Few issues illustrate the hypocrisy of the right better than freedom of speech.

　　Take United States vice president JD Vance, for example. He toured Europe recently to scold its leaders for allegedly using laws to silence far right critics. This attack on freedom, Vance insisted, was a bigger danger to the continent than the usual bogeymen of Russia and China.

　　Yet back in the US, the free speech warrior’s friends are busy kidnapping and deporting people simply for posting support for Palestine on social media. And his administration is stripping words such as “gender”, “equality” and even “disabled” from government websites.

　　For liberals, this double standard is proof that right wing populist governments are a break with normal capitalist values. The hard right is undoing the linkages between capitalism, democracy and free speech that liberals claim underpinned the system’s birth.

　　But while capitalism talks of liberty, it has never offered the majority of people real freedom of expression. Our rulers have always tried to limit our ability to speak out.

　　Take the “free press”, for example. It’s true that in Britain we are all free to start a news organisation and publish a range of opinions. But the huge costs involved mean that only the extraordinarily rich can exercise that “freedom”. Even supporting an internet-only operation with a large reach requires heavy investment.

　　This class ownership of “news” helps define the limits of what can be debated in society.

　　In days of old, newspaper owners intervened directly in journalists’ writings to ensure that their rags reflected their interests. Today’s proprietors are generally more subtle and instead hire editors and writers that largely share their worldview.

　　What sort of “freedom” does that give the readers?

　　And despite their talk, our rulers have never simply allowed the lower orders to say what they like.

　　The state designs terrorism laws specifically to limit our right to discuss issues it declares to be out of bounds.

　　In the 1990s, the Tory government banned the voices of Sinn Fein Irish republicans from being broadcast—even those who were elected Westminster MPs.

　　Since then, a state obsession with “radical Islam” has resulted in the Prevent Programme, which polices what Muslims can say.

　　And added to terror legislation is a web of libel-type laws designed to restrict liberty to those that can afford good lawyers.

　　The state has a long history of using such rules against those who attack the wealthy’s privileges. It’s one that goes back to the trial of radical democrat Thomas Paine in 1792.

　　Then, the British prime minister sued Paine for libel for his now celebrated pamphlet, “The Rights of Man”. Judges sentenced Paine to hang.

　　Socialists today reject state censorship and are the foremost fighters for both individual and collective freedom. And we also defend those limited rights available to us under capitalism.

　　However, we do not support unlimited free speech.Socialists and radicals have a long tradition of fighting against the laws that denied them freedom of speech. They knew putting forward radical ideas was important for building movements for change. But ideas in of themselves change nothing. It is only when combined with a material force that ideas can change the world.

　　Editor: Zhong Yao  Wei Xiaoxue

　　From:https://socialistworker.co.uk/comment/how-the-right-use-and-abuse-free-speech/（2025-4-8）