just in general id like to see some communist perspective on it
Freedom of criticism 👍
Freedom of hate speech 👎
It’s treated as a right when it’s a privilege.
It’s constantly abused as a ‘right’, with people citing the primacy of their rights over all other considerations as justification to be cruel.
And it’s cynically manipulated by didacts and polemicists in the same way.
In the context of the West, it’s just a talking point to me to culturally ingrain onto us the normalization of reactionary speech, while materially cracking down on revolutionary voices. Red Sails made an essay about it.
Hugo Black, the Supreme Court justice most closely identified with First Amendment Absolutism, by his own account, “never believed that any person has a right to give speeches or engage in demonstrations where he pleases and when he pleases.” [14] He also distinguished speech from “conduct.” [15] Hence, he supported prohibitions on flag-burning, the wearing of anti-war armbands in high school, protesting on government property and “Fuck the Draft” t-shirts.
“Freedom of speech” is an abstract principle that doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense. What does exist is access to or control over platforms and the means to spread their ideas. So in that sense, I think the working class should have control over those platforms.
I’d argue the whole freedom of speech idea is basically just propaganda designed to portray the liberal democracy as being more enlightened than other types of societies, which is then used to justify western hostility to other human civilizations.
Every society, without exception, puts some limits on freedom of expression. There is zero reason to believe that the west got the balance right while everybody else has got it wrong. And seeing how western society is now losing all social cohesion by becoming atomized into competing thought bubbles, I’d argue there’s plenty of reason to think the west got it wrong.
A society needs to have to have a common world view to be functional. That world view can evolve over time, but at least some core principles need to be generally accepted. For example, people have to have a common agreement of how politics and economics function in their society. Without that, any sort of progress becomes difficult because everybody pulls in a different direction. We see this happen in western parliamentary democracies all the time. You get one party in power and it tries to pass one set of policies, then another party comes in and starts reverting those policies. So, any projects have a very short horizon of just a few years that a particular party can stay in power. However, even here the parties cannot deviate too far from the agreed upon model. A party has to subscribe to liberalism and capitalism to even get into power. Parties with different ideologies are inherently shut out from the whole process.
A second aspect of this is that the type of free speech championed in the west is superficial because it generally does not translate into any material action. People have the right to scream into the void. As soon as criticism starts to translate into any sort of organized movement then the state takes action to suppress it. And this is often done with brutal violence. The murder of Fred Hampton being a perfect example.
Finally, we are now seeing the whole narrative collapsing even in the west as countries rush to limit expression online, pass age verification laws, ban foreign media, and so on. All this illustrates that a high degree freedom of expression was only really possible because the material conditions facilitated general consensus that the system was working in the interest of the public. When most people have their needs met, and the standard of living is higher than in other regions of the world, then you don’t need to actively suppress dissent. Now that the material conditions are changing, we’re seeing attacks on freedom of expression.
Great answer!
O7
It’s a meme.
I view freedom of speech as not an ideology, but rather as a privilege/luxury for places with favorable conditions and a lack of existential threats. The West liked to flaunt free market and free speech ideals back when they had a massive soft power advantage over the late USSR and emerging world, now that they are losing the economic/soft power game against China they are placing the shoe on the other foot and doing away with those ideals in favor of protectionist and nationalistic measures.
Freedom of speech doesn’t exempt one from the consequences of actions. If you spout reactionary nonsense, you will get punished, simple as.
I hate freedom of speech. Freedom of speech makes my town filled with paramiliters.
Although I hate freedom of speech, I support flexibility of speech.
I am sorry if my english is bad
“freedom” is an idealist concept. Nothing is “Free” there are always constraints on everything.
Should people feel free to voice their opinions? sure why not as long as other people are free to say those opinions as fucking stupid. Should people be free to promote hate and spread slander? no. Should foreign actors be free to spread divisive ideas? no. Should capitalists be able to pay dominate the conversation when their opinions are biased against the majority? no.
I think (maybe it’s a deepity/pseudophilosophical drivel) that freedom of speech is a collective right, that is, while a society should be allowed to speak its mind, an individual person (eg. a reactionary) not necessarily so
Under socialism, I don’t believe there should be freedom of speech for reactionaries, there’s still an active class struggle going on in the ideological sphere. Letting old ideas fester in the superstructure runs the risk of capitalist restoration.
Under communism, sure whatever, it’s not like any remaining reactionaries can do anything at that point.
This is actually a valid point with a historical precedent.
Notice how nearly nobody is genuinely advocating for the return of feudalism. It’s dead in the water, its few defenders so inconsequential that they’re politically impotent. Same for monarchism. The bourgeois revolution succeeded at killing those ideas entirely and as such there’s no real reason to suppress ideologies calling for their return.
Capitalism and liberalism will join them under a communist society. Isolated groups of nobodies who don’t understand history will call for their return, but there will be no actual weight behind their calls. No action will follow and any movements they develop will stagnant or wither and die.
There are fringe (and very strange) people that do support the return to monarchy, and their clearly absurd stance can be seen with two pieces of information:
- They fail to understand that monarchies do not make decisions separate from the class relations of their day, as well as the fact that they do not hold “absolute power”.
- They seem like a bunch of armchairists (without even the theoretical backing that some lazy Marxists have) that are too lazy to restore monarchism, so they just end up supporting conservatism while having a weird obsession with a remnant of feudalism in their minds.
For a socialist educated populace, the idea of bringing back capitalism sounds ridiculous. It’s why the revisionists had to boil the frog to bring about capitalist restoration in socialist countries, and this was possible because there are capitalist elements within socialism as socialism emerges from capitalism.
Under communism, even the most clever revisionists can’t do anything to revive the corpse of capitalism because it’s just straight up dead on a world scale and the capitalist elements are all but gone.
Hi, can you please explain to me what you see as differences between socialism and communism? Thanks.
Socialism: what comes after a successful proletarian revolution; proletarian dictatorship, a proletarian controlled state; the big bourgeoisie has been liquidated but other classes might still exist within the society as proletarianization is an ongoing process.
Communism: what comes after socialism has developed to a high stage world-wide; stateless, classless, and moneyless society; the working classes have been merged into one class, the bourgeoisie worldwide has been liquidated.
Thank you so much. I wasn’t sure if you were using it in this manner or some Western laissez - faire , nebulous sense many in the West use it.
its similar to what happened in china. in early unstable days repression was harsher but nowadays reactionaries are allowed to do their bullshit (within limits) because theres very low threat to the party. there are also many traitors in china going against the party who face no repression in china before they eventually run to the US
Honestly, they might be a bit too soft on these reactionaries because they can be a toxic influence on socialism.
What worries me about this are states like USA and Israel sending in ops to stir the pot, then when things pop off and the state is forced to step in, we get Western narratives about Christians/Falun Gong being persecuted, or operatives and their gullible victims being carried off to jail or being killed in armed confrontation, such as seen in color revolutions, and Western narratives and headlines and a bajillion gazillion “peaceful protesters” being murdered by the government. And people very much believe this despite their own peaceful protesters being imprisoned, killed, decitizenized, deported.
I doubt reactionaries would exist in any concentrated or significant sense, so there would really be no need to enforce freedom of speech when such reaction would no longer exist.
Fun fact: it’s in China’s constitution.
I believe in censoring reactionaries, and explaining why we do it.
I think it doesn’t exist and never has.
This is my take as well. Its not that I don’t like the ideal and I’d be prepared to defend it, but, its such an abstract idea that its hard to point where it exists.
Something like that can’t be a priority for me, there’s so many other important things to build
The control of speech should be in the hands of the working classes, to restrict from reactionaries and disinformation. Too much restriction stifles discussion, a lack of control cedes ground to fascists. That’s why the class character of speech and how it relates to a socialist state needs to be analyzed as such.
