ABSTRACT
Karl Marx’s most condemning attacks are directed at the new censorship instruction for stating that press criticisms about the government and its laws are permitted as long as these criticisms are “decent and their tendency well-meaning.” The new censorship instruction further demanded that the state censors approve the appointment of all editors of the daily press. This chapter looks at what Marx and Friedrich Engels had to say about the censorship law and considers Marx’s explanation why the law on thefts of wood made it a crime for the peasants to take dead timber from the Rhenish forests. It introduces some of Marx’s more fundamental concepts, including dialectics, historical materialism, industrial capitalism, the mode of production, the social relations of production, the economic base, the superstructure, and the idea that law is an instrument utilized by the bourgeoisie to protect and advance their economic and political interests.
