Vol. 75/No. 28      August 1, 2011

As with any blockbuster, the story has drawn tens of millions into following the saga, as cops and media tycoons appear before parliamentary committees, the 168-year-old News of the World is closed, and former editors and others are arrested.

But what are the stakes for working people in all this?  
 
Right to privacy
Media intrusion on privacy—anyone’s privacy—is an assault on the basic dignity of all. And millions of workers are rightly outraged. Down the road, such prying, “legal” or “illegal,” aims to push back workers’ capacity to organize and struggle in our own class interests.

The biggest intruder, however, is not the media but the capitalist state and its agencies.

It is claimed that the News of the World hacked the phones of some 4,000 people. But the British cops have files on millions.

Under the banner of the “war against terror” and the “fight against crime,” state agencies tap phones and Internet connections and scrutinize emails to keep tabs on us. Electronic bugging is already admissible as court evidence, and the government has announced it will expand the admissibility of other intercepted evidence. The last Labour government greatly expanded the role and numbers of spying agencies, and the current Conservative Party-Liberal Democrat coalition government is preparing further expansion.

Recently courts ruled that police can keep files for 100 years on people convicted of minor offenses. The cops keep records on anyone who reports a crime and maintain a Sex Offenders Register. Using National Insurance numbers, car licensing, and other methods, the state keeps files on almost the entire population. Not to mention the national census, other official surveys, immigration and Customs authorities, welfare inspectors, and more.

Such spying and harassment by the state was extensively employed during the 1984-85 coal miners strike. The media acted in tandem, including by distorting the news and smearing miners’ leaders.  
 
Capitalist competition
The holier-than-thou anti-Murdoch coverage in the Guardian, the Telegraph, and BBC broadcasts explicitly downplays state prying. The “real villains here are not the police, but the journalists and newspaper executives who have used corrupt and criminal methods,” wrote the Telegraph in a July 12 editorial.

The alliance of “the respectable press” against Rupert Murdoch has nothing to do with protecting political rights and everything to do with clipping the wings of a capitalist rival.

Anyone who reads the British press—“red top” tabloids and broadsheets alike—or who follows the broadcast media knows that Murdoch’s News Corp. is hardly alone in trampling on rights and dignity.

It is capitalist competition that is driving News Corp.’s detractors, including the hypocritical cries that led to Murdoch’s withdrawal of his £8 billion (US$12.9 billion) bid to increase his control of the UK media group BSkyB.

The fact that Australian-born Murdoch is a naturalized U.S. citizen and News Corp. a U.S.-based company adds a strong dose of interimperialist rivalry, with calls to fight “foreign control of the British media.”

Working people have no interest in backing this nationalist campaign, designed to divide working people in the United Kingdom from workers in other countries.  
 
Bourgeois party factionalism
The “Murdoch affair” is also fueled by the sharpening factionalism among capitalist parties in the United Kingdom. This factionalism rises in step with their political convergence around the rulers’ course of making workers and their imperialist rivals pay for the crisis—through eroding living standards, increasing the pace of work, and waging war from Libya to Afghanistan.

With the political distance between Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Tories so narrow, factionalism is the only way to stake out some apparent political ground. This is sharpened by a coarsening of political and cultural life, in which the capitalist media has a special place, and the greater susceptibility of ruling-class institutions to “scandal.”

The working class has no interest in sensationalist gossip promoted by the rulers for their own ends.

Nor should we support calls by the bourgeois parties for increased state “regulation” of the media. There are already an abundance of such measures in the United Kingdom, like DA (“Defence Advisory”) notices, a supposedly voluntary arrangement under which the government censors the media in the name of “national security.”

Working people should have no doubt that such “regulation” will be used with full force against the workers movement and our right to organize and act in our class interests—including the right to produce and circulate our own newspapers.

In the course of the recent debate, many on the left have trembled before what they describe as the immense power of the media and of the “Murdoch empire” in particular. This is greatly exaggerated. History shows that, try as they might through both propaganda and repression, the capitalist rulers cannot prevent revolutionary struggle by working people. Indeed, such struggle is inevitable as they drive to make working people pay for their crisis.

In the course of such struggle, human solidarity—the opposite of the gutter into which the propertied ruling families, ably abetted by the media, would like to drag us—gets forged anew and prepares us to reorganize society in the interests of the vast majority.
 
 
Related articles:
London march demands right to abortion
World War II: How gov’t tried to suppress ‘Militant’  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home