WORLD WORLDWIDE NEW ZEALAND - news journal UPDATE - (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Class, Labour, and the Freedom to Not Be Exploited (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Any anarcho-communist account of freedom must grapple seriously with the class analysis that sits at the heart of the tradition. Freedom is not only a philosophical question, it is a material one. Who owns what? Who works for whom? Who has the power to compel labour, and who is compelled? These questions are not incidental to freedom; they are constitutive of it. The wage relation is a freedom relation, or rather, it is a systematic denial of freedom disguised as a voluntary exchange. The classical anarcho-communist analysis of class is not identical to the Marxist one, though it overlaps substantially. Anarcho-communists have generally shared Marx's identification of exploitation as the core of capitalist social relations, the appropriation by capital of the surplus value produced by labour. What they have tended to resist is the Marxist privileging of the industrial proletariat as the singular revolutionary subject, and still more strongly the Marxist-Leninist conclusion that liberation requires the seizure of state power by a vanguard party acting in the name of the working class.

For Bakunin, and this was the core of his famous dispute with Marx, the state was not a neutral instrument that could be captured and used for liberatory ends. It was a structure of domination in itself, and any revolution that transferred state power from one class to another while leaving the state intact would produce a new ruling class: - the administrators, the party officials, the revolutionary vanguard - who had taken hold of the machinery of domination and now wielded it in the name of the people. History, Bakunin argued with considerable prescience in the 1870s, would confirm this analysis, that the dictatorship of the proletariat would become the dictatorship over the proletariat.
The anarcho-communist theory of freedom in relation to class is therefore not only about the content of what is demanded, the abolition of exploitation, the socialisation of the means of production, the end of the wage system, but about the form through which liberation is pursued. You cannot achieve freedom through unfree means. A hierarchical party commanding a disciplined mass movement from above cannot produce a free society below. A state that nationalises production and directs economic life cannot produce the free association of producers that genuine communism requires. The form of the struggle must prefigure the form of the society it aims to build.
This is why anarcho-communists have historically been so invested in the forms of working-class self-organisation, such as the revolutionary union, the workers' council, the popular assembly, the commune. These were not merely tactical forms but were attempts to build the infrastructure of a free society within the shell of the old and to practice the kind of horizontal, collective, non-hierarchical selfgovernance that a free communist society would require. The Spanish anarchists of the CNT-FAI, in the collectivisations of 1936-1937, were not simply fighting for better wages, they were attempting to reorganise production on genuinely free and communal principles, demonstrating in practice that workers did not need bosses, that communities did not need police, that people were capable of governing themselves without the mediation of authority.
The freedom demanded by the anarcho-communist is therefore, in relation to labour and class, a comprehensive one - freedom from exploitation (the end of the wage system and the socialisation of production), freedom from alienation (the return to the worker of genuine ownership and meaning in their work), freedom from economic compulsion (the guarantee that no one's survival will depend on their willingness to submit to another's authority), and freedom to participate meaningfully in the collective decisions that shape economic and social life. This is not a modest programme. It is a demand for the reorganisation of the entire basis of social existence.

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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca