What I ask at the very outset is a representative of the News-Writers’ Union, acting as one of the copy-readers of every newspaper. This man will say, in the name of his organization: “That is a lie; it shall not go in. This news-item is colored to favor the railroad interests; it must be rewritten. Tonight there is a mass-meeting of labor to protest against intervention in Russia. That meeting is worth a column.” Such demands of the copy-reader will, if challenged, be brought before a committee of the workers of the paper—the workers both of hand and brain. If any demand is not complied with, the paper will not appear next day. Do you think that lying about the labor movement would continue under such conditions?
I recognize the rights of the general public in the determining of news. I should wish to see a government representative sitting in all councils where newspaper policy is laid down. The owner should be represented, so long as his ownership exists; but unless I mis-read the signs of the times, the days of the owner as owner are numbered in our industry. The owner may best be attended to by a government price-fixing board, which will set wages for newspaper work and prices of newspapers to the public at a point where interest, dividends and profits are wiped out. So the owner will become a worker like other workers; if he is competent and honest, he will stay as managing director; if he is incompetent and dishonest, he will go to digging ditches, under the eye of a thoroughly efficient boss.
Little by little the workers of all industrial nations are acquiring class-consciousness, and preparing themselves for the control of industry. In America they seem backward, but that is because America is a new country, and the vast majority of the workers have no idea how the cards are stacked against them. I have just been reading an account of the general strike in Seattle, the most significant labor revolt in our history, and I observe how painfully chivalrous the Seattle strikers were. Because they did not permit the capitalist papers of their city to be published, therefore they refrained from publishing their own paper! This was magnificent, but it was not war, and I venture to guess that since the Seattle strikers have had the capitalist newspapers, not merely of their city, but of all the rest of the world telling lies about them, they will be more practical next time—as practical as those they are opposing.
How all this works out, you may learn from the Syndicalist movement of Italy—only, of course, Capitalist Journalism has not allowed you to know anything about the Syndicalist movement of Italy! The glass-workers were beaten in a terrific strike, and they realized that they had to find a new weapon; they contributed their funds and bought a glass-factory, which they started upon a co-operative basis. When this factory had its product ready for sale, strikes were called on the other factories. By applying this method again and again, the union broke its rivals, and bought them out at a low price, and so before the war practically the entire glass-industry of Italy was in the hands of co-operative unions, and the glass-workers were getting the full value of their product.
The same thing was being done before the war by the agricultural workers in Sicily. The strikers had been shot down by the soldiery, their own brothers and sons; they bought several estates and worked them co-operatively, and when harvest-time came there was labor for the co-operative estates, and there were strikes against the absentee landlords, who were spending their time in Paris and on the Riviera. So the landlords made haste to sell out, and the agricultural unions were rapidly taking possession of the land of Sicily.
The same methods were recently tried out in the newspaper field by strikers in the Argentine Republic; I quote from an account in the “Christian Science Monitor,” a Boston newspaper which gives fair accounts of radical happenings abroad, and which may some day give fair accounts of radical happenings in America. The “Christian Science Monitor” is interviewing a United States embassy official, just returned from Buenos Aires:
An incident of the latter strike shows the unique control, as Mr. Barrett puts it, that they exercise over the newspapers. During the seventy-three days the port was closed, the only goods handled were shipments of newsprint. The newspapers represent the workers. If a paper dares to send to its composing-room an item opposed to the interest of the labor element, the compositors probably will refuse to put it in type. If they do set it up and it appears, the paper can expect no more newsprint from the docks.
I hear the reader says: “These strikers don’t represent the public; they represent themselves. You are only substituting one kind of class-interest for another.” Ah, yes—dear reader of capitalist opinion!
This at least you admit; the class represented by the strikers is vastly larger than that represented by the owners; we are that much nearer to democracy. But you demand one hundred per cent pure democracy—dear reader of capitalist opinion!
Well, the workers offer you the way; they cheerfully permit all owners to become workers—either of hand or brain—and to receive their full share with all other workers of hand or brain; whereas, in the nature of the case, the owners do not welcome the workers as owners, and are doing all in their power to make sure that no one shall be owners but themselves. This is the fundamental and all-determining fact about the class struggle, and the reason why he who serves the interest of the workers is serving the interest of all society, and of the Co-operative Commonwealth which is to be. To the argument that the taking of power by the workers is the substitution of one kind of class tyranny by another kind of class tyranny, the answer, complete and final, is that there is no need of the capitalist class as a class and that the world will be a happier place for all men when the members of that class have become workers, either of hand or brain. When that has been done, there will be no classes, therefore no class tyranny, and no incentive to class lying. Thus, and thus only, shall we break the power of the capitalist press—by breaking the power of capitalism. And so it is that I, an advocate of pure democracy, am interested in this story from the Argentine Republic, and tempted to cry to the American dockers, the American typographers, the American news-writers: “Help! Help against the lying, kept press!”