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.