In the weeks following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the media of the world treated us to a spectacle of tragedy and martyrdom.
We were told that ‘now is not the time for political partisanship’; that regardless of his politics, Kirk was a hero who fought, and died, for freedom of speech.
So this is not normal!!! https://t.co/jA9rJZK690
— Fiona Lali (@fiona_lali) September 18, 2025
This pressure, of course, is only ever applied one way – not to Erika Kirk selling “never surrender” merchandise, or Elon Musk proclaiming that “it’s kill or be killed”.
Debate
Debate, we are told, is the bedrock of democracy. In the liberal fantasy pushed by the establishment, ideas compete on a level playing field: each view jostling with another in the ‘marketplace of ideas’.
But freedom of expression is not a universal right; some are more ‘free’ than others. Marx explained a long time ago that so-called “human rights” – what Marxists call bourgeois democratic rights – are essentially abstract.
As soon as they are translated into action – the minute that they start to threaten the establishment and the interests of the wealthy – these rights will be constrained by those in power.
The extent that we do have the right to free speech therefore depends entirely on the class balance of forces. That is to say, if the working class and young people fight seriously to defend these rights, they can force the bourgeois state to concede them.
We saw this recently in Nepal, where the ruling class’s social media ban sparked a ‘Gen-Z uprising’, which toppled the entire government.
However, even in this case, real freedom of speech is still greatly constrained by wealth. Under capitalism, the question becomes not ‘are you allowed to have your voice heard?’, but ‘can you afford to?’.
Hypocrisy
Take Kirk himself. At 18, he was catapulted straight to the Republican National Convention, where he won the financial backing of billionaires like Foster Friess. He was bought and paid-for by a part of the Republican establishment, to whip up divisive culture wars, particularly at universities.
He was merrily invited onto every campus in the US to carry out his parody of ‘debate’. Watch any of them, and you will see a man who never answers a straightforward question directly, throwing out shallow ‘gotchas’ designed to catch out teenagers.
Meanwhile, those who stand in solidarity with Palestine are hounded off campuses by violent cops, and smeared in the ‘free press’ as antisemites.
Demonstrations are banned in the name of ‘public safety’ – a threshold conveniently defined by the very institutions tasked with defending the status quo.
Israel is a terrorist state, acting with the backing of the biggest terrorists on the planet – The US ruling class.
— Fiona Lali (@fiona_lali) September 9, 2025
‘No platforming’ is brandished selectively, not against the right-wing shock-jocks who openly lie to promote their ideas, but against movements that dare to criticise the crimes of the ruling class.
Despite all of their whining about ‘cancel culture’, right wingers are typically free to spew their nonsense unopposed.
It’s those on the left – those who stand against imperialism, capitalism, and oppression – who get ‘cancelled’ most of all. This can often mean social media harassment, being suspended from university, and even losing a job.
Whose freedom?
Kirk’s career exposes the lie that anyone can compete equally in the realm of ideas: he demonstrated not free speech, but speech that is purchased, packaged, and weaponised by capitalism and its defenders.
Elon Musk, another self-styled ‘free speech absolutist’, bought Twitter/X under the banner of liberating speech. In practice, he has weaponised the platform to amplify racist conspiracy theories like the ‘great replacement’ – all while throttling dissent from the left.
He constantly edits his own AI, ‘Grok’, to prevent it becoming “cringe” and “woke”. Meanwhile, left wingers find their accounts suspended, shadow-banned, or targeted by trolls.
Elsewhere, Mark Zuckerberg and other tech oligarchs collaborate openly with state agencies, feeding surveillance services with user data, while dictating the limits of online debate.
The establishment proclaims that a free press is essential to a healthy democracy. Yet what is healthy about media monopolies owned by billionaires? What is free about speech policed by algorithms tuned to the demands of advertisers, bankers, and the Pentagon?
When journalists toe the ruling class line, they are celebrated as defenders of democracy. When they expose the crimes of imperialism, they are silenced, sacked, or worse.
Political expression is not a neutral right but a terrain of class struggle. It is extended to reactionaries who safeguard private property, and curtailed for those who mobilise against this.
We should harbour no illusions. The ‘open marketplace of ideas’ is a myth. Markets are never neutral: they are organised by wealth and power.
Freedom of speech under capitalism is freedom for billionaires – for Kirk, for Musk; never for the workers, never for Palestine. The only rights we have are the ones we can practically exercise.
We can only defend our freedom of expression and assembly by actively organising to overthrow the entire system that bears down upon us.
Vladimir Lenin on democratic rights
In this excerpt from his opening speech for the First Congress of the Communist International in 1920, Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin explains how “freedom of assembly” is a hollow phrase under capitalism.
The workers know perfectly well, too, that even in the most democratic bourgeois republic “freedom of assembly” is a hollow phrase, for the rich have the best public and private buildings at their disposal, and enough leisure to assemble at meetings, which are protected by the bourgeois machine of power. The rural and urban workers and small peasants – the overwhelming majority of the population – are denied all these things.
As long as that state of affairs prevails, “equality”, i.e. “pure democracy”, is a fraud. The first thing to do to win genuine equality and enable the working people to enjoy democracy in practice is to deprive the exploiters of all the public and sumptuous private buildings, to give to the working people leisure and to see to it that their freedom of assembly is protected by armed workers.
Only when that change is affected can we speak of freedom of assembly and of equality without mocking at the workers, at working people in general, at the poor.
“Freedom of the press” is another of the principal slogans of “pure democracy”. And here, too, the workers know – and Socialists everywhere have explained millions of times – that this freedom is a deception because the best printing presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalist.
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 publishing houses and bribing newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance oppressed.
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.
The history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrated, even before the war, what this celebrated “pure democracy” really is under capitalism… Terror and bourgeois dictatorship prevail in the most democratic of republics and are openly displayed every time the exploiters think the power of capital is being shaken.
