WORLD WORLDWIDE NEW ZEALAND - news journal UPDATE - (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Freedom and the Self: Autonomy, Desire, and the Inner Life of Liberation (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 So far this article has focused primarily on the external, structural dimensions of freedom - freedom from economic exploitation, from political domination, from the coercive power of the state and capital. These are real and important, but freedom also has an inner dimension, and any anarcho-communist philosophy that ignores it is incomplete, not just philosophically, but politically. A politics that attends only to structures and not to persons will find, repeatedly, that the structures it dismantles are rebuilt from the inside by people who have not yet become free.

Human beings are not only material beings with economic needs, we are also beings who seek meaning, who desire to become themselves, who live complicated inner lives that cannot be reduced to questions of production and distribution. The anarchist tradition has always understood this, even when it has struggled to articulate it clearly. Emma Goldman's famous, if disputed, line about wanting a revolution you could dance to was not mere whimsy. It was a substantive political claim that a liberation which produced only correct economic arrangements while leaving the person diminished, joyless, or unfree in their inner life was no liberation worth the name.
The concept of autonomy at the heart of anarcho-communist freedom is richer and more demanding than it first appears. It is not the autonomy of liberal theory, the choosing self of the marketplace, the consumer selecting between pre-packaged options. It is the capacity to live according to values and desires that are genuinely one's own, formed through real experience and real reflection, not through the internalisation of a culture that has been shaped to produce compliant, manageable subjects. And this distinction, between desires that are authentically one's own and desires that are the product of domination, is one of the most difficult and important problems in the whole of political theory.
Domination does not only constrain people externally, it shapes them internally. This is perhaps its most insidious feature, and the one that purely structural analyses of freedom most often miss. A person raised in poverty may internalise the belief that they are not the kind of person who deserves much, that ambition is dangerous, that the proper response to authority is deference. A person raised under patriarchy may internalise ideas about their own capacities, their proper role, the range of lives available to them, that bear no relationship to what they could actually become under different conditions. A person raised in a racialised social order may internalise the evaluations of their worth that the dominant culture insists upon. These are not merely false beliefs that can be corrected by the provision of accurate information. They are deep orientations toward the self and the world, formed through years of experience, embedded in the habits and reflexes of daily life.
What this means is that the question of what someone genuinely wants, what they would want if they were free, rather than what they want in their actual condition, is not a simple one. The liberal tradition tends to treat expressed preferences as authoritative, you want what you want, and freedom means being able to pursue it. However, this is only adequate if the conditions under which preferences are formed are themselves conditions of freedom. When they are not, when desire has been shaped by deprivation, by fear, by the internalisation of a social order that needed you to want certain things and not others, then the mere satisfaction of existing preferences is not freedom. It may be, in some cases, the efficient administration of unfreedom.
Anarcho-communist thinkers have not always had a fully worked-out theory of this problem, it is genuinely difficult, and the tools for thinking about it carefully were not always available. But the insight runs through the tradition in various forms. Goldman's insistence on the psychological dimensions of liberation, her attention to the ways in which authoritarian personalities are formed and can be unmade; Ferrer's conviction that a free education had to cultivate not just knowledge but the capacity for autonomous thought and genuine desire; de Cleyre's exploration of the spiritual and personal dimensions of anarchist freedom, all of these represent attempts to grapple with the fact that freedom is not only a political condition but a psychological one.
This has a practical implication that any serious politics of freedom must reckon with. The transformation of external structures, however necessary, is not sufficient. People who have lived their whole lives under conditions of domination do not automatically become free when those conditions are removed. They carry the structures of domination inside them: in their habits of deference, their distrust of collective decision-making, their fear of taking up space, their tendency to reproduce hierarchies even in organisations committed to opposing them. The work of liberation therefore has an inner dimension alongside its structural one, not therapy instead of politics, but the recognition that politics is also, always, about the formation of persons capable of freedom. This is why anarchists have cared so much about culture, about education, about the quality of relationships within movements, about the daily practice of treating people as ends rather than means. These are not secondary concerns, they are the substance of the revolution itself.

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