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posted: October 13, 2024
tl;dr: Be extremely wary of anyone who wants to put limits on speech...
Free speech is under heavy attack in the United States, of all places. Sometimes these attacks are explicit, as in the widely ridiculed X post below. More often the attackers claim to be fighting against “misinformation and disinformation”, as though there were some way to know the absolute truth on any topic. The proposed solution is always some form of State-run, Orwellian Ministry of Truth that rules on the truth of any given statement, combined with various censorship mechanisms to prevent the dissemination of what the State declares to be false.
Then there’s the Communist solution to control people’s speech. Here’s what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in their Manifesto of the Communist Party as the sixth of their ten planks for implementing communism (see page 48):
Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
Once the State owns and controls the “means of communication”, then the State can control what people communicate on those means. Speech is no longer free (in the sense of freedom, not cost), it is State-controlled. As a side note, I find it interesting that Mark and Engels also mentioned “transport”. They knew that, in many situations, transportation and communication are two ways of doing the same thing, as I described in my Transportation versus communication post.
It’s clear why Communists need to eliminate free speech. Communism requires people to act in ways that are different from human nature: it wants people to stop trading freely with each other and accumulating goods. These are fundamental human behaviors: if you transport a group of babies to an isolated island and raise them without instilling any belief system in them, they will grow up to freely trade among themselves, build up stores of goods, and get upset if someone steals from them. It requires heavy-handed State control to eliminate free trade and wealth accumulation. This, naturally, upsets some (eventually most) people. It therefore becomes necessary for Communists to also eliminate free speech to prevent criticism of the State from growing into a rejection of the State’s power over the people.
The other reason present-day Communists need to eliminate free speech, at this point in history, is that Communism is a demonstrably failed philosophy. Yet because it has been more than three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, many people have been born who cannot directly remember the failures of Communism. If speech about the failures of Communism and the State can be eliminated and replaced with indoctrination into the theoretical joys of Marxism, then perhaps the world will be doomed to repeat this particular mistake of history.
The opposite of the Marx and Engels view on communication (speech) is what appears in the U.S. Constitution in Amendment One, part of the Bill of Rights:
Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press
The Marx and Engels view on communication is anathema to me. It’s the reason I am against Title II-based net neutrality. I have spent nearly my entire professional life in the communications business, in one form or another. I believe that improving communication between humans, by making it better, faster, cheaper, and more content rich, is fundamentally a good thing. Yes, people can use communication for nefarious purposes, but on balance human welfare is maximized when people can freely communicate. Free speech is an absolute necessity to discuss, debate and reject bad ideas.
Not everyone who wants to eliminate free speech is a Communist. There are plenty of people who believe in other failed philosophies who relish the shuttering of debate on the tenets of their philosophy. It’s really another example of people who cannot admit to being wrong: these people prefer to shut down debate and alternate views rather than having to sway public opinion in a free market of ideas. Be extremely wary of them.