How Germany Keeps Amazon at Bay and Literary Culture Alive

[FrodosPet]

100. What about nationalizing publishing and electronic media?

One of the points of Trotsky is that all the media should be government owned, with publication based on the public support of a position.

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http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1934/08/ame.htm

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For Soviet America will not imitate the monopoly of the press by the heads of Soviet Russia’s bureaucracy. While Soviet America would nationalize all printing plants, paper mills and means of distribution, this would be a purely negative measure. It would simply mean that private capital will no longer be allowed to decide what publications should be established, whether they should be progressive or reactionary, “wet” or “dry,” puritanical or pornographic. Soviet America will have to find a new solution for the question of how the power of the press is to function in a socialist regime. It might be done on the basis of proportional representation for the votes in each soviet election.

Thus the right of each group of citizens to use the power of the press would depend on their numerical strength – the same principle being applied to the use of meeting halls, allotment of time on the air and so forth.

Thus the management and policy of publications would be decided not by individual checkbooks but by group ideas. This may take little account of numerically small but important groups, but it simply means that each new idea will be compelled, as throughout history, to prove its right to existence.

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If the United States goes that route, perhaps the bookstores can sell books and periodicals at cost of production, and the feds could subsidize the store expenses and wages of the employees.