Communicative freedom is materially conditioned. People who are economically precarious, socially subordinated, or existentially afraid do not “participate” in discourse so much as they perform survival. Habermas’s communicative ethics don’t float above reality like a polite philosophical ghost; they need scaffolding—material security, epistemic access, institutional protections, and media structures that don’t punish truth-telling. Without that, “free speech” becomes a decorative slogan, like a fire exit painted on a wall.

Power that cannot tolerate bad news systematically selects for lies, and once that selection pressure stabilizes, reality itself becomes inaccessible to power. This is why dictators are always surprised by losing wars they were obviously losing. It’s not stupidity; it’s epistemic terror. Language mutates under threat, as Bourdieu shows: speech becomes strategic, euphemistic, ritualized, and finally unreal. Austin’s performatives stop describing the world and start actively falsifying it.

Media examples (RTLM, Volksempfänger) underline the next step: distorted communication doesn’t just misrepresent enemies—it manufactures them. Keen’s “hostile imagination” plus Bourdieu’s symbolic power explains how projection becomes infrastructural. The enemy is not merely imagined; it is co-produced through discourse, policy, and violence until the projection retroactively appears justified; people hate admitting that we don’t just misunderstand others—we cultivate them into what we fear.

States and capital don’t need total control; they just need field dominance. Attention, fear, precarity, and exceptionality do the rest. Once a permanent crisis is normalized, communicative ethics collapse into compliance theater. Democracy remains “in name only,” as you say, because the material–epistemic preconditions for dissent no longer exist at scale.

If I were being extra annoying (which I am), I’d add one update: platforms. Algorithmic mediation doesn’t merely transmit distorted discourse; it optimizes it. The state of exception is now A/B tested. Projection is automated. And the insecure subject is not silenced outright—they are incentivized to speak in ways that reproduce the very structures that mute them.

So yes: communicative ethics and material conditions are inseparable. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either very comfortable, very powerful, or selling something. Probably all three.