A-Infos (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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