Editorial: This Age of Discontent (1949)

Editorial from the July 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live in an age of universal political publicity. Every government in the world maintains its home and foreign organisations for advertising itself, by the printed word, the pictorial puff, the cinema and the wireless broadcast. At a time when the workers in all countries are told to avoid waste and to produce more in order to raise the standard of living the governments, who can agree with each other on little else, all agree in spending millions of pounds, dollars, roubles, etc., on a twofold self advertising campaign; twofold because one line of advertising is directed to the workers at home and another, very different, line is aimed at workers in other countries. The propaganda that each government sends to workers' abroad is filled with carefully selected and highly-coloured accounts of the health, wealth, liberty and happiness of the workers who have the good fortune to live under the government, and of the way the workers lives are constantly being improved by social reforms for which the government in question is responsible. The object of this is not to give information, far from it. This overseas propaganda is a weapon in the “cold war," a means of undermining the loyalty of the other workers to the other government. So much so that at the moment the Russian government is busy trying to jam American and British broadcasts in the Russian language.

The propaganda dope for home consumption calls for a different theme. It consists of telling the workers how much better off they are than the workers in foreign countries and how much better off than they used to be under the previous government.

Viewed in the mass the falsity of it all it transparent. No government uses at home the kind of stuff it uses outside the country, and for a very obvious reason. If people are happy and contented you don’t need a high-powered governmental publicity machine to tell them so. But nowhere are the workers satisfied, and every government in the world is scared lest in their discontent the workers should desert their present political beliefs and turn to something else. Every day, in every country some more workers are losing faith in capitalism and even the latest trick, that of calling capitalism Socialism, as in Britain and Russia, is losing some of its effectiveness.