A-Infos (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
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en