“Freedom of the press” is another of the principal slogans of “pure democracy”. And here, too, the workers know — and socialists everywhere have admitted it millions of times — that this freedom is a deception while the best printing presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply, and cynically, the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example.
The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishing houses, and hiring newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed.
The capitalists have always used the term ‘freedom’ to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death.
In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion.
In this respect, too, the defenders of ‘pure democracy’ prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement.
—Lenin, Congress of the First Comintern
Antonio Gramsci writing in 1916
These are the days of subscription campaigns. The editors and administrators of bourgeois newspapers tidy up their display windows, paint some varnish on their shop signs and appeal for the attention of the passer-by (that is, the readers) to their wares. Their wares are newspapers of four or six pages that go out every day or evening in order to inject in the mind of the reader ways of feeling and judging the facts of current politics appropriate for the producers and sellers of the press.
We would like to discuss, with the workers especially, the importance and seriousness of this apparently innocent act, which consists in choosing the newspaper you subscribe to. It is a choice full of snares and dangers which must be made consciously, applying criteria and after mature reflection.
Above all, the worker must resolutely reject any solidarity with a bourgeois newspaper. And he must always, always, always remember that the bourgeois newspaper (whatever its hue) is an instrument of struggle motivated by ideas and interests that are contrary to his. Everything that is published is influenced by one idea: that of serving the dominant class, and which is ineluctably translated into a fact: that of combating the laboring class. And in fact, from the first to the last line the bourgeois newspaper smells of and reveals this preoccupation.
But the beautiful – that is the ugly – thing is this: that instead of asking for money from the bourgeois class to support it in its pitiless work in its favor, the bourgeois newspapers manage to be paid by…the same laboring classes that they always combat. And the laboring class pays; punctually, generously.
Hundreds of thousands of workers regularly and daily give their pennies to the bourgeois newspapers, thus assisting in creating their power. Why? If you were to ask this of the first worker you were to see on the tram or the street with a bourgeois paper spread before him you would hear: “Because I need to hear about what happening.” And it would never enter his head that the news and the ingredients with which it is cooked are exposed with an art that guides his ideas and influences his spirit in a given direction. And yet he knows that this newspaper is opportunist, and that one is for the rich, that the third, the fourth, the fifth is tied to political groups with interests diametrically opposed to his.
And so every day this same worker is able to personally see that the bourgeois newspapers tell even the simplest of facts in a way that favors the bourgeois class and damns the working class and its politics. Has a strike broken out? The workers are always wrong as far as the bourgeois newspapers are concerned. Is there a demonstration? The demonstrators are always wrong, solely because they are workers they are always hotheads, rioters, hoodlums. The government passes a law? It’s always good, useful and just, even if it’s…not. And if there’s an electoral, political or administrative struggle? The best programs and candidates are always those of the bourgeois parties.
And we’re aren’t even talking about all the facts that the bourgeois newspapers either keep quiet about, or travesty, or falsify in order to mislead, delude or maintain in ignorance the laboring public. Despite this, the culpable acquiescence of the worker to the bourgeois newspapers is limitless. We have to react against this and recall the worker to the correct evaluation of reality. We have to say and repeat that the pennies tossed there distractedly into the hands of the newsboy are projectiles granted to a bourgeois newspaper, which will hurl it, at the opportune moment, against the working masses.
If the workers were to be persuaded of this most elementary of truths they would learn to boycott the bourgeois press with the same unity and discipline that the bourgeoisie boycott the newspapers of the workers, that is, the Socialist press. Don’t give financial assistance to the bourgeois press, which is your adversary. This is what should be our battle cry in this moment that is characterized by the subscription campaigns of all the bourgeois newspapers. Boycott them, boycott them, boycott them!
from https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1916/12/newspapers.htm
Free speech is idealist in the same way that the free market is idealist. Some people will have the resources and authority to make their voices (or the voices of those who agree with them) louder than others, and drown them out.
Like, if you are THE socialist political entity, you should let people say what they want, and you should listen. And after listening, you should use dialectical and historical materialism to filter out progressive ideas from reactionary ones, and develop a mass line that’s neither falls into commandism or tailism.
Something something have faith in the masses.
In 1991, in the context of the destruction of the Soviet Union (Cuba’s largest trading partner), with neighbors salivating at the prospect of capitalist restoration, a Mexican journalist asked Fidel Castro, “why do you not allow the organization of people who think differently, or open up space for political freedom?” He answers frankly:
We’ve endured over thirty years of hostility, over thirty years of war in all its forms — among them the brutal economic blockade that stops us from purchasing a single aspirin in the United States. It’s incredible that when there’s talk of human rights, not a single word is said about the brutal violation this constitutes for the human rights of an entire people, the economic blockade of the United States to impede Cuba’s development. The revolution polarized forces: those who were for it and those who, along with the United States, were against it. And really, I say this with the utmost sincerity, and I believe it’s consistent with the facts on the ground, but while such realities persist, we cannot give the enemy any quarter for them to carry out their historical task of destroying the revolution.
(This implies, for example, that political dissidence will not have a space in Cuba?)
If it’s a pro-Yankee dissidence, it will have no space. But there are many people who think differently in Cuba and are respected. Now, the creation of all the conditions for a party of imperialism? That does not exist, and we will never allow it. [8]
As far as I can tell, on this score, there’s only two main differences between Fidel Castro and Western leadership. The first is that he stands for anti-imperialism and socialism, and they for imperialism and capitalism. And the other is that he’s honest about what Cuba does and why, whereas capitalist states brutally crush communist organization with mass-murder and imprisonment — COINTELPRO, Operation Cóndor, Operation Gladio, etc. — then simply lie about embracing plurality. Just think here about the notion of white North Americans celebrating “Thanksgiving.”
And I tend to think that this is, in the final analysis, the crux of the matter. The question of “free press” and “free speech” is not separable from the question of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie versus the dictatorship of the proletariat. The idea of “political plurality” as such turns out to be the negation of the possibility of achieving any kind of truth in the realm of politics, it reduces all historical and value claims to the rank of mere opinion. And of course, so long as someone’s political convictions are mere opinion, they won’t rise to defend them. And so the liberal state remains the dictatorial organ of the bourgeoisie, with roads being built or legislation being passed only as commanded by the interests of capital, completely disregarding the interests of workers. Under regimes where political plurality is falsely upheld as a supreme virtue, the very notion of asserting oneself as possessing a truth appears aggressive and “authoritarian.”
Me, a
enjoyer, doing some sedition and insider trading.Literally nobody on Earth believes in free speech, or ever has. It’s a baby-brained nonsense right-wing talking point. Show me a place where there are no laws about what I can’t say. Even the US has laws against speech about: sedition, conspiracy, libel, false advertising, threats, child pornography, fraud, perjury, defamation, incitement, insider trading, IP infringement, etc.
Even without considering the law, the US surveillance state and the practical reality of most venues of speech being privately owned and moderated means that free speech cannot really exist in 95%+ of venues where speech takes place. This is a good thing inasmuch as it makes these venues somewhat tolerable to exist in but a bad thing in that the acceptable types of speech is dictated by the bourgeoisie.
The reality is that every society puts some limits on speech, and vast majority of people understand that free speech absolutism isn’t desirable. So, the real question is why people think that the limits on free speech that western liberal societies decided on are inherently correct?
This obviously a chauvinistic position that westerners tend to take because they suffer from the anchoring bias of having grown up in a society with a particular set of rules that they’ve internalized and now treat as the natural default.
Define free speech
Well first you buy a peach and then you put it into the freezer
Yes. The very idea of ‘free speech’ tells all those who would participate that you need not do any investigation before opening your mouth. Leaves too many openings for the willfully ignorant to hijack the process.
Under capitalism, free speech is an unrealized ideal that is wielded selectively for the interests of capital and the ruling class. You can see that it rapidly falls apart whenever the ruling class wants it to, including but not limited to when it is threatened. The heart of free speech idealism is the US, where the Red Scare was used to suppress communists as well as anyone pushing against the official capitalist line. Free speech is only tolerated insofar as it does not threaten the ruling order.
The main function of free speech idealism tends to be national chauvinism, the idea that Western countries that possess it are superior to those that don’t. The dividing lines on what counts as having free speech are seemingly arbitrary unless you know the geopolitical boundaries of capitalism, where countries are favorable to the capitalist empire vs. not, or even just which countries have stepped out of line. “Free speech” gets evaluated by a NatSec think tank based on whatever they want the result to be as part of pressure campaigns to justify sending in their goon squads whether that’s groups like USAID or sanctions regimes or the IMF. The countries designated as the enemy for the purposes of capital are always “violating free speech” and oppressing “their own people”, forms of propaganda directed mostly inwards at the populations of “free” countries so that they are sufficiently misinformed to accept the violence done in their name to “the enemy”.
Free speech idealism also involves a sleight-of-hand that claims the state is separate from capital and that the former is at risk of tyranny while the latter is a force of nature and even freedom itself. So, when you get fired from your job and blacklisted for being a member of a socialist party, that actually gets characterized as freedom (of speech) for your at-will employer rather than a violation of your own freedom of association. In reality, capital is the most common suppressor of speech and association and ignoring this is a function of free speech idealism. And more fundamentally, the state is also an arm of capital, so the distinction is really just an expression of how capital negotiates between its functional appendages and different internal factions. When unions are getting too uppity, capital is happy to let the state crush their speech on top of their own efforts.
In addition, you don’t even have to look only at how the rules seem to change depending on conditions because the rules already in the books spell out the limits for you already even within the inconsistent confines of free speech idealism. You have theoretical freedom of association (from government interference) except for when it’s in the interests of “national security” (state infiltration of socialist orgs, for example). You have theoretical freedom of speech except when it “incites a riot” or is considered “treason”. If your efforts actually materially oppose the state itself, they no longer count as free speech. Let’s say a local corporate overlord has been illegally putting up hostile architectural elements on public property in order to discourage homeless people from living there (e.g. on a sidewalk). The state will generally just let them do that, they love that shit. But if you get a few buddies together and smash that shit + put it on the overlord’s doorstep, you will be prosecuted if caught, likely brought up on various charges relating to destruction of private property, terrorism, trespassing, possessing illegal weapons (hammers…), violating noise ordinances, conspiracy, etc. This then gives the state license to go after any organization this may have been part of, using drug and/or terrorism laws to treat you as a gang or insurrectionary group and bringing you up on those charges as well. They might not go as far as all that, but they’ll do a few of them. There’s your freedom of speech in clearing illegal blocking of a public right-of-way. You fuck with the interests of capital and the state fucks with you.
Under free speech idealism, freedom is provided to far right groups far more often than left groups and this is because the former intersect with the interests of popular factions of capital.
Finally, consider the realities of speech in countries that have just had revolutions and seek to maintain them. This doesn’t even need to be socialist revolutions, it can include national liberation revolutions that maintain a national capitalist order but oppose imperial capital. The empire will support and instigate coups, engage in sabotage and terrorism, support and create far-right groups to destabilize your country, use financial powers to create widespread poverty and suffering, and do their best to credibly threaten and then engage in war to force your capitulation. But if your country then stands up and fights against these things, such as expelling NGOs that do dubious things and work with US NatSec, the “free speech” police are suddenly knocking at your door. If you institute state-supported media that pushes back on international capitalist media or ban outlets that constantly lie to and propagandize your people against the revolution, you will be branded a harsh dictatorship that hates and fears the noble profession of journalism. You will be forced to give up your revolution or crack down on “free speech” by the oppressions of international capital.
As an abstract vague ideal it’s fine to like free association and relatively open philosophical spaces. In reality this isn’t how it actually works, it’s a propaganda tool and any successful revolution will need to clamp down on “free speech” due to inherent power differentials against imperialism.
I think a good way to see the thing is that the upkeep of a system requires some degree of media control, so one of the best things that can be done is to build a system where people are part and the focus of the system. So socialism is still preferable, because the focus of the media control is to prevent CIA poisoned information, and others like it, not to gag the population into compliance.
There are 3 kinds of people. People that don’t want 100% free speech without consequence, the other kind of person lies about wanting 100% free speech. The third sensible kind wants speech regulated to some degree but not too much.
In both bourgeoisie and socialist democracies it is good to give people a means to vent their frustrations and hopefully reform or respond to the concerns of the people. Opposing the masses of people with concerns that are legitimately hurting the people is an act of hubris that is not good for the stability of the government. I think it is reasonable to regulate/call out misinformation or campaigns wholly based on misinformation. Ideally, media companies must vet out to not report misinformation because it undermines the ability of the people to assess real threats to their democracy.
To the extent of the country is in fact a democracy representing the people, it is of great priority that the people not be lead astray with false information easily. For this reason, Bourgeoisie democracies often tell falsehoods. Bourgeoisie institutions in general spin narratives to divert the problems capitalism causes onto false scapegoats to keep the Bourgeoisie corporations in power. Socialist institutions that represent the will of the people and accountable to those people have no incentive to spin false narratives in the media. Problems can exist, then they are addressed eventually.
