Commentaries On Toby Terrar's "The New Social History and Colonial America's Press Legacy" In his article "The New Social History and Colonial America's Press Legacy: Tyranny or Freedom?" (Nature, Society and Thought, vol. 2, no.1 [1989]:45-75), Toby Terrar uses a creative, almost poetic approach in analyzing the free-press tradition of the United States. However, as I have said to him in our several exchanges over this topic, I would like to see him take more account of the general historical framework sketched by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.<


Colonial America was largely the result of the bourgeoisie, the "Europeans, "chasing... over the whole surface of the globe" and nestling, settling, and establishing connections everywhere in the need for a constantly expanding market, as feudalism gave way to capitalism. The bourgeoisie was contradictorily both a revolutionary and an emerging exploiting ruling class at the time the U.S. Con- stitution and the ideas behind it were being conceived and born. At the time of the American Revolution, the colonial bourgeoisie had an added revolutionary dimension in that they were fighting against British imperialism.


It is true that the oppressed groups and classes - indigenous Americans, African Americans, women, religious minorities, and poor farmers and workers- were struggling, and this struggle contributed to the freedom principles enshrined in the Constitution. But, from the Marxist standpoint, the main content of the U.S. Constitution, including the First Amendment clause on press freedom, is a reflection of emerging bourgeois values and relations of production; and, since the Constitution was written at a time when the bourgeoisie was still a revolutionary class, it is a progressive document for the era of its origin. Professor Aptheker has made this point in several writings, including Early Years of the Republic.


The oppressed groups and classes from the colonial era, uponwhich Terrar focuses, at most share with the colonial bourgeoisie the main influence on the original Constitution. Terrar attributes to the farmers, artisans, laborers, Quakers, Indians, Blacks, women, and others of the time the political and economic wherewithal and objective social base for a level of liberation struggle that really only comes about with the creation of the industrial working class.


The advanced free press, and other ideas of the day have a sort of utopian-socialist objective base - Quaker communities and other immigrants seeking religious freedom, primitive-communist indigenous communities, Jeffersonian farmers, slaves seeking freedom.

These formations are not, however, the main ancestral units of U.S. social and economic history. The main development of the United States is as modern industrial capitalism and its ancestral formation is colonial manufacture and mercantile capitalism, not the utopian-like socialist communities mentioned above. It is as capitalism that the U.S. system gives rise to a working class (with critical ally roles for oppressed nationalities, farmers, and women); that is the objective basis for our higher-level understanding of the potential of the First Amendment and the Constitution.


Thus, I have limited support for an approach that implies that the Constitution has been fully or inherently socialist from the beginning; or that we just need the historical facts to show that Constitutional original intent was really socialist; or that the First Amendment was conceived in a concrete, materialist way. No, the Constitution's original intent was a bourgeois precursor to socialist ideas just as capitalism is a precursor to socialism.

One might say Terrar reinterprets the Constitution; the point is to change it. An active and dialectical approach is needed: a negation of the negation, wherein there is a qualitative break with some of the old in the Constitution, while preserving the progressive old in it. That qualitative break may take the political and legal form of a mass movement for constitutional amendment; in the case of press freedom, an addendum to the First Amendment. This would include the right to put the mass media to use for the benefit of the vast majority of the people and exclude the broadcast of racist, anti-working-class, and warmongering ideas. The Constitution in 1787-91 was again a reflection of the contradictory revolutionary-exploiting bourgeois class and of the precursor (utopian) socialist oppressed groups and classes. The First Amendment reflects this complex class situation. Terrar has described it from the standpoint of the oppressed classes, but the First Amendment also reflects the bourgeoisie's class struggle with the feudal ruling class and the national-liberation struggle against British imperialism.


Therein is bourgeois idealism's emphasis on reason and therefore freedom of thought - speech, religion, press -without primary attention to being -food, shelter, work. The bourgeois-idealist philosophers' influence (and the influence of the idealism among the oppressed groups Terrar highlights) limited the First Amendment freedoms to relative abstractions. Advance comes through a qualitative development of the concept of freedom in a manner that parallels Marx and Engels's materialist critique of Hegel and other idealists, requiring the concrete basis for real, mass press and speech freedom.


The First Amendment most fully encapsulates the idealist notion that freedom of thought is the highest priority in a free society. The prime importance the framers gave to thought (over being) reflects that issue's status as the main question of philosophy, as Engels labeled it. This may be why it was dealt with in the very first amendment. In other words, as idealists, the framers thought that if they guaranteed freedom of ideas, then freedom of being would follow. Materialists, of course, hold that freedom of being is a necessary foundation for freedom of thought and ideas.


In sum, a dialectical- and historical-materialist approach to the heritage of free press in the United States will be a powerful counter to cold-war distortions of that tradition.


John Henry ( Charles Brown) Detroit, Michigan<


BIBLIOGRAPHY Aptheker, Herbert. Early Years of the Republic. New York: Interna- tional, 1976.


Engels, Frederick, and Marx, Karl. Manifesto of the Communist Party. In vol. 6 of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works. New York: International, 1976. <


Nature, Society, and Thought NST a Journal of Dialectical and Historical Materialism EDITOR: Erwin Marquit (physics, Univ. of Minnesota) MANUSCRIPT EDITOR: Leo Auerbach (English education, retired Jersey City State College) EDITORIAL STAFF: Gerald M. Erickson, Doris Grieser, April Ane Knutson, Joel Swartz, William L. Rowe, and Judy Schwartzbacker ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Herbert Aptheker (history, Univ. of Calif. Law School/ Berkeley) Andrew M. Blasko (grad. stud., philosophy, Duquesne Univ.) Jan Carew (African-American studies, Northwestern Univ.) Gerald M. Erickson (classics, Univ. of Minnesota) Angela Gilliam (anthropology, SUNY College at Old Westbury) George Hampsch (philosophy, College of the Holy Cross) Viktoria Hertling (German, Univ. of Nevada) Gerald A. Horne (African-American studies, Univ. of Calif./Santa Barbara) Jack Kurzweil (electrical engineering, San Jose State Univ.) James Lawler (philosophy, State Univ. of New York/Buffalo) Sara Fletcher Luther (political sociology) Rinda Lundstrom (theater arts, Univ. of Louisville) Philip Moran (philosophy, Triton College) Michael Parenti (political science, Howard Univ.) Howard L. Parsons (philosophy, Univ. of Bridgeport) William L. Rowe (anthropology, Univ. of Minnesota) Epifanio San Juan, Jr. (English, Univ. of Connecticut) Judith Schwartzbacker (grad. stud., philosophy, Univ. of Minnesota) José A. Soler (journalism) Ethel Tobach (comparative psychology, City Univ. of New York) Daniel Todes (history and sociology of science, Johns Hopkins Univ.) ISSUE EDITOR, VOL. 2, NO. 4 (OCTOBER 1989): Stephen Jay Gold BOOK-REVIEW EDITOR: Doris Grieser Copyright © 1989 Marxist Educational Press



Nature, Society, and Thought 1989 Vol. 2, No. 4 CONTENTS 401 ANNOUNCEMENTS ARTICLES Eugene Dennis Vrana, Comic Strips As Propaganda: 403 The New Deal Experience Willis H. Truitt, On the Question of Technological 421 Determinism Ed Beechert, Patterns of Resistance and Social Relations of Production: The Case of Hawaii 443 Herbert Shapiro, Labor and Antislavery: Reflections 471 on the Literature Günter Walch, Conrad's Hamlets, Intertextuality, and the Process of History 491 COMMENTARIES → Charles D. Brown John Henry, On Terrar's "The New Social History and Colonial America's Press Legacy" 505 Steven Jay Gold, On Truitt's "On the Question of Technological Determinism," with response by Truitt 508 BOOK REVIEWS Gerald A. Horne: Discriminate Deterrence: Report of the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy April Ane Knutson: Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers by Barbara Christian 517 521 AUTHOR AND TITLE INDEX TO VOLUME 2 527