- cross-posted to:
- quotes@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- quotes@lemmygrad.ml
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1892258
Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/aug/05.htm
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1892258
Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/aug/05.htm
I saw this quote earlier today and responded to it there, but I'll also comment here.
If the press is not free, it means the government owns it. This means that they'll use it to manipulate narratives and take control. This is bad because the government is exclusively self-interested and evil. It will not hesitate to perform the worst acts imaginable to secure wealth and power.
The best model for the press (at least, that I can think of) is a free market press. One where people freely and continuously choose which press they'd like to support and the more support a news company receives, the more people it can deliver news to.
Yes, there's a risk that the press is bought and bribed, but it's a guarantee with a government controlled press (in that case, the government is the one to buy the press).
Without government involvement, people can hear both sides of the story and the possibility for new, unbiased journalists exists.
but it is worth mentioning that both the USSR back in the day, and China now ha[d][ve] state-owned press, and they also allow[ed] anyone to publish their own press. The USSR was also known to allow its state-owned journalists to publish critiques of the government, and present information in ways that didn't always suit the state. Socialist press was and is far more free than "free" market press.
All of the major news organizations in the West get large portions of their funding from their governments. Some of them also get their funding from the funders of politicians. The vast majority of "independent" journalists will quote those organizations in their publications, meaning "independent" journalism in the West is nothing more than an extension of mainstream media. The only ones who break from this norm are publications that attempt to oppose MSM's reporting.
Six corporations own 90% of news media in the United States. They're NBCUniversal (COMCAST), Disney, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), VIACOM, News Corporation, and AT&T. All of these companies have rich executives who've been known to fund not just individual politicians, but both heads of the American party (I.E. both the Republican and the Democratic parties). Our government is owned by corporations, and those corporations also own our information.
Meanwhile, if you were to go to China and rummage through their news media, you'd see that their media is much more honest about where it comes from, and it's far easier to find the true truth. Sure, sometimes the state-owned media won't publish the full truth, but there are always a few actually independent journalists who're covering the same story, who will publish other views of the situation. That's heaps better than what we have here.
I don't hate to break it to you that
will never work with
uh, why? It seems like a free market economy is exactly where a free market press would work. Companies might buy news companies, but thanks to no government interaction, other news companies can pop up, make money because they deliver a service people want, and then grow.
fight for your life in the comments friend I believe in you
Why would any top company allow others to challenge their market share? Why does the trend under capitalism (where economic power stands above political power, and governments) tend towards increasing monopolization / fewer companies, in every industry?
And existing monopolies won't give a fuck about it, yeah.
They might not like it but it's what happens anyway. I don't have many examples off the top of my head, but I do know of at least one YouTuber who gives updates on geopolitics.
What you are saying is not true. Under socialism, the government is made out of representatives democratically elected by workers who care about the interest of workers. Also, socialism is a system which main goal is to benefit people, so every person in power has that goal. Therefore, news will be more transparent because their point is to show the truth to people instead of just being manipulated information paid off by the wealthy which is the case right now. What you called “both sides” is the same side paying off the two political parties that it owns to write slightly different content.
A dictatorship of the proletariat would be interested in news that help the people and not that help the bourgeoisie.
Who “buys and bribes” the press under the government? The government, of course, but in the name of what? A certain class. Under the bourgeoisie, the press serves the bourgeois state regardless of direct ownership, this is what Lenin is attempting to demonstrate. How do you refute this? You don’t, just as Lenin said you cannot. Instead you say that having direct government ownership is worse. Why? Because “government is evil and market relations are good as a rule”. How is this demonstrated? By you asserting it?
Probably not worth bothering with this one, they seem like an ancap lol
Like, they literally post in a "capitalist questions and discussions" community to make posts praising free market capitalism and complaining about the evils of government intervention (any government intervention)
I want to specialize in converting libs though since we are short on people for the revolution 😅
I'm seriously perplexed what these people think they'll accomplish by trying to bait here.
It's a little more complicated to argue that the free market is good for the consumer (though it can be done), but it's pretty easy to argue that government is self-interested and power-hungry.
Firstly, history. Nearly every government ever has been populated with people concerned with their own power. Even since the popularization of democracy, governments were still incredibly corrupt and did not operate out of a love for the people. All democracy really does to alleviate a government's self-interest is make charisma more important during election cycles, which doesn't do anything to shift the government's interests.
The people in the government are the same type of people as CEOs and people who run multi-billion companies. Whether they're put in power by military force, by elections, or by people willingly giving them money for a good or service in return, they are all people who are 100% acting in their own self-interest collecting as much wealth and power as possible. The only thing that elections do is make it so that sometimes, some government officials have to appear to be good (or appear not as bad as their opponent).
That's way easier if the press is under the government's control though. Now, the government could imprison anyone who doesn't talk about how nice the president is to puppies for at least an hour. Or, less drastically, they could revoke your press license if you say that the things the president is saying is wrong (and then fine or imprison you if you deliver news without a license).
In a free press though, even if all the major news sources are owned by the same people (which is a good point and probably to some extent true, though I don't know to what extent), there's nothing stopping new people from popping up and delivering what they believe to be honest, unbiased news. That won't be the only type of person who pops up, and it'll be exploited a lot, but the possibility of a good news source exists now.
You wrote five whole paragraphs and nowhere have you even once mentioned class or the class character of the governments you are talking about. You talk of governments in the abstract and as if they are all essentially the same. You seem to think that the state is a neutral entity that is above class and that states just represent themselves. But in reality states and their governments always represent the interests of one or another class. In a capitalist society with a bourgeois state there is no need for the state to own the media directly since both the state and the media work on behalf of the interests of capital. The opposite is the case in socialist societies where the state embodies the dictatorship of the proletariat.
This is basic Marxist theory and since you are on a Marxist-Leninist instance i would encourage you to use the resources available here, the literature links and the various educational posts and comments that others have made to learn at least the basics. This will clear up a lot of the confusion and the idealist/liberal misconceptions you have on this subject.
Governments are a separate organization of people with its own goals and motives. Sometimes those goals align with those of companies (either particular ones or just large companies in general), sometimes they align with the people, and sometimes they align with those of ducks.
If you assume that every organization must necessarily be part of either the bourgeoisie or proletariat, and you assume that organizations in those classes all share all their interests, then a governments interests necessarily align with those of a class, but this isn't very enlightening. It's much more useful to view the government as a self-interested organization whose goals may or may not align with any particular group or individual.
If government interests don't inherently perfectly align with those of a particular class, you've got to be pretty careful when giving them power. There is no such thing as a dictatorship of the proletariat (at least, not a stable one) because as soon as you have a dictatorship, the government no longer needs the proletariat. If there is any alignment of interests left at all it is only by coincidence.
Even if you had an extensive democratic system, all that does is incentivise some government officials to sometimes appear like they share interests with some of the people. It doesn't actually change governments interests.
It may be useful to certain interests for us to view government that way, but it does not correspond to reality. This theory of government as a purely self-interested organization is insufficient and inadequate in explaining the behavior which we observe real states engage in.
Again i can only recommend that you do some reading on this subject first. Marx and Engels explained the nature of the state:
"By the mere fact that it is a class and no longer an estate, the bourgeoisie is forced to organise itself no longer locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its mean average interest. Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests. [...]
It is therefore obvious that as soon as the bourgeoisie has accumulated money, the state has to beg from the bourgeoisie and in the end it is actually bought up by the latter. This takes place in a period in which the bourgeoisie is still confronted by another class, and consequently the state can retain some appearance of independence in relation to both of them. Even after the state has been bought up, it still needs money and, therefore, continues to be dependent on the bourgeoisie;" -The German Ideology
"the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie" -The Communist Manifesto
“The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ’the reality of the ethical idea’, ’the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ’order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.” -The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Lenin sums it up like this:
“According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order,” which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes”
Lenin elaborates further on this in The State and Revolution
And here is a more modern discussion of the Marxist understanding of the state using the US as a case study to illustrate the general points.
I've read everything in both those links and either I didn't understand it or it was plainly contradictory and bad.
First, I never saw any reason that the group of people who make up the new government would serve the people. Not once was there a reason that a dictatorship for the proletariat would actually be for the proletariat. In fact, it seems like the exclusive role of the government is to oppress somebody, and the proletariat's a really easy target. Even if you and all your friends pick up arms, overthrow the government, and try to set up a state that acts in the interest of the people, your new government is going to be made up of people who act in their own self-interest, and the interests of the government as a whole will reflect that.
The idea of the state withering away, as I understand it, is based on the idea that the state is an instrument of oppression by one class against another, and when a classless society emerges, the state will lose its purpose and role and then slowly vanish. BUT the very fact that there is an oppressive state (that's busy oppressing the remnants of capitalism) means that there's a class divide (rulers and ruled, oppressed and oppressed, that whole shebang). Thanks to the immeasurability of when the capitalists have been defeated (Lenin stated that he couldn't know by what practical measures the defeat of capitalism will be known) the oppressive state is going to stick around indefinitely, oppressing more and more people.
In simpler terms, there's some dictator in charge of the dictatorship of the proletariat (or at least, there are high ranking members in it). During the extinguishing of capitalism, this dictator will have lots of power and authority granted to him by the people. He won't want to lose it. This man will do everything in his power to maintain total domination for himself forever. He will create imaginary threats, oppress people, frighten them, manipulate narratives, concentrate more power, punish insurrection, whatever it takes. If he doesn't, someone who will will take his place. This is human nature, the human nature you see in the bourgeois.
Secondly, the idea that the state is created by one of the two classes to oppress the other is either not true or a self-fulfilling prophecy. Was Genghis Khan a false mediator? The state exists because people in pre-history had really big armies and wanted to control people to obtain wealth and power for themselves. It turned out that people being alive and prosperous was really helpful for that, so states started supporting that, so people often submitted. This isn't the bourgeois creating a state to adjudicate disputes between them and the proletariat in the former's favor, it's just militaristic (or perhaps political or social) conquest.
I had lots of other problems with both the articles you linked, especially the article from Liberation School, but I don't really want to write a full paper on the errors of communism.
Instead, let's bring it back to the idea of freedom of the press. If the state is a purely oppressive tool used by one class to oppress another, a state-controlled press is bad. It doesn't matter who you're oppressing, or who you're claiming or actually doing it in the name of, it's bad because the result is truth is thrown out in favor of manipulation.
In a post-class society (I don't think that this is possible, but that doesn't matter right now) you actually would have a free press, because there's no government or state restricting it, and this would be great. However, something like this wouldn't come about through state oppression and control of the media. In fact, this dictatorship for the proletariat having power over the news ensures that there'll always be stories about the new, evil things capitalists are doing that your loving dictator needs more money and authority to squash.
So...your whole argument boils down to "human nature". Wow, very original, i'm sure none of us has ever heard that before.
Not really
-no one ever showed me why a dictatorship for the proletariat would be for the proletariat (adjacent to human nature, since there's the assumption that they wouldn't be) -a dictatorship for the proletariat would never wither away because its existence ensures the existences of an oppressor and oppressed, on top of never being able to tell when its intended job is completed -humans don't want to sacrifice control (absolutely human nature, but I want to list it here as well just to list all my arguments) -governments aren't exclusively the tool of oppression for the use of a separate class -if governments are purely oppressive, granting them control over media is always bad -in a society on the brink of becoming a post-class society, control over the press would be the perfect tool to perpetuate idea that more oppression is needed (again human nature adjacent, since there's the assumption that governments would want to do that)
If my argument were entirely based on my idea of human nature though, what part of human nature am I wrong about?
If there is no Bourgeoisie or the government explicitally restricts the Bourgeoisie from controlling the media, who else but the proletariat would control the media?
Just because some people want to oppress others to feed their weak egos doesn't mean that all of humanity wants that. I think most people actually want to live in a society that takes care of them, and in turn will love to help out and serve society. Once it becomes the norm to look out for the collective interest instead of self serving behavior, self serving individuals will either need to learn to adapt, hide or get ostracized by society.
Human nature is not static. Human nature is reacting to the conditions they live in.
Why do you think economic titans are subservient to their political figureheads?
Read Parenti - Inventing reality. You need to badly.
I love me some tautological nothings!
Tautological means that it’s a true statement in every possible case, but the government being evil isn’t.
This is moreso how I meant it.
"This is bad... because [they're] evil."
Ah, I see the tautology now lol