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AWSM has long been a dues paying organisation.  There has been some internal debate about changing this and it was decided to do away with this model. Unfortunately it led to the loss of a member (who was also our treasurer), but this is our thinking behind the stance.

 There is something quietly contradictory about an anarchist organisation that charges admission. Membership dues feel administrative, mundane, almost reasonable. That is precisely why they deserve scrutiny.

This is not an argument against funding political work. Printing costs money. Travel costs money. Maintaining infrastructure costs money. The question is not whether anarchist organisations need resources, they do, but whether a subscription model is a legitimate way to secure them. The argument here is that it is not and that dues-based membership is philosophically incoherent with anarchist principles, and historically at odds with the organisational forms that have actually advanced working-class struggle.

Anarchism, at its core, is a politics of prefiguration. The argument has never simply been that a stateless, classless society would be desirable at some future point, it is that the means of getting there must embody the end. Kropotkin was clear on this. So was Malatesta. The organisational forms we build now are not neutral vessels for transporting us to a better world, but they are themselves expressions of the world we are trying to create. A dues model treats membership as a commodity. You pay a fee and you receive membership status in return. The transaction might be dressed up in the language of contribution and solidarity, but its underlying logic is exchange, and exchange logic is market logic. It draws a boundary between those who have paid and those who have not, and it makes that boundary structurally significant. Whether you intend it or not, you have introduced a price of entry into a space that ought to be defined by shared commitment rather than financial transaction.

This matters because anarchism is not simply anti-state, it is anti-capitalist in a sense that includes the market relations capitalism naturalises. When we replicate those relations inside our organisations, we are not just being inconsistent, we are actively training ourselves and others to understand political participation as something that is purchased. That is a lesson capitalism is already teaching very effectively. Anarchist organisations should not be reinforcing it. There is also a more subtle philosophical problem, dues-based membership tends to produce a bounded conception of the organisation itself. Membership becomes a defined status with defined boundaries, and the organisation comes to understand itself as the aggregate of its paying members. The organisation stops being a tool for struggle and starts being a club, one with good politics, perhaps, but a club nonetheless.

Move from principle to practice and the problems multiply. The most obvious is exclusion. Any fixed monetary threshold will price out people living in poverty, people with unstable or informal income, people in debt, people supporting dependants on a single wage, people who are undocumented and wary of paper trails. In Aotearoa New Zealand, as elsewhere, these are disproportionately Māori and Pasifika communities, recent migrants, people with disabilities, young people, and those caught in the housing crisis that has made even basic financial stability a precarious achievement for a significant portion of the working class. An anarchist organisation that structurally excludes the most marginalised sectors of the class it claims to organise is not just failing at inclusion as a value, it is failing at its own political project. Working-class struggle requires working-class participation, and not just the participation of the relatively secure fraction of the working class that can absorb a monthly subscription without noticing.

The standard response to this problem is the sliding scale or the hardship waiver,  pay what you can, pay nothing if you can’t. This is well-intentioned, but it does not resolve the contradiction – it manages it. It still requires people to identify themselves as unable to pay, to navigate an administrative process, to ask. For many people, particularly those who have experienced bureaucratic humiliation in welfare systems, this is not a neutral act. It is a barrier, even when it is meant to be a door. There is also the question of what dues actually produce inside the organisation. Money tied to membership status creates a constituency of paying members who have, in some sense, a stake in the organisation as an institution. This is not the same as having a stake in the struggle. Organisations funded through dues can develop a conservatism, an interest in organisational self-preservation, that sits uneasily with the kind of risk-taking, confrontational politics that anarchism requires. The budget becomes something to protect. The membership rolls become something to maintain. The organisation starts making decisions not just about what is strategically correct but about what is financially sustainable, and these are not always the same thing.

Anarchist and anarchist-adjacent organisations have been funding themselves without subscription models for as long as they have existed, and the historical record suggests that the alternatives are not just viable but actively superior for building movements with genuine depth. The Spanish anarchist movement, the most significant mass anarchist movement in history, was not funded through individual membership dues in the subscription sense. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo operated through solidarity structures embedded in workplace organisation, where contributions were tied to collective action and mutual aid rather than individual subscription to an organisation. The distinction matters, money flowed from shared struggle rather than purchasing access to a group. The organisation was not something you paid to join, it was something you were already part of by virtue of participating in the struggle.

The broader tradition of mutual aid, operates on a different logic again. Mutual aid is not subscription. It is not transactional. It is the practice of meeting needs because needs exist, funded collectively because the collective has an interest in the wellbeing of all its members. This is the financial logic anarchist organisations should be drawing on, not the logic of the gym membership or the streaming service, but the logic of the whānau, the community hui, the koha,  contributions calibrated to capacity and given freely because the community is understood as something you belong to, not something you pay for. More recent examples reinforce this. The IWW, which has historically used dues, has also been honest about the ways dues structures create barriers and has experimented with alternatives. Food Not Bombs has operated for decades without any membership model at all, funding its work through donations and in-kind contributions, and has arguably achieved broader reach precisely because it has no formal membership boundary to maintain. The historical lesson is not that funding is unnecessary, it is that the funding model shapes the organisation. Dues tend to produce membership organisations. Solidarity-based, need-based, contribution-based funding tends to produce movements.

If not dues, then what? The question is fair, and the answer is not that anarchist organisations should simply operate without money and hope for the best. It is that the alternatives to dues are numerous, and most of them are better. Voluntary contribution models, where members and supporters contribute what they can, when they can, to specific projects or ongoing needs, distribute financial participation without making it a condition of belonging. This requires more organisational trust and more transparency about what money is needed for, but these are both things anarchist organisations should be cultivating anyway. A culture of openness about collective finances is healthier than a bureaucratic dues structure precisely because it keeps the question of money tied to the question of purpose. Fundraising through events, and publishing, for example, serves multiple functions simultaneously.  It raises money, it builds community, and it does political work in public and is an expression of the movement’s vitality and its embeddedness in a broader social world. An organisation that only counts financial contributions is already operating with a framework that privileges those with money over those with other things to offer. And where money genuinely needs to be raised from members, the model should be needs-based and transparent – here is what we need, here is why, contribute if you can. Not a subscription, not a transaction, but a collective response to a collective need.

The argument for dues often comes from a legitimate place, organisations need stability, financial commitment signals genuine membership. These are real concerns, but the solutions dues offer come with structural costs that anarchist organisations cannot afford, the commodification of belonging, the exclusion of the most marginalised, the creeping institutionalism. Anarchism is a politics that refuses to separate means from ends. It insists that how we organise now is not merely instrumental, rather it is itself the practice of the world we are trying to build. An organisation that charges for membership is already, in its deepest structure, practising the wrong world. The alternative is not chaos or underfunding. It is the harder, more honest work of building genuine solidarity, funding our politics the way we want to fund our lives, through collective care, shared commitment, and free contribution rather than purchased access. That is worth more than any subscription.

There is a number sitting in a new report that deserves to stop you in your tracks. One in three New Zealand households struggled to access affordable, nutritious food in the past year. Not one in a hundred. Not a marginal statistical blip that policy wonks can argue over in committee rooms. One in three. In a country that exports enough food to feed tens of millions of people beyond its own borders, roughly a third of households here could not reliably put adequate meals on the table. If that does not clarify something fundamental about the society we live in, it is hard to know what would.
The Hunger Monitor, described as the country’s first comprehensive tally of food insecurity, surveyed three thousand people late last year and was commissioned by the New Zealand Food Network. The numbers it produced surprised even the people working on the frontlines of food poverty. Gavin Findlay, chief executive of the Food Network, described it as confronting. Ian Foster, who has run the South Auckland Christian Foodbank for eighteen years and distributed forty thousand food parcels last year alone, said he was taken aback to learn how wide the problem had spread. These are people who deal with hunger every single day. And they were surprised. That tells you something about the scale of what we are actually dealing with.
Nearly one in five households (eighteen percent) had experienced what the report calls severe food insecurity. Two thirds of households that struggled to afford food had experienced it for the first time last year. And among those going hungry for the first time, many were reluctant to seek help, held back by shame and embarrassment. They had not expected to find themselves in this position. They had played by the rules, done everything they were supposed to do, and still found themselves unable to feed their families.
That shame is not accidental. It is a feature, not a bug. The ideology of individual responsibility, the idea that poverty is fundamentally a personal failure rather than a structural condition, serves capital extremely well. When people blame themselves for their hunger, they do not organise. They do not agitate. They queue quietly at the foodbank, grateful for the charity of strangers, and internalise the lesson that the system has dispensed to them – that their suffering is their own fault.
The Hunger Monitor blows a hole through this fiction, even if it does not quite name it as such. Nearly half of low-income households faced food insecurity, yes but so did just under a third of full-time workers. Read that again. People who are employed. People who are going to work every day, fulfilling their end of a bargain that was never fair to begin with, and still coming home to empty cupboards. The report even found that twelve percent of households earning over $156,000 a year had experienced some form of food insecurity when burdened by debt. The hunger problem in New Zealand is not a story about laziness or poor choices. It is a story about a system that extracts labour and wealth from working people while delivering less and less in return.
Tracey Phillips, chief executive of the Henderson Budget Service, put it plainly. In the five years she has been working with families in financial hardship, the population seeking help has shifted. It used to be primarily people out of work going through a rough patch. Now it is working whānau. Families with children who, after paying rent, power, and fuel to get to work, have under a hundred dollars left at the end of the week. A hundred dollars. For food, for clothing, for anything unexpected, for the small dignities of ordinary life. The arithmetic of survival under contemporary capitalism has become this brutal, and still the dominant political conversation treats it as a problem of individual budgeting rather than one of structural exploitation.
Phillips names the core contradiction clearly – the cost of living has driven food prices up, but wages and benefits have not kept pace. There is a disconnect, she says, between money coming in and what is needed to put food on the table. This is not a mystery. It is capitalism functioning exactly as it is designed to. Wages are a cost to be minimised. Profit is a value to be maximised. The distance between the two is where shareholders get rich and workers go hungry. Every supermarket duopoly price rise, every landlord rent increase, every energy company quarterly profit report represents a transfer of resources away from working people and towards capital. The hungry households in this report are not the victims of a system gone wrong. They are the product of a system working exactly as intended.
From his warehouse in Manukau, Ian Foster described a transformation that has accelerated dramatically in recent years. During the Covid pandemic, the South Auckland Christian Foodbank was distributing a hundred parcels a day, and staff were staggered by the demand. They are now averaging a hundred and seventy-seven a day. The pandemic-era spike turned out not to be a spike at all. It was a new floor. And the floor keeps rising.
Foster identifies something important in how he talks about the people coming through the doors. Budgeters, he says, have done everything they can. The people seeking food parcels are not people who have failed to manage their money. They are people who have managed their money meticulously, found that there still is not enough, and are now at the door of a charity as a last resort. “Until we turn that around,” he says, “we’ve got a major problem.” The politeness of that framing is understandable for someone in his position, dependent on goodwill and donations. But the blunter version is this – until we fundamentally restructure who owns what and who gets what, we will keep having this problem. And it will keep getting worse.
Brook Turner from Vision West has seen a fifty percent jump in households seeking food help since this time last year. Fifty percent, in a single year. He articulates something that cuts to the heart of the matter, he does not understand why food is not seen as a legitimate need. He is right to be bewildered, though the explanation is not difficult to find. Food is not treated as a right under capitalism because treating it as a right would mean guaranteeing it regardless of a person’s capacity to pay, which would mean decommodifying it, which would mean undermining the logic of the market itself. Food is a commodity. Hunger is leverage. If you are hungry enough, you will take whatever wage is offered. You will accept whatever conditions your employer imposes. You will be grateful. The food bank exists not to challenge this logic but to maintain it, to keep the hungry functional enough to return to work on Monday morning without the desperation becoming so acute that it tips into open revolt.
None of this is to disparage the people running food banks. They are doing necessary work under impossible conditions, driven by genuine care for their communities. But it is worth naming clearly what they are doing and what they are not doing. They are providing emergency relief within a system that generates the emergency. They cannot, by their nature, address the causes of hunger. And increasingly, they know this. Turner says food banks are needed for people who fall through the system, and he hopes the government can hear that. This is the language of appeal to power, which is the only language available to charities dependent on state funding. But the subtext is evident, the system has holes in it large enough for a third of the population to fall through.
The food charities asking the government to extend their funding beyond June this year face a grim irony. They are organisations created to manage the fallout of policy decisions, wage suppression, benefit inadequacy, housing costs left to the market, now dependent on the political goodwill of the same class of people whose decisions created the crisis in the first place. If the government does not extend funding, Vision West and others face reducing services or closing entirely, precisely at the moment when demand has never been higher. This is the bind that charity always finds itself in under capitalism – it fills gaps that should not exist while remaining structurally unable to close them.
What would it actually mean to solve the problem of food insecurity in Aotearoa? It would mean wages that genuinely reflect the cost of living, set not by what the market will bear but by what people actually need to live well. It would mean benefits sufficient to eat on, housed in an adequate and affordable home, without choosing between rent and food. It would mean a housing system that serves people rather than investors, because housing costs are eating the money that families need for food. It would mean confronting the supermarket duopoly that has consistently prioritised shareholder returns while squeezing suppliers and charging working people ever more for basic groceries. It would mean, ultimately, an economy organised around meeting human needs rather than accumulating private wealth.
The Hunger Monitor is described as a benchmark, a baseline against which future years can be measured. There is something quietly devastating about that framing. We are now at the stage of formally documenting and tracking mass hunger in one of the wealthiest countries on earth, and treating this documentation as progress. In a way, it is progress of a kind. You cannot solve a problem you refuse to see. But measurement is not a solution. A spreadsheet tracking the depth of the crisis each year is not a substitute for dismantling the conditions that created it.
One in three households. In a country that grows and exports food in extraordinary abundance. The land is not the problem. The farmers are not the problem. The workers who pack and transport and stock and sell food are not the problem. The problem is who owns the land, who controls the supply chains, who sets the wages, who collects the rents, who pockets the difference between what things cost to produce and what they are sold for. The problem has a name, and the Hunger Monitor, for all its value, is not permitted to say it.
We can say it. The problem is capitalism. The solution begins with understanding that food, like shelter, like healthcare, like all the things human beings need to survive and flourish, belongs to everyone. Not as a charity. Not as a conditional gift from the state. Not as a commodity dispensed to those with the means to pay. As a right, inseparable from the fact of being human, and guaranteed by a society that has organised itself around meeting the needs of all its members rather than the profits of a few.
Until then, the warehouses in Manukau will keep running. The numbers will keep climbing. And a country with enough food for everyone will keep watching a third of its people go without.

There is a persistent arrogance embedded in the worldview of Western power that overwhelming violence can break the political will of entire societies. Again and again the same assumption appears. Israeli strategists believe that flattening Gaza will sever Palestinians from their land. Washington spent more than sixty years trying to strangle Cuba economically in the hope that its people would abandon their revolution. Now the same logic is driving the escalating war against Iran. The belief remains that bombs, assassinations and economic siege will eventually force a nation to submit.

These actions are usually described in the language of policy errors or strategic miscalculations. But that framing misses the deeper issue. What we are witnessing is not simply poor strategy. It is the continuation of a worldview shaped by centuries of colonial domination, one that still imagines Europe and its settler extensions as the natural centres of civilisation. That worldview continues to shape the political imagination of Western elites, producing a kind of ideological blindness whenever societies outside the Western sphere refuse to comply.

The current war against Iran illustrates this dynamic with disturbing clarity. The conflict erupted when the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iranian military and strategic sites, triggering retaliatory missile and drone attacks across the region and raising fears of a wider war. The ripple effects have already spread far beyond the Middle East, shaking global energy markets and disrupting shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most important oil transit chokepoints in the world.

Yet even as the war intensifies, the underlying logic driving it remains remarkably familiar. Western policymakers appear convinced that military force will compel Iran to abandon its political trajectory. This assumption persists despite decades of evidence showing that sanctions, assassinations and military threats have failed to achieve that outcome.

To understand why this pattern repeats itself, it is necessary to look beyond individual decisions and examine the ideological structure that underpins Western power. For centuries European empires justified their expansion through a belief in civilisational superiority. Colonised peoples were portrayed as irrational, backward or incapable of governing themselves. This narrative provided the moral cover for conquest, slavery and economic exploitation.

Although the formal colonial empires of Europe have largely disappeared, the assumptions that sustained them remain embedded in the political culture of the West. They shape how conflicts are interpreted and how resistance from non-Western societies is understood. When nations like Iran refuse to submit to Western dominance, their actions are often framed not as political resistance but as irrational fanaticism or extremism.

This mindset has profound consequences. It produces policies that consistently underestimate the resilience of the societies they target. The result is a cycle of escalation in which each failure leads to more coercion rather than reflection.

Iran occupies a particularly central place within this history of imperial confrontation. The modern conflict between Iran and the United States cannot be understood without remembering the 1953 coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he attempted to nationalise the country’s oil industry. The coup, orchestrated by the CIA and British intelligence, restored the authoritarian rule of the Shah and laid the foundations for the 1979 revolution that created the Islamic Republic.

In other words, the very political system that Western governments now describe as a threat was itself shaped by earlier Western intervention. The present war is therefore not simply a confrontation between two states. It is part of a much longer historical struggle over sovereignty, resources and geopolitical power.

Energy lies at the heart of this struggle. Iran sits atop some of the world’s largest oil and gas reserves, making it a crucial player in global energy markets. Control over those resources, and over the financial systems that govern them, has long been central to US foreign policy. The dominance of the US dollar in international trade allows Washington to wield enormous economic power through sanctions and financial restrictions.

But that system is increasingly under strain. Countries targeted by sanctions are developing alternative financial arrangements designed to bypass Western control. Iran has strengthened economic ties with China and Russia while participating in broader discussions within the BRICS framework about alternative trade and currency systems. The more Washington attempts to isolate these states economically, the more incentive they have to construct parallel systems outside the reach of Western financial institutions.

From the perspective of American strategists, this represents an existential threat to the existing global order. The privileged position of the US dollar has allowed the United States to sustain massive deficits while maintaining global influence. Preserving that position requires control over energy flows and the prevention of rival economic blocs capable of challenging dollar dominance.

Seen in this light, the war against Iran appears less like a defensive response to security threats and more like an attempt to enforce the geopolitical architecture that has underpinned Western power since the end of the Second World War.

For people in Aotearoa New Zealand, these dynamics might appear distant. Yet our country is far from neutral in this global system. The New Zealand government has publicly supported the US-Israeli strikes as part of efforts to prevent Iran from threatening international security, while simultaneously calling for negotiations and restraint.

This response reflects a long-standing pattern in New Zealand foreign policy. Successive governments have cultivated the image of an independent, rules-based international actor while remaining firmly embedded within Western strategic alliances. Wellington may not deploy troops in every conflict, but it rarely challenges the fundamental assumptions of the imperial system that structures global politics.

The reaction to the current Iran war illustrates this balancing act. Official statements have avoided openly endorsing regime change while still framing the strikes as a response to Iranian behaviour. Critics, including former Prime Minister Helen Clark, have argued that the attacks constitute a clear violation of international law, drawing parallels with earlier Western interventions such as the invasion of Iraq.

This debate reveals the contradictions at the heart of New Zealand’s international identity. On the one hand, the country likes to present itself as a defender of international law and multilateral diplomacy. On the other hand, it remains politically and economically integrated into the Western alliance system that repeatedly violates those same principles.

These contradictions are not merely diplomatic curiosities. They reflect the material realities of a settler-colonial society embedded within the structures of global capitalism. New Zealand’s prosperity has long depended on participation in an international economic order dominated by Western powers. Our security relationships, intelligence partnerships and trade networks are deeply intertwined with that system.

From an anarcho-communist perspective, this raises uncomfortable questions. Can a state built on the colonisation of Māori land genuinely claim moral authority in global debates about sovereignty and self-determination? Can a society integrated into imperial economic networks meaningfully oppose the wars that sustain those networks?

The war against Iran forces us to confront these questions more directly. It exposes the reality that even small states like New Zealand are implicated in the geopolitical structures that produce global conflict.

This does not mean that the Iranian state itself should be romanticised. The Islamic Republic is a deeply authoritarian regime that suppresses dissent and enforces rigid social controls. Acknowledging that reality, however, does not justify foreign aggression. Opposition to imperial war does not require political support for the governments targeted by that war.

The real issue is the broader system that continually produces such conflicts. The same structures of global capitalism that generate inequality and ecological destruction also generate war. Competition over resources, trade routes and strategic influence drives states toward confrontation.

As that system enters a period of increasing instability, the political responses within Western societies are becoming more authoritarian. Governments expand surveillance powers, criminalise protest and tighten borders. The language of security becomes the justification for repression.

Empire and authoritarianism develop together. The violence inflicted abroad inevitably reshapes politics at home.

For people living in Aotearoa, this reality should not be abstract. Our own history is shaped by colonial conquest and the suppression of Indigenous sovereignty. The same ideological frameworks that justified the seizure of Māori land also underpinned the expansion of European empires across the world.

Recognising this connection does not mean collapsing all struggles into a single narrative. But it does require acknowledging that colonialism, capitalism and imperial war are historically intertwined.

The war against Iran is therefore more than a distant geopolitical event. It is part of a broader crisis within the global system that shapes our lives here as well.

As the conflict escalates, its economic consequences are already being felt around the world. Disruptions to oil supplies threaten to push up fuel prices and destabilise supply chains. Small economies like New Zealand’s are particularly vulnerable to such shocks.

Yet the deeper significance of the war lies not in its immediate economic effects but in what it reveals about the trajectory of global power. The post-Cold War era of uncontested American dominance is fading. New geopolitical blocs are emerging. Old alliances are shifting.

In this uncertain landscape, imperial powers are attempting to preserve their dominance through increasingly aggressive means. Military force, economic sanctions and political destabilisation remain the tools of choice.

But history suggests that such strategies rarely achieve the outcomes their architects intend. Attempts to crush resistance often strengthen it. Societies subjected to external pressure frequently become more determined to defend their sovereignty.

This is why decades of sanctions have not broken Cuba. It is why Venezuela has survived repeated attempts at regime change. And it is why Iran, despite relentless pressure, continues to resist submission.

The lesson is not that states are invincible. It is that the political will of entire populations cannot easily be destroyed through violence and coercion.

For radical movements around the world, including here in Aotearoa, the challenge is to confront the structures that make such wars possible. That means questioning the alliances, institutions and economic systems that bind our society to imperial power.

It also means building forms of solidarity that extend beyond national borders. The struggle against exploitation and domination is inherently international.

The war against Iran is a stark reminder of the stakes involved. It reveals the enduring arrogance of imperial power and the catastrophic consequences that arrogance can produce.

The question facing us is whether we continue to accept the structures that make such wars inevitable, or whether we begin to imagine and organise for a world beyond them.

The age of illusions is ending. The only meaningful response is clarity, solidarity, and resistance.

This article appears in the latest issue of our newsletter which can be found here: https://awsm.nz/awsm-newsletter-solidarity-march-2026/

Our latest newsletter Solidarity is now available:

For most people, the word anarchy conjures chaos. Burning cars, smashed windows, shouting crowds, the collapse of all restraint. It is a word carefully trained to frighten. Politicians invoke it as a threat, newspapers as a warning, and police as a justification. Anarchy, we are told, is what happens when order disappears.

But we are making a simpler and more unsettling claim: anarchy is not the absence of order, but the absence of rulers. And far from being rare, it is woven through everyday life in Aotearoa New Zealand.
This is not about anarchism as an ideology, a movement, or a future revolution. We are not arguing that everyone should call themselves an anarchist, nor do we offer a blueprint for how society ought to be reorganised. Instead, we offer something quieter and more subversive. We look closely at how people already live, care, work, raise children, resolve conflict, and survive, often without asking permission, without formal authority, and without the state playing a central role at all. In other words, we argue that anarchism is a lived practice, not a doctrine.

The inspiration for this approach comes from the British writer and thinker Colin Ward, whose work Anarchy in Action refused the dramatic gestures of revolutionary politics and instead turned attention to the mundane. Ward was interested in housing co-operatives, playgrounds, allotment gardens, informal education, and the ways ordinary people organise their lives when institutions fail or intrude too heavily. His argument was disarmingly simple – if you want to understand anarchism, do not look to manifestos or barricades, look at everyday life.

Aotearoa offers a particularly clear view of this everyday anarchism. Not because it is uniquely radical or harmonious, but because the failures and violences of the state are so visible, and because people have had to rely on one another in spite of it. Mutual aid after floods, whānau stepping in where welfare systems fall short, informal housing arrangements that keep people off the streets, cash work and favours that bypass wage discipline, conflict resolved quietly without police or courts, these are not marginal or exceptional activities. They are normal. They are how life continues and yet they are rarely named as political.

One of the most powerful myths of modern society is that order comes from above. We are taught that without rules imposed by the state, without police, bureaucrats, managers, and experts, society would descend into violence and disorder. Cooperation is treated as fragile, conditional, and in need of constant supervision. When people help one another, it is framed as charity or kindness, never as a form of social organisation in its own right.

This myth serves a purpose. It legitimises authority while obscuring the fact that most of what keeps society functioning happens below the level of law and policy. The state depends heavily on unpaid care, informal cooperation, and community resilience, even as it claims credit for stability and threatens punishment for deviation. It is quick to intervene when people step outside permitted channels, but slow, or absent, when real support is needed.

Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in moments of crisis. After earthquakes, floods, and fires in Aotearoa, it is neighbours, whānau, and community groups who act first. Food is shared, shelter organised, children looked after, elders checked on. These responses are not centrally planned. They emerge from relationships, trust, and local knowledge. The state arrives later, often to regulate, document, or withdraw support once the immediate danger has passed.

This is not an argument that the state does nothing, or that it is always irrelevant. It is an argument that social life is not produced by authority, even when authority claims ownership over it. The order we rely on most is informal, relational, and largely invisible to official accounts.

In Aotearoa, these dynamics are inseparable from colonisation. The settler state did not arrive to create order from chaos. It arrived to impose its own forms of order on societies that were already organised, often in ways that conflicted with European notions of property, hierarchy, and law. Māori social organisation, grounded in whānau, hapū, tikanga, and collective responsibility, represented a profound challenge to the authority of the colonial state. Land tenure without individual ownership, justice without prisons, governance without a sovereign rule, these were not abstract alternatives, but lived realities.
Colonisation sought to dismantle these systems, replacing them with wage labour, private property, policing, and bureaucratic control. Yet despite generations of violence, dispossession, and assimilation, non-state forms of social organisation persist. They persist not as relics of a pre-colonial past, but as adaptive, living practices shaped by ongoing resistance and survival.

It is important to be clear here. We are not claiming that Māori society is “anarchist” in any simple or ideological sense. Such a claim would be both inaccurate and disrespectful. What it does argue is that Māori social life exposes the limits and contradictions of the state by demonstrating that authority is not the only way to organise society, and that relational, non-statist forms of order are not only possible but enduring.

These practices are not confined to Māori communities. Working-class life across Aotearoa is full of informal systems that make survival possible in the face of rising rents, precarious work, and shrinking public services. People share childcare, tools, transport, and knowledge. They look after one another’s kids, cover shifts, lend money without contracts, and find ways around rules that would otherwise leave them stuck. Much of this activity exists in a legal grey area, tolerated when it is convenient and criminalised when it becomes too visible.

What links these practices is not ideology, but necessity. People do not organise this way because they have read anarchist theory. They do it because they have to, and because cooperation works better than competition when resources are scarce and institutions are hostile.

Anarchism, in this sense, is not a destination but a description. It describes what happens when people take responsibility for their own lives and for one another, rather than deferring to distant authorities. It describes social order that emerges from below, shaped by context, relationships, and mutual obligation. It is messy, imperfect, and often fragile, but so is life itself.

This perspective challenges both defenders and critics of the state. Against those who insist that authority is the source of all order, it offers abundant evidence to the contrary. Against those who imagine anarchism only as a future rupture or total collapse, it insists that much of what they desire already exists, quietly, in the present.

We are not trying to romanticise these practices. Informal systems can reproduce inequality, exclusion, and harm. They can fail, break down, or be overwhelmed. Nor do we deny the reality of violence, abuse, or exploitation within communities. What we do though is refuse the assumption that the state is the natural or necessary solution to these problems.

Instead, we ask a different set of questions. How do people actually manage harm when they do not call the police? How do families and communities regulate behaviour without formal authority? What happens when responsibility is collective rather than delegated upward? And why are these forms of organisation so often ignored, dismissed, or actively undermined?

These questions matter now more than ever. As faith in political institutions erodes, as economic inequality deepens, and as crises multiply, the gap between official systems and lived reality grows wider. Governments promise security while delivering precarity. Bureaucracies expand even as their capacity to care diminishes. In this context, the everyday anarchism of mutual aid and informal cooperation is not a fringe phenomenon, it is a lifeline.

We invite you to look differently at your own life and the lives around you. To notice the ways order is created without orders being given. To recognise that much of what feels natural or inevitable is in fact the result of collective effort without command. And to consider what might change if we took these practices seriously, not as temporary stopgaps, but as the foundations of social life.

We are not demanding agreement, but we do ask for attention. Because once you start to see anarchism in action, it becomes difficult to unsee it.

image c/o theslowburningfuse.wordpress.com

Scoop ran a piece on homelessness and basic income in Aotearoa by Basic Income New Zealand, which does something important – it acknowledges that poverty and housing insecurity are not marginal issues but central political questions. The mere fact that guaranteed income schemes are being discussed in relation to homelessness signals how deep the crisis has become. But from an anarcho-communist perspective, it is not enough to debate how much money the state should distribute. We have to ask why, in one of the wealthiest countries per capita in the world, so many people do not have a secure place to live in the first place.

Homelessness in Aotearoa is routinely framed as a failure of income support, a gap in the safety net, or an unfortunate by-product of economic turbulence. That framing is too polite. Homelessness is not a glitch in capitalism, it is one of its regular outputs. We live in a society where housing is treated first and foremost as a commodity, something to be bought, sold, speculated on, leveraged, and accumulated. Shelter is not organised around need but around profit. Land is hoarded, and rents are pushed as high as the market will bear. Under those conditions, it is not surprising that tens of thousands of people experience insecure housing, are shunted into motels at public expense, or end up sleeping rough. The surprise would be if they did not.

The attraction of a basic income in this context is obvious. If rents are extortionate and wages are stagnant, give people more money. If benefits are punitive and conditional, replace them with something universal and unconditional. Parties such as the Green Party and The Opportunity Party have floated versions of guaranteed minimum income schemes as a humane response to poverty and precarity. The idea that every person should have a material floor below which they cannot fall has moral force. It speaks to dignity. It gestures toward the principle that survival should not depend on pleasing a case manager or satisfying bureaucratic criteria. In a country where benefit sanctions and administrative cruelty have pushed people further into crisis, the appeal of unconditional income is understandable.

Yet we have to be clear about the limits of this approach. A basic income, introduced within the existing framework of capitalist property relations, does not de-commodify housing. It does not socialise land. It does not remove rental housing from the speculative market. It does not end the power of landlords to set prices according to what they can extract. Instead, it injects cash into a system that continues to operate according to profit. In such a system, there is every reason to expect that a significant portion of that cash will be absorbed by rising rents and costs. Without structural transformation, income supports risk becoming subsidies for property owners.

There is a deeper issue at stake. Capitalism does not simply generate poverty by accident, it requires insecurity as a disciplining mechanism. The threat of unemployment, debt, and eviction keeps workers compliant. When education is financed through loans, graduates begin their working lives already indebted. When housing is scarce and expensive, people are less likely to resist exploitative work for fear of losing their home. Homelessness, at the extreme end, is a warning written in human terms – fail to secure your place in the labour market and this is what awaits you. A basic income might blunt that threat at the margins, but if it leaves intact the wage system and the commodification of essentials, the underlying logic persists.

In Aotearoa, we have seen how state policy oscillates between paternalistic support and outright punishment. Benefit levels rise slightly, then are eroded by inflation or offset by cuts elsewhere. Administrative hurdles are lowered in one term of government and raised in the next. At the same time, proposals emerge to empower police to issue “move-on” orders to rough sleepers, effectively criminalising the visibility of poverty. The contradiction is stark, the state claims concern about homelessness while expanding its capacity to remove homeless people from sight. Under capitalism, social policy and policing often work hand in hand, one managing poverty, the other containing it.

Those who experience homelessness are not a random cross-section of the population. Women, children, disabled people and Māori are disproportionately affected. That fact alone should dispel the myth that homelessness is about individual failure. It is about structural inequality layered across race, gender and class. The legacy of colonisation in Aotearoa, the alienation of Māori land, and the concentration of property ownership in settler and corporate hands form part of the story. So too does the transformation of housing into an asset class that delivers untaxed capital gains to investors while locking others out. A cash transfer cannot undo that history.

This does not mean that anarcho-communists should dismiss basic income debates as irrelevant. On the contrary, any measure that immediately reduces hardship deserves serious consideration. An unconditional income could weaken the most degrading aspects of the welfare system and give people breathing space. It could reduce the power of employers to coerce workers into unsafe or underpaid jobs. It could create room for care work, community activity and political organising. These are not trivial gains. But we must resist the temptation to treat them as endpoints rather than footholds.

The fundamental problem is that capitalism organises life around exchange value rather than use value. Housing exists to generate rent, not simply to shelter. Land appreciates because it is scarce and privately owned, not because its value derives from community life. As long as these premises remain intact, homelessness will reappear in new forms. The system can tolerate a certain level of misery, but it cannot tolerate a challenge to property relations. That is why even the most generous reforms are carefully calibrated to avoid undermining the sanctity of private ownership.

A genuinely transformative approach to homelessness would start from the principle that housing must be de-commodified. That means large-scale public and community, controlled housing construction, not as a residual safety net but as a dominant form. It means taking land out of speculation and placing it under democratic stewardship. It means supporting hapū-led and community-led housing initiatives that reflect tino rangatiratanga and collective control rather than market dependency. It means confronting the political power of developers, landlords and banks rather than courting them.

Such a programme cannot be delivered solely through parliamentary manoeuvres. The history of social change in this country, from union rights to Māori land struggles, shows that gains are won through collective action. Tenant organising, occupations of vacant buildings, and solidarity networks that redistribute resources outside the market are not romantic gestures, they are practical challenges to the logic that treats shelter as a commodity. When communities occupy empty houses while families sleep in cars, they expose the absurdity of a system that protects property over people.

Worker power is central to this picture. Homelessness is tied not only to housing costs but to wages and job security. An economy built on precarious contracts, gig work and underemployment produces constant risk of eviction. Strengthening unions, building worker co-operatives, and demanding wages that reflect real living costs are essential components of any serious anti-homelessness strategy. Without shifting power in the workplace, income supports risk becoming permanent patches on a leaking boat.

There is also a cultural battle to be fought. Capitalist ideology frames independence as individual self-reliance and dependence as personal failure. A basic income can be sold within that framework as a tool to help individuals “get back on their feet,” but the deeper truth is that none of us survive alone. Housing, like healthcare and education, is a collective good. It depends on shared labour, shared infrastructure and shared land. Reclaiming that understanding is part of dismantling the moral narrative that justifies homelessness.

The Scoop article gestures toward compassion, and compassion matters. But compassion without structural analysis can slide into technocracy. It asks how to administer poverty more efficiently rather than how to abolish it. Anarcho-communism insists that homelessness is not inevitable, not natural, and not the result of insufficient managerial finesse. It is the outcome of deliberate choices about ownership, profit and power. Those choices can be reversed, but not without confronting entrenched interests.

In the end, the debate over basic income in Aotearoa is a test of political imagination. Are we prepared to see housing as a right rooted in collective ownership and democratic control? Or will we settle for cash transfers that leave the architecture of inequality untouched? The answer will determine whether homelessness continues to haunt our cities as a managed crisis or recedes as a relic of a system we chose to leave behind.

If we are serious about ending homelessness, we must move beyond tinkering. We must challenge the commodification of land, the wage system that disciplines through scarcity, and the punitive apparatus that criminalises poverty. We must build networks of solidarity that meet needs directly while organising for deeper transformation. A basic income may be part of that struggle, but it cannot be its horizon. The horizon must be a society in which no one’s right to shelter depends on their capacity to pay, and where collective care replaces market logic as the organising principle of life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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