Author: AWSM

On 31 July 2025, the FBI officially opened its first standalone office in Aotearoa New Zealand, based in Wellington’s U.S. Embassy. For most of the mainstream media, this development was reported with a mixture of bureaucratic neutrality and mild curiosity. For politicians, it was framed as a logical step in enhancing cooperation on “transnational crime.” But for those of us grounded in anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist traditions of resistance, the meaning is far clearer – this is a dangerous expansion of American imperial policing into the Pacific, an alarming deepening of New Zealand’s entanglement with the global surveillance state, and a stark reminder that in the eyes of empire, no land is truly sovereign.

This move is not about safety or justice but about extending the reach of capital and control through surveillance and soft occupation. The narratives of “cybercrime” and “child exploitation” are being used to justify foreign policing on Indigenous land, while drawing historical and contemporary connections to colonialism, Five Eyes hegemony, and capitalist control.

Policing Beyond Borders

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is, by legal definition, a domestic agency. It exists to enforce U.S. federal law on U.S. soil. Yet the FBI now operates over 60 Legal Attaché offices around the world, and the new Wellington branch has been upgraded to become one of them, tasked with responsibility not only for Aotearoa but also for Niue, Samoa, the Cook Islands, Tonga, and even Antarctica. This is a global policing project masquerading as international cooperation.

The FBI has been present in New Zealand since 2017, managed through its Canberra office. What has changed is that now, the FBI is no longer a guest, it is a tenant with its own office, its own staff, and its own extraterritorial power. FBI Director Kash Patel’s visit to New Zealand was not just administrative, it was ideological. At a press conference, he made clear that the new office was about “countering the influence of the Chinese Communist Party in the Indo-Pacific.” While New Zealand ministers such as Winston Peters and Judith Collins quickly distanced themselves from this overt geopolitical framing, the cat was already out of the bag. The FBI is not just here to stop online paedophiles or drug traffickers. It is here to enforce the strategic goals of the American empire.

The backlash was immediate. Beijing condemned the comments as provocative and destabilising. Thousands of Kiwis expressed their anger online. Some posted furious responses on social media. This is not a fringe reaction. It is the instinct of people who know, whether consciously or intuitively, that what is being done in their name is not for their protection but for their submission.

Five Eyes, Many Lies

To understand the danger of this moment, one must understand the Five Eyes. Formed as a post-war intelligence alliance between the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the Five Eyes has become a sprawling surveillance machine. It is a central pillar of what Edward Snowden exposed as the modern panopticon, a world where the internet is weaponised to track, manipulate, and suppress populations in the name of “national security.”

In this context, the FBI’s expansion is not a bureaucratic upgrade, it is an insertion of another gear in the machine. It deepens the convergence of policing, intelligence, and military strategy across the Anglosphere. It makes Aotearoa even more complicit in the surveillance of its own people and of Pacific nations long exploited by Western colonial powers.

It also deepens our vulnerability. New Zealand has tried to maintain a strategic balance in its foreign relations – reliant on China as its biggest trading partner, aligned with the U.S. and UK through Five Eyes. This tightrope walk has always been fraught, but the FBI’s presence risks turning it into a fall. Patel’s anti-China statements not only escalated diplomatic tension, they forced New Zealand to pick a side in the increasingly dangerous theatre of U.S.- China competition.

And that choice is being made without democratic consent. The FBI was not invited by the people of Aotearoa. It was welcomed in by a political class eager to please its imperial friends while hiding behind the language of public safety.

The Carceral Smokescreen

The official justification for the FBI’s expansion rests on the pillars of “transnational crime” – cyber intrusions, child exploitation, organised crime, and drug trafficking. These are serious issues. But serious problems do not justify authoritarian solutions. What we are witnessing is the use of moral panic to expand surveillance infrastructure and carceral logic.

The FBI has a long and brutal history, not just of policing crime, but of repressing dissent. From the COINTELPRO operations that targeted civil rights leaders, Black radicals, and Indigenous activists, to the post-9/11 entrenchment of racial profiling and entrapment, the FBI has always served the preservation of white supremacist, capitalist, and imperial power.

Its arrival in Aotearoa is not neutral. It is not humanitarian. It is not apolitical. It is the expansion of a violent institution that answers to a violent empire.

Moreover, the notion that transnational crime is best tackled through foreign intelligence agencies ignores the real roots of harm. Why is organised crime flourishing? Because economic systems create desperation, exclusion, and inequality. Why are children exploited? Because patriarchal capitalism commodifies bodies and thrives on secrecy and silence. Why is cybercrime rampant? Because capitalism digitised the economy without care for consent, justice, or digital sovereignty.

To address these harms, we do not need more spies. We need more justice, real, transformative, community-rooted justice. The FBI is not the answer. It is part of the problem.

Pacific Subjugation, Again

That the FBI’s jurisdiction includes Niue, Tonga, Samoa, and the Cook Islands is not a coincidence, it is a strategy. The Pacific is being recolonised under the guise of security. With China increasing its presence in the region through economic partnerships and infrastructure projects, the U.S. is rushing to reassert dominance, not through aid or diplomacy, but through militarisation and surveillance.

The FBI in Wellington will act as a regional hub, not just for information gathering, but for soft coercion. These nations, many still grappling with the legacies of colonisation and neo-colonial governance, are now being brought into the orbit of American law enforcement without meaningful consent or reciprocal benefit.

This is not security. This is soft occupation. And it must be opposed.

The People Say No

One of the few hopeful elements in this bleak development has been the public response. Aotearoa is not asleep. Many see this for what it is, imperial overreach dressed in bureaucratic clothing. The protests, online and offline, speak to a population that still values sovereignty, autonomy, and transparency.

As anarcho-communists, we believe in people power. We believe that real security comes not from surveillance but from solidarity. We believe that no foreign agency should operate on these lands without the consent of the people who live here, and that even then, true justice is built from the ground up, not imposed from above.

The anger is growing, and it is righteous. But we must go beyond protest. We must organise.

A Call to Resistance

This moment is a call to action. The FBI’s presence is only the most visible layer of a deeper system that treats Aotearoa and the Pacific as pawns in a geopolitical chess game. To resist this system, we must connect the dots.

We must link the FBI to the NZ Police, to the SIS, to the Five Eyes, to the prison-industrial complex, to colonial land theft, to capitalism’s extraction and surveillance economies. We must say not just “No FBI”, but also “No prisons. No cops. No empires. No bosses.”

We must demand an end to foreign policing and a beginning to something else, something rooted in mana motuhake, tino rangatiratanga, and collective liberation.

The opening of an FBI office in Wellington is not an isolated event. It is a sign of a system expanding, a machine tightening its grip. But every expansion carries the seeds of its own opposition.

The future we want will not be built by diplomats or directors. It will be built by us, together, from below, in defiance of the states and empires that seek to divide and dominate us.

Let this be our line in the sand. We were not born to be watched. We were born to be free.

In the current stage of late capitalism, the figure of the tech billionaire has taken on an almost theological dimension. They are portrayed as visionaries, geniuses, men (almost always men) whose innovations will rescue us from ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and the limits of human biology itself. They promise immortality through AI, peace through crypto, and utopia through deregulated digital governance. But behind the thin veneer of progress and innovation lies a disturbing reality: these men are not building a better world, they are preparing to rule over its ruins.

In a recent episode of Decoder, journalist Gil Duran lays bare what he terms “The Nerd Reich” – a loosely connected but ideologically coherent group of tech billionaires and venture capitalists who are quietly waging war on democratic institutions, collective decision-making, and the very idea of egalitarianism. The interview, rich in insight and dripping with alarm, deserves to be read not merely as a critique of individual arrogance but as a glimpse into the structural death drive of capital. A system that, in its desperation to preserve elite control, is birthing a new form of digital feudalism.

For those of us who stand within the anarcho-communist tradition, this emerging constellation of authoritarian tech-libertarianism is neither surprising nor novel. It is the logical conclusion of a society where wealth is treated as wisdom, ownership as virtue, and control over digital infrastructure as a divine right. What Duran calls “The Nerd Reich,” we might more precisely name techno-neofascism, a ruling class project to resurrect hierarchical domination in sleek black turtlenecks and smart contracts.

From Libertarianism to Autocracy – The Dark Enlightenment Arrives

At the intellectual centre of this movement is a web of reactionary thought cloaked in technological jargon. Duran highlights the influence of Curtis Yarvin (also known by his blog pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug”), a former software engineer turned political philosopher of the so-called “Dark Enlightenment”. Yarvin openly advocates for the dismantling of democracy and its replacement with a kind of “CEO monarchy,” in which a single, unaccountable ruler efficiently governs a polity as if it were a startup.

It is difficult to overstate how grotesque this vision is. Yarvin’s contempt for the “unproductive, which often maps onto the disabled, the racialised, the poor, recalls the most violent projects of eugenics and colonial domination. He has casually proposed turning these people into biodiesel or locking them into VR environments to be managed as livestock. This is not satire. It is class war waged as fantasy, and it is no accident that such ideas find resonance among the likes of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman.

These men are not merely building apps and platforms. They are attempting to build states, or more accurately, to replace states with corporate governance models. Whether it is Thiel bankrolling far-right political candidates, Musk using Twitter (now X) to shape political discourse, or Andreessen pouring millions into projects that aim to “exit” from democratic society entirely, the trajectory is clear. This is not an eccentric ideological fringe. It is the direction of capitalist power itself in an era where traditional mechanisms of state legitimacy are in crisis.

The Rise of the Network State – Capital’s Final Utopia

One of the most chilling developments in this landscape is the increasing popularity of the “network state” concept—a kind of digital micronation built on blockchain governance, bypassing traditional regulatory frameworks. Popularised by Balaji Srinivasan, the network state is presented as a liberatory alternative to the inefficiencies of the nation-state. In reality, it is the digital equivalent of a walled estate, where capital rules without interference and where citizenship is reduced to a subscription model.

In Honduras, Prospera – a private charter city backed by U.S. tech investors – has already begun implementing this model. In Greenland, a startup called Praxis aims to build a city for “like-minded people” (read rich libertarians) with its own governance, currency, and laws. Closer to home, Duran recounts how a major Silicon Valley firm attempted to declare a “national security emergency” to bypass local environmental laws and construct a private city on an old military base in California.

This is the logical endpoint of a capitalist system that no longer needs mass participation. Having outsourced production, financialised labour, and automated much of its value extraction, capital now seeks to secede from humanity itself. The network state is not a fantasy of freedom. It is a blueprint for a neo-feudal dystopia, in which the population is divided into those who own code and those who are owned by it.

The Alliance with Fascism: MAGA, Musk, and Emergency Powers

In case this seems abstract, Duran draws attention to the very real and immediate political alliances forming between the tech elite and authoritarian political movements. Musk’s open alignment with MAGA discourse, Thiel’s financing of Trumpist candidates, and the broader silence of Silicon Valley in the face of growing far-right movements signal a dangerous convergence.

Duran warns that should Trump or another autocratic figure seize power again in the United States, many tech leaders would not resist. They would likely collaborate, seeing in the rollback of democratic norms an opportunity to fast-track their vision of corporate governance. In this alliance, executive emergency powers become tools not for managing crisis, but for realising dreams of total control.

This is not merely opportunism. It is a marriage of convenience between two factions of the ruling class – the decaying fossil of traditional nationalism, and the sleek, data-driven autocracy of the digital elite. Together, they form a hybrid authoritarianism that is both technologically advanced and ideologically regressive – a kind of cybernetic fascism in which dissent is algorithmically filtered and obedience is gamified.

The Technocratic Death Cult: Why the Billionaires Hate Democracy

Why do these men hate democracy? The answer, as always, is that democracy limits their power. Even in its degraded liberal form, democratic governance imposes taxes, regulations, environmental protections, and, worst of all, popular demands for redistribution. For men who have grown used to absolute control within their companies, the idea that a waitress in Des Moines should have equal say in shaping the future as a venture capitalist in Menlo Park is offensive.

But more fundamentally, they see history not as a collective process but as a canvas for their will. In this, they echo the fascist contempt for mass politics and the belief in a natural hierarchy of men. Their preferred future is not a stateless society, but a society in which they are the state. Where their platforms mediate all relationships, their currencies govern all transactions, and their ideologies shape all narratives.

This is what Duran rightly identifies as the “Nerd Reich.” It is a ruling class fantasy of digital totalitarianism, cloaked in the language of innovation and disruption, but animated by the same lust for domination that fuelled colonialism, fascism, and genocide. It is a future in which your landlord is a DAO, your cop is an AI drone, and your government is a startup. And it must be abolished before it is built.

Anarcho-Communist Counterpower: Beyond Resistance, Toward Reconstruction

For Duran, the answer lies in awareness, media exposure, and restoring faith in democratic institutions. While these are necessary steps, they are not sufficient. The tech elite cannot be shamed into submission. They cannot be voted out or regulated into decency. Their power flows not from popularity but from private ownership of infrastructure, and that power must be seized, dismantled, and replaced.

Anarcho-communism offers not only a critique but a program of reconstruction. Where the Nerd Reich offers techno-feudalism, we propose technological mutual aid – open-source tools, federated platforms, worker-owned co-ops, autonomous zones of care and resistance. Where they build network states to exclude, we want digital commons to include. Where they see in automation a way to manage populations, we see in it the possibility of reducing alienated labour and freeing people to pursue lives of dignity and joy.

But we must act quickly. Every year that passes sees deeper entrenchment of platform monopolies, more widespread deployment of surveillance tools, and more ideological capture of the public imagination. We must not only fight back, but we must build the world we want in the cracks of the one they are trying to control.

No Tech Lords, No Masters

Gil Duran’s analysis is essential, urgent, and courageous. But we must take it further. The Nerd Reich is not simply a threat to democracy. It is a threat to life itself. In its attempt to render society programmable, it reduces human beings to data points, social relations to transaction costs, and the Earth to an input-output system. It is, in short, capital in its purest, most death-driven form.

Anarcho-communists must not only expose this horror. It must offer an escape from it, a refusal, a new direction. We must abolish the Nerd Reich not because it is a failed vision, but because it is a successful nightmare. Against their future of domination, we offer a future of solidarity. Against their hierarchies, we offer horizontal care. Against their algorithmic fascism, we offer collective freedom.

We don’t want better tech billionaires.

We want no billionaires at all.

The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, long considered the progressive conscience of Parliament, has proposed an Income Guarantee, a universal, unconditional payment that would replace or simplify several parts of the welfare system. Framed as a liberating policy to reduce poverty, support unpaid labour, and prepare for a future where work may be scarcer, it has garnered enthusiastic support among progressives. But this proposal is not the radical solution it pretends to be.

Instead, it reflects a greenwashed attempt to stabilise capitalism by offering just enough relief to avoid revolt. Far from challenging the structural roots of inequality, private property, wage labour, and capitalist accumulation, the Green Party’s UBI functions as a sedative, dulling the sharp edges of exploitation while entrenching the system that causes it. The Green Party’s UBI is a reformist containment strategy, not a pathway to liberation. Its implementation would cushion the worst aspects of capitalist life, but in doing so, it would pacify resistance, entrench private ownership, and ultimately protect the interests of capital.

What the Greens Propose

In 2023, the Green Party unveiled a rebranded version of UBI called the Income Guarantee. This scheme offers:

-A weekly payment of at least NZD $385 to all adults not in paid work, including students and carers.
-Higher rates for single parents and families with children.
-A restructuring of existing welfare benefits, replacing Jobseeker, Sole Parent Support, and Working for Families with a unified baseline payment.
-A new agency (replacing ACC) to guarantee 80% of minimum wage for those unable to work due to illness or disability.
-No work obligations, sanctions, or means-testing for this baseline.

The Greens frame this as a way to value unpaid work, decouple survival from employment, and support dignity in a time of rising precarity. They also claim that it simplifies bureaucracy and builds trust in people to use the payment in ways that work for their lives.

But while these ideas may seem empowering on paper, they carry deep contradictions, particularly when implemented within a capitalist framework.

Reforming the System That Creates Poverty

The first and most glaring issue with the Greens’ Income Guarantee is that it leaves intact the very system that causes poverty and precarity in the first place. People are not poor because there is no universal income; they are poor because the means of production, land, housing, food, energy, are privately owned and controlled by a small class of capitalists.

By funnelling a state stipend into a market dominated by landlords, bosses, and corporate monopolies, the Greens’ UBI model subsidises capital, not challenges it. The landlord still sets the rent. The supermarket still sets the price of bread. The corporation still determines wages and hours. A “universal income” becomes a universal transfer of public money to private pockets.

This is not wealth redistribution, it’s redistribution of dependency. The Greens imagine that by putting cash in your pocket, they are empowering you. But as long as that cash has to pass through the hands of property owners and profiteers, it simply recirculates back into the capitalist machine.

Flat Payments in an Unequal World

The Green Party’s rhetoric of “universality” masks a dangerous flattening of difference. By giving the same baseline income to all regardless of need, the policy shifts away from needs-based welfare to a market-mediated minimalism.

This sounds fair on the surface, but it has regressive implications. A wealthy investor and a single parent receive the same base rate. Meanwhile, tailored supports for disability, illness, or chronic hardship are pared back, replaced with a one-size-fits-all payment that ignores the complexity of human need.

While the Greens claim that specialised supports would still exist, the logic of simplification, driven by administrative efficiency and cost, risks future erosion of more expensive targeted benefits. This is not an idle concern. Across the world, UBI experiments have been used to justify welfare cutbacks, particularly under conservative governments that follow.

In the long run, a flat payment becomes an excuse to individualise poverty, treating everyone the same while leaving structural inequalities untouched.

UBI as Austerity in Disguise

UBI can become a tool of austerity, not generosity. By packaging welfare reform as “universal empowerment,” the state absolves itself of responsibility for meeting complex needs. It shifts risk back onto the individual giving them a cash payment, but removing the broader safety net that once protected people from market volatility.

In practice, this leads to privatised hardship – disabled people navigating inaccessible housing markets on a flat income; sole parents forced to stretch meagre funds across rent, food, transport, and children’s needs; sick workers unable to afford care once the specialised benefits disappear.

UBI may be universal, but its effects are not equal. It entrenches the neoliberal logic that you are responsible for surviving the system, even as the system remains rigged against you.

The Work Fetish in Reverse

A key selling point of the Green UBI is that it allows people to work less and to study, care for whanāu, volunteer, create art, or simply rest. This is undeniably attractive. For many, the dream of decoupling survival from employment is liberatory.

However, UBI doesn’t abolish work, it just reorganises who gets to do less of it. The means of production still belong to someone else. People may reduce hours or leave exploitative jobs but they still must buy back access to life from those who own it. Without seizing control of land, housing, food systems, and workplaces, UBI only offers a slower treadmill, not a way off.

True liberation from work requires not just the absence of compulsion, but the presence of collective power to shape what, how, and why we produce. Under capitalism, UBI is not freedom from work it is still just freedom to consume what others profit from.

Automation and the Myth of Post-Work Capitalism

Another justification for UBI is the coming wave of automation. As jobs are replaced by AI and machines, we are told, we need a universal income to ensure people aren’t left behind.

This argument is both outdated and naïve. Automation is not new it has always accompanied capitalism. And rather than freeing us from labour, it has consistently resulted in:

-Job displacement for the many,
-Wealth concentration for the few,
-And a race to the bottom for those still working.

Without changing the ownership of technology and the surplus it generates, automation becomes a weapon against workers, not a liberation. UBI does not challenge this, it merely proposes a bribe to stay quiet while the rich get richer from robotic productivity.

If we want automation to free us, we must demand common ownership of its fruits, not a state-managed allowance.

Depoliticising the Class Struggle

UBI has a profoundly depoliticising function. By providing everyone a basic income, it suggests that class conflict can be solved through technocratic redistribution, rather than collective struggle. It individualises economic survival and replaces mutual aid with state-administered charity.

The Greens often present this as “trusting people.” But in truth, it is a move away from politics altogether, away from strikes, occupations, assemblies, and direct action. It encourages people to become passive consumers of state policy rather than active agents of transformation.

This is no accident. UBI fits comfortably within the liberal logic of non-confrontational progressivism – small gains, managed well, with no need to question who owns what or why.

But anarcho-communists know that liberation is not granted it is seized. The abolition of wage labour, rent, and bosses does not come from a Treasury paper. It comes from resistance, solidarity, and revolt.

The Green Fetish for Policy Without Revolution

Ultimately, the Green Party’s UBI is a reflection of their broader political project – a capitalism with a conscience. Their aim is to regulate, reform, and humanise the existing system not to overturn it.

This is the great tragedy of Green politics: it mobilises the language of justice to protect the architecture of oppression. They speak of liberation while fearing confrontation. They dream of balance sheets, not barricades.

The Income Guarantee is not a step toward socialism. It is a safety valve for capitalism, designed to prevent breakdown by making survival just bearable enough to forestall uprising.

As long as the Greens seek legitimacy in Parliament, they will remain managers of compromise, not agents of emancipation.

Toward a Real Alternative

Anarcho-communists do not oppose the idea of everyone having their needs met. But we reject the idea that this must come in the form of a wage or income. We do not want better access to markets we want a world without them.

Imagine a society where housing is free because it is collectively owned. Where food is grown and shared in community gardens, not bought. Where care work is respected and supported through mutual aid, not commodified. Where education, transport, and health are decommodified. Where people work not for profit, but for one another.

This is not utopia. It exists in fragments already in marae, solidarity kitchens, workers’ co-ops, and mutual aid networks. These are the embryos of a post-capitalist future.

We don’t need a basic income. We need basic expropriation. We need the end of property, not its pacification.

No Wages, No Compromise

The Green Party’s UBI plan, however well-intentioned, is not a solution to poverty. It is a reformist illusion, an elegant attempt to stabilise a decaying system without addressing the violence at its core. It replaces welfare with technocracy, struggle with dependence, and solidarity with state charity.

We say: No wages. No landlords. No bosses. No income guarantees only freedom from all need for income at all.

We do not ask for a universal basic income.

We demand a universal reclaiming of life itself.

The latest figures from the 2025 UBS Global Wealth Report confirm a fact that many of us live every day but are rarely encouraged to fully name: the world is not merely unequal; it is grotesquely and systemically so. Just 1.6% of the world’s adult population now controls 48.1% of all personal wealth. That amounts to about 60 million individuals holding $226 trillion in net worth, while the bottom half of the global population – nearly four billion people – share less than 1% of all personal wealth. This is not a failure of the system. It is the system.

In capitalist mythology, wealth is presumed to be the natural outcome of hard work, innovation, or risk-taking. But the sheer scale of this concentration defies any such moral logic. We are not talking about millionaires flourishing due to their talent or thrift. We are dealing with a global oligarchy, a structure of domination so entrenched that it renders the daily struggles of most of the world’s population invisible or irrelevant in the eyes of power. To make sense of this arrangement, we must strip away the illusions of meritocracy, reform, and nationalist development, and instead see capitalism for what it is – a machinery for the extraction and concentration of wealth, backed by state violence, debt coercion, and ideological mystification.

This article is based on the findings presented in Michael Roberts’ summary of the Global Wealth Report . We argue that wealth inequality is not a by-product of mismanagement or corruption, but the predictable and necessary outcome of capitalist property relations. Any attempt to “redistribute” wealth within the bounds of existing state and market frameworks is doomed to fail, not because redistribution is impossible, but because capitalism requires inequality as its central organising principle.

Capitalist Accumulation and the Architecture of Inequality

The UBS report maps what it calls the “global wealth pyramid”, an illustration of class war from above. According to the data, 82% of the world’s adults, 3.1 billion people own just 12.7% of global wealth, placing them in the “middle and lower strata” of the pyramid. At the same time, the top 18.2% (680 million people) control a staggering 87.3% of all personal assets. This means that the vast majority of human labour, time, care, creativity, and sacrifice is ultimately converted into value that benefits an elite minority.

In Roberts’ summary, he rightly highlights the role of financial assets, stocks, bonds, derivatives, in driving inequality. This reflects a deeper shift in capitalism since the 1970s – a movement from industrial capital to financial capital, from the factory floor to the stock exchange, from exploitation through production to exploitation through speculation. In 2024 alone, global financial wealth grew by 6.2%, while real property wealth grew by only 1.7%. In other words, the rich got richer simply by owning the instruments of capital, while the rest of us slogged through stagnant wages, debt burdens, rising rents, and environmental collapse.

This is not wealth as most people understand it, homes, savings, or personal security. It is wealth as control, over markets, states, livelihoods, and futures. It is wealth as a weapon.

The Geography of Exploitation

The global wealth distribution also exposes the regional dimensions of capitalist inequality. North America and Eastern Europe saw the largest increases in wealth last year, while Latin America, Oceania, and Western Europe experienced declines. On average, a North American adult holds almost six times more wealth than a Chinese adult, twelve times more than someone in Eastern Europe, and nearly twenty times more than a Latin American adult.

But regional averages obscure class dynamics. The top 1.6% of wealthy individuals are scattered globally. They may reside in different countries, but they inhabit the same class – a transnational bourgeoisie whose loyalty is to capital, not community, and whose interests are preserved through military alliances, trade agreements, and international financial institutions. Whether they are oligarchs in Moscow, bankers in Zurich, tech moguls in San Francisco, or real estate tycoons in Auckland, they benefit from the same underlying system of dispossession.

This is why appeals to “national development” or “economic patriotism” ring hollow. No nation, however rhetorically independent, can insulate itself from the logic of accumulation without fundamentally breaking with capitalism itself. The wealth gap is not merely between the Global North and South, but between owners and non-owners, between capital and life.
Debt, Discipline, and the Myth of Opportunity

Roberts’ figures focus on net worth – assets minus liabilities – but the centrality of debt to the global wealth system deserves sharper attention. For the majority of the global population, debt is not a tool of investment, but a mechanism of control. People borrow to survive, to pay rent, buy food, access healthcare, get an education. Meanwhile, the wealthy use debt as leverage, a way to multiply their capital, avoid taxes, and speculate with other people’s futures.

Debt enforces discipline. It ensures compliance, obedience, and docility. A person in debt cannot strike. A person in debt cannot relocate, protest, or say no to exploitation. Debt is the modern chain, and it binds workers as surely as any physical shackle.

Moreover, the capitalist system sells the myth that upward mobility is possible for anyone who works hard enough. But the wealth data makes clear that mobility is the exception, not the rule. Capital begets capital. The rich have access to compound interest, diversified portfolios, and tax havens. The poor have payday loans, rising rents, and wage theft.

This isn’t just about inequality. It’s about entrapment.

State and Capital: Partners in Plunder

It would be naïve to assume that this wealth concentration occurred in a vacuum, or in spite of governments. In reality, states are key partners in the preservation and expansion of capitalist inequality. Through tax cuts for the rich, bank bailouts, privatisation, austerity, and militarised policing, governments in both liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes ensure that the rules remain stacked in favour of capital.

Even where progressive reforms are introduced,welfare programs, wealth taxes, public housing, they are often eroded over time, captured by elites, or restricted by legal frameworks designed to protect private property above all else.

This is not accidental. The capitalist state does not exist to serve “the people.” It exists to guarantee the conditions necessary for capital accumulation, and to suppress any serious threats to that accumulation. Courts, police, prisons, and parliaments are not neutral institutions, they are class instruments. Their primary role is to maintain the legitimacy and smooth functioning of capitalist rule, even when dressed in democratic robes.

Beyond Redistribution: The Case for Abolition

Faced with such staggering inequality, liberal reformers often call for redistribution through wealth taxes, basic income, progressive taxation, or stakeholder capitalism. While some of these policies might alleviate immediate suffering, they ultimately leave the core structure of exploitation intact.

Redistribution assumes that the problem is one of outcomes, not origins. But the problem is ownership itself, the private ownership of the means of life. As long as housing, health, education, energy, land, and information are privately owned and controlled, then wealth will continue to flow upward, no matter how clever the tax code.

What we need is not redistribution, but abolition. We must dismantle the structures, legal, financial, and ideological, that make it possible for one person to own the labour and life of another. This means expropriating landlords, cancelling debt, eliminating inheritance, and building new systems based on cooperation, mutual aid, and horizontal decision-making.

It also means rejecting the illusion that states can deliver liberation. History shows us that even leftist governments, when operating within the capitalist framework, become tools of compromise and co-optation. True emancipation must come from below through direct action, popular assemblies, federated communes, and mass refusal.

Imagining the World to Come

The figures from the UBS report are chilling, but they also reveal the cracks in the system. If a tiny elite can hoard nearly half the planet’s wealth, then that wealth is not invincible. It is vulnerable. It is located. It can be seized, reappropriated, and transformed.

The path forward is not easy. It requires organisation, courage, and solidarity across borders and identities. It requires rebuilding the social fabric shredded by decades of neoliberal atomisation. But it is possible.

Imagine a world where housing is a right, not an asset. Where energy is produced by cooperatives for need, not profit. Where no one is in debt for being sick, educated, or alive. Where care is collective, decisions are democratic, and wealth is measured not in dollars but in joy, security, and shared abundance.

Such a world cannot coexist with the wealth pyramid. It must be levelled — not just through policy, but through revolution.

Michael Roberts’ analysis of global wealth inequality confirms what anarcho-communists have long known: capitalism is not broken; it is working exactly as intended. It creates wealth for the few by extracting value from the many. It relies on debt, exploitation, and state violence to preserve this order. And it is incapable of delivering justice, equality, or freedom.

The only way forward is to dismantle the architecture of accumulation and replace it with systems rooted in solidarity, not scarcity; cooperation, not competition; freedom, not coercion.

The time has come to abolish the pyramid.

In a recent piece for Stuff, veteran journalist Paddy Gower expressed his delight at Jeff Bezos’s multimillion-dollar wedding and dismissed criticism of a proposed billionaire helipad in Williams-Mowbray. His closing line, “I just want more billionaires” was not satire. It was offered in earnest, a confession of desire for more wealth, more luxury, more power, imported into Aotearoa under the guise of economic development.

There’s something deeply revealing in this. Gower, promoted as a hard-hitting political reporter, is using his platform to openly cheer for the ultra-rich. But he’s not alone. His article is symptomatic of a broader media culture in Aotearoa that increasingly embraces wealth as spectacle, celebrates elite consumption, and dismisses grassroots resistance to capitalist encroachment as trivial or naive.

As anarcho-communists, we reject this narrative entirely. We don’t want more billionaires. We want none. We want a world without exploitation, without elite land grabs, without jetsetters carving up our whenua for their private pleasure. Gower’s article isn’t just tone-deaf, it’s an ideological endorsement of everything we’re fighting to dismantle.

The Wedding as Spectacle

Gower begins with a flourish, “I loved the Bezos wedding.” He confesses a guilty pleasure in watching the absurdly extravagant nuptials unfold. But this kind of “guilty pleasure” is far from harmless. When the ultra-rich throw grandiose, hyper-consumptive events, they aren’t just celebrating, they are asserting a global social order. The message is clear – the world exists to serve their fantasies, no matter the cost to climate, labour, or community.

This is not an apolitical spectacle. It’s a performance of domination.

Billionaires like Bezos do not simply accumulate wealth; they reshape cities, supply chains, and entire planetary ecosystems in their image. Their weddings, yachts, and rockets are not just excess, they are material expressions of a system that demands the dispossession of the many for the pleasure of the few.

When Gower celebrates such events as entertainment, he normalises that dispossession. He teaches us not to question it. He trains our attention on the dazzling surface, away from the violence that sustains it.

The Helipad Debate: A Case of Local Resistance

Later in the article, Gower waves away concerns about the proposed helipad development on Wellington’s green belt, part of the Williams-Mowbray estate. The development would allow billionaires to bypass the city and land directly in their luxury enclave, quietly circumventing public processes, environmental concerns, and community input.

To Gower, this is unimportant, a “non-issue.” But that’s easy to say from the comfort of media celebrity, far removed from the daily grind of renters, workers, and tangata whenua defending their right to access and care for the land.

The helipad controversy is not about envy or tall poppy syndrome, as Gower claims. It is about power, the power of the wealthy to reconfigure public space for private convenience, and the creeping erosion of collective control over our shared environment. It is about the widening chasm between those who move through the world by helicopter, and those who catch three buses and still can’t afford the rent.

To dismiss this as a side show is to side with enclosure. It is to say, implicitly, that the rich should be free to do what they like, and the rest of us should shut up and watch.

“I Just Want More Billionaires”: The Ideology Behind the Statement

At the heart of Gower’s piece is this astonishing admission, “I just want more billionaires.” He offers this not as critique or irony, but as aspiration. In his view, billionaires bring glamour, jobs, capital. They are, somehow, the answer to what ails Aotearoa.

Let’s unpack this fantasy.

What does it mean to want more billionaires? It means welcoming further concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a tiny elite. It means embracing a system where the fortunes of a few come at the expense of the many. It means approving the logic of private jets, mega-mansions, and speculative capital while ordinary people live in cars, shelters, or overcrowded flats.

To want more billionaires is to want more inequality.

It is also to want less democracy. Billionaires don’t just consume, they dominate. They fund political parties, shape media narratives, and lobby against taxation, regulation, and workers’ rights. They hollow out the commons while selling us their philanthropy as salvation.

And in Aotearoa, they bring with them a colonial logic – that the land is there to be bought, fenced off, and enjoyed by the rich. That whenua is just real estate, to be accessed by helicopter if needed. That local voices, including Māori ones, are to be tolerated only when convenient.

Gower’s desire for more billionaires is not a neutral preference. It is an invitation to intensify capitalist enclosure, environmental destruction, and social hierarchy.

Against the Spectacle: What We Really Need

We don’t need more billionaires. We need fewer landlords. We need more public housing. We need universal access to healthcare and education. We need food sovereignty, community-owned energy, and the return of stolen land. We need an economic system that values people over profit, life over luxury.

In short, we need a rupture with the capitalist order Gower celebrates.

This isn’t about jealousy or moralism. It’s about survival. We are living through climate collapse, a housing crisis, and spiralling mental health epidemics, all driven in large part by the economic system that produces billionaires. Their accumulation is not incidental to our suffering. It is its cause.

Billionaires are not just rich individuals. They are structural expressions of capitalism’s failure to meet human and ecological needs. Their very existence is incompatible with a just society.

To challenge them is not to indulge envy – it is to defend our lives.

Media and the Manufacture of Consent

That a prominent journalist would so brazenly advocate for billionaire expansion is revealing. It tells us something about the role of mainstream media in contemporary Aotearoa – not as a check on power, but as its marketing wing.

Rather than scrutinising wealth, much of the media now celebrates it. Rather than platforming the voices of workers, renters, or tangata whenua, it obsesses over real estate portfolios, luxury developments, and the movements of tech oligarchs.

This is not accidental. Media outlets are increasingly owned, influenced, or funded by capital. Their revenue models depend on advertising and corporate access. And their cultural sensibility is shaped by the worldviews of the comfortable, not the struggling.

What Gower offers, then, is not a rogue opinion, it is a distilled version of a dominant ideology. One that says progress comes from above, from the rich, from overseas. One that sees democracy as obstruction, and community concerns as noise.

As anarcho-communists, we reject this utterly. We believe in bottom-up media, rooted in community, accountable to the people, committed to truth and liberation. We need stories that lift up resistance, not consumption; that challenge wealth, not flatter it.

The Path Forward: Build Collective Power

What, then, is to be done?

We must organise. At the community level, we can fight billionaire encroachment, be it helipads, luxury developments, or speculative land grabs. We can demand participatory planning processes, environmental protections, and respect for Māori sovereignty.

At the economic level, we must build alternatives: housing co-operatives, workers’ collectives, mutual aid networks, and public commons that operate outside of profit logics. We must push for wealth taxes, land reform, and the decommodification of essential services.

And at the cultural level, we must reject the spectacle. We must unlearn the worship of wealth and embrace a politics of solidarity. The Bezos wedding is not a dream, it is a distraction from everything that matters.

We can no longer afford to be dazzled.

Aotearoa Beyond Billionaires

Paddy Gower’s article is not just a one-off opinion, it is a symptom of a deeper sickness in our culture. A sickness that equates wealth with worth, privilege with progress, domination with development.

But another Aotearoa is possible. One where land is held in common. One where resources are shared. One where power flows from the people, not from capital. One where community, not consumption, is the measure of success.

We don’t want more billionaires. We want liberation from the system that creates them.

And that liberation begins not in media boardrooms or luxury wedding venues, but in the streets, the unions, the collectives, and the whenua, where people still fight, still organise, still believe in a world without billionaires at all.

Fight the power” is more than a slogan. It’s a lifeline. A declaration. A refusal. It’s the rallying cry of the dispossessed and defiant. In Aotearoa, it means confronting every institution built on theft, control, and exploitation—from the colonial state to the capitalist system, to the social hierarchies that divide us.

The Power We’re Fighting

To fight the power is to understand it. The power we oppose in Aotearoa didn’t arrive by accident or evolve peacefully, it was forged through violence, cemented by colonisation, and polished into “respectability” through the institutions of state, law, education, and media.

In Aotearoa, power wears a number of faces: the Crown, the police, Parliament, capital, the landlord class, the boss. But its structure is always the same – some rule, most obey. It is enforced from above and justified with myths: that it’s inevitable, that it’s for our own good, that it’s democratic, even benevolent.

But power in this system means the right to hoard land stolen from tangata whenua. It means landlords profiting off a housing crisis while whānau sleep in cars. It means police shooting young Māori men and then being “investigated” by their mates. It means an economy designed not to meet human need but to produce endless growth for the few while the many go hungry, cold, and overworked.

It means people are told they’re failures when they can’t survive a system designed to fail them.

To fight the power is to unmask this system and burn away the illusion of neutrality.

Colonisation Was the Original Power Grab

The colonial state didn’t arrive with democracy. It arrived with rifles, missionaries, and contracts written in bad faith. Te Tiriti o Waitangi was supposed to establish a partnership. Instead, it became the legal smokescreen for land theft, militarised invasion, and economic domination.

In the 1800s, Māori land was stolen under the guise of “civilising” missions. But the real mission was profit. Māori were forced off their whenua so settlers could plant sheep and wheat for the Empire. When iwi resisted, the Crown sent in troops. Resistance was met with massacres. Mana motuhake was criminalised. Indigenous authority was replaced by British law. Tino rangatiratanga was ignored.

Colonisation isn’t just a historic event—it’s a present-tense system. It lives on in state structures that still deny Māori sovereignty. In prisons disproportionately filled with Māori. In urban planning that displaces Māori communities. In the exploitation of Māori labour and the suppression of tikanga in schools and workplaces.

Anarcho-communism in Aotearoa must begin with decolonisation. Not as a metaphor, but as a practical, ongoing process of dismantling Pākehā authority and returning land and power to Māori.

Fighting the power in this context means refusing to play the role of the “good settler” and instead standing in solidarity with indigenous resistance movements. It means recognising that our liberation is bound up with theirs, and that without land back, there is no justice.

The Police Protect Power, Not People

Let’s be clear: the police are not neutral. They were created to protect property and enforce colonial control, not to keep people safe. In fact, the first New Zealand police forces were established to suppress Māori resistance in the mid-1800s. Their mission hasn’t changed.

Every time the cops evict a family from a Kāinga Ora home, arrest a protester, or shoot a young Māori man, they are enforcing capitalist and colonial order. Every time they patrol poor neighbourhoods instead of investigating corporate tax fraud, they remind us who they really serve.

Police violence is not an aberration. It’s the system working as intended.

Calls to “reform” the police misunderstand their purpose. You can’t reform a colonial militia. You abolish it. You defund it. You dismantle the carceral state and replace it with community-led approaches to harm, justice, and safety.

Real safety comes from solidarity, not surveillance. It comes from housing, health care, kai sovereignty, and connection—not from tasers and tear gas.

Capitalism Is the Daily Power Drain

Capitalism is the great battery of power. It drains us of our time, our health, our energy to charge the bank accounts of the rich.

Every week in Aotearoa, thousands of people wake up exhausted, anxious, and dreading work they hate. Not because they’re lazy. Because the economy demands they trade their lives away for survival. Rent, debt, food, bills, these aren’t just costs. They’re chains.

The average wage doesn’t cover the cost of living, and benefits are kept below the poverty line by design. Meanwhile, the 1% accumulate wealth at a rate that would make even colonial governors blush.

Capitalism turns need into profit. You need housing? Here’s a landlord who’ll drain half your income. You need food? Here’s a supermarket cartel price-gouging your weekly shop. You need work? Here’s a boss who’ll surveil your bathroom breaks and fire you for being late.

There is no ethical capitalism. There’s no just version of wage labour. Capitalism is structured around coercion. You work or you starve. You rent or you freeze.

Fighting the power means fighting capitalism. Not by appealing to Labour governments or “kind capitalism” or ESG investing. But by building dual power: co-ops, mutual aid networks, food forests, tenant unions, worker solidarity networks. Every moment we reclaim from profit is a moment of real freedom.

The Power of Patriarchy and White Supremacy

Domination doesn’t only come from above; it’s also reinforced laterally between us. Patriarchy and white supremacy are systems of control that fracture our class, our resistance, and our capacity to build collective futures.

White supremacy in Aotearoa is not just in slurs and swastikas. It’s in who gets the job. Who gets listened to. Who gets stopped by police. Who has access to intergenerational wealth and who has trauma from generations of dispossession and violence.

Likewise, patriarchy is in the power imbalance in relationships, the undervaluing of care work, the expectation that women and gender-diverse people must manage emotion, keep the peace, and clean up the mess created by men trained to dominate.

To fight the power means confronting these systems not just in society, but in ourselves. It means decolonising our relationships. Unlearning dominance. Learning to listen, to be accountable, to be soft where we were taught to be hard.

Anarcho-communism is a relational politics. Our goal is not just to destroy hierarchy but to build new, liberated ways of being that are non-hierarchical, feminist, anti-racist, queer-affirming, interdependent.

Parliament Is a Power Trap

Every election cycle, the system dusts itself off and asks for your trust. Parties pitch their platforms. Billboards go up. Promises are made. And then nothing really changes.

Housing gets worse. Benefits stagnate. Prisons expand. Police budgets grow. The climate burns. The left tells you to vote harder. But Parliament is not where power lives. It’s where resistance goes to die.

Even the most well-meaning MPs are caught in the machinery of a settler-capitalist state. The job of Parliament is to manage capitalism and maintain order. The job of radicals is to smash that order and build something better.

That doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means building outside the ballot box. Strikes. Occupations. Direct action. Autonomous spaces. Land back. It means organising in ways that can’t be bought off, silenced, or co-opted.

The state will never give us liberation. We take it, together, from below.

The Power of Solidarity

Fighting the power is not a solo mission. It’s collective. Power isolates. Solidarity unites.

We build power not through hierarchy, but through horizontal organising. Not through charismatic leaders, but through shared responsibility. Not through control, but through consent.

In every tenancy union that forces a landlord to back down, every picket line that wins higher pay, every decolonial hui that reclaims tikanga from colonial erasure, we see it. Real power lies with the people. When we move together, we can’t be stopped.

Mutual aid, too, is a revolutionary act. Not because it’s charity—but because it decentralises care, redistributes resources, and reminds us of our collective strength. Every community fridge, every radical childcare collective, every zine distro, every seed bank – these are the seeds of the world we want.

The revolution won’t look like a Hollywood explosion. It will look like a thousand hands sowing liberation together.

The Power of Refusal

Sometimes, the most radical thing you can do is say no.

No to the boss who wants you to work unpaid overtime.
No to the cop who asks where you’re going.
No to the landlord who raises your rent.
No to the state that wants to register, track, and control you.
No to the inner voice that says you’re alone, powerless, or crazy for dreaming of something better.

Refusal is a muscle. The more we practice it, the stronger we become.

We refuse to be cogs in their machines.
We refuse to be soldiers for their wars.
We refuse to be obedient voters in their rigged games.

We refuse to live lives defined by their violence.

The Power We Build

To fight the power is to build another one in its place. Not a copy. Not a new party or ideology. But a whole new logic – one based on autonomy, mutual aid, direct democracy, and care.

It’s a slow, messy, beautiful process.

We build worker co-ops where profit doesn’t dominate.
We build community housing on stolen land returned.
We build free clinics where care isn’t rationed.
We build schools where curiosity thrives, not compliance.

We build with the understanding that liberation is not a future destination—it’s a way of moving now.

Final Words

“Fight the power” is not just a slogan to chant. It’s a lens. A practice. A politics of refusal and creation.

In Aotearoa, it means fighting the colonial state, the capitalist economy, the gendered and racialised violence that props it all up—and building something else from the ground up – a society without prisons, without landlords, without bosses, without borders.

We fight not because we believe we will win overnight.

We fight because we cannot unsee what this world does to the people we love.

We fight because we believe, deeply, in each other.

We fight the power—because the power has never fought for us.

Be your own boss.
Disrupt the system.
Chase your passion.
Monetise your dream.

These are the slogans of a society desperately trying to convince itself that freedom can be found inside a cage—as long as you decorate the bars with your own logo.

In today’s capitalist dystopia, entrepreneurship is sold as a way out. Out of poverty, out of dead-end jobs, out of oppression. If you hustle hard enough, brand yourself well enough, and get on the right side of an algorithm, you too can escape the grind. You can be “free.” You can win.

But anarcho-communists know better. Entrepreneurship is not a challenge to capitalism, it is one of its most seductive lies. It promises empowerment while deepening alienation. It markets autonomy while reinforcing exploitation. It encourages people to internalise the system’s logic, calling it creativity.

This critique of entrepreneurship culture is not because we don’t believe in creativity, initiative, or self-determination, but because we want those things freed from the profit motive, private property, and market discipline. We don’t want to be our own bosses. We want no bosses.

The Entrepreneur as Myth: From Barbed Wire to Business School

Capitalism has always needed myths to justify itself. The entrepreneur is one of its most powerful.

The idea is simple: a self-made individual with vision, hustle, and courage builds something from nothing. It’s the rags-to riches story rebooted for the age of TikTok and TED Talks. The entrepreneur doesn’t exploit, they innovate. They don’t dominate, they inspire.

But this is a lie.

Historically, many of the first “entrepreneurs” were slave owners, colonisers, and war profiteers. The modern myth of entrepreneurship hides the violence at capitalism’s roots: enclosure, genocide, forced labour. The original start-up capital was often stolen land and stolen people.

Even today, entrepreneurship relies heavily on inherited wealth, racial and gender privilege, and global labour exploitation. Venture capital funds “visionary” founders while migrant workers clean their offices and build their gadgets. Behind every tech platform is a factory, a warehouse, a mine.

There is no such thing as a self-made billionaire. There is only structural theft, laundered through branding.

Entrepreneurship Is Capitalism Rebranded

The entrepreneur is marketed as an outsider—a rebel disrupting the system. But in reality, entrepreneurship is capitalism distilled to its purest form.

It celebrates private ownership, competition, and profit accumulation. It rewards individualism, scarcity thinking, and hyper-productivity. It demands we treat every moment of our lives as an opportunity to optimise and monetise.

Entrepreneurs are taught to treat people as markets, needs as niches, and care as a service you can charge for. The business model becomes the lens through which all human activity is filtered.

Start a podcast, not a union.
Sell herbal tea blends, not mutual aid.
Build an app for loneliness, don’t challenge the atomisation that causes it.

The system doesn’t want you to question why the world is broken. It wants you to build a product that pretends to fix it.

Hustle Culture Is the New Discipline

Under industrial capitalism, discipline came from the clock, the manager, the factory bell. Today, we wear our bosses in our pockets. The discipline is internalised.

Entrepreneurship culture is hustle culture: wake up at 5am, sacrifice your weekends, work 80 hours now to “live like a boss” later. It’s the Protestant work ethic with an Instagram filter. Burnout is a badge of honour. Exhaustion is reframed as passion.

This culture weaponises autonomy. It says: if you’re still poor, you didn’t hustle hard enough. If your mental health is crumbling, you didn’t meditate hard enough. If your product failed, it’s your fault—not the economy, not systemic inequality, not the parasitic rentier class.

Hustle culture turns systemic failure into personal shame.

In place of solidarity, it gives you self-help. In place of community, it gives you branding. In place of revolution, it gives you marketing funnels.

Entrepreneurship Reinforces Inequality

Start-ups don’t democratise wealth—they concentrate it. The tech industry is a prime example. A handful of founders reap unimaginable profits while workers are casualised, underpaid, and overworked. Gig economy “entrepreneurship” turns taxi drivers and delivery workers into algorithmically managed serfs.

In the Global South, micro-entrepreneurship is pushed as “development” while structural adjustment and debt traps keep countries impoverished. Selling second-hand clothes or SIM cards on the street isn’t empowerment—it’s survival in the wreckage of neoliberalism.

Even when entrepreneurship is presented as a tool for marginalised people—like Indigenous, Black, queer, or disabled entrepreneurs—it often ends up co-opting resistance into the marketplace. Cultural traditions, identities, and struggles are commodified for profit. Authenticity becomes a marketing asset.

Representation is not liberation. One oppressed person with a brand is not a threat to capitalism. It’s often a way for capitalism to absorb, sanitise, and repackage dissent.

The Logic of Entrepreneurship Is Anti-Communal

Entrepreneurship teaches people to see other people as competitors. If someone starts a community garden, you start a branded organic food business. If someone gives things away, you figure out how to monetise that service.

Scarcity becomes a business opportunity. Generosity becomes a threat.

This undermines social solidarity. Instead of sharing knowledge, we “protect our intellectual property.” Instead of organising collectively, we look for “market edge.” Even in social justice spaces, the logic of competition creeps in: who gets the grant, who gets the platform, who gets the followers.

This is no accident. Entrepreneurship atomises us. It trains us to hustle individually rather than act collectively. It replaces collective power with personal branding.

Under capitalism, even care work is being pulled into the market. Coaching, wellness, therapy—all increasingly commodified, all increasingly reserved for those who can pay. But healing is not a service. Community is not a business.

We need care that’s mutual, not monetised.

We Don’t Need More Bosses—We Need No Bosses

Entrepreneurship is often sold as an alternative to wage labour. “Don’t work for a boss—be your own boss.” But this just shifts the exploitation.

Entrepreneurs become their own tyrants, internalising capitalist discipline. And when they succeed, they hire others—becoming bosses themselves. They reproduce the same hierarchies they supposedly escaped.

We don’t need new bosses. We need no bosses. We don’t need more CEOs. We need co-operatives. We need collective ownership of land, resources, and labour. We need structures where no one accumulates power or profit at the expense of others.

Anarcho-communism offers a different model: worker self-management, federated decision-making, community control, solidarity economics. Not everyone clawing their way to the top of a pyramid—but dismantling the pyramid entirely.

Creativity Without Capitalism

Let’s be clear: we are not against creativity. We are not against initiative, invention, or passion. We want people to bake, build, brew, design, craft, plant, paint, and experiment. But we want that freed from the crushing pressures of profit and market survival.

Creativity under capitalism is distorted. Instead of asking “what does the world need?” we’re forced to ask “what can I sell?”

Art becomes content. Innovation becomes disruption. Culture becomes brand identity.

We want a world where creativity is shared, not sold. Where everyone has time, space, and resources to create—not just those who can monetise their talent. Where skills are passed on freely, not hidden behind paywalls. Where no one has to starve to be an artist.

In short: we want to socialise the means of expression, not just the means of production.

Alternatives: Mutual Aid, Co-operatives, Commons

So what does an anarcho-communist response look like in practice?

We reject the capitalist path of entrepreneurship and instead build systems rooted in mutual aid and solidarity. Examples include:

Worker co-operatives run democratically, without bosses, where surplus is shared.
Land trusts and food commons that provide for community need rather than market demand.
Mutual aid networks where people meet each other’s needs without conditions or profit.

Skillshares, hackerspaces, fablabs, and open-source communities where innovation is decentralised and shared.
Community currencies and resource libraries that challenge private ownership and enable non-monetary exchange.

These alternatives don’t replicate the logic of the market. They replace it. They are not about making the system more humane—they are about making it obsolete.

Entrepreneurship Is Not Liberation—It’s Adaptation

Capitalism survives by adapting. It doesn’t fear criticism—it absorbs it. That’s how we ended up with “feminist” venture capitalists, “green” start-ups, “ethical” banks, and “woke” billionaires.

Entrepreneurship is part of this co-option. It offers the illusion of autonomy while leaving the core structure of capitalism intact. It tells the poor and oppressed that their liberation lies in building a brand, not tearing down the system that exploits them.

Liberation cannot be bought. It cannot be pitched. It cannot be monetised.

We will not find freedom by branding ourselves better within capitalism. We will find freedom by destroying the conditions that force us to brand ourselves in the first place.

From Individual Escape to Collective Liberation

Entrepreneurship tells you to “bet on yourself.” We say: “bet on each other.”

Don’t climb the ladder. Kick it down.
Don’t build a brand. Build a commune.
Don’t pitch an idea to investors. Share it with your comrades.
Don’t dream of unicorns. Dream of revolution.

The path out of exploitation is not paved with business plans. It’s built through struggle, solidarity, and shared power. We don’t need more start-ups. We need shutdowns—of the rentier class, the corporate state, and the myth of meritocracy.

We reject the false freedom of the marketplace. We fight for the real freedom of the commons.

In a world where everything is commodified, to create without profit is rebellion. To organise without hierarchy is revolution.

We don’t want to be the next Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. We want to abolish the conditions that make such people possible.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, youth justice policy is often dominated by sensational headlines, alarmist rhetoric, and calls for punitive crackdowns. Yet a recent study from Otago University cuts through the noise and offers a radically simple insight: when young people have access to safe, stable housing, they are far less likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system. This finding, though unsurprising to anyone who understands the roots of social harm, exposes the deep contradictions at the heart of government approaches to both crime and housing.

The study analysed national-level data across multiple housing interventions and justice outcomes. It found that youth living in emergency housing, such as motels or shelters, saw no significant reduction in offending. But those placed in public housing—secure, long-term homes—were significantly less likely to be charged with offences over time. Three years after entering public housing, youth offending dropped by 11.7%, and court charges by 10.9%. Similarly, those receiving the Accommodation Supplement saw an 8.6% reduction in charges and a 13% drop in alleged offending.

In short: if you want to stop crime, give people homes. If you want to build a safer society, invest in community wellbeing, not punishment.

Housing Deprivation Is Structural Violence

What the state likes to call “youth offending” is often nothing more than the logical result of poverty, dislocation, and systemic neglect. It is not a coincidence that Māori and Pasifika youth, those most systematically excluded from stable housing, are overrepresented in our youth justice system. It is not a coincidence that areas with underfunded public infrastructure, precarious employment, and unaffordable housing are also the areas with higher rates of criminalisation.

The dominant narrative, however, frames these young people as the problem – unruly, disrespectful, in need of discipline. From this position, the solution can only be control: boot camps, ankle bracelets, curfews, youth prisons. But this narrative is not only wrong, it is actively harmful. It diverts attention away from the social and economic structures that create conditions of desperation in the first place.

Dr Chang Yu, lead author of the study, put it bluntly: “Cutting public housing supply threatens to reverse the progress achieved.” And yet this is precisely what the current government is doing. While touting a tough-on-crime stance, it is simultaneously slashing funding to Kāinga Ora, gutting public housing development, and restricting access to emergency accommodation. The contradiction is glaring – the same politicians who say they want to stop youth crime are dismantling the very social systems that keep young people out of the courts.

Crime Is a Failure of Capitalism, Not Morality

From an anarcho-communist perspective, this contradiction is no accident, it is a feature of the system. Capitalism produces inequality, and then punishes the poor for the conditions it has created. Housing, under capitalism, is not treated as a human right, but as a commodity to be bought, sold, speculated on, and hoarded for profit. Landlords profit from scarcity; property developers are incentivised to keep housing expensive; banks encourage debt servitude in the form of thirty-year mortgages.

In this environment, public housing becomes a threat. It challenges the idea that homes must be earned through market competition. It represents a form of collectivised provision, however flawed or bureaucratic, that sits uneasily alongside neoliberal dogma. That is why public housing is constantly under attack: not because it is ineffective, but because it works. Because it represents a crack in the logic of capitalist accumulation.

If we follow the logic of the Otago study to its conclusion, we are left with a radical proposition – crime prevention doesn’t begin with more police, more prisons, or more punishment. It begins with material conditions. It begins with food, housing, education, and care. In other words, it begins with communism, not in the abstract, but in the everyday sense of shared resources, mutual support, and collective flourishing.

The Punitive State Is a Dead End

Despite the clear evidence, the state doubles down on carceral logic. In the past year alone, the government has reintroduced the “Three Strikes” legislation, launched a Ram Raid Bill targeting youth with harsher sentences, and announced plans for military-style youth academies – boot camps in all but name.

These moves are not only ineffective; they are actively counterproductive. Boot camps do not reduce reoffending. What they do is isolate, traumatise, and entrench state power over the most marginalised. What they do is funnel youth into a pipeline of surveillance, punishment, and lifelong exclusion. All under the pretence of “restoring discipline.”

But discipline is not what young people need. They need stability. They need to know where they’re sleeping next week. They need food in the fridge, books in their bag, parents who aren’t being evicted or working three jobs just to cover the rent. They need a system that sees them as people, not problems to be fixed, or threats to be neutralised.

Imagining Housing as a Commons

If we are serious about building a future free from cycles of harm, we must go far beyond tinkering at the edges of state policy. We must decommodify housing entirely. Homes should not be sources of profit—they should be embedded in community control, operated through co-operatives, trusts, and iwi-led organisations accountable to those who live there.

This is not utopian. Across the world, examples exist – tenant-run housing collectives, land trusts that resist gentrification, squats transformed into thriving community centres. In Aotearoa, these ideas are not new, they align with traditions of papakāinga, of whānau-based living, of collectivised land use long suppressed by colonial and capitalist interests.

Imagine a housing system where land was not sold to developers but returned to hapū and iwi. Where tenants had real decision-making power over their homes and neighbourhoods. Where housing was integrated with education, health, gardens, and community care. Where “crime prevention” meant supporting people before the crisis hits, not punishing them after the fact.

This is the foundation of a non-carceral, post-capitalist society. A society rooted in tino rangatiratanga and class solidarity. A society that puts relationships before profit, and justice before punishment.

Organising for Real Change

To reach this future, we must organise. Tenants must unionise. Public housing residents must demand accountability and democratic governance. Land occupations, squats, and mutual aid projects must be supported, defended, and multiplied. We must call out the government’s lies when they slash housing budgets while claiming to protect the public.

We must push for a politics that links housing with prison abolition, colonial reparations, and ecological justice. Because these struggles are not separate, they are part of the same terrain.

We are told that justice looks like punishment. But justice, real justice, looks like housing. It looks like the absence of handcuffs, and the presence of home-cooked meals. It looks like young people painting murals, not waiting for court dates. It looks like warm, dry bedrooms, not boot camps. And if we want that world, we will have to build it together.

Contents

The Regulatory Standards Bill: Neoliberal Shackles Disguised as “Good Law”
Rebuke and Resistance: Te Pāti Māori’s Protest, Abstentionism, and the Path to Indigenous Sovereignty

Pay Equity Protest

Greenwashed Capitalism: The Limits of the Green Party’s 2025 Budget

Available from: https://awsm4u.noblogs.org/post/2025/06/01/july-2025-issue-of-solidarity-newsletter-of-aotearoa-workers-solidarity-movement/

The National-ACT-New Zealand First coalition government’s Employment Relations Amendment Bill (ERAB), will see a sweeping series of legislative changes that reshape the legal terrain of labour in Aotearoa. These changes, billed by the government as necessary for “labour market flexibility” and “economic growth,” represent a radical rollback of worker protections. Cloaked in technocratic language and presented as pragmatic reform, the bill in fact amounts to a systemic attack on organised labour, unionism, and the basic rights of working people.

ERAB does not signal the failure of the state to protect workers, it reveals the true nature of the state itself. The bill should be understood not as a policy misstep, but as a calculated act of class warfare by a government acting as the political arm of capital.

What the Bill Contains

At the heart of the Employment Relations Amendment Bill lies a multi-pronged effort to deregulate labour protections and entrench power in the hands of employers. There are four major pillars to this legislative shift:

1. The Introduction of a “Contractor Gateway Test”
2. The Limitation of Personal Grievance Remedies
3. The Repeal of the 30-Day Rule for New Employees
4. The Restoration of Employer Powers to Deduct Wages During Partial Strikes

Each of these measures contributes to the erosion of worker autonomy and legal protections, and together they mark a sharp rightward shift in employment law—one that prioritises capital accumulation over dignity, security, or fairness.

Institutionalising Insecurity: The Contractor Gateway Test

Perhaps the most structurally damaging reform is the introduction of a “contractor gateway test.” This test is intended to establish a legal presumption that certain workers are not employees, but independent contractors—thereby removing them from the protections afforded under the Employment Relations Act. If a worker meets a checklist of conditions (such as having a written contract stating they are a contractor, having the theoretical ability to work for others, and not being penalised for declining work), they can be categorised as contractors regardless of the actual nature of the work.

This change is designed to exploit the legal fiction of contractor “freedom.” In practice, it will increase precarity for thousands of workers who are functionally dependent on a single employer. Gig economy workers, cleaners, hospitality staff, care workers, and migrant labourers will be among the hardest hit – those least able to negotiate or contest exploitative arrangements.

By facilitating this mass misclassification, the state legitimises a race to the bottom. Sick leave, minimum wages, overtime, and holiday pay become luxuries rather than rights. Workers will be rendered atomised economic agents, responsible for their own exploitation.

Making Workers the Problem: Personal Grievance Restrictions

The bill also proposes restricting workers’ ability to raise personal grievances, especially in cases of dismissal. Under ERAB, employers may avoid paying compensation if the dismissed worker is deemed to have contributed to their dismissal through “serious misconduct.” In other words, the government is offering employers legal leeway to terminate employment while avoiding financial consequences.

The bill also excludes workers earning more than $180,000 from being able to raise personal grievances, creating a two-tier system in which legal recourse is determined not by the justice of one’s case, but by the size of one’s paycheque.

These provisions are punitive and ideological. They send a clear message: if a worker is sacked, it is probably their own fault. This is not an attempt to resolve disputes fairly – it is a mechanism of discipline. A demoralised, fearful workforce is a compliant one.

Attacking Unionism: Repealing the 30-Day Rule

Another key component of ERAB is the repeal of the 30-day rule. Previously, when a worker started a job in a workplace with a collective agreement, they would automatically receive the terms of that agreement for their first 30 days. This protected workers from being picked off and offered worse contracts before they had a chance to join a union or understand their rights.

Its repeal will allow employers to immediately undercut collective agreements by offering inferior individual contracts. The aim is not to promote fairness—it is to weaken union density, divide workers, and remove the incentive for employers to negotiate with unions at all. It is a classic tactic of divide and rule.

Recriminalising Solidarity: Deductions for Partial Strikes

Finally, the bill reintroduces employers’ ability to deduct pay for “partial strike” actions—where workers might refuse specific duties while continuing to perform others. Partial strikes are a form of limited industrial action that allow workers to escalate disputes strategically and carefully. Punishing them with pay cuts is intended to suppress this tactic and reassert managerial authority.

This reform is aimed squarely at reasserting capital’s power to punish resistance. It also represents a symbolic victory for employers: a return to the draconian provisions of the Employment Contracts Act era.

A Longer History of Repression

While these reforms are severe, they are not novel. Rather, they follow a decades-long trajectory of neoliberal labour market restructuring in Aotearoa. The 1991 Employment Contracts Act, spearheaded by National’s Ruth Richardson, abolished compulsory unionism and national awards, deregulating industrial relations and shifting power dramatically towards employers. This was complemented by the broader economic reforms of the Fourth Labour Government, which introduced market logic into almost every facet of public life, including education, health, and welfare.

Since then, no government has meaningfully reversed this trend. The Clark government (1999–2008) offered some mild reversals, and the Sixth Labour Government (2017–2023) introduced the Fair Pay Agreements (since repealed). But the fundamental structure of employer dominance has remained untouched.

In this light, ERAB is not a betrayal of some progressive consensus. It is a continuation of the neoliberal project with renewed aggression. Its goal is to further erode the legal terrain on which workers might mount a defence.

The State as the Manager of Capital

Anarcho-communists have long argued that the state does not function as a neutral arbiter in labour relations. It is the executive committee of the ruling class, managing the conditions under which capital can reproduce itself. It may, at times, offer workers concessions such as welfare payments, labour protections, or health and safety laws, but these are always tactical, not moral. They can be revoked as easily as they are granted, and they are most often granted in the wake of unrest or threat.

ERAB illustrates this logic perfectly. Rather than responding to a crisis of productivity or economic necessity, it seeks to pre-emptively disarm the working class in anticipation of future struggle. Its goal is to ensure that capital can extract more surplus value with fewer obstacles. In this sense, the bill is not simply anti-worker—it is anti-democratic, in the truest sense. It aims to suppress the ability of people to determine the conditions of their own labour, and thus their own lives.

Resistance: Beyond Legalism, Beyond the State

Faced with these developments, many liberal commentators and union leaders have called for legal challenges, electoral change, and lobbying. But anarcho-communists recognise that such strategies are insufficient. The state has already shown its allegiances. No matter which party holds office, workers’ rights will be contingent on the approval of capital and its political servants.

Instead, we must build resistance from below. That means rejecting the logic of legalism and instead fostering the conditions for direct action and solidarity. This includes:

-Rebuilding radical, rank-and-file led unions that are accountable to workers, not party officials.
-Organising mutual aid networks to provide material support for striking or sacked workers.
-Occupying and collectivising workplaces under threat, with or without legal recognition.

Conclusion: No Authority but Ourselves

The Employment Relations Amendment Bill is not a detour from democratic principles – it is a confirmation that parliamentary democracy in a capitalist state is a dead end for the working class. It consolidates employer power, undermines unionism, and exposes the state’s role as an instrument of class domination.

But in this dark moment, there is also clarity. The illusions of social partnership, of progressive government, of justice through legislation are burning away. What remains is the possibility of something else: the possibility of worker self-organisation, of mutual aid, of a society based not on hierarchy or profit, but on solidarity and shared need.

We must turn away from begging for better laws and begin building our own power. The road ahead is not easy, but it is ours. And as always, it begins not in Parliament but on the shop floor, in the streets, and in the hearts of those who still believe that another world is possible