Freedom, in anarchist use, is the condition of living without domination. It is not the same as the liberal concept of freedom, and the difference matters.
Liberal freedom is the freedom to choose within a framework of authority. You are free to choose your employer, but not free to work without one. Free to vote for representatives, but not free to govern yourself. Free to speak, but within limits set by the state. Free to own property, but within rules enforced by courts and police. This freedom operates inside a system of hierarchy — it gives you options within a structure of domination but does not let you refuse the structure itself. The employer who offers you a choice between two shifts is offering you liberal freedom; the anarchist question is why anyone gets to dictate your schedule at all.
Anarchist freedom is the absence of hierarchy as such. It means no one commands you — not a boss, not a president, not a landlord, not a priest — and you command no one. It is not the freedom of the isolated individual (that is the libertarian version, which ignores that “individual freedom” for the property owner means domination for the worker). It is collective freedom: people organizing their shared life through voluntary association, mutual aid, and self-organization rather than through command and obedience. Your freedom and mine are not in competition — they are interdependent. Bakunin put it precisely: “I am not truly free unless all human beings surrounding me are equally free.”
This means freedom is not something granted by a constitution or protected by a state. It is something practiced — built through relationships, maintained through refusal of domination, and defended through solidarity. Prefigurative politics follows directly from this: if freedom is a practice rather than a condition granted from above, then the struggle for freedom must itself be free. A hierarchical movement cannot produce a free society. The experience of freedom must be present in the means of achieving it — which is what Bonanno called armed joy.
Related terms
- Domination — the condition freedom opposes
- Hierarchy — the structure that prevents freedom
- Voluntary association — the principle of free social bonds
- Self-organization — the practice of freedom
- Solidarity — the mutual commitment that sustains freedom
- Obedience — the habit that replaces freedom
- Authority — the claim that overrides freedom
- Autonomy — self-governance as the expression of freedom