“When you control the mail...you control information.”

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO

9-21-22

So said one of my favorite characters on US television, Newman, from the show Seinfeld. You do control information if you control the mail which is obvious. More importantly, if you control information or the distribution of it, you not only control the information but what that information is saying. Language matters.

The mass media, the news we see on our TV every day, what we read in the papers and the movies we see that are produced in Hollywood, has a goal. Hollywood has been a faithful, purveyor of propaganda defending capitalism and, in particular, US exceptionalism; it is not simply entertainment. Remember the movies about the war, the John Wayne movies. The mass media is is not a clean slate or a tabula rasa as they say about the human baby. It is not objective. It has a conscious goal.

 

As Marx pointed out in the German Ideology, the ruling class, in our case and ruling classes in general, don’t merely own the means of producing the commodities that are necessities for human life. The ruling class also owns the means of producing the dominant ideas, the dominant ideology of society.

 

Source: Business Day

I just read a headline in the Wall Street Journal, one of the most important journals of the US ruling class, that states, The Ragtag Army That Won the Battle of Kyiv and Saved Ukraine. I haven’t read it yet, but the first thing that came to mind was that a “rag tag” army of medieval religious zealots drove the most powerful military force in the history of humanity from their country, and most of them wear sandals. They certainly have not had the luxury of expensive modern weaponry provided to them by the very force that fled the country, after 20 years after spending two trillion dollars. They did have US weapons provided to them in a former battle with another foreign invader, the Soviet Union. Many of these weapons have been used to kill US troops since.

 

However, the US ruling class has no interest in its citizens, particularly workers, reading about the resolve, dedication and courage of these Afghani's in driving a powerful invader form their land. What we think of them, whether we agree with them or not, courage and determination was not something they lacked.

 

In Ukraine, the US is involved in a proxy war with an imperialist competitor. It wants our support in this confrontation as a weakened Russia will allow US imperialism to direct more attention to a more powerful competitor in China. In this squabble workers have no interests. The Ukraine and Russian working classes are dying in this inter-imperialist war in which they have no interest. We have to ask ourselves; where are the European workers’ organizations, the unions, and the European, so called, workers’ parties? Where is the European working class that should intervene on a class basis here? Or here in the US for that matter. In the US the mass media’s love affair with the Ukrainian regime, a regime of oligarch’s itself is intense.

 

It reminds me of the great PATCO strike in the US in 1980. I recall a TV reporter in an airport sticking a mike in front of a traveler’s face, a traveler whose plane was delayed due to the strike by PATCO, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association. I am paraphrasing here, but the reporter asked, “What does it feel like” or “What’s it like” to be held hostage by the Air Traffic Controllers Union? Isn’t that what lawyers call a “leading question”?

 

The most important thing we as workers must grasp is that whatever we read, see on the news, hear on TV, read in the history books, what matters is who is saying it, writing it, producing it and so on. With any information we take in, we must start from the position, must ask ourselves: Does this advance our class interests or does it harm them? 

 

It’s as simple as that.