By Expressões Anarquistas – Fenikso Nigra
Educate, organize, emancipate. Well-being and freedom. These words have crossed generations of militants and remain just as necessary today as they were over a century ago. Time has changed technologies, governments, and forms of exploitation, but it has not eliminated the structure that turns differences into hierarchies and hierarchies into permanent mechanisms of domination. As long as there are those who concentrate enough power to decide over the lives of others, there will continue to be those who resist.
Human history cannot be told merely as a succession of governments, wars, or technological advancements. It is also the history of struggles against exploitation and oppression. Indigenous peoples expelled from their territories, Black populations subjected to slavery and structural racism, women confined for centuries to subordination, children turned into cheap labor, people persecuted for their sexual orientation or identity, workers reduced to the condition of commodities, and animals subjected to industrial exploitation share distinct experiences, yet all are crossed by a common logic: the transformation of life into an object of control, profit, or submission. Animal exploitation, in this view, is not a separate issue—it is the exact same logic of commodification applied to beings who cannot negotiate their own condition, much like a child in child labor or an enslaved person in the slave trade.
Each of these forms of violence possesses its own history and produces specific suffering. Recognizing this uniqueness is essential. The mistake begins when these struggles cease to dialogue with one another and start competing over which suffering deserves greater attention or which group should occupy the center of social transformation. Fragmentation serves the exact interests of the structures that thrive on division. When each struggle closes in on itself, it becomes harder to perceive what they all have in common: the existence of permanent relations of domination that take on different faces depending on the time and place.
From its origins, anarchism followed a different path. It took part in workers’ struggles, defended women’s emancipation, fought colonialism, denounced racism, organized popular schools, confronted dictatorships, and supported experiences of self-management. More recently, it expanded its reflections to include critiques of environmental destruction and the systematic exploitation of animals. Not because all these causes were identical, but because it recognized that no freedom remains complete while another form of oppression continues to exist.
This understanding also prevents another common mistake: imagining that it is enough for a historically oppressed group to gain power for emancipation to be guaranteed. History offers countless examples to the contrary. Whenever an organization, a party, or a vanguard presents itself as the sole representative of the people’s interests, it also creates the conditions to decide on their behalf. Concentrated power tends to reproduce its own logic, regardless of the intentions that accompanied its origin.
It was precisely this critique that anarchism directed at the centralizing revolutionary experiences of the 20th century. The idea of a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” presented as a temporary stage toward equality, ultimately produced new State apparatuses, new bureaucracies, and new forms of domination—from the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the Eastern European dictatorships that consolidated after World War II. The fact that a class suffers exploitation does not automatically eliminate the relations of authority existing within it. Workers can also reproduce racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and other forms of oppression. A shift in economic positioning does not, by itself, transform social relations built over centuries.
That is why emancipation cannot be delegated. No party, government, union, leadership, or expert will liberate society in its place. Freedom is not born from replacing one elite with another. It grows when ordinary people learn to decide collectively on what affects their lives, share responsibilities, and build forms of organization where no one holds permanent authority over others.
This practice demands education, but an education that preserves the memory of resistance rather than just the history of the victors. It demands organization, but an organization built from the bottom up, sustained by mutual aid, shared responsibility, and direct participation. It demands emancipation, understood not as a concession granted by authorities, but as a daily conquest by communities that reject exploitation in any of its forms.
May our differences never be a cause for division, but a source of solidarity. May each struggle strengthen the rest, rather than compete for priority. No oppression disappears in isolation, because none of them arose in isolation. As long as one form of domination remains standing, all others will continue to find fertile ground to reappear.
It was this understanding that inspired one of the most enduring principles of the international workers’ movement: the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves, or it will not be at all. Today, this principle can be broadened without losing its essence. The emancipation of every exploited and oppressed person will be the work of those who live that reality and decide to confront it collectively. There will be no saviors, no enlightened vanguards, no benevolent authorities capable of carrying out this task for them. Freedom was never granted from above. It has always been born from the hand raised in assembly, the voice that refused to be silenced, and the collective decision to stop obeying.