A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Class, Labour, and the Freedom to Not Be Exploited (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Any anarcho-communist account of freedom must grapple seriously with the 
class analysis that sits at the heart of the tradition. Freedom is not 
only a philosophical question, it is a material one. Who owns what? Who 
works for whom? Who has the power to compel labour, and who is 
compelled? These questions are not incidental to freedom; they are 
constitutive of it. The wage relation is a freedom relation, or rather, 
it is a systematic denial of freedom disguised as a voluntary exchange. 
The classical anarcho-communist analysis of class is not identical to 
the Marxist one, though it overlaps substantially. Anarcho-communists 
have generally shared Marx's identification of exploitation as the core 
of capitalist social relations, the appropriation by capital of the 
surplus value produced by labour. What they have tended to resist is the 
Marxist privileging of the industrial proletariat as the singular 
revolutionary subject, and still more strongly the Marxist-Leninist 
conclusion that liberation requires the seizure of state power by a 
vanguard party acting in the name of the working class.
For Bakunin, and this was the core of his famous dispute with Marx, the 
state was not a neutral instrument that could be captured and used for 
liberatory ends. It was a structure of domination in itself, and any 
revolution that transferred state power from one class to another while 
leaving the state intact would produce a new ruling class: - the 
administrators, the party officials, the revolutionary vanguard - who 
had taken hold of the machinery of domination and now wielded it in the 
name of the people. History, Bakunin argued with considerable prescience 
in the 1870s, would confirm this analysis, that the dictatorship of the 
proletariat would become the dictatorship over the proletariat.
The anarcho-communist theory of freedom in relation to class is 
therefore not only about the content of what is demanded, the abolition 
of exploitation, the socialisation of the means of production, the end 
of the wage system, but about the form through which liberation is 
pursued. You cannot achieve freedom through unfree means. A hierarchical 
party commanding a disciplined mass movement from above cannot produce a 
free society below. A state that nationalises production and directs 
economic life cannot produce the free association of producers that 
genuine communism requires. The form of the struggle must prefigure the 
form of the society it aims to build.
This is why anarcho-communists have historically been so invested in the 
forms of working-class self-organisation, such as the revolutionary 
union, the workers' council, the popular assembly, the commune. These 
were not merely tactical forms but were attempts to build the 
infrastructure of a free society within the shell of the old and to 
practice the kind of horizontal, collective, non-hierarchical 
selfgovernance that a free communist society would require. The Spanish 
anarchists of the CNT-FAI, in the collectivisations of 1936-1937, were 
not simply fighting for better wages, they were attempting to reorganise 
production on genuinely free and communal principles, demonstrating in 
practice that workers did not need bosses, that communities did not need 
police, that people were capable of governing themselves without the 
mediation of authority.
The freedom demanded by the anarcho-communist is therefore, in relation 
to labour and class, a comprehensive one - freedom from exploitation 
(the end of the wage system and the socialisation of production), 
freedom from alienation (the return to the worker of genuine ownership 
and meaning in their work), freedom from economic compulsion (the 
guarantee that no one's survival will depend on their willingness to 
submit to another's authority), and freedom to participate meaningfully 
in the collective decisions that shape economic and social life. This is 
not a modest programme. It is a demand for the reorganisation of the 
entire basis of social existence.

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