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Every New Year and every King’s Birthday the same ritual unfolds. Newspapers publish lists of names. Politicians offer congratulations. Television presenters speak of service and achievement. Photographs appear of smiling recipients standing beside representatives of the Crown. For a few days the country is invited to celebrate the latest round of honours bestowed in the King’s name. Most people barely notice. Some see it as harmless recognition for good work. Others regard it as a quaint tradition left over from another age. Yet beneath the polite language and ceremonial pageantry sits a question that deserves far more attention than it receives -why should anybody accept honours from a king at all?

For anarchists, the answer seems obvious. We oppose monarchy because we oppose hereditary power. We oppose the idea that some people are born into positions of authority over others. We reject the notion that one family should occupy a privileged place within society simply because of bloodline. The British monarchy represents one of the oldest surviving examples of inherited status in the world. Accepting honours from the Crown therefore means accepting recognition from an institution whose existence rests upon principles fundamentally opposed to equality. The issue, however, goes deeper than opposition to monarchy alone. The honours system is not simply about medals, titles and certificates. It performs a political function. It helps maintain respect for existing structures of power. It encourages people to seek validation from those structures. It reinforces the idea that achievement acquires greater significance when recognised from above.

Human beings have always sought recognition. There is nothing strange about that. People want their efforts appreciated. They want their sacrifices acknowledged. They want to know that what they have done matters. The question is who provides that recognition and what values are expressed through it.

When a community thanks a person for years of service, that recognition comes from below. It emerges from relationships between equals. When workers celebrate a fellow worker, or neighbours honour someone who has contributed to collective life, the recognition belongs to the people directly affected. State honours operate differently. They flow downward. They originate from institutions that stand above society. Their value depends entirely upon the prestige attached to those institutions. The recipient is expected to feel honoured because the recognition comes from the Crown.

This is why honours have always been attractive to ruling classes. They provide a means of distributing status without distributing power. They allow elites to reward loyalty while presenting the reward as public gratitude. They create a hierarchy of prestige that sits alongside economic and political hierarchies. The language surrounding honours often obscures this reality. We are told that recipients are recognised for their service. Service to whom? Service according to whose standards? These questions rarely receive serious attention.

The honours system reflects the priorities of the state because it is administered by the state. Decisions are shaped by political institutions, official committees and social networks. People whose work aligns comfortably with existing structures are more likely to receive recognition than those who challenge those structures. History offers many examples. Trade union militants, anti-colonial activists, revolutionary organisers and other opponents of established power have rarely been showered with honours while they are actively engaged in struggle. Governments tend to reward those who contribute to social stability as defined by governments themselves.

This does not mean every recipient consciously supports the status quo. Many are decent people who have devoted years to helping others. Some have spent their lives caring for vulnerable people, building community organisations or advancing worthwhile causes. Their contributions may be genuine and substantial. The problem lies not primarily with individual recipients but with the institution conferring the award.

Good people can become symbols for bad systems. The state understands this perfectly well. By honouring respected figures, it borrows some of their moral credibility. Their achievements become attached to the prestige of the Crown. The relationship works in both directions. The recipient receives recognition. The institution gains legitimacy.

In Aotearoa New Zealand this dynamic carries a particular historical weight. The Crown is not an abstract constitutional arrangement floating above history. It is a living institution deeply connected to colonisation. The authority exercised by the British Crown provided the framework through which land was seized, resistance was crushed and Māori communities were subjected to generations of dispossession.

The New Zealand state often presents itself as separate from these events, as though colonial violence belongs to a distant past disconnected from present institutions. Yet the Crown remains central to the constitutional order established through colonisation. Governments act in the name of the Crown. Courts derive authority from the Crown. Public servants serve the Crown. Against this backdrop, accepting honours from the monarch acquires a different significance. The award cannot be separated from the institution granting it. The medal may appear small. The ceremony may seem harmless. Yet the symbolism remains.

For Māori activists who have spent decades resisting Crown power, this contradiction has often been impossible to ignore. Some have declined honours on precisely these grounds. They recognised that acceptance would conflict with the principles they had spent their lives defending. Others have accepted, arguing that the honour reflects recognition for their communities rather than allegiance to the monarchy. The debate reveals genuine tensions. It is not always straightforward.

Anarchists should approach such decisions with humility rather than moral grandstanding. People make choices for complex reasons. Some recipients see acceptance as an opportunity to draw attention to causes they care about. Others view the award as recognition shared with wider communities. Condemnation alone rarely produces useful political discussion. At the same time, political honesty requires us to examine what honours actually represent.

Imagine a society organised around equality and mutual aid. Imagine a society in which people collectively control the conditions of their lives. In such a society, would anybody require validation from a hereditary monarch living on the opposite side of the world? Would social contribution become more meaningful because a king approved of it? The question sounds absurd because it is absurd.

The prestige attached to honours depends upon social conditioning. From childhood we are taught that kings, queens, governors-general and other figures of authority possess special importance. Ceremonies reinforce this lesson. Flags, uniforms, titles and rituals reinforce it again. Over time many people come to regard these symbols as natural. Yet there is nothing natural about them.

No infant enters the world believing one family possesses a divine or hereditary right to occupy palaces. No child spontaneously develops reverence for crowns and aristocratic titles. Such attitudes must be cultivated. The honours system contributes to that cultivation. It reproduces respect for hierarchy under the guise of gratitude.

This is one reason republicans often oppose honours linked to the monarchy. Even those who do not identify as anarchists recognise the contradiction between democratic ideals and hereditary institutions. If all citizens are supposed to be equal, why should recognition derive from a royal family? Anarchists take the criticism further. The problem is not simply hereditary power. The problem is authority itself. We oppose systems that place some people above others. We oppose arrangements that encourage deference and obedience. We seek forms of social organisation based upon cooperation among equals.

Honours pull in the opposite direction. They encourage people to look upward for approval. They suggest that achievement becomes complete only after official recognition arrives. Many extraordinary people have rejected this logic. Throughout history radicals, artists, writers and activists have declined honours because they understood the political symbolism involved. Some refused knighthoods. Others rejected state awards entirely. Their decisions reflected a simple conviction – the value of their work did not depend upon endorsement from authority. That position deserves greater respect than it often receives.

Modern capitalism constantly pressures people to seek external validation. Success becomes measured through titles, credentials, rankings and awards. Every sphere of life acquires its hierarchy. People are encouraged to compete for recognition rather than build solidarity. The honours system fits neatly within this broader culture. It transforms social contribution into another form of distinction. Individuals are elevated above their peers. Lists are compiled. Status is distributed. Anarchists should be suspicious whenever institutions encourage people to chase prestige. The world already contains too much hierarchy. We do not need additional systems for sorting human beings into categories of importance.

The nurse who cares for patients through exhausting shifts does not become more valuable because a governor-general places a medal around their neck. The volunteer who supports struggling families does not suddenly acquire greater worth because their name appears on an honours list. The worker organising colleagues against exploitation deserves recognition regardless of whether the state approves. Their contribution exists independently of official acknowledgement. Indeed, some of the most important struggles in history were carried forward by people whom authorities despised. Trade union organisers were imprisoned. Anti-war activists were vilified. Indigenous resistance leaders were criminalised. Women demanding political rights were ridiculed and arrested. Had these people waited for approval from above, many victories would never have occurred.

This should remind us that official recognition is a poor measure of social value. Power often celebrates those who accommodate it and attacks those who challenge it. The judgement of institutions deserves neither automatic trust nor automatic reverence. For anarchists in Aotearoa, opposition to honours should therefore form part of a broader commitment to building alternative cultures of recognition. We should celebrate people because they strengthen collective life. We should honour courage, solidarity and resistance through our own practices. Communities are fully capable of expressing gratitude without monarchs, governors-general or state committees.

Imagine neighbourhood assemblies recognising local organisers. Imagine workers celebrating fellow workers. Imagine communities publicly acknowledging care, generosity and sacrifice without attaching ranks or titles. Such forms of recognition would reflect horizontal relationships rather than vertical ones. They would also carry greater authenticity. Praise from those directly affected by your actions means far more than approval from distant institutions.

Some defenders of honours argue that the system simply rewards excellence. Yet excellence exists everywhere. Every workplace contains people whose labour sustains collective life. Every community contains people who give more than they receive. Most will never receive medals. Their contribution remains invisible because recognition systems inevitably favour some forms of work over others. The result is a distorted picture of social value.

A society obsessed with honours often overlooks the countless acts of cooperation that make everyday life possible. Parents caring for children, neighbours helping neighbours, workers supporting one another through hardship, these activities rarely attract official recognition despite their enormous importance.

Anarchism begins from the opposite perspective. It starts with ordinary people. It recognises that society is built from below. Wealth is produced from below. Communities are sustained from below. Real social power resides there as well. Once we understand this, the spectacle of royal honours begins to look strangely hollow. A king honours people for contributions that were made possible by countless others. The ceremony celebrates individual achievement while obscuring collective effort. It wraps social cooperation in the symbols of hierarchy. We can do better than that.

The struggle against monarchy will not be won through arguments about medals alone. The abolition of honours will not transform society overnight. Yet symbols matter because they express values. They shape expectations. They communicate assumptions about how society should function. Accepting honours from the king reinforces the idea that recognition flows downward from authority. Declining them affirms a different principle. It asserts that dignity does not require royal approval. It reminds us that human worth cannot be bestowed by hereditary institutions.

For those committed to freedom and equality, that is a principle worth defending. The highest honour any person can receive is the respect of their peers and the knowledge that they have contributed to collective liberation. No king can grant that. No king can take it away.

An elderly woman in Gisborne recently told the local paper that she had hoped life might become a little easier. Instead, she fears it is about to become more expensive. Solo parents interviewed about proposed social housing rent reforms expressed similar concerns. They were not discussing abstract questions of planning law or economic theory. They were worried about whether they would be able to afford rent, power and other essentials if the changes led to higher housing costs. Their concerns cut through the technical language that usually dominates housing debates and reveal something much more important. For most working-class people, housing is not an investment strategy or a policy problem. It is the question of whether they can remain in their community, keep a roof over their heads and live with a degree of security and dignity.

Not just in social housing but also in private people are feeling the pinch. Politicians tend to discuss housing through the language of markets. We hear about supply constraints, incentives, development opportunities and investment. The people most affected by housing policy rarely speak in those terms. A pensioner living on a fixed income knows that if rent rises, something else must give way. The heater may stay off for longer during winter. Food shopping becomes more restricted. Medical appointments might be postponed. A solo parent faces similar calculations. There is no spare money waiting in reserve and no simple way to absorb rising costs. Every increase has consequences. The concerns expressed by Gisborne residents are therefore not the product of misunderstanding or irrational fear. They arise from lived experience. They reflect decades of watching housing become steadily less affordable while politicians repeatedly promise that the next reform will solve the problem.

What makes these concerns significant is that they point towards the underlying reality of New Zealand’s housing system. The housing crisis is often presented as a complicated puzzle requiring technical expertise to understand. In reality, the central contradiction is remarkably simple. Most people need housing because they require shelter. A smaller group derives income and wealth from owning housing. A tenant looks at a house and sees somewhere to live. A landlord sees rental income. An investor sees an appreciating asset. A bank sees mortgage repayments. These competing interests shape every housing debate in the country. The problem is not that nobody understands how to provide homes. The problem is that housing has been transformed into a commodity whose primary purpose is increasingly to generate profit.

This transformation did not occur by accident. Over the past four decades successive governments have encouraged the treatment of housing as an investment vehicle. Rising property prices became a measure of economic success. Tax settings, lending practices and public policy all helped create conditions where property ownership became one of the most effective ways to accumulate wealth. For those fortunate enough to own multiple properties, this arrangement has been extremely rewarding. For tenants, young workers and low-income families, it has produced a very different reality. House prices have risen far faster than wages, rents consume an increasing proportion of household income and secure housing has become more difficult to obtain. The benefits and burdens of the system have been distributed unevenly, with those who own property accumulating wealth while those who do not are expected to shoulder the costs.

The situation is particularly acute in regional communities such as Gisborne. Political discussion often focuses on Auckland’s housing market because of its size and visibility, but many provincial towns face similar pressures while possessing fewer resources to absorb them. Wages are often lower, employment opportunities more limited and public services less accessible. Under these conditions, even relatively small increases in housing costs can have significant consequences. An elderly tenant in Gisborne may have far less capacity to absorb a rent increase than a professional homeowner in one of Auckland’s wealthier suburbs. Yet housing reforms are frequently debated as though they affect everyone equally. They do not. The costs of economic change are usually borne by those with the least power and the fewest resources.

For Māori communities these issues cannot be separated from the longer history of colonisation and land dispossession. Contemporary housing inequalities did not emerge in a historical vacuum. The colonisation of Aotearoa involved the large-scale transfer of land into private ownership through confiscation, coercion and unequal legal arrangements. Communities that had previously enjoyed collective relationships to land were progressively alienated from it. The consequences remain visible today in patterns of wealth, home ownership and housing insecurity. When Māori are disproportionately represented among those experiencing overcrowding, poor housing conditions and homelessness, this is not an unfortunate coincidence. It reflects historical processes that continue to shape the present. Any serious discussion of housing in New Zealand must therefore confront the reality that the housing crisis rests upon foundations laid long before the current generation was born.

Yet despite these structural realities, responsibility for housing insecurity is frequently pushed onto individuals. People struggling with rising rents are encouraged to examine their budgeting habits, employment choices or personal decisions. Politicians and commentators often frame housing hardship as a matter of individual responsibility rather than collective failure. This narrative serves an important ideological function because it obscures the role played by property relations themselves. A pensioner worried about rent increases is not struggling because of poor financial management. A young worker locked out of home ownership is not failing because they lack discipline. The problem is that access to a basic human necessity has been subordinated to the pursuit of profit. When housing is treated primarily as a commodity, affordability problems are not an unfortunate side effect. They are a predictable outcome.

The fears expressed by elderly people and solo parents in Gisborne should therefore be understood as part of a much broader social problem. Their concerns reveal the gap between the way housing is discussed by policymakers and the way it is experienced by ordinary people. For those at the top of society, housing represents wealth, investment opportunities and financial security. For those at the bottom, it increasingly represents anxiety, uncertainty and struggle. This divide lies at the heart of New Zealand’s housing crisis. It is not primarily a crisis of supply or planning regulations. It is a crisis produced by a system that treats homes as assets before it treats them as places for human beings to live.

As long as housing remains organised around profit, stories like the one emerging from Gisborne will continue to appear. There will always be another reform, another policy announcement and another promise that the market will eventually deliver affordable housing. Yet the experiences of tenants, pensioners and low-income families suggest a different conclusion. Housing insecurity is not the result of the system malfunctioning. It is the result of the system functioning exactly as intended. A society that allows wealth to be extracted from one of life’s most basic necessities will inevitably produce winners and losers. The elderly woman worrying about her future and the solo parent wondering how to make ends meet are not unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise successful model. They are among its most predictable outcomes.

The latest reporting on youth psychological distress in Tairāwhiti is grim reading, but it is difficult to feel surprised by it anymore. We are told that one in three young people in Gisborne are experiencing moderate psychological distress, and the article presents this as a growing crisis demanding urgent attention. The numbers are serious, and the suffering behind them is real. Young people are clearly struggling. But what is striking is how discussions around youth mental health in New Zealand are almost always framed in ways that avoid confronting the social system producing the misery in the first place. Distress is treated as though it exists in isolation from the conditions people are forced to live under. The language used is clinical, managerial, and depoliticised. We hear about “wellbeing outcomes”, “access to services”, “interventions”, and “resilience”, but very little about poverty, alienation, capitalism, or colonialism. The result is a conversation that recognises suffering while carefully avoiding its root causes.

If one in three young people in Gisborne are psychologically distressed, this should not be viewed as some inexplicable public health anomaly. It should be understood as the predictable outcome of life under a system that organises society around profit instead of human need. Young people are growing up in an environment defined by economic insecurity, social fragmentation, housing stress, ecological anxiety, and increasingly bleak prospects for the future. They are expected to navigate rising costs of living, unstable work, impossible housing markets, underfunded schools and collapsing public services while constantly being told that success or failure is ultimately their individual responsibility. The pressures are relentless, and they are not accidental.

The article briefly gestures toward social pressures affecting rangatahi, but like much mainstream reporting it ultimately reduces distress to something that exists primarily inside individuals. The proposed solutions therefore remain individualistic as well. More support services, better awareness, earlier intervention, improved access to counselling. None of these things are bad in themselves. People absolutely need support, and mental health services in New Zealand are chronically overstretched. But the liberal obsession with treatment after the damage has already been done avoids asking why the damage is occurring on such a massive scale in the first place. Therapy cannot substitute for social transformation. Counselling cannot resolve structural despair. No amount of mindfulness exercises or mental health campaigns can make life feel meaningful in a society where increasing numbers of young people feel economically disposable and socially disconnected.

One of the more revealing moments in the article comes when entrepreneurship is raised as part of the solution for struggling youth. This is presented almost instinctively, as though encouraging young people to become entrepreneurs is an obvious pathway toward empowerment and wellbeing. It says a great deal about the ideological limits of mainstream thinking that even in discussions about psychological distress, the answer eventually circles back to the market. Young people are suffering under capitalism, therefore the proposed solution is to integrate them more deeply into capitalist logic.

Entrepreneurship today is treated almost like a secular religion. Politicians, business leaders, and media commentators constantly promote the idea that the path out of insecurity lies in innovation, hustle, self-branding, and small business ambition. The entrepreneur becomes the ideal neoliberal citizen: endlessly adaptable, self-motivated, individually responsible, permanently productive. Structural problems disappear into personal initiative. If opportunities are scarce, invent your own. If wages are low, start a side hustle. If work is insecure, monetise your passions. If the future feels hopeless, become a “creator” or “founder”.

But this mythology collapses under even basic scrutiny. Most small businesses fail. Most entrepreneurs do not become wealthy success stories. In reality, entrepreneurship under capitalism often means precarious self-employment, unstable income, debt, stress, overwork, and the constant pressure to commodify every aspect of your life. The romantic image of the entrepreneur masks the reality that capitalism increasingly offloads risk from corporations and the state onto individuals themselves.

More importantly, entrepreneurship does nothing to address the structural causes of youth distress. A young person struggling with housing insecurity, poverty, isolation, family stress, or hopelessness about the future is not liberated simply because they are encouraged to “think entrepreneurially”. In many ways, this rhetoric intensifies the problem because it deepens the idea that individuals alone are responsible for overcoming systemic conditions. If you fail, it becomes your fault for not hustling hard enough.

There is also something deeply contradictory about presenting entrepreneurship as a solution in regions already suffering from economic neglect and inequality. Tairāwhiti does not need more motivational speeches about innovation culture. It needs material investment, housing, healthcare, decent wages, infrastructure, and community control over resources. It needs collective solutions, not another version of neoliberal individualism dressed up as empowerment.

The entrepreneurial fantasy also reflects a broader ideological shift under neoliberal capitalism where collective politics is replaced by individual aspiration. Previous generations of working-class politics at least recognised that social problems required collective struggle and structural change. Today, even despair is increasingly privatised. Instead of asking why communities are impoverished, people are encouraged to become personal brands within the very system impoverishing them.

Young people today are inheriting a world defined by crisis. Climate catastrophe hangs permanently over the horizon. Stable employment is disappearing. Rent devours huge portions of income. Home ownership becomes more impossible every year. Education increasingly functions as a debt-producing conveyor belt into insecure labour. Social life itself becomes more commodified and isolated. Even leisure is increasingly mediated through screens, algorithms, and corporate platforms designed to monetise attention and insecurity. It is hardly shocking that distress levels are rising. What would be shocking is if they were not.

Capitalism produces alienation because it reduces human beings to economic units. Our worth becomes tied to productivity, employability, and consumption. Relationships become transactional. Time becomes fragmented around work and survival. Communities weaken as competition intensifies. Under these conditions, anxiety and depression are not individual malfunctions but rational responses to a profoundly unhealthy society. The system constantly generates insecurity and then blames individuals for failing to cope with it.

This is especially visible among young people because they are often the first to feel the contradictions most sharply. They are told from childhood that if they work hard enough, stay positive enough, and make the right choices, they can build a decent future for themselves. But the material reality surrounding them increasingly contradicts this narrative. They see parents working exhausting hours while still struggling financially. They see graduates trapped in debt and precarious employment. They see governments endlessly discussing housing affordability while homelessness grows more visible every year. They see corporations making record profits during a cost-of-living crisis. They see politicians speak about climate action while continuing to expand industries driving ecological destruction. The future offered to many young people is one of permanent instability dressed up in the language of opportunity.

In regions like Tairāwhiti these pressures are intensified by long histories of colonial violence and economic neglect. Māori communities have experienced generations of dispossession, land theft, state violence, and deliberate underdevelopment. Poverty in these communities did not emerge naturally. It was created politically and economically. Colonisation shattered communal systems of life and replaced them with exploitative structures designed to enrich settlers and the capitalist economy. The effects continue across generations through inequality, housing insecurity, over-policing, family stress, addiction, and reduced access to resources and opportunities. When Māori youth experience high levels of psychological distress, this cannot be separated from the historical and ongoing realities of colonisation.

Yet mainstream discussions often strip this history away. Distress becomes individualised and medicalised rather than understood politically. The same state that participated in destroying Māori social structures now presents itself as the neutral manager of the resulting social crisis. Governments promise targeted interventions while maintaining the economic conditions producing suffering in the first place. It is a cycle that repeats endlessly. Communities are destabilised through poverty and marginalisation, then handed underfunded services to manage the fallout.

There is also something deeply revealing about the way resilience is constantly discussed in these conversations. Young people are repeatedly told they need greater resilience, better coping mechanisms, improved emotional regulation, and healthier habits. Again, none of these things are inherently bad. But resilience discourse often functions ideologically. It subtly shifts responsibility away from social structures and onto individuals. If you are struggling, the implication becomes that you lack the psychological tools to cope properly. The focus turns toward adapting individuals to unhealthy conditions rather than changing the conditions themselves.

A society that demands endless resilience from its young people is often a society failing them profoundly.

The reality is that many forms of psychological distress are deeply social in origin. Loneliness, hopelessness, anxiety, addiction, despair, and even interpersonal violence do not emerge in a vacuum. They are shaped by the environments people live within. Capitalism fragments collective life. It isolates people from one another while simultaneously intensifying competition between them. It creates constant insecurity while promoting impossible ideals of success and happiness. Social media often amplifies these dynamics, but social media itself is not the root problem. It is a technological expression of broader capitalist relations. Endless comparison, self-branding, performative identity, commodified attention, and algorithmic insecurity all mirror the wider values of capitalist society.

Politicians frequently describe youth mental health as though it were a technical policy challenge requiring improved coordination between agencies and service providers. But the scale of the crisis suggests something much deeper. If distress is becoming normalised among huge sections of the population, perhaps the problem is not simply access to treatment but the structure of society itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fight for anarchism is the fight for peace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/

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