Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement || Last night’s massive Lotto draw was one of those oddly unifying moments in Aotearoa when, for a brief period, the country holds its breath together. The anticipation, the chatter in dairies, the queues for tickets, and the speculative fantasies people share about what they would do with the winnings all point to something far more interesting than simple entertainment. Lotto sells the promise of liberation. It packages relief, security, dignity, time, and agency into a brightly coloured ticket and tells people that the life they long for might, with enough luck, finally fall into their hands. But the fantasy sold on those slips of paper is not merely improbable; it is structurally impossible. Under capitalism, most people will never experience the freedom that Lotto advertises, no matter how many tickets they buy. The game persists not because of its statistical plausibility but because of the deep emotional hunger it feeds, a hunger created by the very social and economic order that Lotto quietly reinforces.
What stands out is not the size of the jackpot, but the fact that so many people felt compelled to invest in the possibility of escape. Lotto’s hold on the public is rooted in a broad sense of powerlessness, the creeping belief that life cannot be changed through ordinary human effort. The routine pressures of capitalism, rising rents, stagnant wages, impossible working hours, insecure housing, and the growing sense that one is simply surviving rather than living, all push people to grasp for anything that promises a different existence. Lotto is the state-sanctioned pressure valve through which that desire for change is released safely, individually, and harmlessly. Instead of directing dissatisfaction into collective organising, community building, or structural challenge, Lotto channels it into a fantasy of miraculous individual uplift. The entire institution functions as a kind of secular prosperity gospel: if you are patient and lucky enough, one day the universe will reward you. If not, better luck next week.
This logic reveals its political usefulness. Lotto encourages people to abandon the idea that their conditions could be changed through their own agency or through collective struggle. It replaces the notion of solidarity with the notion of luck. Where political movements would ask people to confront the systems that produce inequality, Lotto tells them instead to buy a small moment of hope. And since most people will never win, they end up returning week after week for another hit of possibility, trapped in a quiet cycle of hope and disappointment. This cycle is perfect for maintaining the existing order. A public that is hoping for luck is far less likely to demand justice. A public that is waiting to “win” is far less likely to organise to win.
Where Lotto offers fantasy, anarchism offers practice. Where Lotto insists on the extraordinary, anarchism insists on the everyday. Anarchism begins with the premise that people can build the lives they want not through chance but through cooperation, solidarity, and the dismantling of hierarchical power structures. It treats freedom as something constructed, not awarded by randomness. The odds of improving one’s life through collective action are astronomically higher than the odds of winning a jackpot. If one participates in collective struggle, one will almost certainly experience tangible improvements: stronger connections, greater support, practical resources, and the sense of being an active agent in one’s own life. These outcomes are not speculative. They are observable, repeatable, and grounded in the entire history of working-class and Indigenous movements in Aotearoa and internationally.
The contrast becomes stark when you consider what people actually desire when they buy a Lotto ticket. It is rarely about the money for its own sake. People want time with their families, the end of financial anxiety, a secure home, freedom from exploitative labour, the ability to rest, to create, to breathe. Lotto markets these desires as prizes, but anarchism understands them as collective political goals. The desire to escape precarity is not pathological; it is rational. It is capitalism that is irrational for producing conditions in which escape seems possible only through improbable miracles.
Lotto’s emotional appeal is so strong precisely because capitalism has denied people meaningful control over their lives. When you are exhausted, underpaid, overworked, and constantly anxious about housing, it makes a certain sense to fantasise about being plucked from misery by blind luck. Lotto fills the vacuum left by the erosion of collective power. But where Lotto instrumentalises that desire in order to reproduce the very system that generated it, anarchism channels it toward restructuring society so that people need neither miracles nor jackpots to live well.
What anarchism proposes is that the world most New Zealanders fantasise about after buying a Lotto ticket could actually be built, not won. Secure housing could exist through decommodification and cooperative control. Labour could be reorganised around human need rather than profit, with workplaces democratically controlled by workers rather than owners. Communities could develop localised systems of mutual support, resource sharing, and autonomous decision-making. Time could be freed from the tyranny of wage labour and redirected toward collective flourishing. These changes do not require divine intervention. They require people organising together.
And crucially, this kind of organising already works. Workers’ movements have historically won every meaningful labour right we now consider basic – the weekend, the eight-hour day, sick leave, safety standards, and more. Māori land occupations and kaupapa Māori movements have reclaimed land, language, and cultural autonomy. None of these victories came through luck, all of them came through collective struggle.
When people join such movements, the “odds” of transforming their lives shift radically. The likelihood of finding community, support, and empowerment becomes almost guaranteed. The sense of isolation so common under capitalism dissolves. People begin to see themselves as participants in shaping the world rather than passengers hoping for an unlikely upgrade. The contrasts with Lotto could not be more pronounced. A Lotto ticket builds nothing. A movement builds everything.
There is another dimension to consider: Lotto’s function as a political pacifier. It offers a simulation of agency, a momentary belief that one’s life might change without confronting any structures of power. The more desperate people become under capitalism, the more appealing this fantasy grows. In this way, Lotto acts as a safety valve that relieves pressure without altering the system that generates it. The state acknowledges economic suffering but directs people to seek salvation through luck rather than justice. The Lotto kiosk becomes a substitute for political imagination.
Anarchism disrupts this dynamic by insisting that people do not have to wait. They do not need permission from the state, a political party, a boss, or a jackpot draw. They can act now, with the people around them, to carve out alternative ways of living. Every garden, every cooperative, every free store, every occupation, every strike, every blockade, is a concrete step toward the world Lotto only pretends to offer. This is why anarchism is threatening to the established order: it gives back to ordinary people the one thing Lotto, capitalism, and the state all require them to surrender – agency.
The irony of last night’s draw is that millions of New Zealanders experienced the same emotion simultaneously: the longing for a better life. The fantasy may have been individual, but the feeling was collective. If people shared that desire not in queues for tickets but in movements, unions, collectives, and neighbourhood assemblies, the country would be unrecognisable within a generation. The same hope that fuels Lotto could fuel revolution, if redirected.
The lesson is not that people should feel foolish for buying tickets, it is that their desire for change is entirely legitimate. The political question is what they are taught to do with that desire. Lotto teaches them to dream privately. Anarchism teaches them to act publicly. Lotto tells them change must be granted by chance. Anarchism tells them change is made by people. Lotto produces one winner and millions of losers. Anarchism rejects the very premise of winning and losing as capitalist distortions that pit people against each other. Lotto sells fantasy. Anarchism builds reality.
It is no exaggeration to say that you are far more likely to build the life you want through anarchist organising than through Lotto. The former has a track record of success measurable in every labour right, every community project, and every instance of collective solidarity in our history. The latter has odds so infinitesimal that the human brain cannot meaningfully comprehend them. Lotto asks for money and gives back dreams. Anarchism asks for participation and gives back power.
The life people imagine when they hold a Lotto ticket in their hands, a life with security, dignity, and control, is not absurd or unrealistic. What is absurd is the idea that such a life might be delivered by randomness. What is unrealistic is the belief that an economy built on exploitation might one day produce fairness spontaneously. What is fantastical is the notion that a ticket purchased at a dairy could do more to transform your life than collective struggle ever could.
If last night’s draw revealed anything, it is that millions of people in Aotearoa are yearning for liberation. The task is to show that liberation is not granted by luck but made by people. The future is not a jackpot to be won, it is a world to be built. Lotto wants you to wait. Anarchism wants you to act. And if you want the life you dream about when the draw is announced, your chances are infinitely better if you organise, not if you pick numbers.
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