A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Polar Blast - Two Freedoms, and Why One of Them Is a Trap (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

There is a distinction worth making early, because it runs beneath 
almost every argument in this article. Political philosophers call it 
the difference between negative and positive freedom, and while the 
terminology is a little dry, the stakes are not. Negative freedom is 
freedom from interference, the absence of a direct obstacle between you 
and what you want to do. No one is stopping you. No one is forcing you. 
The liberal tradition has been almost exclusively preoccupied with this 
kind of freedom, and the market is its natural expression. In theory, no 
one compels you to take a particular job or sign a particular contract, 
you are simply free to choose. This is the freedom celebrated in 
constitutions, defended in courts, and invoked endlessly by politicians 
of every stripe.
Positive freedom asks a different question, not whether anyone is 
blocking you, but whether you actually have what you need to act 
meaningfully. It is interested in real conditions, your material 
security, your health, your education, your membership in a community 
that supports rather than diminishes you. Positive freedom is what you 
have when the absence of obstacles is accompanied by the actual presence 
of capacity.
The anarcho-communist case is that negative freedom, while not 
worthless, is radically insufficient, and that the liberal fixation on 
it performs a specific ideological function. It makes the coercions 
built into capitalist social relations invisible by framing them as the 
absence of coercion. No one is holding a gun to your head when you sign 
an employment contract, but the choice between signing and going without 
income, housing, or healthcare is not a free choice in any sense that 
matters. The freedom to starve is not freedom. Negative liberty in 
conditions of material inequality simply means the powerful are free to 
dominate the powerless through transactions that are nominally voluntary.
The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws 
because he has himself recognised them as such, and not because they 
have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, 
divine or human, collective or individual. Mikhail Bakunin, God and the 
State Bakunin's formulation cuts straight to what positive freedom 
actually means from an anarchist standpoint. It is not the state 
deciding what freedom requires and imposing it from above, that would 
merely replace one domination with another. It is the capacity of 
persons to understand their own situation, to act in accordance with 
their own nature and reason, to obey nothing they have not themselves 
recognised as worth obeying. Freedom and self-understanding are not in 
tension, they are the same thing seen from different angles. And both 
are impossible under conditions of domination, which is precisely why 
domination must be abolished rather than reformed.

https://thepolarblast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/to-be-free-together.pdf
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