WORLD WORLDWIDE NEW ZEALAND - news journal UPDATE - (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Freedom Is Social: The Rejection of Atomistic Individualism (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 One of the most important and perhaps counter-intuitive aspects of the anarchocommunist theory of freedom is its rejection of individualism as the foundation of political thought. This requires careful explanation, because anarchism is often mischaracterised, particularly by its critics on the Marxist-Leninist left , as a species of individualism, a philosophy of the heroic rebel asserting themselves against society. This mischaracterisation has roots in a real strand of anarchist thought (anarcho-individualism, associated with figures like Max Stirner and Benjamin Tucker), but it fundamentally misrepresents the anarcho-communist tradition.

For the anarcho-communist, the isolated individual of liberal theory is an abstraction, a philosophical fiction that serves particular ideological purposes but corresponds to nothing real in human experience. Human beings are not atoms that bump into each other from time to time. We are social beings, constituted through our relationships, shaped by our communities, dependent on each other for our survival and our meaning. The self that chooses freely in market theory does not exist prior to or independent of society, but it is a product of social relationships, and its capacity for freedom is itself a social product.
Bakunin stated this with characteristic force - the freedom of each is possible only through the freedom of all. This is not just a slogan, it is a substantive philosophical claim. My freedom is not diminished but enhanced by your freedom. A society in which everyone is free creates conditions in which I can be more fully free. I have more people to associate with freely, more collective knowledge to draw on, more forms of mutual support to receive and contribute to. Conversely, your unfreedom threatens my freedom as it creates conditions of domination that I too might be subject to, it narrows the possibilities of collective life, it poisons the social conditions in which genuine freedom grows.
This is the anarcho-communist critique of the libertarian right in a nutshell. When right-libertarians argue for freedom from taxation, from regulation, from collective obligation, they are treating freedom as a purely negative, individual property, something I have to the extent that others leave me alone. But this conception of freedom, pushed to its logical conclusion, simply licenses the freedom of the powerful to dominate the weak. The billionaire who is free from taxation is free in a way that makes millions of others less free, by draining the collective resources on which they depend. The corporation that is free from environmental regulation is free in a way that degrades the conditions of life for entire communities. Individual liberty, exercised without accountability to the social conditions that make all liberty possible, destroys the foundations of genuine freedom.
Errico Malatesta understood this with particular clarity. For Malatesta, anarchism was not about the glorification of the individual will but about the creation of social conditions in which real individuality could flourish, in which each person could develop their unique capacities, pursue their own vision of the good life, and live in accordance with their own values, precisely because they were embedded in a community of equals that supported and enabled this development. Freedom, for Malatesta, was inseparable from solidarity. They were not in tension, they were two names for the same thing seen from different angles.
Anarchism is the abolition of exploitation and oppression of man by man, that is, the abolition of private property and government; Anarchism is the organisation of society by means of free association and free cooperation for the greatest good of all - that is, for the greatest possible freedom, welfare and happiness for each individual. Errico Malatesta, Anarchy.
Notice the structure of this formulation - the goal is described in social terms (the greatest good of all) and individual terms (freedom, welfare, happiness for each individual) simultaneously, because for Malatesta these were not competing values. The social and the individual were not opposites. A genuinely free society would be one in which the social conditions for individual flourishing were universally available, in which no one's freedom depended on the unfreedom of others.

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