By Jose Gutierrez
Charles Edward Russell was one of the great US correspondents of the 1900s. He wrote for the New York Herald and was the author of several books, including The Uprising of the Many, Lawless Wealth, Songs of Democracy and Why I Am a Socialist.
Russell belonged to a generation of journalists who reported events from the perspective of the poor. His observations of the unfairness of capitalism led him to question the system and advocate what he called the public ownership of the means of production.
This generation of great US correspondents seems to have vanished in the mid-1930s. After the second world war, brainwashed with Cold War ideology, most mainstream journalists became apologists for the government and promoted the values and interests of the "free-enterprise system".
Any US journalist who questioned capitalism became taboo. The reporter who openly sided with the oppressed and dared to advocate socialism as an alternative to capitalism lost any credibility and was thrown out of the mainstream. This repression caused many journalists to edit reality and report events from the perspective of the powerful.
It wasn't until the 1960s during the Vietnam War that many mainstream reporters began to question again. Again, anyone who dared to advocate an alternative to capitalism became the enemy. Journalists who took the unprecedented step of reporting events from the perspective of the oppressed and of questioning the system and proposing alternatives were defamed as "KGB spies" — such as Wilfred Burchett, the great Australian correspondent who reported the Vietnam War from behind North Vietnamese lines.
In Vietnam many correspondents reported quite accurately the horrors of the war, but I question whether it moved people to understand that the war was the product of capitalism and the need for social action. In North America and Australia many people rose up against the war, but not against the system that made this war possible; and so, the Vietnam War ended and the antiwar movement ended as well. But just three months later, Washington started another war in Angola and then it became heavily involved in Central America, Afghanistan and about 50 other CIA secret wars around the world. Reporting "objectively" the minute details of the war rather than questioning the whole thing and proposing a solution opened up many job opportunities for professional war correspondents.
How did Charles Russell report the wars of his times?
"I question much if any of the correspondents that followed the Russo-Japanese war are enthusiastic supporters of the theory that modern war has been humanised ... I was in Japan just after the close of the war, and saw some of the remains of Japanese soldiers brought home for burial, an arm or a foot or a cap (being all that could be found after the shell exploded), and there was nothing about these spectacles that appealed much to one's senses as remarkably humane. There is no way, so far as I have been able to learn, by which war can be made anything but infinitely horrible in all its stages and phases; General Sherman's definition of it ["War is hell"] remains absolutely correct after all these years of what are called humane inventions for the speedy making of widows and orphans; and there still remains unchallenged the hideous indictment that for this also the system called Capitalism is responsible." — The Men Behind the Dreadnoughts
"Day after day we read of the battles between the Spanish troops and the Moroccans; about the desperate valour of the Spanish, the dead and wounded they count, or about the sufferings of the troops in the fields ... Not one hint of the real cause is allowed to be made public; the news vouchsafed to the world is that it is a quarrel growing out of the attempt of Spain to police Morocco, in accordance with the international agreement of 1905. The real cause, perfectly well known behind the scenes in every European capital, is that the Interests of Spain have made certain investments in Morocco; they seek those profits and returns that under the present system of the world we have decreed for investments; the native rulers stand in the way of these profits. Hence the Interests compel the Spanish government to make war upon the native rulers, and thousands of Spanish working-men are sent to perish in the desert. What concern is it of theirs? Why should they give up their lives?
"Their brethren in Spain begin to ask this question; their widows ask it, when the news comes that they are dead. The people resent the sacrifices they are making for the Interests; they rise against the government that has thus betrayed them. Then the government places guns in the square of Barcelona and by the thousand mows down the working-men and working-women. This happens in 1909, and when the revolting people have been killed, imprisoned, or overawed, the governments of some other countries are manifestly relieved, and the war in Morocco is prosecuted with renewed vigour." — Two Typical Wars
Today, many journalists hide their pro-establishment views behind the pretence that they are neutral, balanced, unbiased and professional. There is a whole discipline called epistemology — the study of the production of knowledge — to counteract the notion that there can ever be objectivity and neutrality in the media. Professor Noam Chomsky argues that the mainstream media are a propaganda system that manufactures consent, that is, an instrument of social control and manipulation of the masses. As Charles E. Russell wrote, "you cannot change a vast, underlying economic condition by preaching at it".
The professional journalists sell their services to the highest bidder. But profit-making news organisations are part of the oppressive capitalist system. They are just businesses which sell news, information and entertainment as commodities. What, then, is the purpose of writing an article if it does not aim to resolve the problems of the community?
How would Russell describe the media industry today? He understood that profit-making enterprises have their own inescapable logic:
"Suppose each of the stockholders of the United States Steel Corporation to be a most kind-hearted, compassionate man. If you could by any means make him understand the hell that this company maintains, he would be powerless to change it. Let the officers be wholly unselfish philanthropists, and they shall be equally impotent. Let the managers be moved to tears by every accident, they can do nothing that shall prevent accidents. The whole organization is utterly impersonal; it is hard, mechanical, inhuman, relentless, and must be so, and cannot possibly be otherwise. To make profits, to declare dividends, to meet the interest on the outstanding securities, to produce steel, to produce it with the least possible expenditure of money: these are the only considerations that can be entertained everywhere, at any time, by any person in the organization."
Let's rescue the writings and follow the tradition of the classic socialist writers and journalists. Now that the Cold War is over, their writings need to be studied, evaluated, updated and applied to our contemporary reality. We must combine theory with practical struggle. Let's read Marx and Lenin. What's more, let's follow the example of other fighters who shed their blood in the struggle to make of this troubled world a better place.
Capitalism is still the same. It now wears another mask (neo-liberalism), but it is still a system which produces death squads, war, poverty, oppression. And what Charles Russell wrote about such fruits is still true:
"Little children in the process of being first robbed and then murdered in the sacred cause of profits. If you like the system of which this is the certain fruit, come here and like the fruit also. You should not like the one without the other. And if you accept both, let me ask you one question. How if this robbed and tortured child were your daughter, or your little sister? How would you like that? And if it would be bad for your daughter, or your sister, do you think it can be good for another man's daughter and another man's sister?
"This is the offer of Socialism: the righting of the centuries of wrong the producers have suffered, the dawn of a genuine democracy, peace instead of war, sufficiency instead of suffering, life raised above the level of appetite, a chance at last for the good in people to attain their normal development."