A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: What Freedom Actually Requires (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

After all this philosophical work, it is worth being concrete. Not in 
the form of a programme, anarcho-communism is constitutionally 
suspicious of blueprints, for reasons already discussed, but in the 
sense of being honest about the full scale of what genuine freedom 
requires. It is a demanding standard. It is worth stating plainly. ---- 
The most fundamental requirement is the abolition of economic 
compulsion. No one should be forced to submit to another's authority in 
order to survive. This is not only a moral claim it is the precondition 
for everything else. You cannot meaningfully speak of freedom, freedom 
of thought, of association, of self-determination, to someone whose 
primary daily reality is the need to find and keep employment on 
whatever terms are on offer. The communalisation of the means of 
production, the genuine socialisation of economic life, not 
nationalisation under state control, which merely replaces private 
bosses with bureaucratic ones, but real collective ownership and 
governance by the communities of workers and users who depend on 
production is not a detail of the programme, it is the foundation. 
Alongside it, the unconditional guarantee of the material conditions of 
life - food, housing, healthcare, education be available to everyone as 
a matter of right rather than as rewards for labour market compliance.
But material sufficiency alone does not produce freedom. The second 
requirement is the dissolution of hierarchical authority in the 
organisation of collective life, its replacement with horizontal, 
participatory, genuinely accountable forms of selfgovernance. This 
requires more than abolishing the state as a formal institution, it 
requires developing, in the actual practices and relationships of 
communities, the capacities for collective deliberation and 
self-management that centuries of hierarchical authority have atrophied. 
People have to learn, in practice and over time, to govern themselves. 
This is the work that prefigurative politics attempts, building the 
habits, institutions, and cultures of freedom in the present, not 
waiting for revolution to deliver them from above.
The third requirement brings us back to the inner dimension developed in 
Section 8 that genuine freedom demands the conditions in which people 
can develop desires and values that are authentically their own, rather 
than adaptations to domination. This means education that cultivates 
critical thought rather than compliance, culture that expands rather 
than narrows the sense of what is possible, and the kind of community 
that supports rather than diminishes the development of each person. It 
means taking seriously the axes of oppression, race, gender, sexuality, 
disability, colonial history, that compound and intersect with class to 
produce specific forms of unfreedom that a purely economic analysis will 
miss. Formal equality is not enough, what is required is the active 
dismantling of the hierarchies that formal equality papers over.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, freedom requires that we give up 
the idea that it can ever be permanently secured. No institution, 
however well designed, is immune to the tendency toward hierarchy and 
the accumulation of power. No arrangement, however free at its 
inception, maintains itself without ongoing attention, criticism, and 
struggle. The permanent revolution that the title of this work's 
conclusion invokes is not a call for perpetual violence or instability, 
it is a recognition that freedom is a practice rather than a 
destination, a relationship rather than a state, something that has to 
be renewed in every generation, in every organisation, in every 
community that takes it seriously. The moment we stop fighting for it is 
the moment we begin losing it.

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