The Polar Blast || For the past few years, a peculiar current has swept through parts of the anarchist milieu, particularly those corners closest to academia, the NGO apparatus, and the broad “social justice” ecosystems of the liberal left. It goes something like this: “we don’t live in revolutionary times”. The line is always delivered with a kind of weary resignation, as if the speaker has grown too sophisticated, too worldly, too traumatised or too professional to still believe in any of the old principles.
We are told that anarchists cannot reject electoralism, because that would be “dogmatic” or “purist.” We cannot maintain a principled anti-militarism in the face of imperial alignments and geopolitical chessboards, because that would be “naïve” or “privileged” or simply “not how the world works.” We cannot challenge nationalism, because apparently even anarchists must kneel before the altar of flags when the right war breaks out. And in Aotearoa, we are increasingly instructed that anarchists, of all people, should simply fall into line behind Labour, the Greens, or Te Pāti Māori, and that anything else amounts to assisting the Right, aiding fascism, or failing to take “real-world consequences” seriously.
It is a remarkable ideological contortion, one that has transformed a large portion of self-identified anarchists into adjuncts of liberalism, junior partners to parliamentary leftism, and in some cases loud defenders of militarised state power. This collapse is not merely political drift; it represents a profound refusal to uphold the most basic tenets of anarchism. It is a capitulation dressed up as realism, a surrender disguised as nuance, and a fear of being politically unfashionable mispackaged as maturity.
But at its core, this discourse expresses something simple and corrosive – a belief that anarchism is incapable of acting as a revolutionary force in its own right, and must therefore outsource its agency to liberal institutions.
One cannot understand the present collapse of anarchist independence without understanding the cultural ecosystem that many leftists now inhabit. In Aotearoa, as across the Western world, political energy has been systematically redirected into NGOs, consultancies, academic departments, and publicly funded “progressive” institutions which operate comfortably inside capitalism’s infrastructure. These spaces speak the language of radicalism but behave according to the incentives of bureaucracy.
Many young anarchists do not radicalise through struggle anymore, through occupations, workplace organising, anti-militarist resistance, housing fights, or anti-police action. Instead, they are socialised into a professional sphere where the primary goal is to secure contracts, maintain social capital, and avoid political risk. The result is predictable: anarchism becomes merely a branding aesthetic rather than a commitment to revolutionary action.
Inside those institutional spaces, rejecting electoralism is framed as childish. Criticising leftist parties is framed as sabotaging “progress.” Maintaining anti-militarist principles is presented as dangerous idealism. Refusing to collapse into a Labour-Green-Māori Party electoral bloc is seen as a betrayal of the “community.”
But these are not moral judgments, they are occupational ones. Anarchists working within NGO and academic networks quickly internalise that their material survival depends on aligning with the soft-left consensus. Electoral criticism risks contracts. Anti-militarism risks reputational safety. Anti-state politics complicates relationships with funders.
And so a new norm develops – anarchists should avoid being too anarchist. Radical rhetoric is allowed, even encouraged, so long as it ends up reinforcing the parliamentary left. Anything that threatens the state’s monopoly on legitimacy becomes unspeakable.
The result is an anarchism that speaks fluently about “mutual aid” yet forgets that mutual aid is not a social service but a weapon against the state’s claim to necessity. An anarchism that condemns racism and colonialism yet funnels all resistance into state-aligned institutions. An anarchism that champions decolonisation yet recoils from any challenge to parliamentary authority in Aotearoa. An anarchism that supports struggles overseas only when they align with Western strategic narratives.
In essence, it is an anarchism that has lost its nerve — and then rationalised that loss as intellectual sophistication.
The drift into electoral reasoning is a key symptom of this collapse. It takes several forms.
Sometimes it is explicit: “We must vote for Labour/Greens/TPM to keep the Right out.” Sometimes it is dressed up in social-justice rhetoric: “Marginalised communities are harmed when the Right wins, therefore anarchists have a responsibility to vote.” Sometimes it is wrapped in strategic fatalism: “Voting won’t save us, but it helps buy time.”
But underneath all of this is the same core assumption that the state must remain the primary vehicle for social change, and anarchists must adjust their politics to accommodate that reality.
It is extraordinary how quickly anarchists forget that the modern state, liberal or conservative, is structurally unable to abolish the exploitation, hierarchies, and coercive apparatus that define it. Even when left governments attempt reforms, they do so by strengthening the machinery anarchists seek to dismantle: police, prisons, militaries, borders, welfare bureaucracies, surveillance technologies, taxation extraction systems.
In Aotearoa, Labour is a textbook example. Every time it returns to power, the anarchist milieu fractures. Those closest to NGO infrastructures begin arguing for strategic support. The rhetoric of “harm reduction” becomes weaponised to shut down criticism from those who insist, rightly, that Labour has proven itself a reliable servant of capital, imperial alliances, and domestic managerialism.
This dynamic intensified during the Ardern era. Many anarchists who had once mocked parliamentarians found themselves reduced to timid criticism, or complete silence, because the social atmosphere of liberal adoration made genuine dissent feel culturally taboo. Within activist circles, Ardernism was treated as “good enough,” and anarchists who disagreed were cast as troublemakers, misogynists, or unrealistic purists.
A movement that views itself as revolutionary should never be this fragile. Yet the collapse was widespread and revealing: many anarchists were more committed to social belonging within the liberal cultural class than to anarchism itself.
Once this cultural shift occurs, a fatal logic takes hold: anarchists must not reject electoralism because their allies, often their employers, depend on it.
This is how a revolutionary tradition turns into a lobby group.
The most alarming expression of this drift has been the abandonment of anarchist anti-militarism. For centuries, anarchists have insisted that war is not an aberration but a predictable outcome of the capitalist state system. Militarism is the purest expression of hierarchical power, resource extraction, nationalism, and obedience. It is the machine that devours working-class youth to protect the interests of competing ruling classes.
Yet in recent years, many self-described anarchists have adopted a military logic indistinguishable from Western liberalism. They cheer for NATO when it suits them. They speak approvingly of sending weapons to proxy conflicts. They amplify the language of “defence,” “security,” and “strategic necessity.” They shame anti-militarists for “not supporting the right side.”
This is the most dangerous capitulation of all.
Once anarchists accept the legitimacy of war, they have surrendered their last meaningful distinction from the statist left. The result is an anarchism that obediently follows the emotional rhythms of Western media cycles, outraged when instructed, supportive when instructed, silent when instructed, instead of maintaining its own anti-militarist compass.
Part of this collapse is ideological. Part is material. But a significant part is psychological.
Many anarchists today are terrified of being seen as “irresponsible.” The wider liberal-left culture frames politics through the lens of compliance, safety, and harm-minimisation. Anything that challenges institutional frameworks is seen as reckless. Anything that disrupts political normalcy is dangerous. Anything that undermines parliamentary leftism is indirectly “helping the Right.”
This creates a paralysing moral landscape where the worst sin an anarchist can commit is not supporting the status quo loudly enough. The fear of being blamed for a right-wing victory becomes so overwhelming that many stop imagining politics outside the narrow horizon of elections. The fear of being accused of “not caring” about marginalised communities becomes a weapon used to silence radical politics.
In such a climate, anarchism becomes an identity, not a praxis – a way of feeling radical while behaving safely.
This anxiety-based politics produces an anarchist who:
- privately agrees the state cannot liberate anyone, but fears saying so publicly.
- privately knows elections change nothing fundamental, but votes anyway and pressures others to do so.
- privately opposes war, but shares liberal talking points so as not to appear insensitive.
- privately wants to resist capitalism directly, but settles for symbolic action within the system.
The result is tragic: anarchists who are radical everywhere except where it matters.
The situation in Aotearoa intensifies this collapse because the liberal left is structured around moral frameworks linked to biculturalism, Treaty discourse, and NGO-based social justice work. These are important terrains of struggle, but the state has learned to weaponise them to maintain legitimacy.
This produces a political landscape where anarchists are pressured to treat parliamentary actors, especially Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori as central vehicles for “progress,” even when their track record is deeply entangled with colonial administration, policing, market capitalism, and militarised foreign policy.
The liberal state in Aotearoa has become adept at performing moral virtue while intensifying its structural violence. It deploys kupu Māori in its rebranding while expanding prisons. It funds “community providers” while crushing working-class living standards. It hires iwi consultants while pushing militarised surveillance in the Pacific. It offers symbolic recognition while evading material decolonisation.
Yet many anarchists, immersed in NGO environments and Treaty workshops, struggle to critique this dynamic without being accused of cultural ignorance or reactionary politics. The result is silence, caution, or apologism, behaviours entirely incompatible with anarchist commitments to confronting state power, all state power, regardless of the rhetoric it cloaks itself in.
And so the argument returns: anarchists must support leftist parties; anarchists must not reject electoralism; anarchists must not oppose nationalist or militarised frameworks when they are framed as protective of Indigenous sovereignty or marginalised communities.
Such reasoning conflates the state with the people, a mistake anarchists spent 150 years warning against.
The claim that anarchists “can’t” reject electoralism, or “can’t” oppose leftist parties, is ultimately a claim about the impossibility of political imagination. It assumes that the state is the only terrain available, that nothing meaningful can be done outside of it, and that anarchists must align themselves with the managerial left because the alternative is irrelevance.
But this is only true if we accept the premises of liberal fatalism. The entire anarchist tradition exists because previous generations refused those premises. Emma Goldman did not look at the early 20th century and decide anarchists must support progressive mayors. Kropotkin did not conclude that the working class should vote for liberal reformers. Māori radicals in the 1970s did not decide that liberation ran through Parliament. The Spanish CNT did not believe emancipation required alliances with bourgeois parties, until internal liberal capture weakened them with disastrous consequences.
Anarchism has always insisted that politics extends far beyond electoral cycles. If anything, the crises of our age, climate breakdown, housing collapse, militarised imperial alignments, collapsing social infrastructure, prove that anarchist organising is not merely viable, but necessary.
The state is not the only site of political action. It is not even the most effective one. It is simply the only one liberals can imagine.
If anarchism is to reclaim itself from liberal capture, it must reaffirm some basic, uncompromising truths.
Anarchists must reject electoralism not because elections are morally impure, but because electoral participation actively undermines the development of autonomous working-class power. Every hour poured into canvassing is an hour not spent organising. Every argument about strategic voting is a diversion from the real labour of building alternatives. Every second spent defending leftist parties is a second spent normalising the idea that liberation flows downward from Parliament rather than upward from struggle.
Anarchists must oppose all militarism, not selectively, not only when it aligns with Western interests, not only when liberals approve, because every war strengthens the state, intensifies nationalism, and expands the repressive apparatus that will ultimately be used against us.
Anarchists must reject the notion that leftist parties represent “the community.” Labour does not represent working people. The Greens do not represent ecological resistance. Te Pāti Māori does not represent decolonisation. Parties represent themselves – their leadership, their funders, their institutional incentives, their careers.
Anarchists must refuse the guilt-trip politics of liberalism — the idea that we are responsible for right-wing victories if we refuse to align with the parliamentary left. That logic is emotional blackmail used to discipline dissent.
Most importantly, anarchists must rediscover the confidence that we can act, we can organise, and we can build political power outside the state. We must stop believing that autonomy is impossible. The future belongs not to voters but to those who take the risk of creating something outside the suffocating frameworks of capitalist governance.
The liberal discourse infecting contemporary anarchism ultimately reduces to one pitiful sentence:
“Anarchism can’t do anything, so anarchists should help the liberals.”
It is a defeatist creed masquerading as pragmatism. It is the whisper of a movement that has lost faith in itself. It is the ideology of an anarchism that has forgotten its own history, its own victories, its own capacity to terrify the powerful.
When anarchists argue that they cannot reject electoralism, they are abandoning the principle that liberation grows from below. When anarchists argue they cannot oppose leftist parties, they are surrendering their independence to the very institutions designed to neutralise social movements. When anarchists argue they cannot maintain anti-militarism, they are accepting the logic of empire. When anarchists argue they cannot act without state permission, they are no longer anarchists at all.
We stand at a moment when capitalism is unravelling, the climate is breaking down, global militarism is accelerating, and the old political categories are collapsing. This is not a moment to retreat into the exhausted pragmatism of the liberal-left. It is a moment to reclaim the audacity and clarity of anarchism: the belief that the working class can organise itself, that communities can govern themselves, that solidarity can replace coercion, and that states, all states, are obstacles to freedom, not vehicles for it.
We owe the world something better than becoming the auxiliary wing of liberalism.
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