On The Freedom of the Press
THE capitalists (and in their train, either through stupidity or crass ignorance, numerous Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks) define "freedom of the Press" as the suppression of the censor and the power for every party to publish newspapers as they please.
In reality that is not freedom of the Press, but freedom for the rich, for the bourgeoisie, to deceive the oppressed and exploited masses of the people.
There is no doubt about this. Take, for example, the newspapers of Petrograd or Moscow. You will see at the first glance that from their circulation the Ryetch, the Birjovka,[1] the Novoye Vremya,[2] the Russkoye Slovo,[3] and so on and so forth (for their name is legion) have an undoubted preponderance. On what is this preponderance based? One could not say that it was based on the will of the majority, for the elections show that in the two capitals the majority (and the vast majority) is on the side of the democracy, that is the Social-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. These three parties comprise from three-quarters to four-fifths of the total poll[4] while the number of copies of their newspapers equals only a quarter or even a fifth of those belonging to the whole bourgeois Press (which, as we know now and see now, defended Kornilov both directly and indirectly). This because the publication of a newspaper is a capitalist enterprise in which the rich invest millions and millions of roubles. "Freedom of the Press" in bourgeois society means the power given to the rich of systematic, unceasing, daily, million-sale perversion and deception of the poor, of the exploited and the oppressed masses.
This is the simple self-evident truth of which everybody is well aware, but of which hardly anybody dares whisper a word.
The question before us is: Is struggle against such an appalling state of affairs possible and, if so, how can it be carried out?
- ↑ The Stock Exchange Gazette, journal of information without any precise political tendencies, but supported by finance.
- ↑ New Times, a thoroughly monarchist paper, nationalist, anti-Semitic, though it hides these tendencies at the moment.
- ↑ The Voice of Russia, the Moscow paper with a very wide provincial circulation.
- ↑ In the municipal elections of Petrograd on August 20, the Socialist parties altogether obtained 154 seats, against the Cadets' 142.
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