Chris Wyatt
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Freedom as Marxian-autonomy
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This chapter establishes the various elements that when integrated in certain ways constitute the conception of freedom pieced together and defended in this book, ‘freedom as Marxian-autonomy’. Both Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ liberty and Gerald MacCallum’s triadic formula are delineated. The chapter explains why it is a version of the latter that pervades the entire constitution of associational anarchism, and the sense in which it has something significant to offer the more general anarchist theory of ‘advanced selfhood’. In order to establish the other essential premises upon which the associational anarchist conception of freedom stands, three main traditions of political thought that conceptualise liberty in distinct ways are introduced. The next step is to clarify how Marx’s notion of freedom can be incorporated into MacCallum’s formula, and, further, how the former can also be combined with an idealist (sometimes referred to as ‘freedom as autonomy’) interpretation of the latter. Although the chapter endorses Marx’s critique that the abstract individualism of liberalism cannot provide an adequate account of the communal relations through which people gain their self-understandings, state socialist solutions to the liberal contradiction are also rejected. The chapter moves on to indicate the ways in which liberalism’s reductive ontology is replaced with what the book understands as the ‘functionally demarcated higher-self’. Through a discussion of anarchism’s complex relation with democracy, the chapter concludes with an account of the plural democratic forms that constitute the core of associational anarchism’s mode of organisation.

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Associational anarchism

Towards a left-libertarian conception of freedom

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