-What does Freedom of Speech Mean to You:
The standard definition of free speech is the notion that the government may not persecute you for political views that you hold and espouse. I personally find this definition to be fairly useful however it tends not to be how it’s commonly thought of. There are almost as many connotations around the term free speech as there are Socialism, as it tends to be used for rhetorical purposes in political discourse, as such making its use as a term subject to being quite vague at times. It’s used more often as a buzzword than anything with any real political content, however this doesn’t mean it still have content, and in regards to the question I largely align with again this standard definition. Of course though as a Communist I don’t like to define things through the actions of the existing state but rather generalize them to society, so I suppose for me specifically I might say that freedom of speech is the freedom to espouse political views without being persecuted by anybody. Of course though, in the world we live in today the only force that realistically can properly persecute you – imprison you or legitimately harm you -  is the government. There’s the idea that freedom of speech is one of the bedrocks of western society, or one of the fundamentally key features in being able to improve society, through the open debate of opposing ideas. While I wouldn’t contest that free speech is important, and very useful in our society, from a Marxist perspective I would disagree that free speech holds any kind of special principle that marks it as something so deep set in how society changes and evolves. Of course, I claim that it’s class struggle that drives history, and our material conditions that lead societal trends. When comparing our liberal societies to others from history or even today without any notion of free speech, you can see that the trends of Capitalism, in the larger scope, apply in similar if not the same ways even when free speech is absent, so while I think free speech certainly plays a very large role in how politics is carried out, I also think it’s not something we can point to as any kind of unique provider of fundamentally different societies, and if anything its existence at all just tends to be a consequence of the progression of class struggle in society, and how many reforms the population has won from it’s government.