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what do you guys generally think about freedom of speech
(lemmygrad.ml)
A place to ask questions of Lemmygrad's best and brightest
Generally the way that "freedom of speech" is used in a capitalist context is a half-baked idea. When a government says "we will not restrict any form of speech under any circumstances", they haven't made a promise to protect an inalienable right of the working person, they've created a power vacuum to be filled by capitalist firms. Proletarian freedom of speech should be a combination of the negative right (will not prevent speech) and a positive right (will prevent others from preventing speech), and must be balanced with other rights that people have (people's speech must not cause harm).
Liberal governments also all too commonly reveal themselves to be hippocrites even by their own half-baked standards of speech. The fact of the matter is that the freedom of speech as practiced by bourgeois dictatorships is the freedom of the ruling class to control information flows in society. Our own governments have made the calculation that allowing a certain amount of dissenting speech among the populace is not a threat to them, which is the only reason we're allowed to be on this website saying these things - if Communism enjoyed a resurgence in Western democracies we would see a return to Red scares and blacklists for sure.