Month: April 2026

It’s a strange thing to be told, over and over again, that you’re the unreasonable one for refusing to participate in something that, historically and globally, anarchists have treated with deep suspicion at best and outright hostility at worst. In Aotearoa New Zealand, saying anarchists should abstain from elections is still treated as fringe, sectarian, even irresponsible. You’ll be told you’re letting the Right win, that you’re abandoning vulnerable people, that you’re indulging in ideological purity while others suffer. Yet if you zoom out, even slightly, this position is neither new nor particularly extreme. It is, in fact, one of the oldest and most consistent threads in anarchist thought.

So why does it feel so controversial here? Part of it is that New Zealand has cultivated a very particular political culture, one that leans heavily on the myth of fairness, moderation, and incremental progress. Electoral politics here is framed less as a site of domination and more as a kind of collective moral project. Voting is not just a tactic, it is a ritual of belonging. To abstain is not simply to opt out of a strategy, but to step outside what is imagined as the shared ethical life of the nation.

Anarchism, at its core, has never been about belonging to the nation. It has always been about refusing the structures that demand obedience in the first place. Historically, anarchists have been remarkably consistent on this point. From the late nineteenth century through to the present, anarchist movements across Europe, the Americas, and beyond have argued that participation in parliamentary systems does not challenge power but legitimises it. The state, from this perspective, is not a neutral tool that can be wielded for good or ill depending on who holds office. It is a structure built to organise domination, class domination above all, and elections function as a way of renewing consent to that structure.

This isn’t an abstract argument. It emerges from lived experience. Again and again, movements that have placed their hopes in electoral change have found those hopes blunted, redirected, or outright betrayed. Radical parties moderate once they enter parliament. Transformative demands get watered down into policy tweaks. The machinery of the state absorbs opposition and spits it back out as something far less threatening.

Anarchists noticed this early. That’s why abstentionism, refusing to participate in elections, became a defining feature of many anarchist traditions. It isn’t about apathy. It is about clarity. If you believe that the state is fundamentally structured to maintain hierarchy and exploitation, then participating in its rituals starts to look less like pragmatism and more like complicity.

Globally, this position has never really gone away. It has shifted, adapted, been debated internally, but it remains widely understood. In some contexts, anarchists engage tactically with elections, supporting specific reforms, for instance, but often while maintaining a critical distance. In others, abstention remains the default. Which brings us back to Aotearoa. Here, abstention feels different. Not because the arguments against electoralism are weaker, but because the social and political context reshapes how those arguments are heard. New Zealand’s relative stability, its small size, and its carefully managed image as a progressive democracy all contribute to a sense that the system more or less works. Not perfectly, of course, but well enough that participation feels meaningful.

This is where the controversy really sits. When anarchists in New Zealand call for abstention, they are not just critiquing the state in the abstract. They are challenging a widely held belief that the system is capable of delivering justice if only the right people are elected, and that belief runs deep. You can see it in the way political debate is framed. Elections are treated as moments of possibility, of hope, of collective agency. Campaigns are saturated with language about change, about making a difference, about shaping the future. Even when people are disillusioned, the solution offered is usually more engagement, vote harder, get the right party in.

Against this backdrop, abstention looks like withdrawal. It can be read as giving up, as refusing to fight on the terrain where outcomes are decided. And in a context where harm is real and immediate, where people are struggling with housing, healthcare, and poverty, it’s not surprising that this interpretation carries weight. However it rests on a particular assumption, the assumption that elections are the primary or most effective site of change.

Anarchists challenge that assumption. Not by denying that elections can have effects, of course they can, but by questioning their limits. What kinds of change are possible within the framework of the state? What kinds are foreclosed? And what does it mean to focus our energy on a terrain that is structurally tilted towards preserving existing relations of power?

From an anarchist perspective, the problem isn’t just that elections often fail to deliver meaningful change. It’s that they actively shape how we think about change. They channel political imagination into a narrow set of options – vote for this party or that one, support this policy or that one – while sidelining more fundamental questions about power, ownership, and control.

In this sense, participation in elections doesn’t just reflect the system; it reproduces it. This is where the global history becomes important again. Anarchists have long argued that real transformation comes not from capturing the state but from building power outside it. Through unions, through mutual aid networks, through community organising, through direct action. These are not just tactics, but they are forms of social organisation that prefigure the kind of world anarchists want to create, one based on cooperation, autonomy, and collective decision-making rather than hierarchy and coercion. Abstention, in this context, is not an end in itself. It is part of a broader orientation towards building alternative forms of power.

So why does this still feel so marginal in New Zealand? Partly because the infrastructure of extra-parliamentary struggle is relatively weak here. There are exceptions, of course, but compared to other parts of the world, there is less of a tradition of mass movements operating independently of electoral politics. Trade unions are weaker. Community organisations are often tied, directly or indirectly, to state funding. Even protest movements frequently orient themselves towards influencing policy rather than building autonomous power. In this context, elections loom larger. They become the default site of politics because other sites feel less viable.

There’s also the question of scale. In a small country, where political actors are relatively accessible and the distance between voters and representatives feels shorter, it’s easier to maintain the illusion of influence. You might not be able to change the system, but you can imagine nudging it in a better direction. You can meet your MP, submit on legislation, see small wins. These experiences matter. They make participation feel tangible. However, they can also obscure the bigger picture. The structural constraints on what any government can do within a global capitalist economy, within existing property relations, within the logic of state power, remain in place regardless of who is elected. This is where the anarchist critique cuts through the optimism. It asks not just what governments say they will do, but what they are actually able to do without fundamentally challenging the system they operate within.

It’s much easier to believe that change can be delivered through elections than to confront the possibility that it requires building entirely different forms of social organisation. The former fits within existing rhythms of life, vote every few years, follow the news, maybe attend a rally. The latter demands a deeper shift. It asks people to invest time, energy, and imagination into something that is not guaranteed to succeed and may not deliver immediate results. Layered over all of this, and often under-acknowledged, is the liberal co-option of anarchism itself. In New Zealand, as elsewhere, “anarchism” has been softened, aestheticised, and folded back into the very political culture it was meant to disrupt. You see it in the casual way the term is used to mean little more than decentralisation, lifestyle individualism, or a vague distrust of authority, positions that can sit quite comfortably alongside continued participation in electoral politics.

In this diluted form, anarchism becomes less a critique of the state and more a flavour of liberalism. It is reduced to personal expression, ethical consumption, or community-mindedness, all of which can be easily accommodated within the existing system. The harder edge, the rejection of state power, the insistence on dismantling hierarchy, the commitment to building entirely different social relations, gets blunted or ignored. This co-option has consequences. It reshapes expectations about what anarchists should do. If anarchism is understood primarily as a set of values, fairness, equality, anti-authoritarianism, rather than a structural critique, then participating in elections can seem not only compatible with anarchism but required by it. Voting becomes framed as the responsible thing to do, the way to minimise harm, the practical expression of one’s ethics.

Refusing to vote, in that context, looks like a betrayal, not just of society, but of anarchism itself. This is a reversal of the historical position. It takes a tradition that has consistently questioned the legitimacy of the state and recasts it as a moral supplement to that state. It turns anarchism from a challenge into a conscience, from a threat into a corrective. Once that shift happens, abstention becomes much harder to defend. It is no longer seen as a principled refusal grounded in a critique of power, but as an abdication of responsibility within a system that is assumed to be fundamentally legitimate. This helps explain why the argument that abstention helps the Right carries so much weight here. If you accept the premise that elections are the primary means of achieving social good, and if anarchism has been reframed as a set of progressive values within that system, then not voting can only appear as harmful. However, this argument rests on a very short time horizon. It focuses on the immediate outcome of a particular election while bracketing off the longer-term dynamics of the system itself. It assumes that the best we can do is choose the lesser evil, again and again, without asking what that cycle does to our capacity to imagine and build something better.

From an anarchist perspective, this is precisely the trap. Lesser-evilism doesn’t just accept the limits of the system, it entrenches them. It trains us to lower our expectations, to settle for marginal improvements, to see politics as a series of constrained choices rather than an open field of possibility. Over time, this can become self-fulfilling. If all our energy goes into electoral cycles, there is less left for building alternative forms of power. And without those alternatives, elections really do become the only game in town. Abstention is a refusal of that cycle. Not because anarchists are indifferent to harm, far from it, but because they are trying to shift the terrain on which harm is addressed. Instead of asking how to manage exploitation more humanely, the question becomes how to dismantle the structures that produce it in the first place. This is where the position starts to make more sense, even if it remains controversial to some. It’s not about purity. It’s about strategy. It’s about where to invest energy, what kinds of power to build, and how to move beyond a system that, by design, limits what is possible.

So when anarchists here argue for abstention, they are pushing against a deeply entrenched common sense. They are saying that the thing most people take for granted, the idea that voting is the primary way to effect change, is not just insufficient but part of the problem. Even to some who identify as anarchists that is controversial, but controversy isn’t the same as being wrong. Sometimes it’s a sign that a position is touching something real, something that unsettles established ways of thinking. The challenge is to move beyond the surface-level arguments, the accusations of irresponsibility, the defensive appeals to pragmatism, and engage with the underlying questions.

What is the state for? What are elections actually capable of delivering? And what would it mean to build power in ways that don’t rely on either? Those are not easy questions. They don’t come with ready-made answers. But they are the questions anarchists have been asking, consistently, for well over a century. That tension between anarchism as a disruptive force and anarchism as a co-opted aesthetic is where the controversy lives.

Anzac Day always seems an appropriate occasion to restate the anarchist opposition to war, and reiterate that it is never in the interests of the working class to support war.

The anarchist case against war arises from our analysis of, and opposition to, capitalism. Capitalism is the cause of modern war. The insatiable hunger for profit generates a relentless search by the various capitalist powers for markets and sources of raw materials. Modern war is in reality an extension of “business under capitalism” carried to an extreme of violence, where the economic rivalries between the various national sections of the capitalist class can no longer be peacefully resolved or controlled.

Despite the story that the First World War started because of the assassination of the Austrian emperor’s nephew Archduke Ferdinand by Serbian nationalists, the reality was that it was the outcome of years of conflicting capitalist interests. British and French capitalism in New Zealand was being challenged by the rising expansion of Germany, both in Europe and abroad. When Germany showed in 1911, by sending a gunboat to the city of Agadir, that they intended to get a foothold in Morocco, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, Lloyd George, at once reacted with a speech threatening war.

In this tense international environment the crisis that would produce war on a Global scale was probably inevitable. The “Austria-Serbia dispute” was merely the spark that ignited the conflagration.

Anyone who preaches peace and disarmament without calling for an overthrow of capitalism have yet to demonstrate how these objectives can be realised, or how trade and export of capital can expand without violence being the outcome.

The abolition of war, and the threat of war, will only be realised with the overthrow of capitalism and the restructuring of society on the basis of common ownership and production solely to meet human needs. Such a society would unite the human race without economic classes, or national barriers dividing us.

Whenever war is fought, for whatever false reasons that are presented to us, and whichever side is declared the victor, one side is always the loser, and that is us, the workers of the world.

As workers we need to realise that our enemy is not the worker in other lands; rather it is the capitalist class at home, and this is a far more important division than that separating nation from nation.

The fight for anarchism is inseparable from the fight against war. The only way to fight militarism is to fight capitalism and the state.

The fight for anarchism is the fight for peace.

For Anzac Day: The Fight For Anarchism is The Fight For Peace

There is something quietly collapsing in Aotearoa, and it isn’t just household budgets or the promise of home ownership. It’s a belief, once almost hegemonic, that if you work hard, keep your head down, and play by the rules, you will be better off. The recent reporting by Radio New Zealand captures this erosion and highlights the fact that more and more people simply don’t believe the deal holds anymore. The old social contract, work equals reward, has started to look less like a contract and more like a myth we’re expected to keep repeating out of habit.

What’s striking is not just the economic reality, but the ideological shift. This is a country that historically prided itself on egalitarianism, on the idea that effort translated into opportunity, that class was something that happened elsewhere. That self-image was always fragile, but it held enough weight to organise how people understood their lives. Yet over the last few decades, particularly since the neoliberal restructuring of the 1980s, that foundation has been steadily hollowed out. Inequality has widened, wages have stagnated relative to costs, and the promise that hard work pays has become harder to sustain without a certain level of self-deception.

The RNZ piece points to a growing scepticism, people are working hard, often harder than previous generations, but not seeing the expected returns. This isn’t simply a matter of perception. It reflects a structural shift in how wealth is generated and distributed. When housing costs devour incomes, when secure employment gives way to precarious work, when productivity gains are captured by capital rather than labour, the link between effort and reward breaks down. The system continues to demand discipline, punctuality, and ahrd work, the full moral vocabulary of work, but increasingly fails to deliver the material outcomes that once justified those demands.

There’s a cruel irony here. The harder people work under these conditions, the more they sustain the very system that undermines them. This is the core contradiction of capitalism.  Labour produces value, but does not control it. The worker is told that their effort is the source of their future prosperity, yet the surplus they create is extracted and accumulated elsewhere. So when people begin to doubt that hard work leads to a better life, they’re not becoming cynical or lazy, rather they are recognising a truth that has always been present but often obscured.

The political response, predictably, has been to double down on the myth rather than interrogate it. We see this in the rhetoric around “work ethic,” in the moralising discourse that frames unemployment or underemployment as a failure of individual character rather than a feature of the economic system. The idea that young people need to be taught to “show up,” to develop discipline, to earn their place persists even as the material conditions that once made such narratives plausible continue to erode.

This is where ideology does its most effective work. If people can be convinced that their struggles are the result of personal shortcomings, they are less likely to question the structures that produce those struggles. The focus shifts from exploitation to self-improvement, from collective conditions to individual responsibility. It becomes a psychological problem rather than a political one. You’re not being underpaid – you’re not working hard enough. You’re not trapped in a housing market designed to extract rent – you just need to budget better. The system disappears, replaced by a mirror.

But the cracks are widening. When people say they no longer believe hard work makes them better off, they are articulating a kind of everyday critique of political economy. It may not come wrapped in theory, but it carries the same insight  that the relationship between labour and reward is mediated by power, not morality. This matters, because ideology relies on consent as much as coercion. If enough people stop believing in the fairness of the system, the system has to work harder to justify itself, or resort more openly to force.

New Zealand’s historical narrative complicates this further. The idea of a “classless society” was always more aspiration than reality, but it functioned as a kind of national myth. It allowed people to see themselves as fundamentally equal, even as disparities existed. That myth has been increasingly difficult to maintain. The data shows widening inequality, persistent poverty, and entrenched disparities along both class and racial lines. What we are witnessing now is not just economic hardship, but the collapse of a narrative that once made that hardship intelligible.

And when narratives collapse, people look for alternatives. Sometimes those alternatives are reactionary – scapegoating migrants, blaming beneficiaries, clinging to nostalgic visions of a past that never quite existed. But there is also the possibility of something more radical,  a recognition that the problem is not individual failure but systemic design. That the issue is not that people aren’t working hard enough, but that the fruits of that work are being appropriated.

From an anarcho-communist perspective, this moment is both predictable and potentially transformative. The breakdown of belief in the work-reward equation exposes the fundamental irrationality of capitalism. Why should survival be contingent on selling your labour? Why should access to housing, healthcare, or food depend on your position in the labour market? Why is productivity celebrated when it increases profits, but ignored when it fails to improve living standards?

These questions have always been there, but they become harder to ignore when lived experience contradicts ideological promises. When someone works full-time and still cannot afford rent, the system’s legitimacy starts to fray. When someone follows every rule and still falls behind, the narrative of meritocracy begins to look like a cruel joke.

There is a tendency, particularly in mainstream discourse, to treat this disillusionment as a problem to be fixed. How do we restore faith in hard work? How do we make people believe again? But perhaps that’s the wrong question. Perhaps the erosion of belief is not a problem, but a starting point. If people no longer accept that hard work guarantees a better life, they might begin to ask what kind of system would.

Of course, the system has its own answers. Policy tweaks, targeted supports, incentives designed to “make work pay.” These measures can alleviate some pressures, but they rarely address the underlying dynamics. As long as the basic structure remains where labour is commodified, where wealth accumulates at the top, where access to necessities is mediated by the market, the gap between effort and reward will persist.

This is not to say that nothing matters. Reforms can make real differences in people’s lives. But they operate within constraints set by a system that prioritises accumulation over wellbeing. And those constraints become more visible as contradictions sharpen.

There is also a deeper question about what “better off” actually means. The traditional framing is economic – higher income, more consumption, upward mobility. But this framing is itself a product of the system. It reduces wellbeing to purchasing power, life to a series of transactions. When people say they are not better off despite working hard, they are often speaking not just about money, but about time, stress, relationships, a sense of control over their lives.

In this sense, the crisis is not only economic but existential. It is about the alienation that comes from a life organised around work that does not fulfil, that does not provide security, that does not lead to a meaningful sense of progress. It is about the dissonance between what people are told, that work is the path to a good life, and what they experience, that work can be exhausting, precarious, and insufficient.

This is where the anarchist critique cuts through with a certain clarity. The problem is not that work doesn’t pay enough, it’s that work, as organised under capitalism, is fundamentally alienated. People do not control the conditions of their labour, the products of their labour, or the purposes to which that labour is put. They are inserted into systems that extract value from them while offering limited agency in return.

If we take seriously the idea that people should have control over their own lives, then the question is not how to restore faith in hard work, but how to reorganise society so that work is no longer a condition of survival. This does not mean abolishing activity, effort, or contribution. It means disentangling those things from coercion and scarcity. It means recognising that people are capable of organising production and distribution collectively, without the need for markets or wage labour to mediate every aspect of life.

That might sound utopian, but so did the idea that hard work would guarantee a better life. The difference is that one is a promise increasingly contradicted by reality, while the other is a possibility foreclosed by the current system. The erosion of belief in the former opens space to imagine the latter.

The RNZ article doesn’t go this far, of course. It stays within the bounds of mainstream analysis, noting the shift in attitudes, the pressures people face, the sense that the rules have changed. But even within those limits, it captures something important – a growing recognition that the game is rigged. That effort alone is not enough. That the promise of reward is contingent, uneven, and often illusory.

What happens next depends on how that recognition is interpreted and acted upon. It can lead to resignation, to a quiet acceptance that this is just how things are. Or it can lead to anger, to collective questioning, to a refusal to accept the terms that have been set.

There is a long history of workers refusing those terms. Strikes, unions, mutual aid, cooperative forms of organisation, these are not relics of the past but tools that remain available. They represent attempts to reclaim some measure of control over labour and its outcomes, to challenge the structures that separate effort from reward.

In Aotearoa, that history intersects with the ongoing reality of colonisation. The dispossession of Māori land and resources was not just a historical event but a foundational moment in the development of the capitalist economy here. The inequalities we see today are not evenly distributed, they follow lines of race as well as class. Any serious challenge to the current system has to reckon with that, to recognise that exploitation and colonisation are intertwined.

So when we talk about the erosion of belief in hard work, we are not just talking about an economic trend. We are talking about a shift in consciousness, a potential opening. The old story is losing its grip. The question is what replaces it.

Will it be another version of the same myth, repackaged and rebranded? Or will it be something that confronts the reality that people are already beginning to see: that the system does not reward hard work because its purpose is not to reward work, but to extract value from it?

There is no guarantee that disillusionment leads to liberation. But without disillusionment, liberation is almost impossible to imagine. In that sense, the quiet scepticism captured in that RNZ article is more significant than it might first appear. It is a crack in the ideological surface, a moment where lived experience pushes back against received wisdom.

And once people start to question one part of the story, it becomes easier to question the rest.