After all this philosophical work, it is worth being concrete. Not in the form of a programme, anarcho-communism is constitutionally suspicious of blueprints, for reasons already discussed, but in the sense of being honest about the full scale of what genuine freedom requires. It is a demanding standard. It is worth stating plainly. ---- The most fundamental requirement is the abolition of economic compulsion. No one should be forced to submit to another's authority in order to survive. This is not only a moral claim it is the precondition for everything else. You cannot meaningfully speak of freedom, freedom of thought, of association, of self-determination, to someone whose primary daily reality is the need to find and keep employment on whatever terms are on offer. The communalisation of the means of production, the genuine socialisation of economic life, not nationalisation under state control, which merely replaces private bosses with bureaucratic ones, but real collective ownership and governance by the communities of workers and users who depend on production is not a detail of the programme, it is the foundation. Alongside it, the unconditional guarantee of the material conditions of life - food, housing, healthcare, education be available to everyone as a matter of right rather than as rewards for labour market compliance.
But material sufficiency alone does not produce freedom. The second requirement is the dissolution of hierarchical authority in the organisation of collective life, its replacement with horizontal, participatory, genuinely accountable forms of selfgovernance. This requires more than abolishing the state as a formal institution, it requires developing, in the actual practices and relationships of communities, the capacities for collective deliberation and self-management that centuries of hierarchical authority have atrophied. People have to learn, in practice and over time, to govern themselves. This is the work that prefigurative politics attempts, building the habits, institutions, and cultures of freedom in the present, not waiting for revolution to deliver them from above.The third requirement brings us back to the inner dimension developed in Section 8 that genuine freedom demands the conditions in which people can develop desires and values that are authentically their own, rather than adaptations to domination. This means education that cultivates critical thought rather than compliance, culture that expands rather than narrows the sense of what is possible, and the kind of community that supports rather than diminishes the development of each person. It means taking seriously the axes of oppression, race, gender, sexuality, disability, colonial history, that compound and intersect with class to produce specific forms of unfreedom that a purely economic analysis will miss. Formal equality is not enough, what is required is the active dismantling of the hierarchies that formal equality papers over.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, freedom requires that we give up the idea that it can ever be permanently secured. No institution, however well designed, is immune to the tendency toward hierarchy and the accumulation of power. No arrangement, however free at its inception, maintains itself without ongoing attention, criticism, and struggle. The permanent revolution that the title of this work's conclusion invokes is not a call for perpetual violence or instability, it is a recognition that freedom is a practice rather than a destination, a relationship rather than a state, something that has to be renewed in every generation, in every organisation, in every community that takes it seriously. The moment we stop fighting for it is the moment we begin losing it.
https://thepolarblast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/to-be-free-together.pd
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Link: (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: What Freedom Actually Requires (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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