WORLD WORLDWIDE NEW ZEALAND - news journal UPDATE - (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Domination: The Real Enemy of Freedom (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 If freedom is more than the absence of direct coercion, and if market freedom is revealed as a mechanism of domination rather than liberation, then what exactly are we fighting against when we fight for freedom? The anarcho-communist answer is domination in all its forms. And this is a considerably broader category than capitalism alone, though capitalism is its most pervasive contemporary expression. Domination, in the anarchist sense, is any relationship in which one party has the power to compel another, to determine the conditions of their life, to extract their labour, to limit their possibilities, to make them afraid, and does so structurally, not merely as an individual act of violence. Domination is not just the boss who screams at workers, it is the entire wage system that makes workers dependent on bosses in the first place. It is not just the racist police officer, it is the institutional apparatus of racialised social control that makes certain bodies systematically vulnerable. It is not just the abusive partner, it is the patriarchal economic and cultural order that traps people in relationships they cannot afford to leave.

Bakunin identified three primary sources of domination in his time: the Church, the State, and Capital. He understood these as mutually reinforcing structures, each one buttressing the others, each one producing forms of unfreedom that interpenetrate and compound. The Church mystified inequality as divinely ordained; the State enforced it through law and violence; Capital extracted the surplus that made ruling classes powerful enough to maintain both. To fight any one of these without fighting the others was, for Bakunin, a self-defeating project.
Later anarchist thinkers extended this analysis. Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre insisted that patriarchy had to be included as a fundamental structure of domination, that the subordination of women was not a side issue or a secondary contradiction but was built into the very same logic of hierarchy and authority that anarchism opposed. Goldman in particular understood that a revolution that liberated the working class while leaving intact the domination of women would be no revolution at all, only a rearrangement of who held power over whom. Her concept of freedom was explicitly personal as well as political, it included the freedom of sexual and reproductive self-determination, the freedom to love who and how one chose, the freedom from the specific unfreedoms that patriarchal institutions imposed on women's bodies and lives.
Pyotr Kropotkin contributed a different but complementary insight, that domination was not natural, not inevitable, not the expression of some deep human drive toward hierarchy and competition. In Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, he argued, on the basis of extensive naturalistic and historical evidence, that cooperation, solidarity, and mutual support were at least as fundamental to animal and human life as competition. The image of nature as red in tooth and claw, the Social Darwinist story about the natural war of all against all, was ideological, it naturalised the brutality of capitalism by projecting it backward onto an imagined state of nature. In reality, human societies had maintained themselves for most of history through networks of reciprocal care and collective self-organisation. Hierarchy was a historical imposition, not a biological destiny.
What this means for freedom is profound. If domination is not natural but constructed, if authority, hierarchy, and exploitation are arrangements that specific historical forces produced and maintain, then they can be dismantled. Human beings are not doomed to oppress each other. We are capable of organising our lives on the basis of free association, mutual aid, and voluntary cooperation. Freedom is not a utopian dream but a real human possibility, one that already flickers into existence in the practices of solidarity, care, and collective self-governance that persist even within capitalist society.

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