Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement || For much of the socialist movement’s history, the question of the state has acted like a fault line running beneath every strategy, every party, every programme. Again and again, the Left has been pulled back towards the idea that emancipation can be delivered through the machinery of government, that the capitalist state can be captured, redirected, and made to serve the interests of labour. However there is a growing recognition of the hollowness of that belief. It reflects an unease that has been quietly accumulating for decades – that parliamentary socialism, however well intentioned, remains structurally trapped within institutions designed to preserve capitalism rather than abolish it. For anarcho-communists, this is not a new insight but a confirmation of something long understood. The state is not a neutral arena waiting to be occupied by the Left; it is a form of social power built to discipline labour, defend property, and stabilise exploitation.
The capitalist state is not simply a set of elected officials or a collection of policies. It is a dense network of bureaucracies, legal systems, police forces, financial institutions, and ideological norms that together reproduce class domination. Even when staffed by socialists, it remains bound to the imperatives of capital accumulation, economic growth, and social order. This is why left governments, from post-war social democracy to more recent reformist projects, so often find themselves retreating, compromising, or outright capitulating. They inherit a machine whose purpose is to manage capitalism, not dismantle it. To imagine that such a machine can be repurposed for socialism is to misunderstand its very function.
cf. Gilles Dauve: https://classautonomy.info/fascism-anti-fascism/
The appeal of the state has always been understandable. It offers immediacy, visibility, and the illusion of control. Winning an election feels tangible in a way that slowly building collective power does not. Legislation can be passed, budgets allocated, nationalisations announced. Yet these victories remain fragile precisely because they leave the underlying relations of power intact. Capital retains its mobility, its ownership of production, its ability to withhold investment, relocate, sabotage, and discipline. The state, even under left leadership, is forced to respond to these pressures or face economic crisis, capital flight, and political destabilisation. What is presented as political realism is in fact structural blackmail.
AWSM gestures towards this reality by insisting that socialism cannot be reduced to electoral success. We point to the necessity of building power outside the state, in workplaces, unions, and communities, to support and sustain any meaningful transformation. This is an important recognition, but it remains incomplete. From an anarcho-communist perspective, the problem is not merely that the state is insufficient on its own, but that it actively undermines the development of genuine collective power. The more movements orient themselves towards parliamentary outcomes, the more their energies are channelled into leadership contests, messaging discipline, and electoral cycles. Popular participation is narrowed to voting, while decision-making is centralised and professionalised. The result is demobilisation, not empowerment.
Social democracy offers a clear historical lesson. Its great post-war achievements in welfare provision and public ownership were real, but they were also shallow. Workers were not given control over production, they were given managed security within capitalism. Industries were nationalised but remained hierarchical and bureaucratic, run by state managers rather than workers themselves. When neoliberalism arrived, these arrangements were easily dismantled because the working class had never been organised as a ruling power in its own right. The state could give, and the state could take away.
This dynamic was not just confined to Europe. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the legacy of Labour governments tells a similar story. The welfare state, built on colonial foundations and exclusion, provided limited security while entrenching bureaucratic control over Māori and working-class communities. The neoliberal counter-revolution of the 1980s did not emerge from nowhere, but it was enabled by a state apparatus already accustomed to managing society from above. The lesson is not that reforms are meaningless, but that reforms delivered by the state are always contingent, reversible, and ultimately subordinate to capital.
Anarcho-communism begins from a different premise. It understands socialism not as a policy programme but as a transformation of social relations. The abolition of capitalism requires the abolition of the state because both rest on hierarchy, coercion, and alienation. The state concentrates decision-making in the hands of a few, separates people from control over their own lives, and enforces obedience through law and violence. Capitalism does the same in the economic sphere. To dismantle one while preserving the other is impossible.
This does not mean waiting for a mythical moment of total collapse. It means recognising that socialism must be built through practices that prefigure the world we want. Workers controlling their workplaces, communities organising their own resources, people collectively meeting their needs without mediation by state or market. These practices are not supplementary to political struggle, they are its substance. They create the material basis for a society without bosses or bureaucrats.
The parliamentary left need to draw on the idea of extending democracy into the economy, an argument that resonates strongly with anarcho-communist thought. But democracy, if it is to mean anything, cannot be confined to representative structures. Real democracy is direct, participatory, and rooted in everyday life. It is exercised in assemblies, councils, and federations where people have immediate control over decisions that affect them. It is incompatible with institutions that monopolise authority and enforce compliance from above.
Historically, moments of revolutionary rupture have demonstrated this possibility. Workers’ councils, neighbourhood committees, and communal structures have repeatedly emerged in periods of intense struggle, from Russia in 1905 and 1917 to Spain in 1936. These were not spontaneous miracles but the product of long-term organising and collective confidence. They showed that ordinary people are capable of managing society without bosses or states, when given the opportunity and necessity to do so.
The tragedy of much of the twentieth-century Left is that these moments were either crushed by reaction or absorbed into new state structures that replicated old hierarchies under socialist rhetoric. The promise of the state withering away became a justification for its expansion. Anarcho-communists reject this logic entirely. The state does not wither; it entrenches itself. Power, once centralised, resists dissolution.
This is why the strategy of dual power remains crucial. Rather than aiming to take over the state and transform society from above, anarcho-communism seeks to build alternative forms of power that make the state increasingly irrelevant. Mutual aid networks that meet material needs without bureaucratic mediation. Workplace organisations that challenge managerial authority directly. Community assemblies that coordinate housing, food, and care. These structures do not wait for permission, they assert collective autonomy in the here and now.
In the context of Aotearoa, this approach must be inseparable from decolonisation. The colonial state was imposed through violence, land theft, and the destruction of Māori social structures. Any socialist project that centres the state risks reproducing these colonial dynamics, even when wrapped in progressive language. Anarcho-communism aligns with tino rangatiratanga not as a symbolic gesture, but as a practical commitment to autonomy, self-determination, and the dismantling of imposed authority. Supporting iwi and hapū control over land and resources is not a concession within the state framework, but it is a challenge to the legitimacy of the colonial state itself.
The fixation on elections often obscures these deeper questions. Some argue that voting can be a tactic, but it cannot be a strategy. When movements orient themselves primarily towards winning office, they internalise the priorities of the system they seek to oppose. Radical demands are softened to appeal to swing voters, direct action is discouraged to maintain respectability, and organisational energy is funnelled into campaigns that dissipate once the ballot boxes are packed away. Disappointment follows, then cynicism, then retreat.
Direct action, by contrast, builds confidence and capacity. Strikes, occupations, blockades, and collective refusal confront power where it actually operates. They force concessions not through persuasion but through disruption. More importantly, they teach participants that change comes from their own collective strength, not from benevolent leaders. This is the pedagogical function of struggle, one that no parliamentary process can replicate.
Socialism must be rooted in mass participation rather than elite management. Where anarcho-communism diverges is in its refusal to subordinate that participation to the state at all. The goal is not to pressure governments into doing the right thing, but to render them increasingly obsolete. Every time people organise to meet their needs directly, they weaken the ideological and material foundations of state power.
This does not mean ignoring the reality of repression. The state will defend itself, often brutally. Police, courts, and prisons exist precisely to contain challenges from below. Anarcho-communist strategy therefore emphasises solidarity, decentralisation, and resilience. Movements that are horizontal and federated are harder to decapitate. Networks of mutual support reduce vulnerability to repression. Collective defence becomes a shared responsibility rather than the domain of specialists.
Capitalism is entering a period of deep instability, marked by ecological collapse, widening inequality, and permanent crisis. States respond not by resolving these contradictions but by managing them through austerity, surveillance, and repression. In this context, the fantasy that the state can be the vehicle for emancipation becomes increasingly untenable. The machinery is being retooled not for redistribution but for control.
Socialism against the state is therefore not a slogan but a necessity. It means recognising that freedom cannot be legislated into existence. It must be constructed through collective struggle that dismantles hierarchy in all its forms. Anarcho-communism offers not a blueprint but a direction towards a society organised around mutual aid, collective ownership, and direct democracy, without rulers and without classes.
The task before us is not to perfect the art of governance but to abolish the conditions that make governance necessary. To replace domination with cooperation, coercion with solidarity, and representation with participation. In doing so, we move beyond the narrow horizons of state-centred socialism and reclaim the revolutionary heart of the communist project.
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