WORLD WORLDWIDE NEW ZEALAND - news journal UPDATE - (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Two Freedoms, and Why One of Them Is a Trap (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 There is a distinction worth making early, because it runs beneath almost every argument in this article. Political philosophers call it the difference between negative and positive freedom, and while the terminology is a little dry, the stakes are not. Negative freedom is freedom from interference, the absence of a direct obstacle between you and what you want to do. No one is stopping you. No one is forcing you. The liberal tradition has been almost exclusively preoccupied with this kind of freedom, and the market is its natural expression. In theory, no one compels you to take a particular job or sign a particular contract, you are simply free to choose. This is the freedom celebrated in constitutions, defended in courts, and invoked endlessly by politicians of every stripe.

Positive freedom asks a different question, not whether anyone is blocking you, but whether you actually have what you need to act meaningfully. It is interested in real conditions, your material security, your health, your education, your membership in a community that supports rather than diminishes you. Positive freedom is what you have when the absence of obstacles is accompanied by the actual presence of capacity.
The anarcho-communist case is that negative freedom, while not worthless, is radically insufficient, and that the liberal fixation on it performs a specific ideological function. It makes the coercions built into capitalist social relations invisible by framing them as the absence of coercion. No one is holding a gun to your head when you sign an employment contract, but the choice between signing and going without income, housing, or healthcare is not a free choice in any sense that matters. The freedom to starve is not freedom. Negative liberty in conditions of material inequality simply means the powerful are free to dominate the powerless through transactions that are nominally voluntary.
The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognised them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual. Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State Bakunin's formulation cuts straight to what positive freedom actually means from an anarchist standpoint. It is not the state deciding what freedom requires and imposing it from above, that would merely replace one domination with another. It is the capacity of persons to understand their own situation, to act in accordance with their own nature and reason, to obey nothing they have not themselves recognised as worth obeying. Freedom and self-understanding are not in tension, they are the same thing seen from different angles. And both are impossible under conditions of domination, which is precisely why domination must be abolished rather than reformed.

https://thepolarblast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/to-be-free-together.pdf
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca