A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - The Liberal Illusion: Freedom in the Marketplace (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Before making the anarcho-communist critique of liberal freedom, it is 
worth being honest about what that tradition actually achieved. The 
liberal revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth 
centuries were real ruptures. They broke the back of feudal authority, 
dismantled the divine right of kings, established that people could not 
simply be imprisoned or tortured at the whim of rulers, and created, at 
least in principle, a legal and political order in which individuals had 
rights that the state was bound to respect. The freedoms of speech, 
press, assembly, and conscience that liberalism fought for are not 
trivial. People have died for them, and people in many parts of the 
world still lack them. An anarchism that treats these achievements as 
worthless has not thought carefully about what their absence looks like.
The anarcho-communist is not against free speech. They are not against 
freedom of conscience or the right to organise. They are against the 
idea that these formal freedoms, by themselves, constitute the freedom 
worth having, and against the ideological sleight of hand by which the 
liberal tradition has conflated political rights with genuine human 
liberation. That conflation serves a specific purpose, in that it allows 
capitalist societies to present themselves as already free, already 
arrived, already the end-point of the historical struggle for freedom, 
while leaving in place the material and social conditions that make real 
freedom impossible for most of the people living in them.
The dominant conception of freedom in contemporary capitalist societies 
is, at bottom, market freedom. You are free to buy and sell, to choose 
between employers, to consume the products that corporations have 
decided to produce, to vote periodically for parties whose policy 
differences are largely confined to the management of the same economic 
order. This conception has a long philosophical history, running through 
Locke, Smith, Kant, Mill, and Hayek, and the liberal tradition did fight 
real battles to establish it. But the freedom it won was a freedom for a 
specific class of people. The great liberal revolutions, the English, 
the American, the French, liberated the bourgeoisie from the constraints 
of the old aristocratic order. They did not liberate workers, women, 
enslaved people, or colonised nations.
The same philosophical frameworks that celebrated the rights of man and 
the citizen simultaneously rationalised chattel slavery, colonial 
dispossession, and the brutal exploitation of industrial labour. The 
abstract individual of liberal theory was always, in practice, a 
propertied man, usually white, almost always of the owning class. The 
genius of the bourgeois conception of freedom is that it appears 
universal while being structurally particular. Everyone is, in 
principle, free to compete in the market. Everyone is, in principle, 
free to acquire property. Everyone is, in principle, free to sell their 
labour to whomever they choose. What this formal equality conceals is 
the real, material inequality that determines what these formal freedoms 
actually mean in practice. When you own a factory and I own nothing but 
my capacity to work, we are both formally free to negotiate the terms of 
our arrangement. But the terms we negotiate will reflect our vastly 
different positions of power, and the result will inevitably be my 
exploitation and your enrichment. Formal freedom, in conditions of 
material inequality, is the freedom of the powerful to dominate the 
powerless through nominally voluntary transactions.
This is what Marx called the hidden abode of production, and what 
anarchocommunists have always insisted is the central lie of liberal 
society. The freedom capitalism offers the working class is the freedom 
to choose which master to serve. It is the freedom Anatole France 
immortalised in his line about the law, in its majestic equality, 
forbidding both the rich and the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in 
the streets, and to steal bread. It is a freedom that means nothing 
because it operates in conditions that make real choice impossible for 
those without property.
The state, in this analysis, is not the neutral umpire of liberal 
theory, the disinterested enforcer of rules that everyone has notionally 
agreed to. It is the guarantor of the property relations from which the 
ruling class derives its power. It maintains the legal fiction of 
freedom while deploying police, prisons, and courts to enforce the 
conditions that make genuine freedom impossible for most people. The 
wage worker who refuses to work does not face merely the inconvenience 
of having no income; they face eviction, hunger, the loss of healthcare, 
and, ultimately, the coercive power of a state that will not permit them 
to simply take what they need to survive. The freedom to starve is not 
freedom.

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