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A shift from liberal thinking to anarchist thinking necessarily involves a shift from thinking about justice to thinking about liberation.

Justice erases the conditions of what are and what could be, and is concerned only with what the rules say must be. It moralizes our freedom away. It is administered by power, while it pretends that power does not exist. It makes us passionately wish harm upon other human beings in retribution, where healing and transformation could have been options. It makes us forget that we are oppressed, because we are equal on paper.

Liberation is material, intersectional, systemic, and dialectical. It is praxis. It is revolutionary. It cherishes the diverse fecundity of nature, and our part of that as stewards. It acknowledges and dismantles hierarchical power structures, and builds horizontal ones. It does not pretend that any theory is more real than reality itself.

Justice is rigid, where liberation is fluid. Anarchists are less concerned with what is moral, and more concerned with what is conducive to freedom.

In The Ecology of Freedom, at the end of Chapter 6 (Justice: Equal and Exact), Murray Bookchin describes how liberalism became the embodiment of justice. As the patriarchal state came to dominate Western societies, it produced various ideologies to justify its inherent hierarchy. The father figure, whether literal, king, or God, was made out to be a wise maker of justice in order to justify his authority. The individual emerges as a political construct, to divest from the conditions of society and pursue individual enrichment above all--liberal justice is about enabling that, as the ideological wing of capitalism. Under the cosmopolitanism of the Hellenistic Mediterranean, then the Heavenly City of Christianity, then the law of liberalism, people from all ranks of hierarchy were declared equal, sharing in a status of inequality of equals, and discouraged from challenging or even acknowledging the differences in power that actually existed. Liberal justice is rooted not in engaging fully and dialectically with the real world, but in calculating maximum pleasure for maximum number of people, as if we could do so separately from our own setting in which the calculation is being done, and with full understanding of everyone's possible experiences.

Liberalism remains the embodiment of justice in the West. Still, we find the language of justice in many movements that go beyond "rights", and are often doing great work even if not specifically anarchist. Disability justice, transformative justice, and reproductive justice come to mind. The concept of "justice" being invoked here is clearly different from the liberal concept. We can build on the enormous success and potential of these movements by enacting a anarchist interpretations based in liberation.