A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Pay to Belong: Why Membership Dues Have No Place in Anarchist Organisation (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

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 Maori 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 whanau, 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.

)https://awsm.nz/pay-to-belong-why-membership-dues-have-no-place-in-anarchist-organisation/
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