A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Conclusion: Freedom as the Permanent Revolution (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

We began with a question about a word. Freedom: what does it mean, and 
why does it matter to an anarcho-communist? By now, I hope, the answer 
is clearer not in the sense of being simple (it is not simple), but in 
the sense of being substantive. Freedom, for the anarcho-communist, is 
not a liberal abstraction. It is not market freedom, not negative 
freedom, not the formally equal freedom of the individual to do as they 
please in a society structured by domination. It is the real, material, 
social condition of persons who are genuinely free. Free from 
exploitation, from coercion, from the compulsion of hunger and fear; 
free to participate in the collective governance of their shared life. 
Free to develop their full capacities and pursue their own vision of the 
good; free, above all, in relationship with others who are equally free.
This concept of freedom is demanding. It requires not only the abolition 
of capitalism and the state but the transformation of culture, the 
development of new institutions, the cultivation of new habits and 
capacities in people who have grown up under conditions of domination. 
It requires taking seriously the freedom of everyone, not only of 
workers in wealthy nations, but of colonised peoples, of women, of those 
whose sexuality or gender or race makes them targets of domination in 
particular ways. It requires attending to the means as well as the ends 
of political struggle, insisting that the organisations and movements we 
build be themselves prefigurations of the freedom we seek.
This is, admittedly, a lot to demand of a political programme. But 
consider the alternative. The liberal conception of freedom, the one on 
offer in existing capitalist democracies, has produced a world in which 
billions of people live without adequate food, housing, or healthcare; 
in which a tiny fraction of humanity owns most of the planet's 
productive resources; in which the ecological systems on which all life 
depends are being systematically destroyed in the service of private 
profit; in which entire peoples remain subordinated through colonial and 
imperial structures that the rhetoric of freedom systematically 
obscures. If this is what freedom looks like, then freedom is not what 
we were promised.
The anarcho-communist insistence on a richer, more demanding, more 
honest concept of freedom is not naive idealism. It is a refusal to 
accept that the world as it is represents the best that human beings can 
do, a refusal grounded in both philosophical argument and historical 
evidence. Human beings have organised themselves in ways that were more 
free, more equal, and more genuinely supportive of human flourishing. 
They have done so without bosses, without states, without the compulsion 
of the market. They can do so again, at a scale appropriate to the 
challenges we face, if they are willing to fight for it.
Freedom, then, is not something handed down from above. It is not 
granted by constitutions or protected by courts or delivered by 
revolutionary vanguards. It is won in struggle, practised in solidarity, 
built in the daily work of creating free institutions and free 
relationships. It is always partial, always contested, always 
incomplete, but it is real, and it is possible, and it is worth everything.
That insistence, that we can refuse the terms offered to us, that we can 
act as if freedom matters even in conditions that deny it, that we can 
insist on the kind of freedom worth having rather than the kind we are 
permitted, is what anarchocommunism means by freedom. It is what it has 
always meant, and it is why, however imperfect our movements and however 
distant our goals, the tradition matters, not as a museum piece or a 
heritage to be curated, but as a living practice of refusal and 
creation, as old as domination and as urgent as today.

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