A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Against the Ritual: Why Anarchists in Aotearoa Refuse the Ballot Box (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

It's a strange thing to be told, over and over again, that you're the 
unreasonable one for refusing to participate in something that, 
historically and globally, anarchists have treated with deep suspicion 
at best and outright hostility at worst. In Aotearoa New Zealand, saying 
anarchists should abstain from elections is still treated as fringe, 
sectarian, even irresponsible. You'll be told you're letting the Right 
win, that you're abandoning vulnerable people, that you're indulging in 
ideological purity while others suffer. Yet if you zoom out, even 
slightly, this position is neither new nor particularly extreme. It is, 
in fact, one of the oldest and most consistent threads in anarchist thought.

So why does it feel so controversial here? Part of it is that New 
Zealand has cultivated a very particular political culture, one that 
leans heavily on the myth of fairness, moderation, and incremental 
progress. Electoral politics here is framed less as a site of domination 
and more as a kind of collective moral project. Voting is not just a 
tactic, it is a ritual of belonging. To abstain is not simply to opt out 
of a strategy, but to step outside what is imagined as the shared 
ethical life of the nation.

Anarchism, at its core, has never been about belonging to the nation. It 
has always been about refusing the structures that demand obedience in 
the first place. Historically, anarchists have been remarkably 
consistent on this point. From the late nineteenth century through to 
the present, anarchist movements across Europe, the Americas, and beyond 
have argued that participation in parliamentary systems does not 
challenge power but legitimises it. The state, from this perspective, is 
not a neutral tool that can be wielded for good or ill depending on who 
holds office. It is a structure built to organise domination, class 
domination above all, and elections function as a way of renewing 
consent to that structure.

This isn't an abstract argument. It emerges from lived experience. Again 
and again, movements that have placed their hopes in electoral change 
have found those hopes blunted, redirected, or outright betrayed. 
Radical parties moderate once they enter parliament. Transformative 
demands get watered down into policy tweaks. The machinery of the state 
absorbs opposition and spits it back out as something far less threatening.

Anarchists noticed this early. That's why abstentionism, refusing to 
participate in elections, became a defining feature of many anarchist 
traditions. It isn't about apathy. It is about clarity. If you believe 
that the state is fundamentally structured to maintain hierarchy and 
exploitation, then participating in its rituals starts to look less like 
pragmatism and more like complicity.

Globally, this position has never really gone away. It has shifted, 
adapted, been debated internally, but it remains widely understood. In 
some contexts, anarchists engage tactically with elections, supporting 
specific reforms, for instance, but often while maintaining a critical 
distance. In others, abstention remains the default. Which brings us 
back to Aotearoa. Here, abstention feels different. Not because the 
arguments against electoralism are weaker, but because the social and 
political context reshapes how those arguments are heard. New Zealand's 
relative stability, its small size, and its carefully managed image as a 
progressive democracy all contribute to a sense that the system more or 
less works. Not perfectly, of course, but well enough that participation 
feels meaningful.

This is where the controversy really sits. When anarchists in New 
Zealand call for abstention, they are not just critiquing the state in 
the abstract. They are challenging a widely held belief that the system 
is capable of delivering justice if only the right people are elected, 
and that belief runs deep. You can see it in the way political debate is 
framed. Elections are treated as moments of possibility, of hope, of 
collective agency. Campaigns are saturated with language about change, 
about making a difference, about shaping the future. Even when people 
are disillusioned, the solution offered is usually more engagement, vote 
harder, get the right party in.

Against this backdrop, abstention looks like withdrawal. It can be read 
as giving up, as refusing to fight on the terrain where outcomes are 
decided. And in a context where harm is real and immediate, where people 
are struggling with housing, healthcare, and poverty, it's not 
surprising that this interpretation carries weight. However it rests on 
a particular assumption, the assumption that elections are the primary 
or most effective site of change.

Anarchists challenge that assumption. Not by denying that elections can 
have effects, of course they can, but by questioning their limits. What 
kinds of change are possible within the framework of the state? What 
kinds are foreclosed? And what does it mean to focus our energy on a 
terrain that is structurally tilted towards preserving existing 
relations of power?

From an anarchist perspective, the problem isn't just that elections 
often fail to deliver meaningful change. It's that they actively shape 
how we think about change. They channel political imagination into a 
narrow set of options   vote for this party or that one, support this 
policy or that one   while sidelining more fundamental questions about 
power, ownership, and control.

In this sense, participation in elections doesn't just reflect the 
system; it reproduces it. This is where the global history becomes 
important again. Anarchists have long argued that real transformation 
comes not from capturing the state but from building power outside it. 
Through unions, through mutual aid networks, through community 
organising, through direct action. These are not just tactics, but they 
are forms of social organisation that prefigure the kind of world 
anarchists want to create, one based on cooperation, autonomy, and 
collective decision-making rather than hierarchy and coercion. 
Abstention, in this context, is not an end in itself. It is part of a 
broader orientation towards building alternative forms of power.

So why does this still feel so marginal in New Zealand? Partly because 
the infrastructure of extra-parliamentary struggle is relatively weak 
here. There are exceptions, of course, but compared to other parts of 
the world, there is less of a tradition of mass movements operating 
independently of electoral politics. Trade unions are weaker. Community 
organisations are often tied, directly or indirectly, to state funding. 
Even protest movements frequently orient themselves towards influencing 
policy rather than building autonomous power. In this context, elections 
loom larger. They become the default site of politics because other 
sites feel less viable.

There's also the question of scale. In a small country, where political 
actors are relatively accessible and the distance between voters and 
representatives feels shorter, it's easier to maintain the illusion of 
influence. You might not be able to change the system, but you can 
imagine nudging it in a better direction. You can meet your MP, submit 
on legislation, see small wins. These experiences matter. They make 
participation feel tangible. However, they can also obscure the bigger 
picture. The structural constraints on what any government can do within 
a global capitalist economy, within existing property relations, within 
the logic of state power, remain in place regardless of who is elected. 
This is where the anarchist critique cuts through the optimism. It asks 
not just what governments say they will do, but what they are actually 
able to do without fundamentally challenging the system they operate within.

It's much easier to believe that change can be delivered through 
elections than to confront the possibility that it requires building 
entirely different forms of social organisation. The former fits within 
existing rhythms of life, vote every few years, follow the news, maybe 
attend a rally. The latter demands a deeper shift. It asks people to 
invest time, energy, and imagination into something that is not 
guaranteed to succeed and may not deliver immediate results. Layered 
over all of this, and often under-acknowledged, is the liberal co-option 
of anarchism itself. In New Zealand, as elsewhere, "anarchism" has been 
softened, aestheticised, and folded back into the very political culture 
it was meant to disrupt. You see it in the casual way the term is used 
to mean little more than decentralisation, lifestyle individualism, or a 
vague distrust of authority, positions that can sit quite comfortably 
alongside continued participation in electoral politics.

In this diluted form, anarchism becomes less a critique of the state and 
more a flavour of liberalism. It is reduced to personal expression, 
ethical consumption, or community-mindedness, all of which can be easily 
accommodated within the existing system. The harder edge, the rejection 
of state power, the insistence on dismantling hierarchy, the commitment 
to building entirely different social relations, gets blunted or 
ignored. This co-option has consequences. It reshapes expectations about 
what anarchists should do. If anarchism is understood primarily as a set 
of values, fairness, equality, anti-authoritarianism, rather than a 
structural critique, then participating in elections can seem not only 
compatible with anarchism but required by it. Voting becomes framed as 
the responsible thing to do, the way to minimise harm, the practical 
expression of one's ethics.

Refusing to vote, in that context, looks like a betrayal, not just of 
society, but of anarchism itself. This is a reversal of the historical 
position. It takes a tradition that has consistently questioned the 
legitimacy of the state and recasts it as a moral supplement to that 
state. It turns anarchism from a challenge into a conscience, from a 
threat into a corrective. Once that shift happens, abstention becomes 
much harder to defend. It is no longer seen as a principled refusal 
grounded in a critique of power, but as an abdication of responsibility 
within a system that is assumed to be fundamentally legitimate. This 
helps explain why the argument that abstention helps the Right carries 
so much weight here. If you accept the premise that elections are the 
primary means of achieving social good, and if anarchism has been 
reframed as a set of progressive values within that system, then not 
voting can only appear as harmful. However, this argument rests on a 
very short time horizon. It focuses on the immediate outcome of a 
particular election while bracketing off the longer-term dynamics of the 
system itself. It assumes that the best we can do is choose the lesser 
evil, again and again, without asking what that cycle does to our 
capacity to imagine and build something better.

From an anarchist perspective, this is precisely the trap. 
Lesser-evilism doesn't just accept the limits of the system, it 
entrenches them. It trains us to lower our expectations, to settle for 
marginal improvements, to see politics as a series of constrained 
choices rather than an open field of possibility. Over time, this can 
become self-fulfilling. If all our energy goes into electoral cycles, 
there is less left for building alternative forms of power. And without 
those alternatives, elections really do become the only game in town. 
Abstention is a refusal of that cycle. Not because anarchists are 
indifferent to harm, far from it, but because they are trying to shift 
the terrain on which harm is addressed. Instead of asking how to manage 
exploitation more humanely, the question becomes how to dismantle the 
structures that produce it in the first place. This is where the 
position starts to make more sense, even if it remains controversial to 
some. It's not about purity. It's about strategy. It's about where to 
invest energy, what kinds of power to build, and how to move beyond a 
system that, by design, limits what is possible.

So when anarchists here argue for abstention, they are pushing against a 
deeply entrenched common sense. They are saying that the thing most 
people take for granted, the idea that voting is the primary way to 
effect change, is not just insufficient but part of the problem. Even to 
some who identify as anarchists that is controversial, but controversy 
isn't the same as being wrong. Sometimes it's a sign that a position is 
touching something real, something that unsettles established ways of 
thinking. The challenge is to move beyond the surface-level arguments, 
the accusations of irresponsibility, the defensive appeals to 
pragmatism, and engage with the underlying questions.

What is the state for? What are elections actually capable of 
delivering? And what would it mean to build power in ways that don't 
rely on either? Those are not easy questions. They don't come with 
ready-made answers. But they are the questions anarchists have been 
asking, consistently, for well over a century. That tension between 
anarchism as a disruptive force and anarchism as a co-opted aesthetic is 
where the controversy lives.

https://awsm.nz/against-the-ritual-why-anarchists-in-aotearoa-refuse-the-ballot-box/
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