Category: Anarchism

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

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

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

Capitalist Accumulation and the Architecture of Inequality

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

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

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

The Geography of Exploitation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

State and Capital: Partners in Plunder

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

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

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

Beyond Redistribution: The Case for Abolition

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

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

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

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

Imagining the World to Come

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

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

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

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

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

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

The time has come to abolish the pyramid.

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

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

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

The Wedding as Spectacle

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

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

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

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

The Helipad Debate: A Case of Local Resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s unpack this fantasy.

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

To want more billionaires is to want more inequality.

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

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

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

Against the Spectacle: What We Really Need

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

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

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

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

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

Media and the Manufacture of Consent

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

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

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

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

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

The Path Forward: Build Collective Power

What, then, is to be done?

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

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

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

We can no longer afford to be dazzled.

Aotearoa Beyond Billionaires

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Entrepreneur as Myth: From Barbed Wire to Business School

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

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

But this is a lie.

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

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

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

Entrepreneurship Is Capitalism Rebranded

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

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

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

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

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

Hustle Culture Is the New Discipline

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

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

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

Hustle culture turns systemic failure into personal shame.

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

Entrepreneurship Reinforces Inequality

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

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

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

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

The Logic of Entrepreneurship Is Anti-Communal

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

Scarcity becomes a business opportunity. Generosity becomes a threat.

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

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

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

We need care that’s mutual, not monetised.

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

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

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

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

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

Creativity Without Capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

Alternatives: Mutual Aid, Co-operatives, Commons

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

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

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

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

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

Entrepreneurship Is Not Liberation—It’s Adaptation

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

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

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

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

From Individual Escape to Collective Liberation

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

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

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

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

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

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