Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/104



"Freedom of the press" is another of the chief watchwords of "pure democracy." But workers all know, and the Socialists of all countries have admitted millions of times, that this freedom must remain a fraud as long as the best presses and the most abundant supplies of paper remain in the hands of the capitalists, as long as capital retains its power over the press,—a control which manifests itself most clearly and sharply, most cynically, wherever democracy and a republican regime are most highly developed as, for example, in America. In order to win a real equality and a real democracy for the working masses, for the workers and peasants, it will be necessary first to deprive the capitalists of the possibility of hiring writers, of buying publishing plants, of bribing newspapers. And to accomplish this it will be necessary to shake off the yoke of capitalism, to dethrone the exploiters, and to break their resistance. Capitalists have always meant by "freedom" the freedom of profits for the rich and the freedom of the poor to perish of starvation. Capitalists mean by freedom of the press the freedom of the rich to bribe the press, the freedom to employ wealth in the manufacture and the falsification of so-called public opinion. Once again, the defenders of "pure democracy" reveal themselves as in reality the defenders of this most vile and purchasable system of control by the rich over the means of enlightening the poor, as betrayers of the people seeking with fair but lying phrases to divert them from their concrete historical task of freeing the press from the control of capital. Real freedom and real equality will exist in the order which the Communists are creating, an order which will provide no possibility, direct or indirect, for subjecting the press to the might of money; an order in which nothing will prevent the worker (or group of workers of any size) from possessing and exercising an equal right to the presses and the paper supplies belonging to society.

Even before the war, the history of the 19th and 20th century showed us what becomes of the boasted "pure democracy" under Capitalism. The Marxists have always maintained that the more highly developed, the more "pure" a democracy is, the more open, keen, and merciless will be the nature of the class-struggle, the more obvious will be the pressure of capital and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The Dreyfus affair in republican France, the bloody conflicts between mercenaries armed by capital and striking