blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fight for anarchism is the fight for peace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our latest newsletter Solidarity is now available:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

image c/o theslowburningfuse.wordpress.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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