Any theory of freedom that takes seriously the social and material conditions of freedom must grapple with colonialism and imperialism, the structures through which some nations have built their freedom and prosperity on the unfreedom and dispossession of others. The anarcho-communist tradition has been, on balance, more consistent in this regard than many strands of the Marxist left, though it has not been without its failures.
The freedom of the worker in the imperial metropole has historically been purchased, in part, through the exploitation of colonised peoples. The relatively high wages, social services, and political rights that workers in wealthy countries have won were made possible by the extraction of resources, labour, and surplus from colonised territories. This does not mean that metropolitan workers are the allies of their ruling classes, or that class struggle is irrelevant within imperial nations, but it does mean that an internationalist politics of freedom cannot simply champion the freedom of workers in rich countries while ignoring the structures of colonial exploitation that partially underpin their relative privilege.Anarchism, at its best, has understood this. Bakunin's opposition to nationalism was rooted in the recognition that national liberation, if it merely replaced foreign domination with indigenous ruling-class domination, did not represent genuine freedom for the working class of the newly independent nation. Emma Goldman's opposition to the First World War included a sharp analysis of how nationalism and patriotism were used to bind workers to a ruling class whose interests were diametrically opposed to their own, sending them to die for the territorial ambitions of people who owned everything and risked nothing. Anarcho-communist internationalism is not merely the sentimental idea that workers everywhere deserve solidarity, but it is the recognition that the systems of domination we oppose are globally articulated, and that a freedom that stops at the national border is not the freedom we are fighting for.
This means taking seriously the freedom struggles of colonised and indigenous peoples, not instrumentalising them in service of a metropolitan revolutionary agenda, but recognising them as expressions of the same fundamental demand for self-determination, collective autonomy, and freedom from domination that animates anarcho-communism everywhere. The Zapatistas, the Kurdish freedom movement in Rojava, the countless indigenous land defence movements around the world, these are not exotic special cases to be noted and set aside, they are fronts in the same struggle, and their experiments in autonomous self-governance have things to teach any serious anarchist.
An anarchism that cannot account for colonialism is incomplete in a structural sense. It has identified some of the machinery of domination while leaving the rest running. The freedom the anarcho-communist seeks is not freedom for workers in the global North while the global South remains subject to imperial extraction. It is not freedom within the borders of settler states while indigenous peoples remain dispossessed of land, language, and self-determination. The internationalism of the anarchist tradition, Bakunin's opposition to all nationalism, Goldman's anti-imperialism, the IWW's insistence on organising across racial and national lines, is not an optional supplement to the core theory. It is what the core theory requires once you follow its logic honestly to its conclusions.
https://thepolarblast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/to-be-free-together.pd
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Link: (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Freedom Against Empire: The Internationalism of Anarcho-Communist Freedom (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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