Almost certainly from the pen of Mary E. Marcy writing under one of her many pseudonyms (there are Marcy articles out there still uncredited to her because of her use of other names) on the manufacture of consent as the U.S. prepared to enter World War One in what was an imperialist state, at home as well as abroad. Fantastic stuff, the full Marcy on display.

‘The Lies We Believe’ by John Randolph (Mary E. Marcy) from International Socialist Review. Vol. 17 No. 1. July, 1916.

WHERE do you get your ideas, you workingmen and working women, who feed and clothe and shelter the world; who transport the food from the farms to the cities, who mine the coal and make the wheels go round? Where do you get your ideas?

You get your ideas from your school teachers and your preachers, from the newspapers and the magazines and from the books that are written—and praised because they teach you things that are not true.

You get your ideas from the men who work beside you, whom you talk to on the street cars, in the barber shops and saloons. And these men and women are fed up on the lies printed in the newspapers and in the magazines and in the books and which are taught in the public schools.

In any age the ideas of people in general are the ideas of the ruling class, the ideas that will benefit the people who rule the people who work.

Almost everybody believes in “honesty” so far as workingmen are concerned. We have all been taught all our lives that an honest workingman is something praiseworthy and noble. Nobody but the rebels, who have always been people whom nobody with property respects at all, nobody but these rebels has ever said that it was wrong for a man to take all the things the wage workers make. That sort of graft is respectable. But if a workingman stuffed a hundred links of sausage in the Armour packing plant and carried away two pounds of sausage in his pockets for his own dinner, he would be arrested and put into jail. But folks think it is all right for one man to make and another man take the sausage.

Our teachers and college professors tell us that if we are honest and hardworking and economical we can all save up enough to get rich. If a school teacher or a college professor taught us the truth and said that a man who works for wages couldn’t support a family and save up $20,000 in a thousand years, would be fired from his job because he didn’t teach what the owning class wants us to believe.

The incident of Scott Nearing and his removal from the University of Pennsylvania because he showed that the average worker gets only five or six hundred dollars a year in wages, is too recent for us to forget what happens to college professors who see things and tell them. His students would naturally decide that if a workingman earned only $500 a year he couldn’t save $20,000 in less than forty years if he slept in the streets and wore fig leaves for clothing and lived on free lunches.

And you know and I know what would happen to the man who tried to live on Free (?) Lunches, or who was reduced to wearing Fig Leaves instead of coats and trousers.

Do you know that it is only a man or a woman with exceptional brains who can read between the lines of the newspapers and see the truth? Do you know that it takes more brain than most of us have to think for ourselves?

When you are taught to think and to do all the things that will make you a “contented,” “industrious,” “honest” wage worker all your life, so that your boss may take your products and pile up profits and wealth, and when you see everybody kowtowing to your boss and praising your honest, industrious efforts so long as you do not rebel, it is hard to spit in the face of respectability and fight. But as long as we do not fight we shall keep on making profits and dividends and remain wage slaves.

Just now I think if you will watch the newspapers and the magazines you will see one of the most interesting phenomena of your lives. You can see “public opinion” manufactured right before your nose. You can see how the ruling, or capitalist, class has decided that it needs something and wants something that it never thought of wanting two years ago, and how it is going to make us workingmen and women howl for it, too.

This is something that is going to be a very bad thing for the working class. If the capitalist class gets what it wants, it will mean that one of the few liberties left to us “free” (?) Americans will be taken away from us. It will mean that every man and woman in America will be ticketed and watched from the cradle to the grave, and that the young men will be forced into the army.

It will mean that every workingman will be forced to train to fight for and die for the property interests of the very class, the employing class, which exploits him, which keeps him a poverty-stricken, propertyless wage-worker.

You and every other able-bodied workingman will have to give up two years or three years of your lives to training and working in the army, so that when the capitalist class decides to go down and take the rest of Mexico, you will be ready to give up your lives to protect the big ranches of Hearst or the oil wells of Rockefeller or the mines of the Guggenheims.

You will have to fight to gain more oil wells, more land, more mines for those who have already robbed the United States of these natural resources.

The capitalists in this country have decided to make a big bid for world markets and for the natural resources of those countries not already modernized. And so we are all going to become patriotic.

During the past few months we have noticed with pleasure that the working class was not enthusiastic over a proposed war with Mexico, or over a larger army and navy. But the ruling class, with the help of its public servants, the press, the pulpit, the school and college, is going to flood that press with lies that will make the whole world believe that we workers are demanding “Preparedness” a bigger army and navy, and—ultimately—universal conscription or universal military service. By “universal” we mean universal for the workers. The owning class can always be exempted from the disagreeable things of life.

The capitalist class imports gunmen in times of strike; it uses the militia to protect strike-breakers. It may employ soldiers in the factories, mines and mills, at a price so low as to break up the unions or to break a strike.

And the papers and magazines will be declaring within the next few months that we want all this. People scattered all over the country will read of the great Preparedness parades and the “enthusiasm” of the Man Who Toils, and before we know it, half the working class will read these things and believe them and begin to root for Preparedness themselves.

This is an idea and a movement being deliberately manufactured by the capitalistic class because it wants a great army and a great navy to further its own interests.

When you read that 200,000 people paraded in a demonstration for Predaredness in Chicago on June 3rd, you will not know that men marched for fear of losing their jobs, or on the threat of a “lay-off” or of being “docked” for the day in wages.

You will not know that the newspapers deliberately over-stated the size of the parade, nor that the line of march was reduced to something over a mile so that every inducement should be given the “employees” to parade, that those who promised to march were given the whole day as a holiday.

OUR COUNTRY

Now, I want to say right here that I am willing to fight for my country—when I get it, and I am willing to fight right now to get a country that will be our country, a real country of, for and by workingmen and women. But until we have a country of our own, until we have a country that guarantees security from want, a job if we want it, a home to live in, an income for our old age, equal opportunity for all to work and produce things and to secure the value of our products—until we have such a country, I think the only thing worth fighting for is a chance to get it.

We must stand for Preparedness for the coming working class struggle, which is the only struggle worth while. Today the working class has no country. It has nothing on earth but its strength, which it has to sell for wages–in order to live. And the workers cannot always find a boss–a place to sell this laboring power. They cannot always find a job at which to make profits for somebody else.

One of the other decent and intelligent things Prof. Scott Nearing did, for which the capitalist class could not forgive him, was to point out that the laws and the Government were made to protect profits before they protected the lives of the workers.

The Government will back up the banker or the land owner who wants to take back his land from the farmer who cannot pay his mortgage on it. It will take away the crop of the farm tenant, who produced the crop, and turn it over to the landowner, without first seeing that the producer has enough to eat.

The Government and the judges and the laws are here to support your employer, who turns you out without a job, homeless and penniless, in order that he may be sure to make his own profits which you earned and your boss appropriates.

The Government does nothing for you who work. It does everything for profits and profit-takers. It assures the capitalist of his profits. It offers and gives you absolutely nothing.

Let a dozen strikers threaten to burn the factory of their boss—the police and the militia will jump to the scene to protect property. Let a dozen miners be entombed in a mine through the criminal negligence of the mine owners—the State will rush to the aid of the mine owner to see that fires in the mine do not cause any loss of property, while they will allow the entombed miners to die.

The Government of this country and of every other “civilized” country in the world today is a government of and for the property owners only. Property, profits and dividends are its only consideration.

The life of the worker is considered only when it involves profits. Now that the capitalist class has declared itself for Preparedness, it may be that the Government will provide some means of producing healthier, stronger, more able workingmen because the ruling class needs strong soldiers to fight in its interests.

ALL GOVERNMENTS ALIKE

At the root, all capitalist governments are alike. They may vary in some of their branches, or statutes, or minor forms, but they function in the same way. All these Governments–will go to the same lengths to keep your class, and my class, in subjection.

One capitalist government is not worse than another. People point to the German naval officer who blew up a hospital ship lying at anchor and say that this is more brutal than anything that the English government would do.

And then came the Irish rebellion and our wounded comrades were held up to be shot for treason against their enemies’ government. And you and I can look back a few pages and see the lieutenants of John D. Rockefeller murdering men, women and children in Ludlow, Colorado, with the connivance of the State.

Which is worse? Aren’t they all alike? Are they not all the enemies of the working class of the world?

Last week I read the words of a millionaire Chicago patriot who was for “Preparedness and America All the Time,” But I could not forget that only two months ago he was hiring Mexican factory workers to put in the places of his own American workers making binder twine.

He wants Preparedness and an army in Yucatan to help him get a monopoly of the sisal industry there. He wants American working class soldiers to help him clinch the slavery of the Indian sisal workers in Mexico.

But what does he say and what does “Our” Country and “Our” Government have to say when he imports “foreign” wage workers to take our jobs in time of strike? Or at any other time? Where does Americanism come in then?

An I.W.W. boy wrote us that since the war began a foreign government has placed soldiers in the factories to work beside men and women who were getting union wages. The soldier got six pence an hour. Any soldier that rebelled was taken out and shot. Soldiers can be used in more than one way.

Imperialism is here in America today. It is growing by leaps and bounds. Don’t be carried away by it. Explain it to your shopmates and fight the tide all you can.

And educate and organize for the day when we shall be strong enough to seize control of the means of production and distribution for the working class!

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/isr/v17n01-jul-1916-ISR-riaz-ocr.pdf