The inaugural meeting of the Network of Anarchist Internationalists (NAI), held on 9 November 2025, is to be welcomed. It arrives at a moment when the world is being marched towards deeper militarisation, permanent war, and the normalisation of mass death as a background condition of capitalism. The importance of this meeting is not that it produced something entirely new, but that it restated, with rare clarity, something anarchists have always known and too often failed to insist upon loudly enough: war is not a mistake, a deviation, or the result of bad leaders. War is a structural feature of capitalism in crisis, and internationalism is not a moral posture but a material necessity.
Across the globe, ruling classes are preparing their populations for sacrifice. The language differs, democracy, security, sovereignty, civilisation, but the demand is the same everywhere – accept falling living standards, accept repression, accept death, so that capital may survive its own contradictions. In this context, the NAI’s insistence on revolutionary defeatism and class internationalism cuts against the grain not only of mainstream politics, but of much of what passes for the contemporary left. It refuses the comforting lie that peace can be secured by choosing the right side in imperialist conflicts. It rejects the fantasy that workers share a meaningful interest with “their” state. And it insists, instead, that the only war worth fighting is the class war, waged from below against all states and all forms of capital.
This position matters precisely because the dominant political atmosphere is one of enforced alignment. Populations are told that neutrality is complicity, that refusal to choose between competing imperialisms is wrong, and that solidarity must be filtered through the interests of nation-states. The NAI’s intervention exposes this logic for what it is – the ideological conscription of the working class. When anarchists refuse to take sides in capitalist wars, we are not refusing solidarity, we are refusing to let solidarity be defined by generals, politicians, and arms manufacturers.
The network’s emphasis on supporting deserters, draft resisters, and war refusers on all sides is especially significant. These figures are rarely celebrated, even by much of the left, because they embody a politics that cannot be easily instrumentalised. The deserter does not die heroically for a flag. The refuser does not advance a national narrative. Instead, they act on the simple recognition that the enemy is not the worker in another uniform, but the system that put both of them there. To defend and organise around such acts is to affirm that internationalism begins not in abstract declarations, but in concrete refusals to kill and be killed for capital.
For anarcho-communists in Aotearoa, this analysis resonates deeply with our own position at the margins of the imperial core. The New Zealand state presents itself as benign, humanitarian, and peace-loving, even as it integrates itself more tightly into Western military alliances, expands surveillance powers, and prepares the ideological ground for future conflicts in the Pacific. The language of partnership and security masks the same underlying reality found elsewhere, that the state exists to manage capitalism, and capitalism requires violence to reproduce itself. There is no “clean” participation in this system, only varying degrees of distance from its most visible atrocities.
The value of the NAI is that it reasserts internationalism not as a sentimental attachment to distant struggles, but as a way of understanding our own conditions. War does not only happen “over there”. It happens in the ports, in the supply chains, in the factories producing weapons and components, in the austerity budgets justified by military spending, and in the police powers normalised in the name of security. The battlefield is not only the front line, it is the everyday life of the working class under capitalism.
Recognising this dissolves the false separation between anti-war politics and local class struggle. They are the same fight, viewed from different angles.
Historically, anarchist internationalism emerged from precisely this understanding. From the First International through to the Saint-Imier split and beyond, anarchists rejected the idea that emancipation could be achieved through national projects or state power. The catastrophe of the First World War only confirmed this analysis, as socialist parties across Europe abandoned international solidarity in favour of patriotic mobilisation. The lesson was brutal but clear – without an uncompromising opposition to nationalism and the state, the working class will always be mobilised against itself.
What the NAI represents is a conscious attempt to recover that lesson in the present moment. This is not nostalgia, but necessity. Capitalism today is globalised to an extent unimaginable to earlier generations, and its crises are correspondingly international. Supply chains stretch across continents, financial shocks ripple instantly, and wars are fought not only with soldiers but with sanctions, debt, and energy markets. Any meaningful resistance must operate on the same scale, or it will be contained, co-opted, or crushed.
At the same time, the network avoids the trap of imagining internationalism as a centralised structure issuing directives from above. It speaks instead of coordination, communication, and mutual recognition between autonomous groups rooted in their own contexts. This is crucial. Anarchist internationalism cannot be a pale imitation of statist internationals, nor can it ignore the unevenness of global struggle. Solidarity must flow in multiple directions, shaped by listening as much as by speaking, and grounded in the understanding that no single movement or region holds the key to liberation.
From an anarcho-communist perspective, the NAI’s framework aligns with a broader commitment to abolishing not only war, but the social relations that make war inevitable. Capitalism fragments humanity into competing units, firms, nations, identities, each forced to struggle against the others for survival. War is simply this logic made explicit. To oppose war without opposing capitalism is therefore to treat the symptom while leaving the disease intact.
Of course, revolutionary internationalism faces real challenges. Nationalism remains powerful, especially in moments of crisis, and the pressure to “take sides” can fracture movements. There are also genuine questions about how anarchists relate to anti-colonial and national liberation struggles without reproducing statist logic or dismissing the lived realities of oppression. These tensions cannot be resolved through slogans alone. They require ongoing debate, humility, and a willingness to sit with contradiction without abandoning core principles.
What the NAI offers is not a finished programme, but a political compass. It points away from alignment with power and towards solidarity from below. It reminds us that the working class has no homeland, that borders are tools of domination, and that peace under capitalism is always temporary and conditional. Most importantly, it affirms that internationalism is not something to be postponed until “after the revolution”. It is the means by which revolution becomes possible at all.
For anarcho-communists in Aotearoa, the task is to take this perspective seriously, not as observers of a global process, but as participants in it. That means interrogating how our labour, our resources, and our silence may be implicated in global systems of violence. It means building links with comrades elsewhere that go beyond statements and into shared practice. And it means refusing the comforting illusion that we can insulate ourselves from the consequences of a world order built on exploitation and war.
The inaugural meeting of the Network of Anarchist Internationalists should be understood as an invitation to sharpen our analysis, deepen our commitments, and re-anchor anarchist politics in the uncompromising struggle against capitalism, the state, and all their wars.
“For No War But the Class War”: Reflections on the Inaugural Meeting of the Network of Anarchist Internationalists
