Apolitical is Community Power
Refusal is not privilege
I found it in the 1990s. It was part of an exchange with another infoshop. A big box of zines and books and stickers and buttons. One zine didn’t want to be ignored: odd shape, deliberate design, red ink bleeding into the page like it meant trouble.
The zine was an essay entitled:
The Importance of Being Apolitical.
Most of it was written in red ink—literal red ink, resisting the eye, slowing the reader down. The only black ink was at the end: the address and bio of a South African infoshop, and a signature not from one person but from an anarchist collective.
Multiracial. Anti-apartheid. Committed to liberation and equity for Black South Africans.
That matters because it breaks the modern cliché before it can even form. These writers weren’t neutral. They weren’t sheltered. They weren’t outside history. They were inside it, in a country where politics was not an abstract argument but an enforced hierarchy.
So when they argued for being “apolitical,” they weren’t naming apathy.
They were naming refusal.
And even though the text itself is gone—no archive, no searchable trace—the argument survived, because it was never meant to be admired. It was meant to be used.
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Today, the accusation arrives fast:
Being apolitical is privilege.
It’s delivered like morality. It functions like pressure. It tries to force people back into the approved posture: participate, endorse, choose a side, validate the system.
But that accusation depends on a strawman. It imagines an apolitical person as a comfortable spectator—insulated, untouched, safe enough not to care.
That person exists.
But that person is not who we are talking about.
We are talking about people without access to centralized power.
And we need to say this with precision:
we are not powerless.
We have power.
We have power in our relationships, our workplaces, our neighborhoods—where life actually happens. We can show up. We can share resources. We can refuse cooperation with harm. We can protect people. We can create consequences.
That is power.
What we do not have is access to the machinery that centralizes it—party filters, donor networks, institutional pipelines, managed visibility. The system is designed so ordinary people can be counted, courted, and managed, but rarely allowed to steer.
So when we’re told political participation is duty, the real demand underneath is:
trade real power for symbolic power.
Trade community action for representation.
Trade accountability for a ballot.
Trade the reachable for the theatrical.
And if we refuse that trade, we’re called privileged.
That inversion is the entire problem.
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Apolitical, as we mean it, is not disengagement.
It is methodology.
Apolitical means we stop treating centralized politics as the only legitimate arena for moral life, and we relocate our agency to where it can actually be exercised: the local, the relational, the accountable.
Apolitical means:
we do not outsource responsibility to rulers.
we do not confuse voting with power.
we do not treat spectacle as participation.
we build capacity where we live.
we keep dignity mutual.
we insist on justice as equal application, not institutional theatre.
Apolitical is not absence. It’s refusal.
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If we want to stay honest, we have to name what politics does most consistently.
Politics doesn’t primarily organize people.
It organizes power.
It gathers authority upward, away from communities, into institutions that are hard to reach and harder to contest. It turns decisions that shape daily life into distant procedures: budgets, committees, platforms, campaigns, talking points.
And elections become the machine’s cleanest trick.
They create the illusion of choice to manufacture your consent.
You are asked to give power to someone you do not know, will never meet, cannot meaningfully control. You are asked to trust them with your life. And you are asked to accept that once empowered, they can do what they want.
And they often do.
That isn’t cynicism. It’s observation.
Promises get you in. Excuses keep you there.
We say ‘politicians lie’ like it’s a punchline. It’s not. It’s the job description. It’s a recurring outcome of a system that rewards performance and protects betrayal.
Lying isn’t a flaw of politics.
It’s the performance bonus.
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Now we make one thing explicit.
The machine is whatever converts public need into private gain, then calls it process.
That machine has many faces—parties, donors, corporations, media, bureaucracy, police—but the function stays constant: centralize power, extract legitimacy, and enforce compliance as normal life.
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At this point someone will say: yes, but participation matters.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes it changes an outcome. Sometimes it slows harm.
But even when participation has effects, a deeper truth remains:
centralized politics asks us to surrender our power upstream.
And upstream power is structurally hard to hold accountable.
So people become disillusioned, not because they’re childish, but because they notice the pattern.
They notice something else too.
The political class often leaves office richer than when they entered.
There’s an old saying—crude, but accurate:
if you leave office richer than when you entered, you’re probably a crook.
Call it what you want. The result is the same: the political class grows rich while communities are told to tighten belts.
You don’t need every politician to be corrupt for corruption to become normal.
You only need the incentives.
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So we return to the accusation: “apolitical is privilege.”
No.
For many of us, being apolitical is not comfort.
It’s refusing a trade we were never going to win.
It’s recognizing that the system doesn’t just fail sometimes—
it is built to concentrate power, protect it, and punish those who don’t feed it.
The anger here isn’t abstract.
It’s the anger of being misnamed.
It’s the anger of being told we’re entitled for refusing to hand our autonomy to someone who’s never had to honor it.
It’s the anger of being pressured to validate a machine that feeds on the legitimacy of the people it abandons.
If that anger makes anyone uncomfortable, good. It should.
Anger is often the moment a person stops consenting.
That is not privilege.
It’s refusal to obey the vile maxim—all for ourselves and nothing for other people.
It’s refusal to surrender decision-making to people who treat power as personal property.
It’s refusal to call it “democracy” when millions are told their only role is to vote, obey, and hope.
Centralized power is community power denied.
If your version of democracy means handing off decisions to strangers who profit from obedience—keep it.
We’re not participating in our own disempowerment.
So we stop treating “apolitical” as an insult.
We reclaim it as a stance of community power:
It’s power held close—where consequences land.
It’s decisions made by the people who live with them.
It’s protection that doesn’t wait for permission.
It’s dignity that isn’t negotiated through campaigns.
It’s justice that doesn’t depend on winning a vote.
And it’s refusal—flat refusal—to legitimize the rule of the few at the expense of the many.
Misery loves plutocracy. Keep your pity party—we’ve got shit to build.
