A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Freedom Against Empire: The Internationalism of Anarcho-Communist Freedom (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Any theory of freedom that takes seriously the social and material 
conditions of freedom must grapple with colonialism and imperialism, the 
structures through which some nations have built their freedom and 
prosperity on the unfreedom and dispossession of others. The 
anarcho-communist tradition has been, on balance, more consistent in 
this regard than many strands of the Marxist left, though it has not 
been without its failures.
The freedom of the worker in the imperial metropole has historically 
been purchased, in part, through the exploitation of colonised peoples. 
The relatively high wages, social services, and political rights that 
workers in wealthy countries have won were made possible by the 
extraction of resources, labour, and surplus from colonised territories. 
This does not mean that metropolitan workers are the allies of their 
ruling classes, or that class struggle is irrelevant within imperial 
nations, but it does mean that an internationalist politics of freedom 
cannot simply champion the freedom of workers in rich countries while 
ignoring the structures of colonial exploitation that partially underpin 
their relative privilege.
Anarchism, at its best, has understood this. Bakunin's opposition to 
nationalism was rooted in the recognition that national liberation, if 
it merely replaced foreign domination with indigenous ruling-class 
domination, did not represent genuine freedom for the working class of 
the newly independent nation. Emma Goldman's opposition to the First 
World War included a sharp analysis of how nationalism and patriotism 
were used to bind workers to a ruling class whose interests were 
diametrically opposed to their own, sending them to die for the 
territorial ambitions of people who owned everything and risked nothing. 
Anarcho-communist internationalism is not merely the sentimental idea 
that workers everywhere deserve solidarity, but it is the recognition 
that the systems of domination we oppose are globally articulated, and 
that a freedom that stops at the national border is not the freedom we 
are fighting for.
This means taking seriously the freedom struggles of colonised and 
indigenous peoples, not instrumentalising them in service of a 
metropolitan revolutionary agenda, but recognising them as expressions 
of the same fundamental demand for self-determination, collective 
autonomy, and freedom from domination that animates anarcho-communism 
everywhere. The Zapatistas, the Kurdish freedom movement in Rojava, the 
countless indigenous land defence movements around the world, these are 
not exotic special cases to be noted and set aside, they are fronts in 
the same struggle, and their experiments in autonomous self-governance 
have things to teach any serious anarchist.
An anarchism that cannot account for colonialism is incomplete in a 
structural sense. It has identified some of the machinery of domination 
while leaving the rest running. The freedom the anarcho-communist seeks 
is not freedom for workers in the global North while the global South 
remains subject to imperial extraction. It is not freedom within the 
borders of settler states while indigenous peoples remain dispossessed 
of land, language, and self-determination. The internationalism of the 
anarchist tradition, Bakunin's opposition to all nationalism, Goldman's 
anti-imperialism, the IWW's insistence on organising across racial and 
national lines, is not an optional supplement to the core theory. It is 
what the core theory requires once you follow its logic honestly to its 
conclusions.

https://thepolarblast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/to-be-free-together.pd
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en