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The right to vote is seen by most as a necessary prerequisite for freedom across the world. People have fought and died for the right to vote in elections. Women across the world fought bitter battles for the right to vote. So why should anarchists question this as a right worth having?

The entire electoral show is designed to encourage us to believe that not only does our vote matter, but that it is the most important decision we could possibly make. Indeed, voting is held so sacred by many that the mere mention of not voting is enough to cause outrage. Pointing out that our vote makes no difference anyway, will see you accused of being apathetic, privileged, immature, and even being part of the alt-right!

But as noted anarchist Vernon Richards wrote,

“So long as we have capitalism and government, the job of anarchists is to fight both, and at the same time encourage people to take what steps they can to run their own lives.” [“Anarchists and Voting,” pp. 176–87, The Raven, No. 14, p. 179].

Electoralism ensures that a statist perspective becomes dominant. Everything is seen in terms of state intervention and following the decisions of the leaders, which has always proved deadly to encouraging a spirit of revolt, self-management, and self-help – the very keys to creating change in a society. Rather than being something other people discuss on behalf of working-class people, anarchists argue that politics should not be a specialised activity in the hands of the so-called experts (i.e., politicians) but instead lie in the hands of those directly affected by it in the process of participation, direct action, and self-management. Those that channel any “political” conclusions into electoral politics distort discussions into only what is possible within the current system. Given this, is it surprising that anarchists argue that the people “must organise their powers apart from and against the State?” [Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 376].

Abstentionists get told, “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain about the outcome,” but we consider the opposite to be true. It is those who have voted, who have agreed to the rules, and agreed to be governed by the winners who cannot complain. It is those who do not participate who have the right to complain about the outcome more than anyone else.

We get told that the reality is that voting does change things, but we can, and do, deny that. Voting attempts to provide the population with the illusion of change while in reality it reinforces the current system. A policy here and there may change, the faces may change, but the system of a wealthy minority ruling a poorer majority remains. People will continually be telling us that abstaining from voting will help the right-wing win the election, that it is better if the lesser evil wins. This may possibly be the case (although the argument is far from convincing), but why should we base our society on a compromise with evil? In fact, the “progressive” left wing party you vote for will often be ready to take the same actions as a right-wing government when it comes to imposing anti-working-class action upon us, (as we shall show later in this essay the state has a corrupting effect on those who enter politics with high principles). There should be a better way, and we say the dismantling of government, in all its existing and potential forms is that way.

Most of the left wing in Aotearoa, and quite a few people who claim to identify as anarchists, will support reformist parties in the upcoming election. You will hear them saying things like “vote Labour (or Green) without illusions,” or “vote Labour/Green but build a socialist alternative.” The slogans that these others may shout only reflect the idea that change can and should be brought about by a small number of elite politicians. Abstentionists do not say things like this. There are many problems with our electoral system of democracy, which we shall run through, but we must state that first and foremost, as anarchists, we see voting as against running contrary to our anti-statist and anti-hierarchy principles, and we see electoralism as contrary to our goals and practice. It reinforces the idea that society is divided into order-givers and order-takers. Famed French anarchist, Elisee Reclus, put it well when he said,

“Everything that can be said about the suffrage may be summed up in a sentence. To vote is to give up your own power. To elect a master or many, for a long or short time, is to resign one’s liberty… Instead of entrusting the defense of your interests to others, see to the matter by yourselves. Instead of trying to choose advisers that will guide you in future actions, do the thing yourselves, and do it now!…. Do not vote!”

We are against is a system that allows for us to tick a box every few years for candidates that are selected for us, and policies that are chosen for us, which gives whoever received the most X’s to make decisions that affect our lives in all ways. Much of our so-called “democracy” is bogus and undemocratic, as many of the hundreds of thousands of kiwis who do not vote understand. Politicians, once elected, have no compunction to keep their promises they made while campaigning, they can, and do, pretty much what they like because we have no power to recall them until the next election comes along, when again we will be given a barrage of promises that don’t have to be kept, and mostly won’t be kept. To call this democracy and representative of our demands is a blatant falsehood.

So, to continue, voting in government elections is an inherently authoritarian activity, and authoritarian means can never yield libertarian results. In the words of Emma Goldman, “participation in elections means the transfer of one’s will and decisions to another, which is contrary to the fundamental principles of anarchism.” [Emma Goldman, Vision on Fire, p. 89]. The very act of voting is an attempt on the part of the voters to delegate control over their own life to another person. While states of various sorts provide some services and benefits to their citizens, the institution of government also maintains and makes use of the police, the courts, the prison, the military, etc, to coercively interfere in the lives of its subjects. For anarchists, it is a basic belief that individuals should not have the authority to coerce others, and therefore they should not put themselves in a position to delegate such authority to anyone else, which, after all, is the essence of voting. Noone, whether in or out of government, should have such power. Anarchists who oppose political power and coercion of any sort cannot advocate voting in national elections and stay true to the principles of anarchism. This is a system that divides us into a massive majority ruled by a tiny minority, and which allows for power, wealth, and privilege to be ever more concentrated into the hands of that minority. The state is not a neutral body which can be used by all classes in society to protect their interests, rather it is an instrument of class rule that exists to protect the wealth and power of the ruling class and enforce their property rights and authority.

What we are offered as democracy is a farce, a dictatorship of capital devoid of any real choice. Even worse is that this form of democracy gives the illusion that we, the people, have the power to change it, while simultaneously reinforcing it. No wonder all politicians agree on one point – that we should vote. They want you to sanction the process by which they acquire their position, because without that sanction they have no legitimacy, and it is that claim to legitimacy they use to dismiss any actions taken by oppressed or marginalised groups outside of parliament as illegitimate. Before going to cast your vote remember that there is a real limit to what governments can do anyway – winning an election is not taking power. The real decision-making takes place in the boardrooms of corporations, not in parliament. Political parties, even in a majority government, can only do what capitalism allows them to. The politicians’ only argument is to organise capitalism in a “kinder way,” but anarchists want to smash capitalism, not waste our time trying to make it kinder.

MPs are little more than the committee for managing the affairs of capitalism. We cannot elect the revolution, or even a radical government, because capitalism will use its economic power, in the form of things such as sanctions and the flight of capital, to punish anyone who wishes to radically reform society, regardless if the majority voted for it or not. Even worse, in some situations the elected government may well see itself undermined by outside influences, even facing invasion and war. Realistically though the nature of the state means that capitalists rarely have to use these tactics.

While many radicals may be tempted to agree with this analysis of the limitations of electioneering and voting, very few will automatically agree with the anarchist arguments of not voting. Instead, they argue that we should combine direct action with electioneering, and they will suggest that the state is too powerful to leave in the hands of right-wingers. Those that say this though ultimately fail to take into account the nature of the state and the corrupting effect it has on politicians. If history is anything to go by, the net effect of radicals using elections is that by the time they are elected to office the radicals will happily do what they once would have condemned the right-wing for doing.

Given that we have had many decades of universal suffrage, not only in Aotearoa but worldwide, and we have seen the rise of Labour and other so-called progressive parties aiming to use that system to effect change, it is sad to say that we are probably further away from socialism than ever. The simple fact is that these parties have spent so much time trying to win elections that they have stopped even thinking about creating socialist alternatives in our communities and workplaces.

The state shapes people. As Noam Chomsky argues, “within the constraints of existing state institutions, policies will be determined by people representing centres of concentrated power in the private economy, people who, in their institutional roles, will not be swayed by moral appeals but by the costs consequent upon the decisions they make — not because they are ‘bad people,’ but because that is what the institutional roles demands.”

It was Bakunin who predicted in 1869 (three years before Marx hoisted his parliamentarianism onto the First International) that when “the workers … send common workers … to Legislative Assemblies … The worker-deputies, transplanted into a bourgeois environment, into an atmosphere of purely bourgeois ideas, will in fact cease to be workers and, becoming Statesmen, they will become bourgeois … For men do not make their situations; on the contrary, men are made by them.” [The Basic Bakunin, p. 108] Similarly, Krotpotkin argued that “in proportion as the socialists become a power in the present bourgeois society and State, their socialism must die out.” [Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets, p. 189]. History has undoubtedly proven the anarchists correct.

We cannot repeat this often enough, electioneering results in the party using it to become more moderate and reformist — indeed the party often becomes the victim of its own success. In order to gain votes, the party must appear “moderate,” “responsible” and “sensible” and that means working within the system. This has meant that (to use Rudolf Rocker’s words),

“Participation in the politics of the bourgeois States has not brought the labour movement a hair’s-breadth nearer to Socialism, but thanks to this method, Socialism has almost been completely crushed and condemned to insignificance… Participation in parliamentary politics has affected the Socialist Labour movement like an insidious poison.” [Anarcho-Syndicalism, p. 49]

Every time a so-called or Labour party has come to power, they have acted in a way that makes them almost indistinguishable from their more right-wing opponents. Despite their promises to act for the working class, once in government they always seem to be more concerned with being ‘respectable’ and ‘reasonable,’ and not doing anything that would offend the rich, the real rulers of our society. Nowadays we have ‘progressed’ to the stage where parties do not even pretend to campaign on the basis of representing the working class, limiting themselves to saying they are more “trustworthy,” or are a “safe pair of hands” to control the economy. Socialism is an embarrassment from the past.

The Labour Party in Aotearoa has been one of a history of compromise with capitalism and anti-working class action. Three quotes from Peter Fraser, early once a self-proclaimed revolutionary socialist and Labour prime minister 1940–49 demonstrates this. In 1913 Fraser was writing: “Industrial Unionism plus revolutionary political action, in my opinion, provide the most effective and expeditious means of reaching [socialism].” By 1918, Fraser had moderated his views. Instead of revolution he called for “the peaceful and legal transformation of society from private to public ownership and the increasing of democratic control over land and industry.” By the early 1930s Fraser saw Labour’s main objective as a simple one: jobs for the unemployed.

Janet Biehl sums up the effects on the German Green Party of trying to combine radical electioneering with direct action:

 “The German Greens, once a flagship for the green movement worldwide, should now be considered stink normal, as their de facto boss himself declares. Now a repository of careerists, the Greens stand out only for the rapidity with which the old cadre of careerism, party politics, and business-as-usual once again played itself out in their saga of compromise and betrayal of principle. Under the superficial veil of their old values – a very thin veil indeed, now – they can seek positions and make compromises to their heart’s content… They have become ‘practical,’ ‘realistic’ and ‘power orientated.’ This former New Left ages badly, not only in Germany but everywhere else. But then, it happened with the S.P.D. in August 1914, then why not with Die Grunen in 1991? So it did.” [“Party or Movement?,” Greenline, no. 89, p. 14]

Here in Aotearoa the effect has been the same on our own Green Party, whose evolution has seen it tie itself firmly to sensible budgeting and relying on market forces to solve our problems and moved from something of an activist party to one of “professional politicians.”

It is not enough to blame the individuals elected to office for these betrayals, arguing that we need to elect better politicians, or select better leaders. For anarchists nothing could be more wrong as it is the means used, not the individuals involved, which is the problem. Writing of his personal experience as a member of Parliament, Proudhon recounted that,

 “[a]s soon as I set foot in the parliamentary Sinai, I ceased to be in touch with the masses; because I was absorbed by my legislative work, I entirely lost sight of the current events … One must have lived in that isolator which is called a National Assembly to realise how the men who are most completely ignorant of the state of the country are almost always those who represent it. “There was “ignorance of daily facts” and “fear of the people” (“the sickness of all those who belong to authority”) for “the people, for those in power, are the enemy.” [Property is Theft!, p. 19]

Ultimately, as syndicalist Emile Pouget argued, this fate was inevitable as any socialist politician “could not break the mould; he is only a cog in the machine of oppression and whether he wishes it or not he must, as minister, participate in the job of crushing the proletariat.” [quoted by Jeremy Jennings, Syndicalism in France, p. 36]

Ultimately, supporters of using political action can only appeal to the good intentions and character of their candidates, and hope for the best. Anarchists, however, in contrast to Marxists and other radicals, continually give an analysis of the structures of government and the other influences that will determine how the character of the successful candidates and political parties will change. Only anarchists continually present an analysis of the effects of electoralism and its effects on radicals. History is our proof, electoralism, as Bakunin put it, “inevitably draws and enmeshes its partisans, under the pretext of political tactics, into ceaseless compromises with governments and political parties; that is, it pushes them toward downright reaction.” [The Basic Bakunin p. 288].

Not only is making use of the ballot box as a tactic harmful to politicians and their parties, but it also has a negative effect on the rest of the population too. Support for electioneering is at odds with us being in favour of collective mass action. It hinders the arguments for collective organisation and action as the voters expect their representative to act and fight for them. Political actions become solely considered to be parliamentary activities, made for the people by their representatives. There is no other role for the people than that of passive support and spectators. So, instead of working-class self-activity and self-determination, there results in a non-working-class leadership acting for the people. The real causes and solutions to the problems we face are not understood and ignored by those at the top of the party and rarely discussed in the open, less they damage their chance of re-election.

There is nothing more isolated and individualistic than voting. It is the act of one person in a booth by themselves. It is the total opposite of collective struggle. The individual is alone before, during and after the act of voting. Indeed, unlike direct action, which, by its very nature, throws up new forms of organisation in order to manage and coordinate the struggle, voting creates no alternative forms of working-class self-management. Nor can it. It simply empowers an individual (the politician) to act on behalf of a collection of other individuals (the voters). Political parties forsake direct action in favour of success in elections (indeed, winning elections will soon enough become the be-all and end-all of their activity). Also, if radicals are elected the whole focal point of struggle changes. Rather than direct struggle against the state and the boss, this is seen as being no longer needed as the elected representatives will act, or people will think they will act, and so do not act themselves. They have elected someone to fight for them and so do not see, or realise, the need to fight themselves.

In a lot of ways, direct action is a more effective means for people to have a say in society than voting is. Voting is a lottery, your preferred candidate may not get elected, and all the time and energy put into supporting them is wasted. With direct action, you can be sure that your work will offer some kind of results, and the experience you gain, the lessons learnt, and networks and connections built up in the process, cannot be taken away from you.

Also voting is only possible when election time comes around, direct action can be applied whenever the need rises. Relying on electoralism means you can only address whatever topics are current in the political agendas of candidates, while direct action can be applied to deal with the issues in every aspect of your life.

In other words, our support for direct action is linked with our rejection of voting, and our call to not vote stresses the importance of direct action, as well as having an important educational effect in highlighting that the state is not neutral, but serves to protect class rule, and that meaningful change only comes from below. So just not voting is not enough, we need to organise and fight. In the words of an anarchist member of the Jura Federation writing in 1875,

 “Instead of begging the State for a law compelling employers to make them work only so many hours, the trade associations directly impose this reform on the employers; in this way, instead of a legal text which remains a dead letter, a real economic change is effected by the direct initiative of the workers … if the workers devoted all their activity and energy to the organisation of their trades into societies of resistance, trade federations, local and regional, if, by meetings, lectures, study circles, papers and pamphlets, they kept up a permanent socialist and revolutionary agitation; if by linking practice to theory, they realised directly, without any bourgeois and governmental intervention, all immediately possible reforms, reforms advantageous not to a few workers but to the labouring mass — certainly then the cause of labour would be better served than … legal agitation.” [quoted by Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, p. 226]

So, we urge people to not vote in order to encourage activity, not apathy. Instead of spending our time urging people to vote for one set or another of groups offering slightly different ways to manage capitalism, we raise the option of choosing to rule yourself, to organise with others in your workplace, in your community, everywhere. We offer the option of something you cannot vote for, a new society. Instead of waiting for others to make some changes for you, along with all anarchists we urge people to do it themselves. In this way, we can build an alternative to the state, which can reduce its power now and, in the long run, replace it. This is the core of our anarchist principles and why anarchists say do not vote.

By making the principled choice not to participate in the election, we open an opportunity to question the acceptance of the status quo. We consider it is important to stand up and remind people what is wrong with voting. Maybe by consciously not voting, and explaining to others why we are not voting, we can change people’s beliefs about government. We use this opportunity to say that there are better, more meaningful ways to achieve a fairer, freer, more meaningful life; that we do not need to resort to the state to solve problems.

As anarchists we simply think that our policy should be the destruction of the State rather than looking to work with it. We believe this stance is essential if we are to be able to promote anarchism, and if we are going to mark a divide between others and ourselves and place ourselves firmly outside the activity and the political games of all the other parties. We believe this is essential so as not to be seen as another bunch of leftists after votes, and to avoid being tainted by the inevitable failure of any government to meet our needs. We believe in revolution and have a revolutionary ideology and we want to win people over to anarchism. If people started associating Anarchism with the political parties, then it would be difficult for people to understand what Anarchism actually is.

By arguing for our anti-electoral position, we can get our ideas across about the nature of the current system, how elected politicians are controlled and shaped by the state, and how the state acts to protect capitalism. In addition, it allows us to present our ideas of direct action and encourage those disillusioned with political parties and the current system to become anarchists by presenting a viable alternative to the sham of party politics. For, after all, a sizeable percentage of not just non-voters but voters too are disillusioned with the current set-up. Many who do not vote do so for essentially political reasons, such as being fed up with the political system, failing to see any major differences between the parties, or recognition that the candidates do not represent their interests. Many who do vote do so simply against the other candidate, seeing them as the least-worst option. This is an opportunity when people are talking a little more about politics to challenge the notion that important decisions can only be made by a few and put across our anarchist ideas.

This essay started with a quote from Vernon Richards, and will finish with one,

“If the anarchist movement has a role to play in practical politics it is surely that of suggesting to, and persuading, as many people as possible that their freedom from the Hitlers, Francos and the rest, depends not on the right to vote or securing a majority of votes ‘for the candidate of one’s choice,’ but on evolving new forms of political and social organisation which aim at the direct participation of the people, with the consequent weakening of the power, as well of the social role, of government in the life of the community.” [“Anarchists and Voting,” pp. 176–87, The Raven, no. 14, pp. 177–8]

So… Do not vote and let us start making a real difference.

the anarchist case for abstentionism in elections _ now available as downloadable pdf

A piece of Christchurch that the property market abandoned after the earthquakes has become home to people abandoned by the property market. The old Bexley neighbourhood was largely cleared after liquefaction made conventional residential development impossible. Houses disappeared, streets remained and the land sat waiting for whatever official purpose would eventually be found for it. Into that gap came people who needed somewhere to live. They arrived in cars, vans, buses and tents. Some were working. Some were retired. Some had children. They did what people have always done when the institutions around them fail, they improvised. A community grew. Earlier this year about 40 people were living around Wetlands Grove; reports now put the number at more than 100. Christchurch City Council has told them they must leave by 28 February 2027 because the area is intended for wetland development. There is an obvious temptation to treat this as a story about homelessness, council planning or the difficulties of finding somewhere suitable for a group of people living in vehicles. It is all of those things, but underneath them sits a much simpler question. What is land for? The answer given by our economic system is that land belongs to whoever has legal title to it, and its legitimate use is determined by owners, planners and institutions. The people actually living on it remain secondary. They may sleep there, look after one another there and make the place usable through their own effort, but none of that gives them any meaningful claim to it. Their relationship to the place exists only for as long as the legal owner tolerates it. That distinction between ownership and use lies close to the heart of the anarchist criticism of private property.

The people living at Wetlands Grove have already demonstrated something that governments spend enormous amounts of money trying unsuccessfully to manufacture through policy documents – people can organise social life themselves. Earlier reporting described an informal community growing around buses, vans and cars, with neighbours helping one another through winter and a communal tent being established as shared space. One man who had been sleeping in a small tent was helped into an old car when the cold became severe. Council rubbish collection and portable toilets made conditions more bearable, but the social organisation of the place came largely from the people living there. Moko, one of the informal figures in the community, was working full-time on an on-call road crew. Others were pensioners. Ngawai Timu described abandoning a $470-a-week rental because she felt she was spending her life paying somebody else’s mortgage. Polly Stewart was surviving on the pension in a bus. Families were living there too, including a woman with several children living from a bus. These details matter because homelessness is constantly spoken about as though it were primarily a pathology of homeless people. Addiction, mental illness, poor budgeting, antisocial behaviour and bad choices are summoned as explanations because those explanations leave the social order intact. They allow us to imagine that housed people possess some quality that homeless people lack. Wetlands Grove makes that story harder to sustain. When people with jobs cannot obtain housing, when pensioners decide rent leaves too little for ordinary life, and when families find themselves competing with dozens of others for a private rental, the problem is no longer plausibly located inside the individual. There are certainly people living rough who struggle with addiction or serious psychological distress. There are also people who get up and go to work from a tent. A housing system that cannot reliably house either has failed at the most elementary level.

New Zealand has become remarkably skilled at describing this failure without challenging the institution producing it. We talk about housing supply, affordability pressures and housing need. We devise eligibility categories and waiting lists. We construct administrative pathways through emergency housing, transitional housing, community housing and social housing. Every stage acquires its own assessments and rules. The language becomes more sophisticated while people remain without homes. At the 2023 Census, Statistics New Zealand estimated that at least 112,496 people were experiencing severe housing deprivation, around 2.3 percent of the usually resident population. The estimate itself is likely conservative because hundreds of thousands of people could not be conclusively classified. As of 30 June 2026 there were still 19,002 applicants on the Housing Register, meaning people already assessed as eligible for social housing and waiting to be matched with somewhere suitable. Behind every administrative term is the same physical requirement humans have had for as long as there have been humans – somewhere safe to sleep. Capitalism has managed to turn that requirement into an investment class. A house can simultaneously be a place necessary for human survival and an asset expected to generate rent, capital gain or both. When those purposes conflict, ownership wins. Ngawai Timu’s remark about paying somebody else’s mortgage is therefore more politically perceptive than most discussion of the housing crisis. Rent appears to be payment for accommodation, but economically it transfers part of a tenant’s income to somebody who controls access to land and housing. The tenant works. The landlord owns. Money moves from the former to the latter because the legal structure of property permits one person to charge another for access to something they need in order to live.

Anarcho-communists have always distinguished personal possession from property used to extract income or control the lives of others. Nobody is proposing that a person should lose the bed they sleep in or the home they actually occupy. The argument concerns the social power created when houses and land can be accumulated and withheld by people who do not use them, then rented back to those who do. Wetlands Grove shows the opposite principle operating almost accidentally. The residents occupy land because they need it. Their claim arises from use. They have created relationships there and made forms of mutual aid possible there. Under capitalist property law none of this ultimately counts for much. Christchurch City Council owns the land and has another use planned for it, so the residents must go. There is an environmental complication here that should not be ducked. The council intends to restore tidal wetlands in an area profoundly altered by earthquake damage, and wetland restoration is worthwhile. The answer cannot be to demand that ecological restoration be sacrificed so people can remain indefinitely on land without proper sanitation or infrastructure. The revealing part is that we are being offered a choice between the wetland and the people living there. A wealthy society ought to be capable of restoring an ecosystem while guaranteeing every person displaced by that work somewhere secure to live. If it cannot do both, the problem is political. The ecological project becomes another deadline imposed upon people who already have almost no control over the circumstances of their lives.

This is where the word “choice” begins doing dubious work. Some Wetlands Grove residents have said they prefer living there. Ngawai Timu spoke about the freedom of the place. Polly Stewart compared the prospect of living in a Kāinga Ora apartment unfavourably with her life in the bus. Those views should be taken seriously. People should be allowed far greater freedom over how they live than either the private housing market or the bureaucratic state usually permits. Cooperative settlements, tiny homes, communal land, papakāinga, vehicle-based living and other arrangements should not automatically be treated as deviant because they fail to resemble a suburban house with a mortgage. Yet freedom requires genuine alternatives. Choosing a bus because conventional rent would consume most of your pension is a peculiar form of freedom. Choosing a tent because every rental viewing has another 30 applicants is not the same as freely deciding to camp. Capitalism routinely transforms constrained decisions into evidence of personal preference. A worker is “free” to accept an employer’s conditions because technically nobody forces them to take that particular job. A tenant is “free” to accept the rent because another landlord might charge the same amount down the road. A homeless person is “free” to reject temporary accommodation that is unsuitable for their life. Formal choice conceals the distribution of power underneath it.

The state cannot easily solve this because the state is one of the institutions maintaining the property relations that produced the problem. Governments can build public housing, and they should. They can regulate landlords, fund Housing First, provide emergency accommodation and prevent evictions. Those measures can keep people alive and they matter enormously to anyone who needs them. An anarchist criticism of the state does not require indifference to whether somebody has a warm house tonight. We should support measures that materially improve people’s lives while refusing to mistake them for the resolution of the underlying conflict. The current Kāinga Ora programme illustrates the contradiction. The Government says around 900 state houses a year may be sold as part of stock renewal while new construction and redevelopment will prevent the total national stock from declining. From an administrative viewpoint this is portfolio management. From the viewpoint of someone sleeping in a vehicle while houses are treated as units in a managed asset base, the language feels rather different. Housing remains something allocated through institutions according to scarcity. The scarcity itself becomes normal.

Wetlands Grove also unsettles another comfortable assumption that order flows downward from authority. The community appeared before the council had a plan for it. People found the place, negotiated relationships with one another and established ways of getting by. That does not mean it is an anarchist commune, nor should people living in poverty be turned into political mascots. There will be arguments there, difficult personalities and all the problems found anywhere humans live together. Anarchism does not depend on romanticising people. What matters is that social organisation emerged without a landlord designing it or an agency assigning everyone a place. The residents discovered one another through a shared material predicament and began constructing a community around it. Their circumstances are harsh, but the impulse underneath what they have made is recognisable. Mutual aid begins with the discovery that another person’s survival is connected with your own.

The bitter part is that once people create something workable in the gaps left by capitalism, authority often arrives to remind them that the gap was never theirs. Squatted buildings are emptied while people sleep outside. Informal settlements are cleared because they breach regulations written for a world in which everyone supposedly has conventional housing. People living in vehicles are moved from one parking area to another. Public space is made hostile to anyone attempting to remain there too long. None of this creates housing. It manages visibility. The homeless person disappears from one street and appears in another, allowing the first location to be recorded as a successful intervention. Wetlands Grove could easily follow the same pattern. On 1 March 2027 the council may possess an empty road ready for ecological work while the people who lived there are scattered across cars, spare rooms, emergency accommodation and some other piece of land where they will eventually be noticed again. If that happens, nothing will have been solved. Geography will have changed.

The anarcho-communist response begins somewhere else. Housing should be organised around use rather than profit. Land should cease to function primarily as a commodity. Housing that people need should not be held from them because somebody else possesses a stronger legal claim backed by money. Communities should have the power and resources to shape the places where they live, with decisions made by those affected rather than handed down through property ownership or distant administration. That does not supply a magic blueprint for Wetlands Grove. It does tell us what a decent outcome would look like. Nobody currently living there should be made homeless by its closure. People who want conventional housing should receive secure, permanent homes before they are required to leave. Those who prefer communal or vehicle-based living should be involved in establishing another legal, serviced site rather than being forced back into a model of housing they have rejected. Families should not have to demonstrate months or years of escalating desperation before they become sufficiently urgent for assistance. A pensioner should be able to rent without sacrificing the income needed to live. A full-time worker should not finish a shift and return to a tent.

Perhaps the most revealing sentence spoken at Wetlands Grove came from a resident who rejected the description of the people there as homeless. “We’re refugees in our own country,” he said. The phrase is uncomfortable, but it captures something important about dispossession. These are people surrounded by houses, roads, supermarkets and all the accumulated wealth of a developed society, yet somehow unable to secure a small portion of it in which to live. Nothing has physically disappeared. New Zealand has timber, builders and land. We have engineers and electricians. We know how to construct houses. What stands between the person and the home is a network of ownership, prices, debt and permissions that we have been taught to regard as natural.

There is nothing natural about it. Property is a social arrangement. Rent is a social arrangement. The rule that one person may own several houses while another sleeps in a car is a social arrangement. These things continue because institutions enforce them and because we have lived with them long enough to mistake familiarity for inevitability. Wetlands Grove briefly exposes the arrangement by turning it upside down. People found unused land and used it. They made homes where there were no houses. They built a community in the remains of one destroyed by an earthquake. Now the official city has returned with plans for the land and the authority to move them on. The question facing Christchurch is therefore larger than what should happen to a hundred people beside an old road in Bexley. It is whether the right to exclude people from land should continue to carry more weight than the human need for somewhere to live. Until we are prepared to answer that question, New Zealand will keep treating homelessness downstream. We will fund programmes, adjust waiting lists and move people from one temporary arrangement to another while leaving the machinery producing housing insecurity largely untouched. Then we will act surprised when another Wetlands Grove appears.

It will appear. It has to. People need somewhere to go.

The death of a New Zealand man, Samuel Haines,  fighting in Ukraine was reported in the familiar language used whenever ordinary people are consumed by war. He was described through his personal history, his motivations, his family and his decision to travel across the world to take part in a conflict that had nothing to do with the daily lives of most people in Aotearoa. What was not highlighted was the fact that the tragedy of war is that those who suffer most are usually not the people who create wars. Politicians, generals and corporate interests make decisions from offices far away from the front lines, while working-class people are asked to sacrifice their bodies in the name of nations they did not create and systems they do not control.

The death of a Kiwi volunteer in Ukraine raises questions that go beyond one individual. Why are people from countries on the other side of the world being drawn into a conflict between major powers? Why has a war involving Russia, Ukraine, NATO and competing geopolitical interests been presented to millions of people as a simple battle between good and evil? And what does the presence of far-right nationalist forces within Ukraine’s military tell us about the way states use ideology and violence when they prepare societies for war?

For anarchists, the answers do not begin with choosing which flag deserves our loyalty. The history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries shows that nationalism has repeatedly been used to convince ordinary people that the interests of their rulers are their own. Workers who have more in common with each other than with their own governments are encouraged to see each other as enemies because states require obedience, sacrifice and the willingness to kill. The war in Ukraine is no exception. It is a conflict shaped by Russian imperial ambitions, Ukrainian nationalism, NATO expansion, Western strategic interests and the wider competition between global powers. The people trapped inside this struggle are paying the price for decisions made by governments that claim to represent them.

Sam Haines ended up fighting and dying as a volunteer militia as part of the Azov battalion that emerged in 2014 during the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Its early period was associated with individuals and organisations connected to far-right nationalist politics. Some of its founders had histories linked to ultranationalist movements, and the organisation used symbols and imagery that attracted criticism because of their associations with European fascist traditions. Scholars, journalists and human rights organisations have documented these connections. When Azov was incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard, it became an official military unit rather than an independent militia. Some argue that integration changed the organisation and that its fighters have since played a significant role in defending Ukrainian territory. Critics sttae that formal incorporation does not erase its ideological origins or the influence that nationalist movements gained through wartime conditions. Denying or minimising the reality of these movements serves the interests of those who want war narratives to remain simple and unquestionable.

The uncomfortable truth is that states have often relied on extremist movements when those movements are useful. Governments that present themselves as defenders of civilisation have repeatedly made alliances with forces they would condemn under different circumstances. During wartime, groups willing to use violence are often granted influence because military effectiveness becomes more important than political principles. This pattern is not unique to Ukraine. It has appeared throughout history wherever states have faced crises and sought to mobilise society around national struggle. The machinery of war creates conditions where authoritarian ideas can grow because war rewards hierarchy, obedience and the belief that violence can solve political problems.

The debate around NATO’s role in Ukraine is another area where discussion is often reduced to slogans. One side argues that NATO is a defensive alliance whose support for Ukraine is a necessary response to Russian aggression. The other argues that NATO expansion after the collapse of the Soviet Union created a security crisis that helped produce the conditions for war. An anarchist analysis should be sceptical of both state narratives because both begin from the assumption that the interests of governments and military institutions should determine the future of ordinary people.

NATO expansion did not happen in a vacuum. After the end of the Cold War, Western governments continued to extend their political and military influence into Eastern Europe. Countries that had once existed within the Soviet sphere joined a Western military alliance that Russia had long viewed as a strategic threat. From Moscow’s perspective, NATO’s movement closer to its borders represented a challenge to its regional power. From the perspective of countries that had experienced domination by the Soviet Union, joining NATO represented a search for security against future Russian aggression.

Great powers have always justified their actions as defensive. The United States has built military bases around the world while claiming to protect global security. NATO presents itself as a shield against authoritarianism while expanding its influence through military alliances. States rarely describe themselves as aggressors. They present their actions as necessary responses to the actions of others. This is how imperial competition operates. Each power claims it is responding. Each claims it is acting reluctantly. Each claims that its violence is necessary because the other side started it. Meanwhile, ordinary people are sent to die.

The idea that a worker from New Zealand, Britain, Poland, Russia or Ukraine should risk their life because of disputes between governments is one of the central illusions of nationalism. Nationalism asks people to identify with a territory, a flag and a ruling structure rather than with the people who share their workplaces, communities and struggles. A Ukrainian worker and a Russian worker may be told they are enemies, even though both face similar problems created by economic systems that concentrate wealth and power among elites.

The same applies to those who travel overseas to fight. Foreign volunteers often believe they are acting according to their values. Some are motivated by genuine opposition to invasion. Some are driven by adventure, ideology or a desire to find meaning through conflict. Some are drawn towards nationalist movements that promise belonging and purpose. War attracts people who are searching for something because war offers a powerful illusion, that that individual struggles can be transformed into a heroic mission. But the reality of war is rarely heroic. It is exhaustion, trauma, injury and death. It is young people being transformed into weapons by governments that will replace them when they are gone.

The arms industry understands this better than anyone. Every modern war creates opportunities for those who profit from weapons production. Governments spend billions on missiles, tanks, aircraft and military technology while claiming that such spending is necessary for security. The companies that manufacture these weapons do not lose when wars continue. Conflict becomes an economic system in itself, with entire industries dependent on permanent preparation for violence.

This is one reason anarchists have always opposed militarism. The problem is not simply that wars are tragic. The problem is that war is built into a political and economic order where power is concentrated in the hands of states and corporations. A society organised around competition, domination and profit will repeatedly produce conflicts because those conflicts serve the interests of powerful institutions.

The ordinary soldier is placed in an impossible position. They may genuinely believe they are defending their community. They may believe they are standing against injustice. They may have personal reasons for being there that outsiders cannot understand. But individual courage does not change the nature of the systems that send people into battle. A worker carrying a rifle does not become powerful because a government gives them a uniform. They become a tool of someone else’s power.

This is why anarchists reject the idea that the answer to imperialism is simply supporting a different imperial power. Opposing Russian aggression does not require celebrating NATO militarism. Criticising NATO expansion does not require supporting Russian nationalism. Rejecting far-right movements in Ukraine does not require accepting the authoritarian politics of the Russian state. A consistent anti-war position must reject the logic that ordinary people should become soldiers in struggles between competing rulers.

The tragedy of Ukraine is that millions of people have been forced into a conflict where their choices are shaped by forces far larger than themselves. Ukrainian civilians face the consequences of invasion and destruction. Russian civilians face the consequences of their government’s decisions and international isolation. Soldiers on both sides experience the reality of industrialised warfare. Refugees are displaced. Families lose loved ones. Meanwhile, political leaders continue to speak the language of victory.

The lesson anarchists draw from wars like Ukraine is not that people should ignore oppression or accept domination. The opposite is true. People have every right to resist invasion, exploitation and authoritarianism. But resistance does not have to mean replacing one hierarchy with another. The liberation of ordinary people will not come from stronger states, bigger armies or more powerful alliances. It will come from solidarity across borders.

The working class has no interest in endless competition between national elites. A Russian factory worker and a Ukrainian factory worker do not benefit from each other’s deaths. A New Zealand worker travelling thousands of kilometres to fight in someone else’s war is not advancing the interests of ordinary people here or anywhere else. The interests of workers are not found in the success of governments, military alliances or corporations. They are found in the possibility of a world where people no longer have to choose between obedience and destruction.

The death of a Kiwi in Ukraine should not simply be used as another piece of evidence in a debate between rival states. He was a person, not a symbol. His life mattered beyond the politics that surrounded his death. The question we should ask is why a world organised around borders, armies and competing powers continues to create situations where people believe that a meaningful path available to them is to travel across the world and risk dying in another country’s war.

The answer is not more nationalism. It is the opposite. The future belongs not to the flags that divide us, but to the solidarity that connects us.

Every election we are told the same story. Democracy is under threat. The stakes have never been higher. This election is the most important of our lifetime. We are urged to enrol, urged to participate, urged to have our say. Politicians, journalists, lobby groups and activists all repeat the message until it becomes background noise. Yet despite this relentless campaign, huge numbers of people continue to stay away from the ballot box.

According to figures drawn from the 2023 General Election, around 1.19 million eligible New Zealanders did not vote. Roughly 829,000 enrolled voters stayed home, while hundreds of thousands of eligible people were not enrolled at all. Together they amounted to one of the largest political groupings in the country. If non-voters were a political party, they would dwarf every party currently represented in Parliament.

Predictably, politicians interpret this as a problem to be solved. They see a vast reservoir of untapped support waiting to be mobilised. Every party imagines that if only the disengaged could be persuaded to participate, they would vote the “right” way. The left imagines that non-voters are frustrated workers waiting to be radicalised into electoral politics. The right imagines that they are ordinary people alienated by political correctness and bureaucracy. Both sides believe the solution is greater participation in the existing system.

What if they are wrong? What if the refusal to vote is not a failure of democracy but a judgement upon it? The political class treats abstention as evidence of apathy. This explanation is convenient because it absolves politicians of responsibility. If people do not vote because they are lazy, ignorant or indifferent, then there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the institutions themselves. The fault lies with the public. Yet the evidence points in another direction. Many people who do not vote are far from disengaged. They complain about housing, wages, healthcare, rents, policing, war, environmental destruction and inequality. They have strong opinions. They simply do not believe that casting a ballot every three years will meaningfully alter any of these conditions. It is difficult to argue with their conclusion.

Election campaigns create the illusion of choice while narrowing the range of possible outcomes. Voters are invited to choose which group of professional politicians will administer capitalism. They are not invited to decide whether capitalism itself should continue. They may choose between competing managers of the state, but they cannot vote away the state’s monopoly on power. They may vote for different tax rates, different spending priorities or different personalities, but they cannot vote to abolish wage labour, landlords, prisons, borders or the structures that generate exploitation in the first place. The ballot paper offers options. It does not offer freedom.

This becomes clearer when we look at the history of political promises. Governments campaign as agents of change and govern as custodians of the existing order. Labour promised transformation and delivered record house prices. National promised prosperity and delivered austerity. Coalition governments are assembled, broken apart and reassembled while the fundamentals remain untouched. Wealth continues to accumulate at the top. Rent continues to rise. Work consumes more of our lives. The machinery of government continues regardless of who occupies the ministerial offices.

Many people recognise this. They may not describe it in anarchist terms, but they understand it instinctively. They have watched governments come and go while their own circumstances remain largely unchanged. They have learned that election rhetoric bears little relationship to political reality. When they refuse to vote, they are often expressing not indifference but disbelief.

The defenders of electoral politics respond that non-participation only strengthens the powerful. If you do not vote, they say, someone else will decide for you. This argument assumes that voting constitutes genuine power. It confuses the ability to choose rulers with the ability to rule ourselves. Anarchists reject this confusion. The question has never been who governs. The question is why anyone should govern at all.

Representative democracy rests on a strange proposition. Millions of people are told that they possess political power, yet that power can only be exercised by transferring it to somebody else. Every few years citizens are invited to surrender their authority to professional politicians, who then act in their name until the next election. This arrangement is presented as self-government. In reality it is government by others. The act of voting does not challenge hierarchy. It legitimises it.

This is why abstention has a long history within revolutionary movements. From the anarchists of nineteenth-century Europe to contemporary anti-authoritarian movements around the world, many radicals have viewed elections not as vehicles of liberation but as mechanisms of incorporation. Voting channels discontent into institutions designed to contain it. Instead of organising workplaces, building communities of resistance or creating alternatives to state authority, people are encouraged to place their hopes in politicians. The result is passivity. Political action becomes something performed on our behalf rather than something we undertake ourselves.

None of this means that all non-voters are conscious anarchists. Far from it. The million-plus New Zealanders who did not vote in 2023 hold a wide variety of beliefs. Some will be socialists. Some will be conservatives. Some will be politically confused. Some will be simply busy. Yet taken together they reveal an important truth. A growing section of society has withdrawn its consent from the electoral spectacle. That withdrawal deserves closer examination.

Political commentators frequently describe low turnout as a crisis of democracy. From an anarchist perspective, it may be a crisis of legitimacy. The state requires more than police, courts and prisons. It requires belief. People must accept that the system represents them. They must believe that participation grants them influence. They must trust that governments derive authority from popular consent. When increasing numbers refuse to participate, that story becomes harder to sustain.

A parliament elected by a shrinking proportion of the population remains legally valid, but its moral authority begins to look questionable. The problem for the political class is not merely that people are staying home. The problem is that people are losing faith in the institutions themselves. This is why governments and political organisations devote enormous resources to increasing voter participation. They need people to believe. They need citizens to see elections as meaningful acts of empowerment. The moment large numbers begin to question that assumption, the ideological foundations of representative government start to crack.

The answer, however, is not cynicism. There is a difference between passive disengagement and active abstention. Passive disengagement says, “Nothing can be done.” Active abstention says, “Something can be done, but not through this.” Anarchists advocate the second position. Refusing to vote is not enough. Staying home on election day while leaving existing power structures untouched achieves little. Abstention only becomes politically significant when connected to collective action outside parliamentary channels. The real question is not whether we vote. The real question is how we organise.

History provides plenty of answers. Workers have won gains through strikes rather than elections. Communities have defended themselves through mutual aid rather than legislation. Social movements have forced change through direct action rather than lobbying. Every meaningful improvement in ordinary people’s lives has depended on pressure from below. Politicians may eventually sign documents and pass laws, but they generally do so after being compelled by organised movements.

Power concedes nothing voluntarily. The obsession with elections obscures this reality. Every three years political energy is funnelled into campaigns, candidates and polling. People are encouraged to view politics as a spectator sport. They become audiences rather than participants. The election cycle consumes attention that could otherwise be devoted to building enduring forms of collective power.

Imagine if even a fraction of the energy spent on electoral campaigning were redirected elsewhere. Imagine neighbourhood assemblies capable of solving local problems without waiting for councils. Imagine tenant unions capable of confronting landlords directly. Imagine workplaces organised enough to challenge employers through collective action. Imagine networks of mutual aid that reduce dependence on state bureaucracy. These are not fantasies. They exist already, albeit on a limited scale. The challenge is expanding them.

This points toward a different understanding of democracy. Not democracy as periodic voting. Not democracy as parliamentary representation. Democracy as direct participation in the decisions that affect our lives. Democracy as collective self-management. Democracy without politicians. The tragedy of modern electoral politics is that it has narrowed our political imagination. We are encouraged to believe that democracy begins and ends at the ballot box. The result is a population that feels powerless because it has been taught to locate power in institutions beyond its control.

The million-plus New Zealanders who did not vote in 2023 should not be viewed as a problem requiring correction. They are evidence that many people already sense something is wrong. The task is not to shepherd them back into the voting booth. The task is to transform scepticism into organisation.

Abstention is often portrayed as silence. In reality it can be a statement. It can express the belief that liberation will not arrive through Parliament, that politicians cannot solve problems rooted in the structures they administer, and that genuine social change requires ordinary people to act for themselves. The largest political force in New Zealand may not be National, Labour, ACT, the Greens or New Zealand First. It may be the millions who no longer believe that any of them speak on their behalf. The political establishment sees this as a reservoir of votes waiting to be captured. Anarchists should see it as something else – a sign that faith in representative politics is weakening.

The question is what comes next. If non-voting remains an individual act of withdrawal, it will change little. If it becomes part of a broader project of self-organisation, mutual aid, workplace struggle and direct action, it points beyond the limits of parliamentary politics altogether. The goal is not a better set of rulers. The goal is a society in which rulers are unnecessary. For those who seek such a society, the choice is clear. Do not vote. Do not place your hopes in parties, candidates or parliamentary majorities. Organise where you live. Organise where you work. Build relationships of solidarity. Create forms of power that do not depend upon the state.

The future will not be delivered through a ballot box. It will be built by our own hands.

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.