A-Infos (en) NZ, Aotearoa, AWSM: Anarchy Is Not What You Think It Is (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

For most people, the word anarchy conjures chaos. Burning cars, smashed 
windows, shouting crowds, the collapse of all restraint. It is a word 
carefully trained to frighten. Politicians invoke it as a threat, 
newspapers as a warning, and police as a justification. Anarchy, we are 
told, is what happens when order disappears. ---- But we are making a 
simpler and more unsettling claim: anarchy is not the absence of order, 
but the absence of rulers. And far from being rare, it is woven through 
everyday life in Aotearoa New Zealand.
This is not about anarchism as an ideology, a movement, or a future 
revolution. We are not arguing that everyone should call themselves an 
anarchist, nor do we offer a blueprint for how society ought to be 
reorganised. Instead, we offer something quieter and more subversive. We 
look closely at how people already live, care, work, raise children, 
resolve conflict, and survive, often without asking permission, without 
formal authority, and without the state playing a central role at all. 
In other words, we argue that anarchism is a lived practice, not a doctrine.

The inspiration for this approach comes from the British writer and 
thinker Colin Ward, whose work Anarchy in Action refused the dramatic 
gestures of revolutionary politics and instead turned attention to the 
mundane. Ward was interested in housing co-operatives, playgrounds, 
allotment gardens, informal education, and the ways ordinary people 
organise their lives when institutions fail or intrude too heavily. His 
argument was disarmingly simple: if you want to understand anarchism, do 
not look to manifestos or barricades, look at everyday life.

Aotearoa offers a particularly clear view of this everyday anarchism. 
Not because it is uniquely radical or harmonious, but because the 
failures and violences of the state are so visible, and because people 
have had to rely on one another in spite of it. Mutual aid after floods, 
whanau stepping in where welfare systems fall short, informal housing 
arrangements that keep people off the streets, cash work and favours 
that bypass wage discipline, conflict resolved quietly without police or 
courts, these are not marginal or exceptional activities. They are 
normal. They are how life continues and yet they are rarely named as 
political.

One of the most powerful myths of modern society is that order comes 
from above. We are taught that without rules imposed by the state, 
without police, bureaucrats, managers, and experts, society would 
descend into violence and disorder. Cooperation is treated as fragile, 
conditional, and in need of constant supervision. When people help one 
another, it is framed as charity or kindness, never as a form of social 
organisation in its own right.

This myth serves a purpose. It legitimises authority while obscuring the 
fact that most of what keeps society functioning happens below the level 
of law and policy. The state depends heavily on unpaid care, informal 
cooperation, and community resilience, even as it claims credit for 
stability and threatens punishment for deviation. It is quick to 
intervene when people step outside permitted channels, but slow, or 
absent, when real support is needed.

Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in moments of crisis. After 
earthquakes, floods, and fires in Aotearoa, it is neighbours, whanau, 
and community groups who act first. Food is shared, shelter organised, 
children looked after, elders checked on. These responses are not 
centrally planned. They emerge from relationships, trust, and local 
knowledge. The state arrives later, often to regulate, document, or 
withdraw support once the immediate danger has passed.

This is not an argument that the state does nothing, or that it is 
always irrelevant. It is an argument that social life is not produced by 
authority, even when authority claims ownership over it. The order we 
rely on most is informal, relational, and largely invisible to official 
accounts.

In Aotearoa, these dynamics are inseparable from colonisation. The 
settler state did not arrive to create order from chaos. It arrived to 
impose its own forms of order on societies that were already organised, 
often in ways that conflicted with European notions of property, 
hierarchy, and law. Maori social organisation, grounded in whanau, hapu, 
tikanga, and collective responsibility, represented a profound challenge 
to the authority of the colonial state. Land tenure without individual 
ownership, justice without prisons, governance without a sovereign rule, 
these were not abstract alternatives, but lived realities.
Colonisation sought to dismantle these systems, replacing them with wage 
labour, private property, policing, and bureaucratic control. Yet 
despite generations of violence, dispossession, and assimilation, 
non-state forms of social organisation persist. They persist not as 
relics of a pre-colonial past, but as adaptive, living practices shaped 
by ongoing resistance and survival

It is important to be clear here. We are not claiming that Māori society 
is “anarchist” in any simple or ideological sense. Such a claim would be 
both inaccurate and disrespectful. What it does argue is that Māori 
social life exposes the limits and contradictions of the state by 
demonstrating that authority is not the only way to organise society, 
and that relational, non-statist forms of order are not only possible 
but enduring.


These practices are not confined to Māori communities. Working-class 
life across Aotearoa is full of informal systems that make survival 
possible in the face of rising rents, precarious work, and shrinking 
public services. People share childcare, tools, transport, and 
knowledge. They look after one another’s kids, cover shifts, lend money 
without contracts, and find ways around rules that would otherwise leave 
them stuck. Much of this activity exists in a legal grey area, tolerated 
when it is convenient and criminalised when it becomes too visible.


What links these practices is not ideology, but necessity. People do not 
organise this way because they have read anarchist theory. They do it 
because they have to, and because cooperation works better than 
competition when resources are scarce and institutions are hostile.


Anarchism, in this sense, is not a destination but a description. It 
describes what happens when people take responsibility for their own 
lives and for one another, rather than deferring to distant authorities. 
It describes social order that emerges from below, shaped by context, 
relationships, and mutual obligation. It is messy, imperfect, and often 
fragile, but so is life itself.


This perspective challenges both defenders and critics of the state. 
Against those who insist that authority is the source of all order, it 
offers abundant evidence to the contrary. Against those who imagine 
anarchism only as a future rupture or total collapse, it insists that 
much of what they desire already exists, quietly, in the present.


We are not trying to romanticise these practices. Informal systems can 
reproduce inequality, exclusion, and harm. They can fail, break down, or 
be overwhelmed. Nor do we deny the reality of violence, abuse, or 
exploitation within communities. What we do though is refuse the 
assumption that the state is the natural or necessary solution to these 
problems.


Instead, we ask a different set of questions. How do people actually 
manage harm when they do not call the police? How do families and 
communities regulate behaviour without formal authority? What happens 
when responsibility is collective rather than delegated upward? And why 
are these forms of organisation so often ignored, dismissed, or actively 
undermined?


These questions matter now more than ever. As faith in political 
institutions erodes, as economic inequality deepens, and as crises 
multiply, the gap between official systems and lived reality grows 
wider. Governments promise security while delivering precarity. 
Bureaucracies expand even as their capacity to care diminishes. In this 
context, the everyday anarchism of mutual aid and informal cooperation 
is not a fringe phenomenon, it is a lifeline.


We invite you to look differently at your own life and the lives around 
you. To notice the ways order is created without orders being given. To 
recognise that much of what feels natural or inevitable is in fact the 
result of collective effort without command. And to consider what might 
change if we took these practices seriously, not as temporary stopgaps, 
but as the foundations of social life.


We are not demanding agreement, but we do ask for attention. Because 
once you start to see anarchism in action, it becomes difficult to unsee it.

image c/o theslowburningfuse.wordpress.com




https://awsm.nz/anarchy-is-not-what-you-think-it-is/
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