A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Freedom and Solidarity: Why They Are Not Opposites (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Perhaps the most persistent mischaracterisation of anarcho-communist 
freedom is the claim that it is in tension with solidarity, community, 
and collective obligation, that to fully embrace freedom is to embrace a 
kind of self-interested individualism that leaves no room for genuine 
care and mutual responsibility. This mischaracterisation comes from both 
the right (which claims that any collective obligation infringes on 
individual liberty) and from a certain authoritarian left (which claims 
that freedom must be subordinated to collective discipline in the 
service of revolutionary goals).
The anarcho-communist answer to both is that this supposed tension is 
illusory, that it depends on a thin, impoverished conception of freedom 
that anarcho-communists reject. When freedom is understood as the 
negative freedom of the isolated individual, then yes, collective 
obligation appears as its enemy. Every tax, every social norm, every 
demand of solidarity represents a constraint on what the individual 
would otherwise do. But when freedom is understood in the richer, social 
sense that the anarcho-communist tradition has developed, as the real 
capacity for self-determination and flourishing, which can only be 
achieved in conditions of genuine equality and mutual support, then 
solidarity is not the enemy of freedom but its very condition of 
possibility.
Kropotkin's argument in Mutual Aid is relevant here again. The evidence 
of both natural and human history suggests that solidarity is not an 
imposition on free individuals but an expression of deeply human 
tendencies toward cooperation, care, and collective support. People help 
each other and communities sustain each other. In conditions where the 
coercive structures of the state and capital are not distorting social 
life, human beings organise themselves through networks of mutual aid 
that combine genuine freedom of association with robust collective 
provision. The free commune of Kropotkin's imagination is not a place 
where individuals pursue private interest without interference, but it 
is a place where people freely choose to contribute to collective 
wellbeing because they understand that their own flourishing depends on 
and is expressed through the flourishing of their community.
This understanding is captured in the anarcho-communist insistence on 
free association, the principle that collective life should be organised 
through the voluntary coming-together of free people rather than through 
the coercive imposition of authority. Free association does not mean 
that people are bound by nothing, that they can withdraw from any 
commitment the moment it becomes inconvenient. It means that the bonds 
of collective life are created through genuine consent and genuine 
solidarity, not through the threat of state violence or economic compulsion.
A community organised on the basis of free association may well make 
demands of its members, such as contributions of labour, and respect for 
collective decisions, but these demands are legitimate precisely because 
they emerge from free agreement rather than from domination, and they 
can be renegotiated, challenged, and transformed through the same 
processes of free association that created them.
Solidarity, in this sense, is not the enemy of freedom but its fullest 
expression. To freely choose to stand with others, to contribute to 
collective wellbeing, to organise one's life around relations of mutual 
care and support, this is not a limitation on freedom but an exercise of 
it. The person who is free only in the sense of having no obligations to 
others is not more free than the person embedded in a community of 
genuine solidarity, they are poorer, more isolated, more vulnerable, and 
ultimately less capable of the kind of self-determination that full 
freedom requires.

https://thepolarblast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/to-be-free-together.pd
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