The Invisible Cage
Collective Liberation or Nothing
Morning Comrades.
I’ve been increasingly angry of late, much of what has to do with an incoming burn out and this is my usual response to not setting boundaries especially in regards to my relationship to work but obviously, also, well, everything I presume. The contradictions of capitalism are sharpening by the day and the imperial core’s nonchalant approach to dissent is well and truly over. When that happens I do find focusing on core tenets of our work helps me to re-centre myself on what is important and cut out the noise, much of which is artificially engineered by their omnipresent culture war machine and with that much if not all of this week will be dedicated to some important concepts for us to dig into. To start, not only because it is one of my few, person, core principles but one I find that has been increasingly attacked by capitalist fuckery here in the West is the brilliant and important idea, that:
“Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free”
In the late 1960s, black and white women were both inspired and disillusioned by the movements for social change. The centuries-long struggle for gender equality was reinvigorated by their experiences within civil rights, Black Power, and newly formed student organisations. Fannie Lou Hamer challenged core aspects of the women’s liberation movements, especially the feminists’ one-dimensional view of relations between the sexes and their stances on birth control and other aspects of reproductive rights. Hamer expressed her concerns in a speech delivered at the founding meeting of the National Women’s Political Caucus in Washington, D.C. on July 10, 1971, which is where this line is from.
The truth is violent: what they call freedom is merely sanctioned obedience. A leash long enough to let you pace, but short enough to snap your neck the moment you forget who owns it.
They sold us the lie of “individual freedom” like it was the crown jewel of civilization, an abstraction gilded in blood, built on prisons, borders, wage slavery, and war. They taught us to see our “liberty” in consumption, in property, in competition, in the success of outpacing others. But I cannot be free if I must step over another’s broken body to reach the illusion of it. I cannot be free when my existence relies on someone else’s dispossession. The soul of this system is parasitic, and it names your oppression a personal failure.
And so the truth must be shouted, again and again: there is no individual freedom without collective freedom. I am not free until everyone is free. It is a material law. It is a revolutionary axiom as old as the first slave revolt and as urgent as the breath caught in the tear gas of today.
To say this is not just to utter solidarity, it is to declare war on the false gods of capitalist democracy. Freedom was never about the right to speak into the void, to “own” your body in a system that sells it daily, or to “choose” between oppressors. It was, and remains, the condition that arises only when exploitation is destroyed and collective human flourishing begins. Until then, freedom is not real. Until then, none of us are free.
Marx, Engels, and the False Freedom of the Isolated Individual
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels grounded their understanding of freedom in material conditions, not in legal forms, moral abstractions, or philosophical ideals, but in the relations of production. In The German Ideology, they directly reject the liberal concept of the “free individual” as mystification. What the bourgeois world calls “freedom” is nothing more than the freedom of the wage-laborer to sell their labor to a boss, or starve.
In Capital, Marx reveals how the worker is “free” only in the sense that they are not legally enslaved, but nonetheless must submit to exploitation to survive. This is the infamous “double freedom”: freedom from owning any means of production and freedom to sell oneself on the market. Real freedom is not found in contracts but in the destruction of the wage system.
“Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.”¹
But Engels extended this critique beyond the factory and the wage relation, into the home itself. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), Engels demonstrates that the modern nuclear family, rooted in private property, male dominance, and monogamy is not a natural or eternal structure. It is a historical invention that emerged alongside the rise of class society and the subjugation of women.
He writes:
“The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife.”²
Monogamous marriage, far from being an expression of love or individual freedom, was designed to ensure the father knew whose children would inherit his property. Romantic “freedom” was born from the same conditions as wage labour: private property, hierarchy, and control.
This insight obliterates the liberal fantasy that the family is a refuge of freedom in an unfree world. In reality, the traditional family has long been a disciplinary institution, producing gendered roles, suppressing non-heteronormative identities, and locking people into economic dependency through marriage contracts. The family ensures that women, especially working-class women perform reproductive labour without compensation, while being told this is “natural.”
Even “progressive” states uphold this model, rewarding tax benefits to married couples, enforcing strict gender norms through law and media, and criminalizing non-traditional kinship structures. The state protects the family not out of compassion, but because it needs the unpaid, privatized labour it provides to maintain capitalist society.
As Silvia Federici later elaborates, the family is where the worker is reproduced, not just biologically, but socially and emotionally.³ And as long as that reproduction takes place in unpaid, isolated, gendered units, there can be no true personal freedom, no sexual freedom, no collective emancipation.
The real liberation of the individual, then, is inseparable from the collective dismantling of class, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and property. Freedom is not found in the privacy of marriage, the “sanctity” of family, or the isolated bedroom of the bourgeois subject. It is found only in the commune, the collective, the future we build together.
Frantz Fanon: Decolonization Is the Birth of Human Freedom
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon reveals that colonialism divides humanity itself, casting the colonised as subhuman and the coloniser as the only subject entitled to freedom. For Fanon, there is no “reform” of such a system. Freedom under colonial rule is a contradiction in terms. Liberation, he insists, must be violent, total, and world-making.
“The condition for a man to be free is for there to be no slave.”⁵
Fanon’s revolutionary humanism expands Marxism into a global terrain. He makes clear that the “freedom” spoken of in the West, freedom of markets, speech, elections is built on the expropriation and brutalisation of the Global South. This is not a distortion of liberalism, it is its logical conclusion. What liberalism offers the colonised is not freedom, but incorporation into a world where capitalism is god and brown life is cheap.
Freedom, for Fanon, must decolonize not only territory but identity, subjectivity, and being itself. Until we destroy the colonial relationship, the master and the slave we will not be human. We will not be free.
Against the Liberal Lie of Freedom in Crisis Capitalism
Today, as the West burns, ecologically, economically, socially it still clings to the narrative that its institutions guarantee liberty. Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, shows that the capitalist state needs unpaid reproductive labour to survive. The family, she argues, was weaponised during primitive accumulation to turn women into domestic slaves. The freedom to choose between wage labour and motherhood is not freedom, it is coerced labour in different forms.
Harsha Walia, in Border and Rule, reveals how borders manufacture hierarchy and suffering. While Westerners enjoy “freedom of movement,” refugees drown in oceans, rot in detention camps, or are deported. Freedom, in this context, is a passport, a symbol of privilege purchased by centuries of imperial violence.
Andreas Malm, in How to Blow Up a Pipeline, cuts through the greenwashing of liberal climate politics. The freedom to own, pollute, and accumulate is burning the world. The only path to survival is direct action, disruption, sabotage, revolution.
Every liberty granted by capitalism is conditional. Every freedom is someone else’s enclosure.
Capitalism teaches us to chase personal freedom like it’s a prize we can earn. But it’s a mirage. You cannot be free in a system that exploits others. You cannot be free when your comfort rests on someone else’s cage, someone else’s hunger, someone else’s silence.
The only real freedom is collective freedom. And that means organising, refusing, fighting, not just for rights within this world, but to end this world and build another.
Until that day comes, until the final boss falls, the last cop quits, the last border burns, I am not free.
And neither are you.
As always, thank you for your time and attention,
Yours, warmly,
V.
Footnotes
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Collected Works, Vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 439.
Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans. Ernest Untermann (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 137.
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004), 92.
Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, trans. Bertram Wolfe (New York: Workers Age Publishers, 1940), 69.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 180.
Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 16.
Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), 21.
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 139.
Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (London: Verso Books, 2021), 74.