgeois state will be found in subsequent volumes. This approach is of a piece with Marx’s. One must remember that most of the states that Marx had occasion to discuss were not capitalist states—as yet—even in Europe, let alone throughout the rest of the world. From the standpoint of theory this is a good thing, since no phenomenon can be thoroughly understood if only one specimen or type is available for examination. The literature of Marxism and marxology is unfortunately full of statements about Marx’s views which actually apply only to capitalism and the bourgeois era, and which require at least considerable qualification as soon as the focus is widened to include most of the world and world history. It is a form of ethnocentrism.
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Marx makes it not aphoristically but by implication. The censorship is not only a police measure, “but it is even a bad police measure, for it does not achieve what it wants and does not want what it achieves.” It succeeds only in adding the allure of martyrdom and mystery to the victims of censorship.
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A “London Mechanic's Wife” made a point that historians should take to heart: Shall the idiot-like, the stupid and usurious capitalists, tell us to look to our domestic affairs, and say, “these we understand best,” we will retort on them, and tell them that thousands of us have scarce any domestic affairs to look after, when the want of employment on the one hand, or ill-requited toil on the other, have left our habitations almost destitute...
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But the censorship itself admits that it is not an end in itself, that it is not a good in and of itself, that it is therefore based on the principle that “the end sanctifies the means.” But an end that needs unholy means is not a holy end.81 Besides, Marx argues, the maxim always works both ways as a justification: if the censorship can plead the goodness of its ends as justification for what it does, then so can the (antigovernmental) press.
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Only by fighting for democratic power do workers educate themselves up to the level of being able to wield that power.
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Censorship places us all in subjection, just as under despotism we are all equal … that kind of freedom of the press acts to introduce oligarchy into questions of the spirit. … That [kind of] freedom of the press pushes presumptuousness to the point of forestalling world history, substituting itself for the voice of the people. …
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Social radicals have therefore always faced the need to distinguish. There is a vital distinction between concern for women's rights (or liberty), founded on the aspiration for human freedom, and rejection of all restrictions on sexuality imposed by current social mores. This distinction is clearer in our day than ever before. Precisely because so many veils have been lifted, we plainly see the contemporary phenomenon of “sexual freedom” advocates who are only a new type of oppressors and exploiters of women. Many of the latter deserve the Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year award — from the Henry Miller type, whose anti-establishment rebellion masks the fact that he regards women as sexual objects only, to the Playboy Club sexploiter. To these champions of sexual freedom, women's emancipation operationally means their emancipation from sexual inhibitions the better to make them available to “emancipated” men for purposes that have nothing to do with social equality.