Month: December 2025

The New Year arrives each January like an official decree. It is announced by fireworks and by media outlets rehearsing the same tired narrative of fresh starts and personal reinvention. The calendar flips, the numbers change, and we are told that something has begun anew. But for the working class, for the colonised, for those ground down by rent, debt, policing, and war, the New Year is not a rupture. It is a continuity. The same relations of domination carry over at midnight without so much as a pause for breath.

Capitalism loves the New Year because it individualises time. It turns history into a sequence of private moral challenges. This year you will do better, work harder, save more, heal yourself, improve your brand. If last year was difficult, the problem is framed as personal failure or poor choices rather than the structural violence of an economic system that extracts value from our lives while returning precarity, exhaustion and alienation. The New Year resolution is the ideological cousin of neo-liberalism – a demand that we fix ourselves rather than abolish the conditions that harm us.

For anarcho-communists, the New Year cannot be approached as a neutral or innocent moment. Time itself has been colonised. The Gregorian calendar, the fiscal year, the quarterly report, the deadline and the productivity cycle are tools of governance. They discipline our bodies and our expectations, teaching us to measure life in output rather than meaning, compliance rather than freedom. Even celebration is regimented. We are permitted a controlled release of joy, alcohol and fireworks before returning obediently to work, debt and surveillance.

Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss the New Year entirely as mere spectacle. People do feel something at the turn of the year, and that feeling matters. Beneath the manufactured optimism there is often grief, anger, exhaustion and a quiet recognition that life cannot continue indefinitely as it is. The desire for change is real, even if the system works relentlessly to misdirect it inward. Our task is not to sneer at that desire, but to collectivise it, politicise it, and turn it outward against the structures that make renewal impossible.

From an anarcho-communist perspective, the only meaningful “new year” is one that breaks with the social relations of the old. Without the abolition of wage labour, private property, the state and colonial domination, no year is truly new. The boss remains a boss on January 1st. The landlord still extracts rent. The police still enforce property relations with violence. The prison gates do not open because the calendar has changed. The bombs do not stop falling because politicians wish peace on social media.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, the New Year also sits awkwardly atop unresolved colonial violence. The land remains stolen, despite decades of settlement processes designed more to stabilise capitalism than to restore tino rangatiratanga. Māori over-representation in prisons, child removals and poverty statistics does not reset at midnight. The state continues to manage inequality rather than abolish it, presenting incremental reform as justice while defending the fundamental structures of dispossession. To speak of a “fresh start” without confronting this reality is to participate in historical erasure.

Anarcho-communism rejects the idea that history progresses automatically through calendar time. There is nothing inevitable about improvement. Things get better only when people organise collectively to make them better, often at great cost. Every gain made by working people – shorter hours, safer conditions, welfare, and collective rights – was won through struggle, not optimism. And every gain can be taken away when struggle recedes. The New Year should therefore not be treated as a passive hope for improvement, but as a moment to recommit to active resistance.

This does not mean adopting the language of grim duty or joyless militancy. On the contrary, anarcho-communism insists that liberation must be lived now as well as fought for. The problem with capitalist New Year narratives is not that they promise happiness, but that they isolate it. They tell us to heal alone, to improve alone, to cope alone. Anarchist politics insists that joy, care and renewal are collective practices. We do not become free by perfecting ourselves under oppression, but by dismantling oppression together.

The turn of the year can therefore be reclaimed as a time for collective reflection rather than individual self-discipline. Not “how will I be more productive,” but “how did power operate last year, and how did we resist it?” Not “what are my goals,” but “what do we need each other to survive and fight?” This kind of reflection does not fit neatly into social media posts or corporate planners, but it is far more dangerous to the existing order.

Globally, the context in which this New Year arrives is bleak. Militarisation accelerates, from Ukraine to Gaza to the Pacific. Climate collapse advances while states prepare not to prevent it, but to police its consequences. Borders harden, prisons expand, and fascist movements gain confidence by feeding on despair and alienation. Liberal democracy offers little beyond managerial cruelty and moral theatre. Social democracy promises protection while administering the same underlying violence. The system is not broken; it is functioning exactly as designed.

In such a context, calls for unity without class struggle are worse than useless. The New Year speeches of politicians speak of “bringing the country together” while passing laws that weaken workers, criminalise protest and protect capital. Unity under capitalism always means unity on the terms of the powerful. Anarcho-communists reject this false unity in favour of solidarity and a commitment forged through shared struggle against common enemies, not polite agreement with them.

The New Year is often framed as a clean slate, but there are no clean slates under capitalism. We begin each year already entangled in histories we did not choose. Anarcho-communism does not promise purity or innocence. It promises struggle with our eyes open. It promises a politics grounded not in fantasy, but in material reality and collective capacity.

In this sense, the most radical New Year gesture is not to declare who we will become, but to reaffirm who we stand with and what we stand for. To choose solidarity over self-improvement, resistance over resignation, and collective liberation over individual escape. To recognise that the future will not be given to us as a gift wrapped in fireworks and slogans, but taken through organised, sustained struggle.

If there is to be a genuinely new year, it will not begin on a calendar. It will begin when people refuse to live as they are told they must. It will begin when workplaces become sites of resistance rather than obedience, when communities defend each other against the state, when land is returned and borders are rendered meaningless by collective care. It will begin when the logic of profit is replaced by the logic of need.

Until then, we enter the New Year not with hope in abstraction, but with commitment in practice. Not asking what this year will bring, but what we are willing to fight for together. Not promising ourselves personal transformation, but building the collective power required for social transformation. That is the only resolution worth keeping, and the only sense in which the New Year can truly be new.

For much of the socialist movement’s history, the question of the state has acted like a fault line running beneath every strategy, every party, every programme. Again and again, the Left has been pulled back towards the idea that emancipation can be delivered through the machinery of government, that the capitalist state can be captured, redirected, and made to serve the interests of labour. However there is a growing recognition of the hollowness of that belief. It reflects an unease that has been quietly accumulating for decades – that parliamentary socialism, however well intentioned, remains structurally trapped within institutions designed to preserve capitalism rather than abolish it. For anarcho-communists, this is not a new insight but a confirmation of something long understood. The state is not a neutral arena waiting to be occupied by the Left; it is a form of social power built to discipline labour, defend property, and stabilise exploitation.

The capitalist state is not simply a set of elected officials or a collection of policies. It is a dense network of bureaucracies, legal systems, police forces, financial institutions, and ideological norms that together reproduce class domination. Even when staffed by socialists, it remains bound to the imperatives of capital accumulation, economic growth, and social order. This is why left governments, from post-war social democracy to more recent reformist projects, so often find themselves retreating, compromising, or outright capitulating. They inherit a machine whose purpose is to manage capitalism, not dismantle it. To imagine that such a machine can be repurposed for socialism is to misunderstand its very function.

The appeal of the state has always been understandable. It offers immediacy, visibility, and the illusion of control. Winning an election feels tangible in a way that slowly building collective power does not. Legislation can be passed, budgets allocated, nationalisations announced. Yet these victories remain fragile precisely because they leave the underlying relations of power intact. Capital retains its mobility, its ownership of production, its ability to withhold investment, relocate, sabotage, and discipline. The state, even under left leadership, is forced to respond to these pressures or face economic crisis, capital flight, and political destabilisation. What is presented as political realism is in fact structural blackmail.
AWSM gestures towards this reality by insisting that socialism cannot be reduced to electoral success. We point to the necessity of building power outside the state, in workplaces, unions, and communities, to support and sustain any meaningful transformation. This is an important recognition, but it remains incomplete. From an anarcho-communist perspective, the problem is not merely that the state is insufficient on its own, but that it actively undermines the development of genuine collective power. The more movements orient themselves towards parliamentary outcomes, the more their energies are channelled into leadership contests, messaging discipline, and electoral cycles. Popular participation is narrowed to voting, while decision-making is centralised and professionalised. The result is demobilisation, not empowerment.

Social democracy offers a clear historical lesson. Its great post-war achievements in welfare provision and public ownership were real, but they were also shallow. Workers were not given control over production, they were given managed security within capitalism. Industries were nationalised but remained hierarchical and bureaucratic, run by state managers rather than workers themselves. When neoliberalism arrived, these arrangements were easily dismantled because the working class had never been organised as a ruling power in its own right. The state could give, and the state could take away.

This dynamic was not just confined to Europe. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the legacy of Labour governments tells a similar story. The welfare state, built on colonial foundations and exclusion, provided limited security while entrenching bureaucratic control over Māori and working-class communities. The neoliberal counter-revolution of the 1980s did not emerge from nowhere, but it was enabled by a state apparatus already accustomed to managing society from above. The lesson is not that reforms are meaningless, but that reforms delivered by the state are always contingent, reversible, and ultimately subordinate to capital.

Anarcho-communism begins from a different premise. It understands socialism not as a policy programme but as a transformation of social relations. The abolition of capitalism requires the abolition of the state because both rest on hierarchy, coercion, and alienation. The state concentrates decision-making in the hands of a few, separates people from control over their own lives, and enforces obedience through law and violence. Capitalism does the same in the economic sphere. To dismantle one while preserving the other is impossible.

This does not mean waiting for a mythical moment of total collapse. It means recognising that socialism must be built through practices that prefigure the world we want. Workers controlling their workplaces, communities organising their own resources, people collectively meeting their needs without mediation by state or market. These practices are not supplementary to political struggle, they are its substance. They create the material basis for a society without bosses or bureaucrats.

The parliamentary left need to draw on the idea of extending democracy into the economy, an argument that resonates strongly with anarcho-communist thought. But democracy, if it is to mean anything, cannot be confined to representative structures. Real democracy is direct, participatory, and rooted in everyday life. It is exercised in assemblies, councils, and federations where people have immediate control over decisions that affect them. It is incompatible with institutions that monopolise authority and enforce compliance from above.

Historically, moments of revolutionary rupture have demonstrated this possibility. Workers’ councils, neighbourhood committees, and communal structures have repeatedly emerged in periods of intense struggle, from Russia in 1905 and 1917 to Spain in 1936. These were not spontaneous miracles but the product of long-term organising and collective confidence. They showed that ordinary people are capable of managing society without bosses or states, when given the opportunity and necessity to do so.

The tragedy of much of the twentieth-century Left is that these moments were either crushed by reaction or absorbed into new state structures that replicated old hierarchies under socialist rhetoric. The promise of the state withering away became a justification for its expansion. Anarcho-communists reject this logic entirely. The state does not wither; it entrenches itself. Power, once centralised, resists dissolution.

This is why the strategy of dual power remains crucial. Rather than aiming to take over the state and transform society from above, anarcho-communism seeks to build alternative forms of power that make the state increasingly irrelevant. Mutual aid networks that meet material needs without bureaucratic mediation. Workplace organisations that challenge managerial authority directly. Community assemblies that coordinate housing, food, and care. These structures do not wait for permission, they assert collective autonomy in the here and now.

In the context of Aotearoa, this approach must be inseparable from decolonisation. The colonial state was imposed through violence, land theft, and the destruction of Māori social structures. Any socialist project that centres the state risks reproducing these colonial dynamics, even when wrapped in progressive language. Anarcho-communism aligns with tino rangatiratanga not as a symbolic gesture, but as a practical commitment to autonomy, self-determination, and the dismantling of imposed authority. Supporting iwi and hapū control over land and resources is not a concession within the state framework, but it is a challenge to the legitimacy of the colonial state itself.

The fixation on elections often obscures these deeper questions. Some argue that voting can be a tactic, but it cannot be a strategy. When movements orient themselves primarily towards winning office, they internalise the priorities of the system they seek to oppose. Radical demands are softened to appeal to swing voters, direct action is discouraged to maintain respectability, and organisational energy is funnelled into campaigns that dissipate once the ballot boxes are packed away. Disappointment follows, then cynicism, then retreat.

Direct action, by contrast, builds confidence and capacity. Strikes, occupations, blockades, and collective refusal confront power where it actually operates. They force concessions not through persuasion but through disruption. More importantly, they teach participants that change comes from their own collective strength, not from benevolent leaders. This is the pedagogical function of struggle, one that no parliamentary process can replicate.

Socialism must be rooted in mass participation rather than elite management. Where anarcho-communism diverges is in its refusal to subordinate that participation to the state at all. The goal is not to pressure governments into doing the right thing, but to render them increasingly obsolete. Every time people organise to meet their needs directly, they weaken the ideological and material foundations of state power.

This does not mean ignoring the reality of repression. The state will defend itself, often brutally. Police, courts, and prisons exist precisely to contain challenges from below. Anarcho-communist strategy therefore emphasises solidarity, decentralisation, and resilience. Movements that are horizontal and federated are harder to decapitate. Networks of mutual support reduce vulnerability to repression. Collective defence becomes a shared responsibility rather than the domain of specialists.

Capitalism is entering a period of deep instability, marked by ecological collapse, widening inequality, and permanent crisis. States respond not by resolving these contradictions but by managing them through austerity, surveillance, and repression. In this context, the fantasy that the state can be the vehicle for emancipation becomes increasingly untenable. The machinery is being retooled not for redistribution but for control.

Socialism against the state is therefore not a slogan but a necessity. It means recognising that freedom cannot be legislated into existence. It must be constructed through collective struggle that dismantles hierarchy in all its forms. Anarcho-communism offers not a blueprint but a direction towards a society organised around mutual aid, collective ownership, and direct democracy, without rulers and without classes.

The task before us is not to perfect the art of governance but to abolish the conditions that make governance necessary. To replace domination with cooperation, coercion with solidarity, and representation with participation. In doing so, we move beyond the narrow horizons of state-centred socialism and reclaim the revolutionary heart of the communist project.

The Employment Relations Amendment Bill currently before Parliament represents one of the most aggressive and naked assaults on working-class power in Aotearoa in a generation. While it has been framed by government ministers and business lobbyists as a necessary “modernisation” of employment law, its real function is far more transparent. This is not about flexibility, efficiency, or productivity. It is about reasserting employer domination over labour at a time when capital feels threatened by rising costs, worker resistance, and the slow unravelling of the neoliberal settlement that has underpinned New Zealand capitalism since the 1980s. As the Council of Trade Unions has correctly identified, this Bill rivals, and in some respects surpasses, the Employment Contracts Act of the 1990s in its hostility to organised labour. That alone should set alarm bells ringing for anyone with even a passing interest in working-class survival.

At its core, the Bill seeks to rewrite the basic terms on which workers and employers relate to one another, not by correcting an imbalance of power, but by deepening it. The mythology of employment law under capitalism has always rested on the idea of a “fair bargain” between two equal parties. In reality, the employment relationship has never been equal. One side owns capital, controls access to wages, and can absorb risk; the other sells their labour because the alternative is poverty. The Employment Relations Act, for all its limitations, at least acknowledged this structural inequality and attempted to moderate it through collective bargaining rights, good faith obligations, and mechanisms for challenging unjust treatment. The Amendment Bill strips away even these modest concessions, exposing the raw class logic beneath the law.

One of the most dangerous elements of the Bill is its deliberate erosion of the distinction between employee and contractor. By introducing a new category of “specified contractor” and weakening the long-established “real nature” test, the legislation opens the door to widespread misclassification. This is not accidental. It is a direct response to workers who have successfully challenged their bogus contractor status, most notably gig economy workers such as Uber drivers. Rather than accept court decisions affirming that these workers are employees entitled to basic protections, the state has chosen to intervene on behalf of capital, rewriting the law to ensure future claims fail before they begin. This is class power operating exactly as designed. When workers win through the courts, the rules are changed to prevent it happening again.

The implications of this shift are enormous. Once workers are pushed into contractor status, they lose access to minimum wage protections, paid leave, sick leave, personal grievance rights, and collective bargaining. They are atomised, isolated, and forced to negotiate individually with companies that hold all the cards. This is particularly devastating for migrant workers, Māori workers, women, and young people, who are already overrepresented in insecure and low-paid work. The Bill does not simply allow exploitation – it actively facilitates it, embedding precarity as a legal norm rather than an aberration.

Equally destructive is the weakening of the personal grievance system. The right to challenge unjust dismissal has long been one of the few protections workers possess against arbitrary employer power. Under the Amendment Bill, that right is significantly curtailed, especially for higher-income workers, who may be excluded entirely unless their employer agrees otherwise. This so-called “mutual agreement” is a farce. In a labour market defined by power imbalance, the employer’s consent is not a neutral condition but an assertion of authority. The message is clear, if you earn above a certain threshold, your job security exists only at your boss’s discretion. Speak up, organise, resist, and you can be removed without meaningful recourse.

The removal of the 30-day rule further exposes the Bill’s anti-union intent. That rule ensured new workers were automatically covered by collective agreements during their first month of employment, giving them immediate access to union-negotiated conditions and a breathing space in which to decide whether to join. Its abolition is a calculated strike at union density. By forcing new hires onto individual contracts from day one, employers gain the upper hand before workers have time to understand their rights or build collective confidence. This is union-busting by legislative stealth, achieved not through overt repression but through procedural manipulation.

Taken together, these changes amount to a systematic dismantling of collective labour power. They weaken unions, fragment the workforce, and normalise insecure employment relationships that favour capital accumulation at the expense of human need. This is not an accidental outcome of poorly drafted legislation. It is the intended result of a political project that treats labour as a cost to be minimised rather than as human beings whose lives depend on stable and dignified work.

The broader political context makes this trajectory even clearer. The Employment Relations Amendment Bill does not exist in isolation but forms part of a wider rollback of worker protections. Pay equity mechanisms have been gutted under urgency, undermining decades of feminist struggle for wage justice. Fair Pay Agreements have been repealed before they could take root, denying entire sectors the chance to lift conditions collectively. Sick leave entitlements and strike protections have been repeatedly targeted, all in the name of “economic growth” that somehow never translates into better lives for those who actually produce society’s wealth. Each reform follows the same pattern of take from workers, give to employers, and dress the outcome up as common sense.

From an anarcho-communist perspective, none of this is surprising. The state is not a neutral arbiter between competing interests but an instrument shaped by and for the ruling class. When capital feels confident, it tolerates limited concessions to labour. When it feels threatened, it reasserts control. The current wave of employment “reforms” reflects a capitalist system under strain, facing declining productivity, global instability, and growing discontent. Rather than addressing these crises structurally, the state has chosen the easiest path – intensifying exploitation.

Trade unions have rightly condemned the Bill as a historic attack, but condemnation alone is not enough. Parliamentary opposition, submissions to select committees, and appeals to fairness will not stop a government committed to disciplining labour. The history of working-class gains in Aotearoa and elsewhere teaches a clear lesson: rights are not granted from above; they are forced from below. The eight-hour day, the weekend, minimum wages, health and safety protections — all were won through struggle, not persuasion. They were secured by workers organising, striking, and refusing to accept the terms imposed upon them.

This moment demands a revival of that tradition. Rank-and-file organising, militant unionism, and solidarity across sectors are not optional extras but necessities. Where the law is used to weaken workers, direct action becomes not only legitimate but essential. Strikes, work stoppages, slowdowns, and collective refusal remain the most effective tools available to the working class. They disrupt the flow of profit and remind capital that without labour, nothing moves.

At the same time, resistance must extend beyond the workplace. Mutual aid networks, strike funds, and community support structures can help mitigate the risks workers face when they challenge employer power. Political education is equally crucial. Workers must understand that what is happening is not the result of bad leadership or poor policy choices, but the predictable outcome of a system built on exploitation. Without that clarity, resistance risks being defused into nostalgia for a kinder capitalism that never truly existed.

Ultimately, the Employment Relations Amendment Bill is not just about employment law. It is about who holds power in society and whose interests the state exists to serve. By stripping away collective protections and normalising insecurity, the Bill seeks to discipline labour into submission, ensuring that workers remain fragmented, fearful, and compliant. The response cannot be limited to defending the remnants of a compromised system. It must point beyond it, toward a society in which work is organised for human need rather than profit, and where the power to decide how we live and labour rests with workers themselves.

The stakes are high. If this Bill passes unchallenged, it will embolden further attacks on workers’ rights and deepen the erosion of collective power. But resistance is not futile. History shows that even the most entrenched systems can be shaken when workers act together. The question is not whether the law is unjust, that is already clear, but whether the working class is prepared to organise, resist, and fight back.

The inaugural meeting of the Network of Anarchist Internationalists (NAI), held on 9 November 2025, is to be welcomed. It arrives at a moment when the world is being marched towards deeper militarisation, permanent war, and the normalisation of mass death as a background condition of capitalism. The importance of this meeting is not that it produced something entirely new, but that it restated, with rare clarity, something anarchists have always known and too often failed to insist upon loudly enough: war is not a mistake, a deviation, or the result of bad leaders. War is a structural feature of capitalism in crisis, and internationalism is not a moral posture but a material necessity.

Across the globe, ruling classes are preparing their populations for sacrifice. The language differs, democracy, security, sovereignty, civilisation, but the demand is the same everywhere – accept falling living standards, accept repression, accept death, so that capital may survive its own contradictions. In this context, the NAI’s insistence on revolutionary defeatism and class internationalism cuts against the grain not only of mainstream politics, but of much of what passes for the contemporary left. It refuses the comforting lie that peace can be secured by choosing the right side in imperialist conflicts. It rejects the fantasy that workers share a meaningful interest with “their” state. And it insists, instead, that the only war worth fighting is the class war, waged from below against all states and all forms of capital.

This position matters precisely because the dominant political atmosphere is one of enforced alignment. Populations are told that neutrality is complicity, that refusal to choose between competing imperialisms is wrong, and that solidarity must be filtered through the interests of nation-states. The NAI’s intervention exposes this logic for what it is – the ideological conscription of the working class. When anarchists refuse to take sides in capitalist wars, we are not refusing solidarity, we are refusing to let solidarity be defined by generals, politicians, and arms manufacturers.

The network’s emphasis on supporting deserters, draft resisters, and war refusers on all sides is especially significant. These figures are rarely celebrated, even by much of the left, because they embody a politics that cannot be easily instrumentalised. The deserter does not die heroically for a flag. The refuser does not advance a national narrative. Instead, they act on the simple recognition that the enemy is not the worker in another uniform, but the system that put both of them there. To defend and organise around such acts is to affirm that internationalism begins not in abstract declarations, but in concrete refusals to kill and be killed for capital.

For anarcho-communists in Aotearoa, this analysis resonates deeply with our own position at the margins of the imperial core. The New Zealand state presents itself as benign, humanitarian, and peace-loving, even as it integrates itself more tightly into Western military alliances, expands surveillance powers, and prepares the ideological ground for future conflicts in the Pacific. The language of partnership and security masks the same underlying reality found elsewhere, that the state exists to manage capitalism, and capitalism requires violence to reproduce itself. There is no “clean” participation in this system, only varying degrees of distance from its most visible atrocities.

The value of the NAI is that it reasserts internationalism not as a sentimental attachment to distant struggles, but as a way of understanding our own conditions. War does not only happen “over there”. It happens in the ports, in the supply chains, in the factories producing weapons and components, in the austerity budgets justified by military spending, and in the police powers normalised in the name of security. The battlefield is not only the front line, it is the everyday life of the working class under capitalism. Recognising this dissolves the false separation between anti-war politics and local class struggle. They are the same fight, viewed from different angles.

Historically, anarchist internationalism emerged from precisely this understanding. From the First International through to the Saint-Imier split and beyond, anarchists rejected the idea that emancipation could be achieved through national projects or state power. The catastrophe of the First World War only confirmed this analysis, as socialist parties across Europe abandoned international solidarity in favour of patriotic mobilisation. The lesson was brutal but clear – without an uncompromising opposition to nationalism and the state, the working class will always be mobilised against itself.

What the NAI represents is a conscious attempt to recover that lesson in the present moment. This is not nostalgia, but necessity. Capitalism today is globalised to an extent unimaginable to earlier generations, and its crises are correspondingly international. Supply chains stretch across continents, financial shocks ripple instantly, and wars are fought not only with soldiers but with sanctions, debt, and energy markets. Any meaningful resistance must operate on the same scale, or it will be contained, co-opted, or crushed.

At the same time, the network avoids the trap of imagining internationalism as a centralised structure issuing directives from above. It speaks instead of coordination, communication, and mutual recognition between autonomous groups rooted in their own contexts. This is crucial. Anarchist internationalism cannot be a pale imitation of statist internationals, nor can it ignore the unevenness of global struggle. Solidarity must flow in multiple directions, shaped by listening as much as by speaking, and grounded in the understanding that no single movement or region holds the key to liberation.

From an anarcho-communist perspective, the NAI’s framework aligns with a broader commitment to abolishing not only war, but the social relations that make war inevitable. Capitalism fragments humanity into competing units, firms, nations, identities, each forced to struggle against the others for survival. War is simply this logic made explicit. To oppose war without opposing capitalism is therefore to treat the symptom while leaving the disease intact.

Of course, revolutionary internationalism faces real challenges. Nationalism remains powerful, especially in moments of crisis, and the pressure to “take sides” can fracture movements. There are also genuine questions about how anarchists relate to anti-colonial and national liberation struggles without reproducing statist logic or dismissing the lived realities of oppression. These tensions cannot be resolved through slogans alone. They require ongoing debate, humility, and a willingness to sit with contradiction without abandoning core principles.

What the NAI offers is not a finished programme, but a political compass. It points away from alignment with power and towards solidarity from below. It reminds us that the working class has no homeland, that borders are tools of domination, and that peace under capitalism is always temporary and conditional. Most importantly, it affirms that internationalism is not something to be postponed until “after the revolution”. It is the means by which revolution becomes possible at all.

For anarcho-communists in Aotearoa, the task is to take this perspective seriously, not as observers of a global process, but as participants in it. That means interrogating how our labour, our resources, and our silence may be implicated in global systems of violence. It means building links with comrades elsewhere that go beyond statements and into shared practice. And it means refusing the comforting illusion that we can insulate ourselves from the consequences of a world order built on exploitation and war.

The inaugural meeting of the Network of Anarchist Internationalists should be understood as an invitation to sharpen our analysis, deepen our commitments, and re-anchor anarchist politics in the uncompromising struggle against capitalism, the state, and all their wars.

Extreme inequality is no longer a trend that economists cautiously warn about or a distant moral concern for charity campaigns. It is now the defining feature of global capitalism. The latest World Inequality Report, discussed by Michael Roberts in “Extreme Inequality – and what to do about it”, confirms what working people have long known from lived experience: wealth is being hoarded at the top at a scale unprecedented in human history, while the majority are expected to accept stagnation, precarity and ecological collapse as the normal price of “economic growth”.

Today, the richest ten percent of the world’s population take more income than the remaining ninety percent combined. A tiny elite of roughly sixty thousand people controls more wealth than half of humanity. These numbers are so grotesque that they almost lose meaning through repetition, yet they describe a reality that structures everyday life from housing unaffordability and crumbling health systems to climate breakdown and permanent insecurity for workers. Inequality is not an abstract statistic; it is the background condition shaping how we live, work and survive.

What is striking about the current moment is not just how extreme inequality has become, but how openly it is now defended. We are told that billionaires are “job creators”, that obscene wealth is the reward for “innovation”, and that any attempt to limit accumulation will harm everyone else. This ideological cover has become thinner over time, precisely because the material outcomes are impossible to hide. Productivity rises, profits soar, and yet wages flatline. Wealth multiplies at the top, while public services are stripped back and people are blamed for failing to thrive in an economy rigged against them.

The World Inequality Report makes clear that this concentration of wealth is not accidental. Since the 1980s, the deliberate dismantling of labour protections, the privatisation of public assets, and the globalisation of capital have allowed wealth to flow upwards with remarkable efficiency. Tax systems have been re-engineered to favour capital over labour. Financial markets have been deregulated, enabling speculative profits divorced from any social use. States have become managers of inequality rather than restraints on it, ensuring that the conditions for accumulation remain intact even during crises.

This global picture has local resonance in Aotearoa New Zealand. While politicians still trade on myths of fairness and opportunity, wealth inequality here has steadily deepened since the neoliberal restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s. Housing has become a primary vehicle for accumulation, locking entire generations out of secure shelter while landlords extract rent as a form of unearned income. Māori and Pasifika communities continue to experience disproportionately worse outcomes across health, housing and income, a direct legacy of colonial dispossession compounded by capitalist exploitation. None of this is a policy failure, rather it is the logical outcome of a system designed to concentrate ownership.

One of the most politically useful insights from the inequality data is the way it exposes the connection between wealth concentration and climate destruction. The richest layers of society are not only the primary beneficiaries of capitalist growth, they are also its most destructive agents. The top ten percent are responsible for the vast majority of emissions linked to private consumption and investment, while the poorest half of the world contributes almost nothing to the climate crisis. Yet it is the poor who face the harshest consequences, from rising food prices to displacement and environmental collapse.

This alone should demolish the moral blackmail that frames climate action as a sacrifice demanded of ordinary people. The problem is not that “we all consume too much”, it is that capital demands endless expansion, and the wealthy profit from it. Any serious response to climate change must therefore confront inequality at its root. Green capitalism, carbon trading schemes, and market incentives merely repackage the same logic of accumulation under a different aesthetic. They do nothing to challenge who owns, controls and benefits from production.

Michael Roberts is clear that mainstream responses to inequality, while often well-intentioned, fail to address these structural realities. Proposals for wealth taxes, improved public services, and international cooperation on tax avoidance are important, but they remain defensive measures within a system that constantly regenerates inequality. Even where such reforms are implemented, they are fragile and reversible. Capital is mobile, organised and politically powerful; gains made through reform can be undone the moment they threaten profitability.

From an anarcho-communist perspective, this limitation is fundamental. Redistribution after the fact does not change the underlying relations of power. As long as a small minority owns the means of production – land, housing, infrastructure, factories, finance – inequality will reassert itself. The state, no matter how progressive its rhetoric, exists to manage these relations, not abolish them. This is why decades of social democratic compromise have failed to halt the upward transfer of wealth.

The deeper question, then, is not how to make capitalism fairer, but why we continue to accept a system that requires inequality to function. Capital accumulation depends on exploitation. Profit is extracted from labour by paying workers less than the value they create. This surplus is then reinvested to generate more profit, concentrating wealth and power in fewer hands over time. No amount of moral appeal or technocratic adjustment can change this basic mechanism.

Anarcho-communism begins from a different premise: that the resources and productive capacity of society should be held in common and democratically controlled by those who use them. This is not an abstract utopia but a practical alternative rooted in cooperation, mutual aid and collective self-management. Rather than redistributing wealth after it has been hoarded, anarcho-communism aims to prevent hoarding altogether by abolishing private ownership of productive assets.

Under such a system, production would be organised around human need rather than profit. Housing would exist to shelter people, not to generate rent. Food would be grown to feed communities, not to maximise export returns. Energy systems would be designed for sustainability and collective benefit, not shareholder dividends. The obscene accumulation of wealth that defines our current reality would simply be impossible.

Critics often respond that this vision is unrealistic, yet what could be more unrealistic than a system that concentrates vast wealth in the hands of a few while pushing the planet toward ecological collapse? Capitalism presents itself as inevitable only because alternatives have been systematically marginalised or violently suppressed. History is full of examples of cooperative production, commons-based resource management and non-hierarchical organisation. These practices persist today, often invisibly, wherever people organise to meet their needs outside the market.

The challenge, of course, is scale and power. Capitalism is not merely an economic system but a social order enforced by law, police and military force. Dismantling it requires organised collective resistance. This is where the struggle against inequality becomes inseparable from class struggle. Workers withholding labour, tenants organising against landlords, communities defending land and water from extraction – these are not isolated issues but interconnected fronts in the same conflict.

In Aotearoa, this also means confronting the ongoing reality of colonial capitalism. The theft of Māori land was not a historical aberration but a foundational act of accumulation. Any genuine movement against inequality must therefore be anti-colonial, supporting tino rangatiratanga and recognising that capitalism and settler colonialism are deeply intertwined. Re-indigenisation is not an optional add-on to class struggle; it is central to dismantling the structures that produce inequality here.

What, then, is to be done? Not in the sense of policy recommendations, but in terms of building power. The answer is not to wait for better leaders or kinder governments, but to organise where we are. Strengthening unions, supporting strikes, building tenant and community organisations, creating networks of mutual aid. These are not symbolic gestures but concrete steps toward a different social order. They challenge capital directly by asserting collective control over labour and resources.

Internationally, solidarity matters more than ever. Capital moves freely across borders, exploiting differences in wages, regulation and political stability. Resistance must be equally internationalist, rejecting nationalist narratives that pit workers against each other. Global inequality is not caused by migrants or foreign workers, but by a system that extracts wealth from the Global South and concentrates it in imperial centres. An anarcho-communist politics insists on solidarity across borders, recognising shared interests against a common enemy.

The data on extreme inequality should not lead us to despair, but to clarity. The problem is not that we lack wealth or productive capacity; it is that wealth is controlled by a class whose interests are fundamentally opposed to human flourishing. Ending extreme inequality is not a matter of better distribution within capitalism, but of abolishing the system that creates it.

The choice before us is stark. Either we accept a future of deepening inequality, ecological collapse and permanent insecurity, or we organise to build something different. Capitalism will not collapse on its own, nor will it reform itself into justice. It must be confronted, resisted and replaced.

There is no technocratic fix for a system built on exploitation. There is only struggle, solidarity and the collective creation of a world where no one hoards while others go without. Extreme inequality is not an unfortunate outcome, it is capitalism working exactly as intended. Our task is to make it unworkable.