He Ako mo ngā Umanga Mahi Ngātahi — a free 6-module course on how to start a cooperative in Aotearoa.

I built this on github pages so it’s easy to transfer, link to etc

Covers the legal structures, the Mondragón model, Māori collective economics, and the solidarity economy.

Read and download it free here:

https://robertmccallnz.github.io/cooperative-aotearoa/

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.

Want to spread the word? Download free social media cards for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn:

https://robertmccallnz.github.io/cooperative-aotearoa/memes.html

The Night Wall Street’s Backyard Cracked

On 23 June 2026, three openly democratic socialist candidates won New York City Democratic congressional primaries, two of them unseating sitting members of Congress. Brad Lander defeated two-term incumbent Dan Goldman in NY-10 with approximately 65.8% of the vote. Darializa Avila Chevalier ousted incumbent Adriano Espaillat in NY-13 with roughly 49.4% to Espaillat’s 46% in a close but decisive race. Claire Valdez won the open NY-7 seat, defeating Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso by around 10 percentage points with 92% of precincts in. All three were endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist elected mayor in November 2025 with 50.78% of the vote — the highest turnout NYC mayoral election since 1993.

This is not a one-off protest vote. It is the third major escalation of a socialist electoral project that has been building since 2016. It is happening in the belly of global finance capital. And it carries direct lessons for Aotearoa heading into the November 2026 general election.[7]

Who Are These Candidates?

Brad Lander — former New York City Comptroller, endorsed by Mamdani, ran explicitly on opposing US military aid to Israel, immigration rights, and working-class economic demands. Lander accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza; his opponent Goldman received support from pro-Israel organisations. AIPAC’s United Democracy Project, which has been on pace to break its own spending records in 2026 primaries, poured money into supporting Espaillat. Lander’s demographic breakdown was striking: 61% of younger voters backed him against Goldman’s 39%; in college-educated areas he won 69-31; in higher-income areas, 70-30. Goldman performed better in lower-income areas (57-43), which flags a class complexity discussed below.

Darializa Avila Chevalier — doctoral student and Columbia University Gaza war encampment leader. She is described by the New York Times as an “activist and democratic socialist” who ousted a sitting Congressman in an upset. Her support skewed toward younger voters (+24.5 points advantage among under-40s) and college-educated precincts, while Espaillat retained the established Hispanic working-class vote in lower-income majority-Hispanic districts, again showing a generational and class fracture within the left coalition.

Claire Valdez — State Assembly member, DSA-endorsed, backed by Mamdani and AOC. She won the open Brooklyn-Queens seat, defeating the more moderate borough president. Pre-election polling from Emerson College had her leading Reynoso among younger voters 33%-15%. Men broke for Valdez; women were more split. In majority-Black communities, Reynoso outperformed significantly, again showing a non-uniform class and racial coalition.

The Ideological Shift — What It Is and How We Measure It

These three candidates ran on a shared platform anchored in the DSA’s 2025-2026 national programme: universal healthcare (Medicare for All), universal rent control and the right to counsel for tenants, a 32-hour work week with no pay cut, tax the rich including a wealth tax, a Green New Deal with public ownership over energy infrastructure, union power, abolition of mandatory minimums, free higher education, free public childcare, and — critically — an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an end to military and economic aid to Israel. The word “socialist” appeared on their campaign materials and public statements without apology.

This represents a clean break from the dominant Democratic Party mode of the last 30 years, which has been: accept the market as given, soften its edges, and above all never name the class enemy. These candidates named it.

How we measure an ideological shift

An ideological shift is not a feeling. It is measurable in at least four ways:

1. Who wins elections they were not supposed to win.

Lander beat a well-funded two-term incumbent by 32 points. That is not a polling error or a bad candidate — it is a structural shift in what a safe Democratic district will accept. Avila Chevalier beat a sitting Congressman in a majority-Hispanic district while being an activist doctoral student, not a party machine product.[8][3][14][21]

2. Organisational growth.

NYC-DSA had 5,910 members in October 2024, the month Mamdani launched his mayoral campaign. By December 2025, it had 13,145 members — more than doubled. National DSA grew from 50,713 to 92,912 in the same period. That is not a trend; it is a rupture. Historically, DSA hovered around 5,000 for decades before exploding to 50,000 between 2016 and 2020, then stagnating during Biden before surging again post-Mamdani.

3. Where the money and attacks are concentrated.

AIPAC and its United Democracy Project are on pace to break their own spending records in 2026, openly targeting DSA-backed candidates. The United Democracy Project routed $22 million through shell PACs in Illinois primaries and spent heavily in New York and Maryland. When capital spends like this to stop a political current, it has correctly identified a genuine threat — not a performative one. Mamdani called AIPAC “monsters” who spend “millions in dark money” to “turn us against one another”. He was not wrong about the spending.

4. What becomes “sayable” without career death.

In 2022, calling Israel’s actions genocide in a Democratic primary was career-ending. In 2026, Lander built his entire campaign on it and won 65.8%. In 2022, “democratic socialist” on a ballot was a liability in New York. In 2026, it is the winning brand in multiple working-class districts of the empire’s financial capital.

The generational and class fracture

These wins are not unambiguous. The demographic breakdowns reveal a fracture within the working class itself. In NY-10, Goldman outperformed Lander specifically in lower-income areas (57-43). In NY-13, Espaillat — the incumbent, a Latino representative with deep machine roots — retained lower-income majority-Hispanic communities even while losing overall to the younger, more educated socialist challenger. In NY-7, Reynoso significantly outperformed Valdez in majority-Black communities.

This is a genuine tension the socialist left must grapple with honestly. The DSA’s current coalition skews toward younger, college-educated, often white-collar renters rather than the lowest-income sections of the working class, who retain ties to the existing party machine — the machine that, however corrupted, has historically brokered local services, housing placements and political patronage for immigrant and Black communities. The NYC socialist project has begun to bridge this through tenant organising and Palestine solidarity in immigrant communities, but the fracture is real data, not a smear.

The lesson is not to abandon the project. The lesson is that **electoral wins are insufficient without deep organising in the communities that still back the machine**, and that the DSA’s success depends on proving, in practice, that socialist governance delivers more material improvement than the machine ever did.

***

The Mamdani Effect: One Year of Socialist City Government

The context for June 2026 is Mamdani’s mayoral campaign and victory. He ran explicitly on rent control, fare-free public transit, tax the rich, and opposition to US-backed war crimes. He was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and the DSA. Three-quarters of New York’s youth voters (ages 18-29) voted for him — 75% vs 19% for Cuomo and 5% for Sliwa. Youth turnout hit 28% in a mayoral race, historically one of the lowest-turnout elections in the country.

His endorsement of the three June 2026 congressional candidates was a direct test of whether his political project could expand beyond the mayoralty into congressional representation. It passed — and with striking margins. As the New York Times summarised: “The results also indicated voters’ acceptance of far-left ideologies”.

The broader city-wide picture: democratic socialists now hold the mayoralty of the world’s financial capital, and are on course to hold multiple seats in the US House of Representatives from NYC districts. The Hill’s political analysts note that socialist mayors have now won or advanced in NYC, Washington DC, and Los Angeles in 2025-2026, with commentators divided on whether this signals a durable ideological shift or primarily a “desire for change” anger vote. The weight of evidence — especially DSA’s membership growth, the coherence of the policy platform, and the establishment’s coordinated spending response — points toward the former.

The Correlations with Aotearoa — Real and Structural

Where the parallel is direct and evidenced

Housing un-affordability as a class weapon.

In New Zealand, average annual housing costs increased 31% between 2020 and 2024, while average disposable income increased only 24% over the same period. Approximately one in four households that rented spent more than 40% of their income on housing costs in the June 2024 year. Around two-thirds of non-owner-occupier Māori and Pacific households spend 30% or more of their income on housing. The median house price nationally is $753,500 against a median household disposable income of $51,597 — a ratio of 14.6 times annual income to afford the median home outright. This is the same structural crisis — housing as an asset class stripped from workers and handed to capital — that Mamdani’s platform directly attacked. The parallel is not rhetorical. It is the same mechanism, operating across the Pacific.

The fracturing of the left vote under MMP.

The 2023 New Zealand general election saw Labour’s vote almost halve — from 50.0% in 2020 to 26.91% in 2023. The Greens rose to a record 11.6% and won two traditionally Labour electorates outright. Te Pāti Māori doubled its parliamentary seats to six, taking Māori electorates that Labour had held. The combined National-Labour two-party vote was just 65.9%, the lowest since 2002. This is a structural vote fracture: Labour is losing its working-class Māori and Pacific base to Te Pāti Māori, its urban progressive base to the Greens, and its rural and small-town working-class base to NZ First and National.

By April 2026, a 1News Verian poll showed Labour surging to 37% with the left bloc (Labour-Greens-Te Pāti Māori) holding 66 seats against 58 for the right. However, by May 2026, Roy Morgan showed National’s bloc back at 51.5% and the left bloc at 41.5%, with Labour plunging 7.5 points in one month to 26.5%. The Greens at 12.5% and Te Pāti Māori at 2.5% tell the story: the left vote is fragmented, volatile, and driven by economic anger rather than organised class solidarity.[34][35]

The non-voter base — Aotearoa’s sleeping giant.

In the 2023 New Zealand general election, approximately **1.19 million eligible New Zealanders did not vote** — including 829,396 enrolled voters who chose not to participate and a further 500,000+ eligible but not enrolled. In percentage terms, 22% of enrolled voters did not cast a vote. This is the largest untapped electoral bloc in the country, concentrated among the young, the poor, Māori, and Pacific communities — exactly the demographic that Mamdani activated in NYC. The DSA did not win on swing voters. It won by turning out people who had previously been written off by the machine.

Where the parallel does not directly hold

Structural differences in electoral systems. New Zealand uses MMP, which already produces proportional representation and allows smaller parties to win seats without needing to take over a major party from within. The DSA’s strategy is explicitly to operate inside the Democratic Party because the US first-past-the-post system makes independent socialist parties electorally unviable. In Aotearoa, the DSA model (entryism into Labour) is one option, but the MMP system means that a credible, organised socialist current could instead build a dedicated party and win seats directly — as the Greens and Te Pāti Māori have demonstrated.[38][39]

The left fragmentation problem. Aotearoa’s socialist and anarchist left is substantially more fragmented than NYC-DSA. The ISO calls for coalitions with Labour and the Greens; the WSWS (Socialist Equality Party) attacks the ISO for doing exactly that; and neither has the organisational weight, the embedded community roots, or the electoral experience that NYC-DSA has built over a decade. Socialist Aotearoa, ISO, and the Greens each claim portions of the left space without unified strategy or membership base remotely comparable to 13,000 NYC-DSA members alone.[23][40][41]

The Palestine question lands differently here. In NYC, opposition to the genocide in Gaza was a ballot-box winner in multi-racial working-class districts because of the demographics of those districts (large Arab-American, Muslim, Black, Latino communities) and the material reality of AIPAC’s dark money. In Aotearoa, anti-war and pro-Palestine sentiment exists and is growing — the ISO is explicitly trying to channel anti-war sentiment ahead of the 2026 election — but it has not yet achieved the ballot-box crystallisation that it reached in NYC. However, with New Zealand’s involvement in Five Eyes and the US war machine, and with a NZ election in November 2026, the conditions for this to become electorally significant are present.[

What Aotearoa Can Actually Use

Lessons from NYC with direct application

1. Name the class enemy and win more votes, not fewer.

The evidence from NYC is now three cycles deep: campaigns that say “socialist,” “tax the rich,” and “rent control” explicitly win in working-class urban areas. The NZ left’s reflex of softening demands for “electability” has no empirical basis — see Labour’s 26.91% in 2023 and 26.5% in May 2026 polls. Clarity works.[2][31][35][16][19]

2. Build the candidate from the movement.

Avila Chevalier came from the Gaza encampment at Columbia. Mamdani came from state assembly organising and the Working Families Party. DSA’s Jacobin-published strategy explicitly calls for “candidates who have come out of movements themselves, not just lifelong politicians who only turn to movements for endorsements every four years”. In Aotearoa, this means the candidates should come from rent strikes, the food poverty campaigns, te ao Māori organising, migrant worker advocacy, and Palestine solidarity — not from party list bureaucracies.[42][19]

3. The non-voter base is the electoral revolution.

Mamdani’s 50.78% came in part because youth turnout hit 28% in a usually low-turnout election, and 75% of those youth voters backed him. Aotearoa’s 1.19 million non-voters are predominantly the same demographic: young, working-class, Māori, Pacific, and renters. A serious socialist electoral project in Aotearoa must be organised around mobilising this base, not competing for swing voters already embedded in National or Labour.[5][28][37]

4. Use MMP’s proportionality as a weapon, not an excuse.

The 5% threshold is real, but the Greens, Te Pāti Māori, ACT, and NZ First all clear it regularly. Under MMP, a genuinely socialist current that builds 5-8% support through movement-embedded organising can hold seats and extract policy concessions from any government. The precedent — that socialists and trade unionists fought for MMP specifically to break the two-party stranglehold — is real history. That tool exists. The question is whether there is organisation disciplined enough to use it.[33][35][39]

5. The fracture in the left coalition is a warning, not just a success story.

NYC’s class and racial fractures within the socialist vote are a live warning for Aotearoa. The Greens’ growing support base is urban, educated, and predominantly Pākehā. Te Pāti Māori represents a different class fraction of the Māori working class. The ISO, Socialist Aotearoa, and the far-left speak to small activist layers. Without genuine unity of these currents around material class demands — rents, wages, food prices, public housing, healthcare — the left vote fracture in Aotearoa will continue to hand power to the right bloc, just as NYC’s fracture among Hispanic working-class communities in lower-income areas demonstrated the limits of even a winning coalition.

The Bottom Line

Three socialists just beat the Democratic Party machine in the financial capital of the United States, backed by a movement that doubled its membership in fourteen months and turned out young people at rates not seen in a generation. They did it on a platform that said “rent control,” “tax the rich,” “Medicare for All,” “end the genocide,” and “32-hour work week” — without apology. AIPAC spent record money to stop them and lost

Aotearoa has 1.19 million people who didn’t vote in 2023, housing costs rising three times faster than wages, a left bloc that fractures every election, and a November 2026 general election four months away. The conditions are not identical to NYC. But the core lesson transfers without modification: when working-class people are organised into movements that then run their own candidates on clear class demands, they win. When they are managed by careerists who ask them to be patient and moderate, they stay home.

The empire just showed us the crack in the wall. The question is what we do in Dunedin, in Ōtara, in Porirua, in Te Tai Tokerau.

*Sources: Democracy Now![19] | New York Times live results[29][8][13][4] | Patch NY[3] | Forward[1] | Politico[9][11][16] | BBC[12] | Washington Post[2] | Al Jazeera[42][10] | The Hill[27] | Jacobin[45] | DSA Platform 2025-2026[18] | DSA membership data, City & State NY[23] | CIRCLE/Tufts (youth vote)[28] | Wikipedia: 2025 NYC mayoral election[5] | Unherd[20] | Elections NZ: 2023 Official Results[33] | The Conversation (NZ Greens)[43][44] | Australian Institute of International Affairs[31] | The Conversation (NZ 2023)[32] | 1News Verian poll April 2026[34] | Roy Morgan NZ May 2026[35] | Stats NZ Housing 2025[30] | Scoop: NZ non-voters 2026[37] | ISO NZ[36] | WSWS NZ[40] | vote.nz 2026[7] | Jacobin: NZ MMP history[39] | DSA NYC working groups[46]*

Building an AI data centre in Aotearoa from a socialist standpoint means rejecting the extractive logic of Big Tech — where socialised costs fund privatised profits — and designing infrastructure that is publicly owned, democratically governed, rooted in Te Tiriti, powered by the whenua’s own renewable energy, and whose surpluses flow back to the workers who build and run it. This is not a utopian fantasy. The material conditions in Aotearoa are unusually favourable: ~85% renewable electricity, a cool climate that slashes cooling costs, a co-operative economic tradition that contributes 13% of GDP, strong data sovereignty law, and existing models of state ownership in the energy sector.cpusa+2

Why Private Ownership of AI Infrastructure Fails Workers

The core contradiction of the current AI boom is simple: the costs are socialised, the profits are privatised. When a hyper-scaler builds a data centre in Invercargill, it consumes local power and water, drives up costs for residents, offers no guarantee of local employment, and exports all profit offshore. New Zealand’s data centre market is projected to generate over USD 1.37 billion in revenue in 2025, yet communities hosting these facilities receive little in return beyond infrastructure strain.reddit+2

Under private ownership, workers have no say over how AI is deployed — whether to automate their jobs, surveil them, or extract value from their communities. The tech oligarchy’s monopoly control must be broken if AI infrastructure is to serve rather than exploit. The strategic objective is political: subjecting AI infrastructure to democratic, public control.cpusa

Foundations: The Socialist Structural Principles

Public and Worker Ownership

The data centre must be publicly or cooperatively owned — not a PPP (public-private partnership) that hands control to capital after the ribbon is cut. There are several viable ownership models suited to Aotearoa’s existing legal landscape:treasury

The most robust socialist model combines a worker cooperative operating structure with a public majority ownership stake — similar to how NZ’s state-owned energy SOEs (Meridian, Mercury, Genesis) have retained public dividends while employing a unionized workforce. The Crown’s residual 51% stake in Meridian alone is worth more than the total received from partial privatization, demonstrating the long-term fiscal logic of public ownership in infrastructure.devonfunds

Workers’ Councils and Democratic Governance

A workers’ council, composed of all employees across technical, maintenance, administrative, and support roles, must hold binding authority over key decisions: hiring and wages, working conditions, technology deployment, and reinvestment priorities. This is consistent with NZCTU principles for AI in the workplace, which mandate that workers must be involved in decision-making on the introduction, use, and regulation of AI technology — with high-risk AI only deployed where workers and their unions have agreed.union

Governance should be structured in layers:

• Shop floor councils — direct worker democracy at the technical level

• Enterprise board — elected by worker-members plus community representatives

• Public accountability layer — Parliamentary oversight via select committee and an open public register of all decisions, contracts, and compute allocations

This mirrors proposals from democratic AI theorists who advocate for citizens’ assemblies — representative cross-sections of everyday people with real authority to set binding goals and constraints on AI systems.oneproject

Te Tiriti and Māori Data Sovereignty

Any socialist framework in Aotearoa that ignores Te Tiriti o Waitangi is incomplete. Data sovereignty for Māori is not a compliance checkbox — it is a fundamental right grounded in tino rangatiratanga (self-determination) and the understanding that data about Māori is taonga (treasure).minterellison+1

Te Mana Raraunga (the Māori Data Sovereignty Network) has established clear principles: asserting Māori rights and interests in data, safeguarding Māori data, advocating for Māori involvement in the governance of data repositories, and supporting the development of Māori data infrastructure. A socialist data centre must:ecs.wgtn

• Co-design governance with iwi and hapū from the outset, not as consultation theatre

• Reserve compute capacity for Māori digital businesses and innovations

• Give hapū representation on the enterprise board with binding veto over decisions that affect Māori data

• Support te reo Māori AI development — training language models on te reo with iwi consent and benefit-sharing

This is not charity — it is rangatiratanga expressed materially, and it connects the socialist project to decolonization rather than reproducing Pākehā control under a red banner.

Energy: Built on the Whenua’s Renewable Power

Aotearoa generates approximately 85% of its electricity from renewable sources — hydro, wind, geothermal, and emerging solar. New Zealand data centres already operate at an average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of just 1.3, well below the global average of 1.54. The South Island’s cool climate provides natural cooling, further reducing energy waste.ey+3

A socialist data centre should be co-located with, or directly contracted to, a publicly owned renewable generator. The most compelling model comes from the Te Huka geothermal field, where co-location design eliminates the data centre’s cooling energy demand and the geothermal plant’s thermal waste simultaneously. This is circular socialist infrastructure: the land’s geothermal energy runs the computers; the computers’ waste heat returns to the community.facebook

The Swiss workers’ cooperative Infomaniak offers the clearest global proof-of-concept. Their Geneva D4 data centre runs entirely on renewable energy, houses 10,000 servers in 1,800 sqm, and at full capacity feeds 1.7MW into a district heating network capable of heating up to 6,000 homes. By eliminating air conditioning and recycling all heat, it avoids up to 3,600 tonnes of CO₂ per year. The facility is embedded in the basement of a housing cooperative — integrating digital infrastructure with community life. This is the model Aotearoa should replicate.datacenterdynamics+1

A socialist Aotearoa data centre built on similar lines could:

• Use Waikato or Taupō geothermal energy (already an established grid resource)

• Feed waste heat into community heating networks in the adjacent town

• Source hardware through publicly tendered, union-approved contracts

• Operate under a Power Purchase Agreement with a Crown energy SOE

Labour: Who Builds It, Who Runs It

Current private data centre investment in NZ offers no guarantee of local employment during construction — operators may choose imported labour if it is cheaper. A socialist data centre must contractually mandate:reddit

• All construction work performed under union collective agreements with local labour hire preferences

• Living wages as the minimum for all operational roles — cleaning, security, maintenance, and technical staff alike

• No casualization — all roles are permanent with full employment protections

• Training pipelines embedded in the enterprise: apprenticeships, digital skills programmes for working-class communities, and partnerships with polytechnics (including Otago Polytechnic)

• Profit-sharing through annual distributions to worker-members, proportional to hours worked, not capital invested

The NZCTU’s AI principles are explicit: workers must share fairly in any benefits that the use of AI creates, such as increased productivity. A worker coop data centre operationalizes this from the ground up.union

What the Centre Computes For

A socialist data centre is not neutral infrastructure — it should have a mission. Compute capacity should be allocated by democratic priority, not highest bidder. This means a tiered access model:

TierUsersAccess TermsPublic ReserveGovernment agencies, public hospitals, schoolsFree at point of useResearch TierUniversities, CRIs, public interest researchSubsidized, peer-reviewed allocationCooperative TierWorker coops, social enterprises, NGOs, Māori digital businessesBelow-market ratesCommercial TierPrivate companiesMarket rate, with a solidarity levyExcludedSurveillance capitalism, weapons AI, fossil fuel optimizationBanned by governance charter

The Ada Lovelace Institute frames public compute investments as an industrial policy lever for reshaping AI development — not just building more compute, but challenging concentrated power and promoting public value throughout the AI supply chain. This means AI models built on this infrastructure should, wherever possible, be released as open-source public goods.adalovelaceinstitute

Financing Without Capital

The standard critique of socialist infrastructure projects is: where does the money come from without private capital? Several mechanisms exist within Aotearoa’s current institutional architecture:

• Green bonds issued by the Crown — the same mechanism proposed for energy infrastructure, redirected to public digital infrastructurereuters

• NZ Superannuation Fund — the Cullen Fund already invests in infrastructure; a democratic socialist government could mandate a public compute allocation

• Development contributions from commercial users — private firms using the co-op tier contribute a capital development levy reinvested into capacity expansion

• International solidarity finance — cooperative finance networks (e.g., through the International Cooperative Alliance) can provide long-term, below-market debt

• Worker investment bonds — workers and communities can purchase low-yield bonds, creating public stake and social ownership from below

The Harvard Kennedy School’s cooperative AI research is blunt: “The federal government could support the creation of a cooperative research-focused cloud, owned and operated by nonprofits, government, and universities to ensure sufficient compute and storage power for research into innovative, safe uses of AI — and without a shareholder profit motive.” New Zealand should not wait for Washington. The political and material conditions to do it here, now, are real.ash.harvard

Data Sovereignty and Privacy

Private hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft subject NZ data to foreign jurisdictional risk — US CLOUD Act provisions mean American law enforcement can compel access to data held by US firms regardless of where it is physically stored. A state-owned cooperative data centre, governed under NZ law and the Privacy Act 2020, eliminates this risk by design.catalyst+1

Locally headquartered providers like Catalyst Cloud already demonstrate that fully NZ-owned, NZ-operated cloud services are viable. A socialist data centre goes further: it is not just locally owned but collectively governed, with data policy set democratically rather than by executive fiat or shareholder pressure.catalyst

Data cooperatives — organizations where individuals pool their data while retaining control, collectively benefiting from its use — represent a user and worker-owned alternative to current extractive practices. Building a data cooperative layer into the centre means workers and communities whose data trains AI models share in the value those models generate.policyreview

Challenges and Honest Contradictions

A socialist analysis demands honesty about contradictions:

• Scale gap: AI training workloads require enormous compute. A cooperative data centre starts smaller than hyperscalers — this is a feature (lower resource footprint) but also a constraint on the most intensive AI work.

• Skills shortage: NZ faces a digital skills gap. Worker ownership only works if workers have the skills to participate meaningfully in governance — requiring serious investment in technical education.

• Political resistance: NZ’s current government has moved toward private data centre attraction, not public ownership. Building socialist infrastructure requires a political majority willing to use the state as a tool of class power, not just a neutral regulator.reuters

• Hardware supply chains: GPUs and specialized AI chips are dominated by NVIDIA, a US firm. No cooperative data centre escapes this hardware dependency in the short term. The longer-term answer is supporting open hardware initiatives (RISC-V, etc.) and international cooperative procurement.

• Co-operative economy already exists but is underpowered: NZ’s top 30 co-operatives contribute revenues of more than NZD 42.3 billion per annum — the co-operative tradition is real, but it is concentrated in dairy (Fonterra) and agriculture, not tech. Building digital worker coops requires new organizational effort.massey+1

The Vision in Concrete Terms

A socialist AI data centre in Aotearoa is:

• Sited in a regional centre (Taupō, Hamilton, Dunedin, or Christchurch) near renewable generation, not just Auckland

• Powered by geothermal or hydro under a Crown PPA, with waste heat piped to community heating

• Owned as a worker cooperative with Crown majority stake and iwi representation on the board

• Governed by a workers’ council with democratic allocation of compute capacity

• Staffed under union collective agreements, with permanent contracts, living wages, and training pipelines

• Serving public agencies, researchers, cooperatives, and Māori digital enterprises first — commercial users last

• Transparent — open public registry of all compute allocations, energy use, and financial accounts

• Sovereign — NZ law governs all data, no foreign jurisdictional hooks

This is not a compromise with capitalism. It is the infrastructure of a different kind of digital economy — one where AI, for once, actually works for the workers who live beside it, build it, and are changed by it.

Banners: Unite for Trans Rights. Stop the Gender Bill.

Neave Ashton at the mic: “What better distraction than punching down on an already marginalised community?”

Same weekend. North Belfast burning. Masked men going door to door in Lower Shankill, chanting “foreigners out.” A two-month-old pulled from a fire. Fourteen police injured. Twenty thousand people then marching through Belfast and Derry under a different banner — Belfast Stands Against Racism.

Same week. Different hemisphere. Same energy.

Ben-Gvir in the Knesset saying Lebanon should be “Israel’s playground.” Brazil voting 461-19 to end the 6x1 work week. Spain’s former justice minister jailed for 24 years. Ireland’s far-right party collapsing from within.

The week told us something. Not a series of unrelated news items. A single, cracked structure showing more of itself.

HISTORICALLY SPEAKING

Rose Brewer’s Insurgent Sociology opens with a demand: ground the moment historically. Don’t just read the headlines. Read the duration.

First thesis: what we are living through is not a sequence of bad events. It is the polycrisis of racial capitalism — a system that has always required hierarchy, always required an enemy within, always required the management of populations through division.

The Belfast pogrom didn’t come from nowhere. A decade of austerity. A social media infrastructure built to amplify outrage. One man’s knife weaponised into a “coordinated programme of intimidation” against an entire immigrant community. Elon Musk amplified it from New York.

New Zealand First’s gender bill is the same architecture. A manufactured moral panic. Peters has found his campaign issue: define “woman” and “man” in all legislation, erase the legal existence of trans and non-binary people, call it clarity. A speaker in Dunedin named it: trans people used as scapegoat “from a government that has been a disaster.”

Ben-Gvir calling Lebanon a “playground.” Not a military objective. Not a threat assessment. A playground. You do not use that word accidentally. It is the language of a child who does not consider the other children real. It is the grammar of ethnic cleansing, spoken aloud in a parliament. 3,798 Lebanese killed since March. Ben-Gvir: “even if there are tears from a thousand Lebanese mothers, we need to keep going.” The silence of the international labour movement on this is a political failure with consequences.

The 6x1 work schedule in Brazil — six days on, one off, running since 1988 — disproportionately destroys Black and poor workers in retail, food service, healthcare. Not an accident of policy design. The design.

These are not separate pathologies. They are the same pathology, expressed in different national idioms. Racial capitalism does not produce one crisis. It produces the polycrisis — simultaneous, mutually reinforcing, designed to exhaust.

Why is everything happening at once. Because it was always happening. We just kept treating it as separate.

THE CORRELATION OF FORCES

Stuart Hall borrowed “conjuncture” from Gramsci. This specific moment. This alignment of forces. Who has power, who does not. Not permanent. Not inevitable. Open.

Map it. June 2026.

New Zealand. The coalition is fracturing. National announces compulsory KiwiSaver — every worker enrolled, contributions rising to 12% by 2032. ACT’s David Seymour calls it “a big gift for the financial services sector.” A property developer’s party and a libertarian party running out of room to coexist. The cracks are showing.

The new 1News poll: Labour down five points since April, at 32%. National at 29%. The left bloc — Labour, Greens, Te Pati Maori — projects to 64 seats. The current coalition holds 60. Peters at 11% and rising, already in campaign mode. Winston Peters does not poll at 11% and stay quiet.

Israel/Palestine/Lebanon. Netanyahu is moving to seize control of Likud’s candidate selection, removing primaries, installing loyalists. A leader who rigs his own party’s internal democracy is not operating from strength. He is building a fortress because the walls are failing.

Ben-Gvir calls Lebanon a playground while Trump signs a deal with Iran. The US Senate votes 50-48 to halt military operations against Iran — the first time both chambers have passed a war powers resolution against a sitting president. The American imperium is not monolithic. It contains contradictions.

Spain. Sanchez’s former right-hand man, Abalos, sentenced to 24 years for corruption. Social democracy’s rot is not hidden. It rots in court, on the record. Proximity to state power without structural accountability produces the same outcomes across partisan lines.

Ireland. The Irish Freedom Party loses its registered party status — destroyed by internal conflict, “a handful of disruptive members” per its own leader. The far right is not invincible. It is often its own worst enemy. Note this. The enemy has contradictions too.

Brazil. The Chamber of Deputies votes to phase out the 6x1 work schedule. 461-19. That margin does not happen without the street. The Vida Alem do Trabalho campaign, organising millions of workers through social media and union networks, created the political conditions for a parliamentary vote that would otherwise never have happened.

On the streets. Anti-G7 protesters in Geneva: windows smashed, a Tesla burning. The No Kings movement in the US. The DSA developing a platform that actually names class. None of this is the revolution. All of it is the correlation of forces shifting in contested terrain.

The right is overextended, internally contradictory, propped up by media infrastructure that can be challenged. But the left is fragmented, reactive, frequently unable to hold the class line while defending the communities most targeted by the culture war.

PRAXIS

Brewer’s third thesis is the hardest: what do we do with the analysis?

“Sociology for whom?” she asks. The answer is: for the people most exposed to the crisis. Not the academy. Not the left that wants to feel correct. For the workers on the 6x1 schedule. For the trans kid in Dunedin whose legal existence is up for parliamentary debate. For the family in north Belfast made homeless by a coordinated pogrom.

For NZ readers: the gender bill and the KiwiSaver fight are the same fight approached from opposite ends. The gender bill is divide-and-rule — get working-class people arguing about who counts as a woman while the financial services sector pops champagne on Queen Street. The KiwiSaver fight is the moment that mask slips: National and ACT cannot agree on retirement policy because they serve different fractions of capital. Make that visible. Hold both at once.

The Brazil vote shows what mass pressure actually does. 461-19 is not organic. It is the result of organised workers making the political cost of voting no too high. That is a method.

The Belfast counter-march — 20,000 people, trades councils, migrant centres, community organisations — is what working-class anti-fascism looks like when it organises rather than posts. Belfast Trades Council was on the organising committee. Not symbolic. Structural.

The AI rollout in schools: parents and teachers pushing back, demanding a pause. Ask the question Brewer demands: whose children are being experimented on? Not the children of the ruling class. Their schools still have adequate staffing, the technology supplements rather than replaces. The AI moratorium campaign is a class question dressed in tech language.

Ben-Gvir’s “playground” language must be named for what it is — ethnic cleansing rhetoric, spoken publicly, with impunity. The labour movement’s silence is not neutrality. It is a choice that will be remembered.

The November election in New Zealand is a floor, not a ceiling. 64 projected left-bloc seats is not a mandate for transformation. It is an opportunity for organised pressure to matter. Whether the movements that filled the Octagon on Saturday have any relationship to the electoral strategy is the question. Right now they remain strangers to each other.

THE ONLY QUESTION

The conjuncture is open.

Not won. Not lost.

The right is overextended. The coalition is cracking. The street is active. The senate voted 50-48 against the president’s war. Brazil’s workers cut their work week for the first time in 38 years.

And: Belfast burned. Lebanon is a playground. The gender bill moves through select committee. The financial services sector celebrates.

Both things are true simultaneously. That is what the polycrisis looks like from inside it.

Brewer doesn’t offer comfort. Neither does the week. Racial capitalism does not resolve itself. It intensifies until something breaks it, or it breaks everything else.

What you do with that is the only question that matters.

The Kiwi Dialectic publishes irregular dispatches from the material conditions of the present. Based in Aotearoa. No institutional affiliation.

There’s a concept David Graeber spent his life dissecting: the performance of power. Not power itself — the actual boots-on-the-neck stuff — but the elaborate theatre states and ruling classes put on to make domination feel natural, inevitable, even warm. Kings wore crowns. Pharaohs built pyramids. Christopher Luxon does a magazine shoot.

Here’s what the Women’s Weekly soft-focus lens doesn’t show you. As of 2024, Luxon’s net worth sat somewhere between NZ$21 million and NZ$30 million, making him the second-wealthiest MP in Parliament. He has owned as many as seven properties — Auckland rentals, a Waiheke Island holiday home, a family home in Remuera — while simultaneously claiming $52,000 in taxpayer-funded accommodation allowances to live in a Wellington apartment he owned outright, mortgage-free. The Spinoff called it “the highest plane of passive income — truly the boss level.” He told reporters: “I get it, I’m wealthy.”wikipedia+2

He gets it. And then he builds a cover story about it.

Graeber, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, showed that property — the accumulation of it, the enforcement of it — has always required a mythology. You don’t just need the land. You need people to believe you deserve the land. That your good fortune is a function of your good character. The Women’s Weekly exists, functionally, to manufacture that myth. It is a machine for converting class power into personality. The cover doesn’t say “landlord.” It says: Life, love & leadership.image.jpggoodreads

Meanwhile, in the real world this family photo is papering over: Budget 2026 nearly halved funding for food banks. The Family Violence support contracts — gone, $14 million cut by Oranga Tamariki alone. GP fees heading toward $100 a visit, forcing families to choose between seeing a doctor and paying the power bill. Patients dying in hospital waiting rooms under unsafe staffing conditions that this government’s hiring freeze helped create.psa+3

Austerity, as The Spinoff put it in June 2026, is for poor people, not politicians.thespinoff

Graeber had a term for this too — the inverse relationship at the heart of capitalist work: the more socially necessary your labour, the less you get paid for it. The nurses working understaffed wards at Dunedin Hospital. The food bank volunteers filling the gap left by Luxon’s Budget. The checkout workers at Countdown paying rent to a landlord who’s claiming a parliamentary accommodation subsidy. Inversely: the man on the cover, whose primary economic contribution to New Zealand has been owning houses in a market his own party keeps inflated.thespinoff+2

The magazine’s pull quote is “the heart of the Prime Minister’s world.” That heart beats for capital gains. It beats for property speculation. It beats for the kind of person who can sell a Wellington apartment for $890,000 profit while telling the country it needs to tighten its belt.reddit

Graeber was an anarchist. He didn’t believe in waiting for better kings. He believed the first step was seeing through the theatre — understanding that what gets presented as natural authority is usually just well-dressed theft, photographed nicely for a magazine rack.

So next time you see this cover in the waiting room of a GP surgery you can barely afford to visit: look at it clearly. That’s not a family. That’s a balance sheet in a blazer. And the magazine is the frame.

Key Takeaway: Every ruling class needs its mythology. Ours comes with a Women’s Weekly spread. Don’t buy it — literally or figuratively.

The Kiwi Dialectic | Edition 1 of 5 | June 24, 2026 | thekiwidialectic.substack.com

This is the first in a five-part series running the length of RIMPAC 2026. Each week we go deeper. This week: what RIMPAC is, what it costs us, and where our retirement savings are sitting right now.

WHAT’S RIMPAC AND WHY SHOULD YOU GIVE A DAMN?

Every two years, the US Pacific Fleet throws the world’s biggest naval party in Hawaii and invites its mates. This year — June 24 to July 31, 2026 — it’s called RIMPAC 2026. Rim of the Pacific. The world’s largest maritime war games.

Here are the numbers: 31 nations. 40 warships. 5 submarines. 140 aircraft. 25,000+ personnel. The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier group leading the American contingent. (Stars and Stripes)

And us. New Zealand is there. Three ships — HMNZS Te Mana (178 people), HMNZS Aotearoa (101 people), HMNZS Matataua (49 people) — plus 20 staff officers and 3 support personnel. 351 New Zealanders. Our 17th time at this rodeo. (NZDF)

The official line from NZDF is that it’s about “interoperability” and “a sharing of cultures.” Sweet as. The real line, from CounterPunch, is blunter: “The intent of RIMPAC, as with the entire U.S. military posture in the Asia-Pacific, is to prepare for war against China.” (CounterPunch)

That’s not a fringe reading. That’s what the exercise is. The US encircles China with bases in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia. RIMPAC trains everyone to fight together when the time comes. New Zealand is practising being a component of that machine.

Meanwhile NZ politicians “regularly condemn the militarisation of the Pacific.” Then they send the navy. (Scoop)

That’s hypocrisy. Or it’s ideology. Either way, workers pay for it.

WE PAID FOR THIS

Budget 2026. Finance Minister Nicola Willis. NZ$3.5 billion for defence and intelligence — $2.3 billion capital, $1.2 billion operating. The NZDF is explicitly exempt from the 2% budget cuts every other government agency has to swallow. (Defense News)

Total new defence spending since the Defence Capability Plan last year: NZ$5.8 billion. The goal: double defence spending to 2% of GDP over eight years. Nine billion dollars in new military spending over four years. (Newswire NZ)

To put it in plain English: we are spending nine billion dollars so our navy can train with the US to potentially fight China.

We just signed a NZ$2.6 billion deal — approved by the US State Department — to buy five Lockheed Martin MH-60R Seahawk helicopters armed with Mk 54 torpedoes. (Stars and Stripes)

Lockheed Martin. The same company that makes the F-35. The same company whose missile systems are used in Gaza. The same company whose satellite intelligence systems underpin US global military dominance. We just gave them NZ$2.6 billion.

Now look at what’s happening to everyone else. 8,700 public sector jobs axed. CPI inflation running at 4%. Unemployment rising to 5.5% by June 2026. Workers getting a temporary $50/week in-work tax credit — for one year. (BDO Budget 2026 analysis)

The choice is being made. Guns over people. Every single time.

This is not an accident of fiscal policy. It is a statement of priorities. The state knows what it values. And it’s not you.

YOUR RETIREMENT SAVINGS ARE IN THIS TOO

Here’s the part they really don’t want you to think about.

The NZ Superannuation Fund — the Crown’s retirement savings vehicle, currently worth about $94 billion (Keen Lens Substack) — is invested in companies directly implicated in war crimes, genocide, and the occupation of Palestinian land.

In May 2026, the Auckland High Court found that the NZ Superfund’s investment policies are “unreasonable and unlawful.” The Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa brought the case. The court found the Guardians’ framework for making ethical investment decisions doesn’t comply with the NZ Superannuation and Retirement Income Act 2001. (High Court judgment 2026-NZHC-681)

Four companies were at the centre of the case. Here’s what the Fund holds:

Motorola Solutions — NZ$123.3 million. Supplies surveillance and communications tech to Israeli military forces at West Bank checkpoints and illegal settlements. Named in the UN Human Rights Council database as complicit in the occupation.

Booking Holdings (Booking.com) — NZ$48.6 million. Lists accommodation in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The ICJ ruled in July 2024 that Israel’s occupation is unlawful and states must not aid or assist it. Your retirement savings are listed on Booking.com next to stolen Palestinian land.

Airbnb — NZ$18.3 million. Same deal. Airbnb removed settlement listings in 2018 under public pressure. Then put them back in 2019 under pressure from the settler lobby. Your money went back in with them.

Expedia Group — NZ$467,000. Smaller. Same problem.

Now add one they didn’t bother to include in the court case:

Palantir Technologies — NZ$140 million. Not in the court case. Not on the exclusions list. Just sitting there. (Anti-War Aotearoa / Solidarity)

Palantir builds the AI targeting systems the Israeli military uses to select who to kill. Specifically, the “Lavender” programme — an AI system that generates kill lists. And the “Where’s Daddy?” programme — which tracks Palestinian men and hits them when they arrive home, to maximise civilian casualties counted as “collateral damage.” Palantir appears prominently in the UN’s Economy of Genocide report. Its founder and majority shareholder is New Zealand citizen Peter Thiel.

The Fund has NZ$140 million in Palantir. Meanwhile the Dutch pension fund ABP divested in April 2026. Cardano dumped 89% of its Palantir shares in Q1 2026. European banks and institutional investors are fleeing. (Business and Human Rights Centre)

New Zealand is staying put.

Let that sink in. Cardano ran. ABP ran. And the Guardians of the NZ Super Fund — the people managing your parents’ retirement — are holding firm on $140 million in the company running AI kill lists in Gaza.

THE EXCLUSIONS LIST IS WINDOW DRESSING

Here’s the thing that should make you furious. The Superfund has an exclusions list. It sounds responsible. It sounds like someone’s keeping an eye on things. RTX (Raytheon). Lockheed Martin. Northrop Grumman. General Dynamics. Elbit Systems. All formally excluded. (NZ Superfund Exclusions List August 2025)

But here’s what that list actually means in practice:

RTX was confirmed still held in the portfolio as recently as September 2024 — after exclusion. (Scoop) For context: RTX paid a $200 million fine for 750 violations of the US Arms Export Control Act. That’s not a technicality. That’s a company that ran arms exports illegally at industrial scale. And it was still in the portfolio.

The High Court found the framework that produced those exclusions is itself unlawful. Every decision made under that framework sits on rotten legal foundations.

Palantir — directly implicated in mass civilian killings — is not excluded at all. Didn’t even make the list.

And your KiwiSaver? The PSNA says KiwiSaver funds hold even more in these companies than the Superfund does. The money working-class New Zealanders squirrel away every paycheque — sometimes the only savings they have — is being funnelled into the same machine. Check yours at mindfulmoney.nz. Look for the OPT symbol. It means the UN has listed that company as operating in occupied Palestinian territory.

FIVE EYES AND THE DIGITAL KILL CHAIN

This isn’t just about ships and money. It’s about what New Zealand is plugged into systemically.

Five Eyes — the intelligence alliance between the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — is the most integrated surveillance network in human history. Every signal intercepted by the GCSB in Wellington feeds into the same system as the NSA in Fort Meade, Maryland.

The UK has been running near-daily spy flights over Gaza, feeding real-time intelligence on Palestinian movements to Israeli military forces. (Ground News) That intelligence flows through Five Eyes channels. Which New Zealand is a member of.

NZ’s own GCSB uses Palantir software for Five Eyes interoperability. (PSNA) The same Palantir whose AI systems run Lavender and Where’s Daddy. The state apparatus and the investment portfolio are pointing in the same direction. This is not a coincidence. It’s coherence.

In May 2026, NZ military representatives attended the Five Eyes Combined Digital Leadership Summit, committing to “Project Arcadia” — integrating AI into the Five Eyes war-fighting network. (Otago Daily Times) The NZDF said it “will play a full role in the project” but won’t say which AI tools will be used, for “national security reasons.”

Meantime, the US Congress is pushing Section 622 of the Intelligence Authorization Act — which would legally require the US to share all its intelligence with Israel, eclipsing even Five Eyes in scope. If it passes, it becomes impossible for any partner nation to apply pressure through intelligence withdrawal. (The Independent)

New Zealand would be embedded in an intelligence architecture that is legally bound to serve Israeli military operations. That’s not a slippery slope. That’s the plan on paper.

THE COURT SAID IT’S CRIMINAL. WE SAID CARRY ON.

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024: war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare. (Al-Ahram Online)

In December 2025, the ICC Appeals Chamber upheld those warrants. Rejected Israel’s appeal outright. The warrants stand.

The UN Commission of Inquiry found in September 2025 that Israel “committed and was continuing to commit genocidal acts with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinian group in Gaza.” (UN UNISPAL)

The ICJ ruled in July 2024 that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful. States must not render aid or assistance that maintains the occupation. That’s binding international law.

Amnesty International published conclusive evidence in June 2026 of the war crime of unlawful deportation and the crime against humanity of forcible transfer in the West Bank. (Amnesty International)

Israel is at RIMPAC 2026. New Zealand is at RIMPAC 2026. We are building “familiarity, trust, interoperability and collective strength” — the NZDF’s own words — with a state whose head of government has an active international arrest warrant for war crimes.

The Scoop piece puts it directly: NZ “has an obligation under the Genocide Convention to prevent genocidal behaviour.” (Scoop) Instead we are drilling with the accused.

There is no fine print that makes this okay. There is no asterisk. We are there.

WHAT DO WE DO?

This is not a counsel of despair. Naming what’s happening is the first act of resistance. Here’s what you can do right now.

Check your money:

• Look up your KiwiSaver at mindfulmoney.nz — search for the OPT symbol (UN-listed occupation-linked companies). Find out where your savings are sitting.

Apply pressure on the Fund:

• Write to the Guardians of the NZ Super Fund and demand full implementation of the High Court ruling — and immediate divestment from Palantir. They are managing public money. They answer to the public.

Contact elected representatives:

• Defence Minister Chris Penk. Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters. PM Christopher Luxon. Tell them RIMPAC with Israel is a violation of our Genocide Convention obligations. You don’t need a law degree to say that. You just need to say it.

Support the organising:

• Anti-War Aotearoa: antiwaraotearoa.nz

• Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa: psna.nz

The bigger picture:

Workers did not vote to spend $9 billion preparing to fight China. Workers did not vote to park $140 million of retirement savings in the AI infrastructure of genocide. These decisions are made by ministers, fund managers, and military brass — people who don’t live with the consequences and won’t be conscripted when the shooting starts.

The labour movement in Aotearoa needs to take a position on this. Not in the abstract. Concretely. The question isn’t whether we’re anti-war in principle. It’s whether we’re willing to name what our government is doing and demand it stop.

Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1916 that militarism “fulfils a quite specific function in the history of capital.” It’s not an aberration. It’s not a policy mistake. It’s the system working as designed — extracting from workers at home to project power abroad, locking in the relationships between states and corporations that keep the whole thing running.

RIMPAC is not a training exercise. It’s a commitment. Every ship New Zealand sends is a promise to fight alongside the US in whatever war comes next. The money flowing from our Superfund into Palantir, Motorola Solutions, and occupation-linked platforms is not an accident of passive indexing — it’s a choice, one a High Court just found was made unlawfully.

We are financially and militarily embedded in systems of imperial violence. That’s not rhetoric. It’s the balance sheet.

KEY TAKEAWAY: Your taxes fund the warships. Your retirement savings fund the kill-list AI. Your intelligence agency feeds the same network running surveillance over Gaza. New Zealand is not a neutral bystander. We are a component. The first step is knowing that. The second step is organising to change it.

Research verified June 2026. All sources linked inline. Series continues weekly through July 31 — read the full run at thekiwidialectic.substack.com

THE KIWI DIALECTIC — RIMPAC 2026 SERIES PLAN

Five Editions: June 24 – July 31, 2026

SERIES OVERVIEW TABLE

EditionDateTitleCore Focus1June 24YOUR MONEY. THEIR WARS.RIMPAC overview + Superfund investments. The full frame: workers fund this at every level.2July 1THE CORPORATIONS.Military-industrial complex deep dive. Lockheed Martin, RTX/Raytheon, Palantir, Motorola Solutions. KiwiSaver angle. Who profits from permanent war?3July 8FIVE EYES: THE SURVEILLANCE EMPIRE WE NEVER VOTED FOR.Five Eyes history and architecture. GCSB. Project Arcadia. UK Gaza spy flights. Section 622. Surveillance of workers and surveillance of Palestinians — same logic.4July 15THE LAW SAID GENOCIDE. THE WEST SAID CARRY ON.ICC warrants, ICJ rulings, UN genocide finding, Amnesty West Bank report. NZ’s Genocide Convention obligations. Compare to 1985 nuclear-free moment. What would compliance actually require?5July 29WHAT DOES AN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT LOOK LIKE IN AOTEAROA?Synthesis + organising edition. NZ peace movement history. What socialist demands look like in 2026. Concrete asks. Rosa Luxemburg on militarism and capital.

EDITION-BY-EDITION CONTENT DIRECTION

EDITION 1 — June 24: YOUR MONEY. THEIR WARS.

The combined overview. Establish the frame.

• Open with RIMPAC as a fact on the ground: 351 New Zealanders, three ships, 17th time, $25,000+ personnel globally. The numbers are overwhelming by design — this is a show of force, not a training camp.

• Budget 2026 as the material base: $3.5b defence and intelligence, NZDF exempt from cuts, $9b over four years, $2.6b Seahawk deal with Lockheed Martin. Juxtapose directly with public sector job losses and flat wages.

• Superfund as the hidden financial arm: High Court ruling, the four companies named (Motorola Solutions, Booking Holdings, Airbnb, Expedia), plus Palantir as the most egregious omission from the exclusions list. $140m in AI targeting systems.

• Close with the systemic picture: Five Eyes, Project Arcadia, GCSB-Palantir link. NZ is not a bystander — we are a node in the machine. Invite readers into the series.

EDITION 2 — July 1: THE CORPORATIONS.

Follow the money. Who profits from permanent war?

• Lockheed Martin: The $2.6b Seahawk deal as the entry point. Widen out: F-35 programme, missile systems in Gaza, satellite intelligence infrastructure. Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest arms dealer by revenue. NZ just became a customer. What does it mean to buy weapons from a company whose products are currently being used in an active genocide finding?

• RTX/Raytheon: On the exclusions list. Still held in September 2024. 750 violations of the US Arms Export Control Act, $200m fine. Patriot missile systems. The exclusions list as performance — the gap between what the Guardians say and what they do.

• Palantir: Full treatment. Lavender, Where’s Daddy, the Economy of Genocide UN report. Peter Thiel as NZ citizen and majority shareholder — the sovereignty question. European institutional divestment wave while NZ holds. What does it mean that the GCSB runs Palantir software?

• Gramsci angle: The concept of manufactured consent. “Defence” as a language that launders military spending for public consumption. The military-industrial complex is not a conspiracy — it’s a class project, with beneficiaries and victims, and the beneficiaries are not working-class New Zealanders.

EDITION 3 — July 8: FIVE EYES: THE SURVEILLANCE EMPIRE WE NEVER VOTED FOR.

The digital architecture of empire.

• What Five Eyes actually is: Start from scratch — the UKUSA Agreement 1946, post-WWII Anglo-American signals intelligence network, expanded to include Canada, Australia, NZ. The most comprehensive surveillance alliance in history. Snowden revelations as the definitive public exposure of its scope.

• How NZ fits: GCSB as the Five Eyes node in the South Pacific. What it intercepts, where it goes, who sees it. The absence of meaningful parliamentary oversight. The public didn’t vote for Five Eyes membership and can’t vote to leave it.

• Gaza as the live case: UK near-daily spy flights over Gaza, real-time intelligence to Israeli military. Five Eyes intelligence sharing channels. GCSB-Palantir link for interoperability. The digital kill chain: from GCSB signal collection to Palantir processing to IDF targeting decision. NZ is a link in that chain.

• Project Arcadia and Section 622: AI integration into Five Eyes war-fighting, NZ NZDF committed but won’t say which AI tools. Section 622 would legally mandate US-Israel intelligence fusion — eclipsing Five Eyes and making NZ exit from Gaza intelligence-sharing structurally impossible. Pedagogy box: what is signals intelligence, how does mass surveillance serve capital, the connection between surveilling workers at home and surveilling civilians abroad.

EDITION 4 — July 15: THE LAW SAID GENOCIDE. THE WEST SAID CARRY ON.

International law, its limits, and what NZ must do.

• The legal record, plainly stated: ICC arrest warrants (November 2024) upheld on appeal (December 2025) — war crimes, crimes against humanity, starvation as a method of warfare. ICJ July 2024 occupation ruling — unlawful, states must not aid or assist. UN Commission of Inquiry September 2025 genocide finding. Amnesty International June 2026 forcible transfer/ethnic cleansing evidence from West Bank. This is not contested among international legal bodies.

• Why the law isn’t stopping it: Trump administration sanctions on ICC prosecutors. US veto at the Security Council. The structural limits of international law — it was designed by states, and states with power can exempt themselves from it. Pedagogy: how does international law work, who enforces it, what are its class limits? The ICJ is not a police force.

• NZ’s Genocide Convention obligations: Article I requires states to prevent and punish genocide, not just refrain from committing it. Drilling with the accused state at RIMPAC, holding $140m in its AI targeting infrastructure, sharing intelligence through Five Eyes — each is a form of complicity the Convention was designed to prohibit.

• Compare: 1985 nuclear-free moment: When NZ actually defied the US. The ANZUS crisis. Lange’s government refused USS Buchanan entry. The US suspended NZ from ANZUS. NZ didn’t cave. The lesson: defiance of the imperial partner is possible. It has happened. It happened here. What would it require in 2026?

EDITION 5 — July 29: WHAT DOES AN ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT LOOK LIKE IN AOTEAROA?

Synthesis, history, and concrete demands.

• History of NZ peace movement: Anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s–70s. The Springbok Tour resistance of 1981 — the largest civil disruption in NZ history, and a model of mass non-compliance. The nuclear-free campaign of the 1980s. What these movements had in common: mass participation, union involvement, willingness to name the imperial relationship directly.

• What’s organising now: Anti-War Aotearoa. The PSNA divestment campaign and its High Court victory. The limits of NGO campaigning without union muscle behind it. The trade union movement’s silence on RIMPAC, on Palantir, on Project Arcadia — and why breaking that silence is the key task.

• What socialists should be demanding — concrete, not abstract:

  • NZ out of Five Eyes Gaza intelligence sharing, at minimum; full withdrawal from Five Eyes as a longer-term demand

  • Superfund: immediate full divestment from Palantir and Motorola Solutions, implement the High Court ruling in full

  • No RIMPAC with Israel until ICC warrants are complied with

  • Full public disclosure of Project Arcadia — which AI tools, which contracts, which companies

  • Parliamentary vote required before any future RIMPAC deployment

• Rosa Luxemburg close: “Militarism fulfils a quite specific function in the history of capital, accompanying it on every step of its historical journey.” (The Junius Pamphlet, 1916.) This is not a deviation from normal capitalism. This is capitalism doing what it does. The anti-war movement is the labour movement, or it’s a pressure group. Which one do we want to be?

Full series at thekiwidialectic.substack.com | Research verified June 2026

Winston Peters is furious again.

This time it’s at an RNZ reporter who dared to ask whether NZ First might work with Te Pāti Māori after the next election.[facebook]
He snaps about “career politicians”, ducks the actual question, and wraps himself in that familiar cloak of wounded outsider.[en.wikipedia]
It’s a hell of a performance from a man who has spent nearly half a century on Parliament’s payroll, ministerial perks and all.[en.wikipedia]

Takeaway: This is not an anti‑establishment voice. It is the establishment lashing out at anyone who questions its pecking order.

2. Right‑Wing Populism 101: Punch Sideways, Not Up

NZ First sells itself as the home of the fed‑up: sick of “Wellington”, sick of “woke elites”, sick of being ignored.[youtube][nzfirst]
On paper, they talk about “social and economic justice” and “power to the people”.[nzfirst][youtube]
In practice, their anger rarely points at the people who own the banks, supermarkets, farms, or rental empires.
It points sideways – at Māori, at migrants, at anyone flying a rainbow flag or speaking too much te reo in the office.[thespinoff.co]

When Peters rages about “career politicians”, he’s doing three things at once:

• Pretending he isn’t one.[en.wikipedia]

• Turning justified anger at politics-as-usual into hatred of anyone to his left, especially Te Pāti Māori.[youtube][facebook]

• Keeping capital out of the firing line entirely.

Takeaway: NZ First’s populism is a safety valve for the system. It vents working‑class anger without ever threatening who owns what.

3. The Coalition Deal: Baubles for Him, Austerity for Us

If you want to know what a party stands for, don’t listen to the speeches.
Read the coalition agreements and the Cabinet circulars that tell ministers how to behave.[dpmc.govt]

In 2023, Peters took NZ First into a three‑way government with National and ACT.[en.wikipedia]
The deal gave his party cabinet posts, a chunk of a $1.2b “regional infrastructure” fund, and a raft of nationalist culture‑war toys.[nzfirst]
In return, he signed up to:

• Shrinking the public sector back to 2017 levels – code for cuts in services and jobs.[thespinoff.co]

• Restoring perks for landlords and advancing ACT’s deregulatory agenda.[clladvocates]

• Supporting a Treaty Principles Bill that aims to rewrite how Te Tiriti works in law, while reviewing and rolling back Treaty references across the statute book.[russellmcveagh]

Behind all the rhetoric about “equality before the law” and “no special treatment”, NZ First is locking in an austerity‑plus‑reaction package that hits workers, beneficiaries, Māori communities, and migrants hardest.[thespinoff.co]

Takeaway: Peters didn’t go into government to blow up the establishment. He went in to secure baubles and help drive a hard‑right programme.

4. Anti‑Māori Politics in a High‑Vis Vest

Peters’ hostility to Te Pāti Māori is not a personal quirk, it’s baked into the project.
He’s attacked them as “not pro‑Māori”, and his party has pushed for a referendum on the Māori seats and for rolling back co‑governance across public services.[facebook][youtube][russellmcveagh]

The coalition’s constitutional package is dressed up as “one law for all”, but the details are blunt:

• Remove co‑governance from public service delivery.[russellmcveagh]

• Repeal Ngāi Tahu’s dedicated regional council representation and force local referenda on Māori wards.[russellmcveagh]

• Police language, making English the primary name and mode for state entities, with narrow carve‑outs for Māori agencies.[russellmcveagh]

This is colonial politics in a high‑vis vest: wrap it in talk of “unity” and “fairness”, then use the state to claw back every fragile gain Māori have fought for.
Socialists should be absolutely clear – an attack on tino rangatiratanga is an attack on the whole working class, because it strengthens the bosses’ power to divide and rule.

Takeaway: NZ First’s anti‑“race‑based” agenda is just old‑school colonialism with better marketing.

5. What a Real Working‑Class Politics Would Say

When Peters barks at reporters and rails against “no consequences”, he’s tapping into something real: people know the game is rigged.[facebook]
But he refuses to name who it’s rigged for.
There’s no sustained attack on corporate profits, on landlords hiking rents, on banks posting record earnings while foodbanks explode.[thespinoff.co]
Just endless noise about the supposed excesses of “woke” bureaucrats, Māori radicals, and anyone who looks or sounds different.

A socialist response starts somewhere else entirely:

• The problem isn’t “career politicians” in the abstract, it’s a capitalist state that reliably serves wealth over need.

• The answer is not a grumpy uncle in a pinstripe suit, it’s organised worker power – unionised workplaces, tenants’ unions, iwi and hapū organising, community campaigns that don’t accept the colonial frame at all.

• Instead of a Treaty “review” designed by the right, we need deeper rangatiratanga and democratic control over resources – land, housing, energy, finance – in the hands of those who do the work and bear the costs.

That’s the conversation Peters cannot have, because it would mean confronting the class he has spent his whole life reassuring.
So he rants, he sneers, he picks new enemies. The job of the left is to refuse the bait and keep pointing at the owners, not the neighbours.

Takeaway: Don’t let Winston Peters define what “anti‑establishment” means. If it doesn’t challenge profit, property, and colonial power, it’s just another costume change for the same old ruling class.

Christopher Luxon flew to Singapore in May 2026. Signed a deal. Shook hands. Came home.

Then he got on Newstalk ZB and told Mike Hosking we have “serious work to do on our infrastructure compared to Singapore”.

He told us to look at Singapore.

He looks at Singapore.

He looks at Finland.

He holds Singapore up like a report card.

Like we’re the slow kid in class

and Singapore’s the one who got it right.

What Chris Knows About Singapore

Singapore is clean. Singapore is fast. Singapore does business. Singapore doesn’t mess around.

Chris knows this.

Chris likes this.

Chris wants us to be more like this.

What Chris Doesn’t Mention

The Singaporean state owns 90 percent of the country’s land.

Every time Luxon says “look at Singapore” — he’s pointing at one of the most interventionist land ownership models on the planet.

In 1949, Singapore’s government owned 31 percent of the land. Ordinary people owned the rest.

Then the state started buying it.

Not asking.

*Buying* — at prices the government set

What Americans call eminent domain. What the rest of us call: the government takes your land.

Decade by decade, the state accumulated.

By the 1980s it had the biggest land ownership in Singapore — over 76 percent.[8]

Today: 90 percent.

The “Homeownership” Trick

Here’s the part that gets funnier.

Singapore has a 90 percent homeownership rate. Everyone talks about it. Luxon types love it. *Look at their property-owning democracy.

But what Singaporeans own is a 99-year lease.

Not the land.

Not ever the land.

After 99 years, it reverts to the state.

Your kids might own the lease. Your grandkids might own the lease. Your great-grandkids get nothing — the state takes it back.

That’s not homeownership. That’s a very long rental agreement with good branding.

The Numbers, Plain

- 90% of Singapore’s land: state-owned[5][9]

- 80% of Singaporeans: live in housing built by the HDB — the government housing corporation[11][12]

- 77% of residents: still live in that public housing today[12]

- 99 years: length of the “ownership” lease before the land reverts to the Crown[6]

- 0: the number of times Luxon mentioned any of this

The NZ Initiative Agrees (Sort Of)

Even the NZ Initiative — the right-wing think tank that loves Luxon’s Singapore comparisons — wrote a piece asking whether turning New Zealand into Singapore means adopting its housing model.[13]

It’s the question they had to ask.

Because the model doesn’t work the other way around.

You can’t have Singapore’s outcomes without Singapore’s methods.

And Singapore’s method is: the state owns the land, the state builds the housing, and the state decides what you can do with it.

That’s not the free market.

That’s not property rights.

That’s closer to what Luxon would call socialism — if he found it in the wrong country.

What This Tells Us

When Chris Luxon says “be more like Singapore,” he means:

low corporate tax,

fast infrastructure,

a business-friendly environment.

He means the Singapore that appears in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business index.

He does not mean the Singapore where the government owns 90 percent of the land.[6]

He does not mean the Singapore where the state built and still manages most of the housing stock.

He does not mean the Singapore where “owning your home” means holding a century-long lease from the government.

He wants the aesthetics of Singapore without the politics.

He wants the efficiency of state planning with none of the state.

And nobody — not one journalist, not one press conference question — has made him explain the contradiction.

Singapore Is a Real Priority for New Zealand

That’s what he said before the trip.

*Singapore is a real priority.*

Yeah. We can see that.

A country where the government owns the land, builds the houses, and controls the leases.

A real priority.

For a man who tells us property rights are sacred.

The Kiwi Dialectic is published from Dunedin, New Zealand. Working-class. Socialist.

The first two courses in this series gave us a toolkit for understanding power. Gramsci showed us how ruling ideas become common sense and how to build counter-hegemony. Kropotkin showed us that cooperation is the real basis of human survival, and that mutual aid is a form of politics in itself.

David Graeber takes these insights into the present. He asks: what does power look like in the 21st century? Why do so many people spend their lives doing work that feels pointless? Who designed the bureaucratic systems that humiliate and exhaust us? And what does real democracy — not parliamentary democracy but the kind where people actually govern themselves — look like when ordinary people build it?

Graeber was an anthropologist and anarchist who helped spark the Occupy Wall Street movement, coined the concept of bullshit jobs, wrote one of the most important books about debt in a generation, and was cancelled from Yale before finding a home at LSE. He died in 2020, unexpectedly, at 59. He left behind a body of work that is essential reading for anyone trying to understand and change the world we live in.

This course is for anyone who has ever:

Felt that their job produces nothing of real value but cannot say so out loud. Spent hours on hold to a government department to prove they deserve help they are legally entitled to. Wondered why they owe money to institutions they never agreed to deal with. Participated in a meeting where everyone pretended to have power but decisions were made elsewhere. Felt that the world is run for the benefit of people who shuffle money and paper while those who do actual work are treated as costs to be minimised.

Graeber gives a name and a theory to what you already know.

What this course covers

Lesson 1: Who was Graeber? Anthropology, anarchism, and seeing the world differently.

Lesson 2: Debt — the first 5,000 years. How debt was invented as a tool of domination long before capitalism, and what that means for the moral weight we give it today.

Lesson 3: Bullshit jobs. Why so much work under capitalism is meaningless by design, who benefits from that, and what it does to people.

Lesson 4: The bureaucratic violence of everyday life. How paperwork, means-testing, and administrative humiliation are tools of class power — not unfortunate side effects.

Lesson 5: Direct democracy and prefigurative politics. What Occupy Wall Street and other movements taught us about how to build the future in the present.

Lesson 6: Graeber in Aotearoa today. Debt, work, bureaucracy, and direct democracy through a New Zealand lens — and what we do with it.

How this course works

Free. By email. Twice a week. Fifteen minutes a lesson. Discussion questions at the end of every one. Reply or comment and your experience becomes part of the course.

This is the third course in The Kiwi Dialect’s free socialist education series. You do not need to have done the Gramsci or Kropotkin courses to follow this one, though each course builds on the others. Links to the full series are in the Courses section of this publication.

Share this

Share it on socials: “Free Graeber course from The Kiwi Dialect — six lessons on debt, bullshit jobs, and building real democracy. Arrives by email. Free. Sign up here: [your substack link]”

Send it to someone whose job they hate, someone drowning in debt, someone who has given up on politics but not on their community. This course is for them.

First lesson arrives shortly.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

You have reached the final lesson of the Kropotkin and Mutual Aid course. We have covered the theory, the history, the Aotearoa context, and the tension between state welfare and self-organised solidarity. This lesson is about now — and about you.

Mutual aid is already everywhere

Before we talk about building mutual aid, we need to recognise that it is already everywhere. The gap between Kropotkin’s theory and your daily experience is much smaller than you might think.

Every time workers cover each other’s shifts without being asked. Every time a neighbour takes in someone’s parcels, mows an elderly person’s lawn, or organises a meal train for a family in crisis. Every time a community Facebook group mobilises to support a family after a house fire. Every time a study group shares notes, a union worker rights their colleague up, or a parent volunteers in a school that can no longer afford a teacher aide. This is mutual aid.

What Kropotkin asks us to do is name it, take it seriously as a political practice, and extend it.

Current forms of mutual aid

Food banks and community pantries: These have proliferated across Aotearoa as the welfare state has contracted and food poverty has grown. At their best, they are not charities but community infrastructure — run by volunteers, governed by the communities they serve, and increasingly political in their analysis of why food poverty exists. The Otago Community Foodbank, like many others, now explicitly advocates for structural change alongside providing material support.

Tenants unions: The tenants union movement is growing in Aotearoa and globally. Tenants unions organise renters collectively to resist evictions, negotiate with landlords, advocate for policy change, and build power in a housing market designed to isolate and exploit individual tenants. They are a direct application of mutual aid logic to the housing crisis.

Time banks and tool libraries: These formalise informal exchange networks. Members contribute hours of service and draw on others’. Tool libraries let communities share expensive equipment none of them could individually afford. These are small in scale but significant in logic: they demonstrate that value can be exchanged without money, that cooperation is more efficient than individual ownership, and that communities have more collective capacity than they typically use.

Worker cooperatives: From cleaning cooperatives in South Auckland to construction cooperatives in Wellington, worker coops are growing. Workers own and manage their enterprises collectively, share profits democratically, and are not subject to the extraction of an owning class. The cooperative sector is not large enough to replace capitalism, but every cooperative is a daily demonstration that workplaces do not have to be organised around exploitation.

Climate mutual aid: The climate crisis is producing new mutual aid responses. Community resilience networks are being built in recognition that extreme weather events will increasingly outstrip state response capacity. These networks organise local food production, energy sharing, water storage, and emergency response — all forms of mutual aid preparation for a world where individual households cannot cope alone.

Mutual aid as politics

Kropotkin’s deepest insight is that mutual aid is not separate from politics. It is politics — a form of politics that builds power from below through practice rather than waiting for power from above through elections.

But mutual aid alone is not enough. Without a political analysis of why food poverty, housing insecurity, and precarious work exist, mutual aid can become a permanent solution to problems that require structural change. Food banks should not exist. Tenants should not need unions to resist arbitrary evictions. Workers should not need cooperatives to escape exploitation. These are failures of the social order, not permanent features of life.

The most powerful form of mutual aid is the kind that meets immediate needs while building the analysis and relationships needed for structural change. The food bank that campaigns for a liveable income. The tenants union that fights for rent control and public housing. The worker cooperative that advocates for cooperative law reform. The climate resilience network that demands a Green New Deal.

This is Gramsci’s war of position and Kropotkin’s mutual aid working together: meeting people where they are, building cooperative power, developing organic intellectuals, and creating the conditions for a different kind of society.

What comes next

This is the second course in The Kiwi Dialect’s series of free socialist education courses. The next course will look at David Graeber — anthropologist, anarchist, and one of the sharpest thinkers about debt, bureaucracy, work, and direct democracy in the last generation. Graeber builds on both Gramsci and Kropotkin, and his work on bullshit jobs, the violence of bureaucracy, and the political potential of direct action will take the analysis of these first two courses further.

If you are subscribed to The Kiwi Dialect’s Courses section, you will receive it by email when it launches. If someone forwarded you this lesson, subscribe here to make sure you get the whole Graeber course from the beginning.

Share this course

If this course has been useful, share it. Send it to your union. Share it in your community group. Post it on socials. The course is free precisely because we believe that socialist education should not be locked behind a paywall. The more people who work through these ideas, the more the terrain of common sense shifts.

A final question

After six lessons on Kropotkin and mutual aid: what is one mutual aid practice already in your life that you want to take more seriously? And what is one new form of mutual aid you want to start or join?

Reply to this email or leave a comment. Every answer adds to what this course is about.

Thank you for reading, cooperating, and building alongside us.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

This lesson is one of the most politically complex in the course, and one of the most important. We need to think clearly about the relationship between the welfare state and mutual aid — because getting this wrong leads to serious errors in both directions.

The welfare state as a gain

The welfare states built across the world after the Second World War were real gains for the working class. They were won through decades of labour movement struggle and represented a genuine redistribution of power: guaranteed access to healthcare, education, housing, and income support regardless of individual circumstances.

In Aotearoa, the first Labour government of 1935–49 built one of the most comprehensive welfare states in the world. The Social Security Act 1938 provided universal entitlements to health and income support. State housing gave working-class families secure, affordable homes for the first time. Free secondary and university education opened up pathways that had previously been closed by class.

These gains were enormous. To argue that the welfare state harmed the working class would be absurd. It did not. It substantially improved the material conditions of life for millions of people in Aotearoa and around the world.

What the welfare state also did

But Kropotkin’s tradition asks us to look at a second dimension of the welfare state’s effect: what happened to the self-organised networks of mutual aid that working-class communities had built?

Friendly societies lost their membership as state insurance replaced their core function. Workers no longer needed to join a mutual benefit organisation to access healthcare or income support. The dense social fabric those organisations created — the halls, the networks, the culture of collective responsibility — gradually dissolved.

This was not entirely bad. Many friendly societies had been racially exclusive, limited to men, or tied to conservative churches. The universalism of the welfare state was in many ways more just than the particularism of voluntary mutual aid networks.

But the effect was that working-class communities became more dependent on the state and less capable of self-organisation. The political muscle that comes from running your own institutions — managing finances, resolving disputes, building solidarity through shared practice — atrophied.

This mattered enormously when the welfare state was dismantled.

The neoliberal attack and the mutual aid vacuum

When Rogernomics hit Aotearoa in 1984, the welfare state was rapidly dismantled. Benefit levels were cut, state housing was sold, public services were corporatised or privatised, and the labour market was deregulated. This was done with extraordinary speed and without a democratic mandate.

Working-class communities were devastated. But they had lost much of the self-organised infrastructure that would have allowed them to absorb the shock collectively. The friendly societies were gone. The union movement was weakened by the Employment Contracts Act 1991. The cooperative institutions that might have provided alternatives had been absorbed into mainstream capitalism or had withered.

The result was a crisis managed individually: families made do alone, communities fragmented, and what remained of collective support was channelled through increasingly professionalised NGOs dependent on state contracts — exactly the transformism we discussed in the Gramsci course.

The lesson Kropotkin teaches us

Kropotkin does not tell us to oppose the welfare state. He tells us to never allow it to become a substitute for self-organised solidarity. The welfare state should be a floor, not a ceiling. And while we fight to defend and extend it, we must also build the cooperative institutions and mutual aid networks that can survive if it is attacked.

This is not a counsel of despair or a retreat from state politics. It is a counsel of resilience: build from below while fighting above, so that you are never entirely dependent on the goodwill of governments that can change without notice.

The communities that weathered the 1984–93 reforms best in Aotearoa were those with the strongest self-organised networks: Maori communities with intact whanau and hapu structures, Pacific communities with strong church and family mutual aid, working-class communities with strong union cultures that survived the Employment Contracts Act by building new forms of solidarity.

Questions for you

How has the reduction of the welfare state in your country or community affected people’s reliance on informal mutual aid? What has emerged to fill the gaps?

Do you think it is possible to defend and extend the welfare state while also building robust self-organised solidarity networks? What would that look like in practice?

Reply or comment below. This question sits right at the heart of what socialist politics looks like today.

Next up: Lesson 6 – Mutual aid now: from food banks to tenants unions to climate response, and how we build further.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

One of the most powerful insights this course offers is that Kropotkin was not introducing a foreign concept to Aotearoa. He was describing something that had existed here long before European colonisation — and that survived colonisation precisely because it was so deeply embedded in the fabric of Maori and working-class life.

Tikanga Maori as mutual aid

The core values of tikanga Maori are suffused with mutual aid principles. Manaakitanga — the practice of caring for and uplifting others — is not a sentimental ideal. It is an organising principle of social life. Whanaungatanga, the web of relationships and obligations that bind people together, creates a distributed network of support and accountability that functions as a form of social insurance.

Hapu and iwi organised collective labour for agriculture, construction, defence, and resource management. The concept of utu — often mistranslated as revenge but better understood as reciprocity — underpins a whole system of exchange and obligation that ensures no one in the community is left without support.

Marae function as physical centres of this mutual aid network: places where communities gather to care for each other through tangihanga, weddings, hui, and collective work. The obligation to feed visitors, support whanau in need, and contribute labour to communal tasks is not a burden. It is the infrastructure of a cooperative society.

Colonisation and the attack on Maori mutual aid

Colonial capitalism systematically attacked this mutual aid infrastructure. Land confiscations destroyed the economic base that made collective self-sufficiency possible. Urbanisation broke the connections between whanau and hapu. The introduction of individual title to land replaced collective ownership with a system designed to produce individual vulnerability to the market.

The Native Schools system explicitly targeted tikanga Maori, removing children from whanau and punishing the use of te reo. This was not just cultural destruction. It was the destruction of mutual aid networks: the intergenerational transmission of cooperative values, practices, and obligations.

And yet tikanga survived. Maori communities rebuilt and adapted their mutual aid practices under colonial conditions. The Ratana movement, Kotahitanga, and later Maori land development trusts were all efforts to reconstruct cooperative economic power within the constraints of colonial capitalism.

Working-class Aotearoa

Pakeha and migrant working-class communities also built strong mutual aid cultures. The freezing works towns of the South Island, the mining communities of the West Coast, the waterfront communities of the major ports — these were places where collective self-help was not optional. It was how people survived.

Working Men’s Clubs, Women’s Institutes, church mutual aid organisations, and later the strong union culture of the mid-twentieth century all functioned as mutual aid networks: pooling resources, sharing information, supporting members through hard times.

The 1951 waterfront lockout, covered last lesson, had a particularly striking mutual aid dimension in Aotearoa. Mining communities in Westland provided food and solidarity for locked-out wharfies hundreds of kilometres away. Women’s support networks operated largely outside the formal union structure. Pasifika communities who had come to New Zealand for work showed strong cooperative traditions from their home islands.

Pacific and migrant mutual aid

Aotearoa’s Pasifika communities brought extraordinarily rich mutual aid traditions with them. The Samoan fa’alavelave system, the Tongan ngatu making cooperatives, and various rotating credit systems found across Pacific cultures are all forms of mutual aid that predate and outlast the welfare state.

These traditions are often invisible to mainstream New Zealand society, which tends to see Pacific communities primarily through a lens of poverty statistics. But underneath those statistics are dense cooperative networks that have sustained families and communities through decades of economic marginalisation.

The cooperative economy today

Aotearoa has a larger cooperative economic sector than is commonly recognised. The Maori economy, organised substantially through iwi and hapu trusts, land incorporations, and development corporations, is one of the largest cooperative economic formations in the country. Credit unions and building societies serve hundreds of thousands of members. Community housing trusts are growing rapidly. Worker cooperatives, though still small, are increasing.

The challenge is not to build mutual aid from scratch. It is to recognise what already exists, strengthen it, make it more explicitly political, and connect disparate cooperative practices into a broader counter-hegemonic project.

Questions for you

What mutual aid practices from your own cultural tradition or community do you recognise in this lesson? What names do they go by in your context?

How have those practices been challenged, suppressed, or undermined by colonial capitalism or neoliberal restructuring? What has survived?

Reply or comment below. This lesson is particularly enriched by your local knowledge.

Next up: Lesson 5 – The state vs mutual aid: when welfare replaced self-organised solidarity, and what we lost.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

The last two lessons established Kropotkin’s core argument: that mutual aid is a real, scientifically observable force in nature and society, and that Social Darwinism is not science but ideology. This lesson we look at what that argument explains about working-class history.

Because the history of the working class is, in large part, a history of mutual aid.

Friendly societies and mutual benefit organisations

Before welfare states existed, working-class people built their own insurance systems. Across Britain, Europe, Australia, and Aotearoa, workers formed friendly societies: voluntary organisations where members paid small weekly dues and received support in times of illness, injury, unemployment, and death.

At their peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, friendly societies had millions of members worldwide. In Britain alone, more workers were covered by friendly societies than by any state scheme. In Aotearoa, organisations like the Oddfellows, the Druids, and the Manchester Unity had branches in almost every town.

These were not charities. They were democratic mutual aid organisations run by and for their members. They built halls, ran social events, supported political campaigns, and maintained dense networks of working-class solidarity that cut across workplaces and communities.

Strikes as mutual aid

The strike is mutual aid in its most direct and powerful form. Workers who withdraw their labour collectively are saying: none of us will work until all of us benefit. The individual worker who crosses a picket line to take a higher wage destroys the capacity of the whole. The worker who holds the line accepts personal cost for collective gain.

The history of labour organising is a history of workers building the capacity to support each other through industrial action: strike funds, food for picketers’ families, solidarity visits from other unions, boycotts, and black bans. These are all forms of mutual aid — cooperation organised around a shared interest against an exploitative power.

The 1951 waterfront lockout in Aotearoa is one of the most significant examples. The government declared a state of emergency and made it illegal to support the locked-out waterside workers. Ordinary families defied the law by leaving groceries on doorsteps and organising food networks in secret. That was mutual aid under conditions of state repression.

Consumer and housing cooperatives

Across the world, working-class communities built cooperative enterprises: stores where members bought goods at cost and shared the surplus, housing cooperatives where members owned collectively rather than renting from a landlord, credit unions that provided finance without interest extraction.

The Rochdale Pioneers in England established the first modern cooperative in 1844, run on principles of democratic control, open membership, and surplus shared among members. This model spread globally. Today, cooperatives employ more than one billion people worldwide, more than all multinational corporations combined — though you would not know it from the economics curriculum.

In Aotearoa, Fonterra is a dairy cooperative, though it has drifted far from its cooperative origins. The credit union movement, Maori land trusts, and community housing trusts are all cooperative forms with deep roots in mutual aid traditions.

International solidarity

Mutual aid has never been limited by national borders. The early labour movement understood that capital was international and that working-class solidarity had to be too. International brigades volunteered to fight fascism in Spain. Dockers in Britain and Australia refused to load cargo for apartheid South Africa. New Zealand unions refused to service South African sports teams. Solidarity donations crossed the world during major strikes.

This tradition of international solidarity is a form of mutual aid at the largest scale: the recognition that workers everywhere share a common interest, and that supporting each other across borders is not charity but collective self-interest.

What happened to this history?

Much of this history has been deliberately suppressed. The welfare state replaced many friendly societies, which had the effect of weakening the dense networks of working-class self-organisation on which they depended. Cooperative movements were absorbed into mainstream capitalism or marginalised. The history of labour solidarity was removed from school curricula.

This is Gramsci’s civil society at work: the systematic effort to make working-class cooperative history invisible, so that competition and individualism appear to be the only available options.

Recovering this history is part of the war of position.

Questions for you

What working-class mutual aid organisations or practices do you know about in your own community, past or present?

Have you ever been part of a strike, a cooperative, a union, or another form of collective self-help? What was it like? What made it work or not work?

Reply or comment below. This history belongs to all of us.

Next up: Lesson 4 – Mutual aid in Aotearoa: hapu, whanau, working-class communities, and cooperative economies.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

Last lesson we met Kropotkin and the basic idea of mutual aid: that cooperation, not competition, is the fundamental driver of survival and progress. This lesson we go deeper into the scientific and political argument that underpins it.

To understand why mutual aid was so important as a theory in Kropotkin’s time — and still is today — we need to understand what he was arguing against: Social Darwinism.

What is Social Darwinism?

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. His theory of natural selection was a genuine scientific revolution. But the version of Darwin that captured the popular imagination was not Darwin’s own. It was a distortion created by thinkers who wanted to use evolutionary science to justify the social order of industrial capitalism.

Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer — who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”, not Darwin — argued that competition was the fundamental law of nature, and therefore of society. The rich were rich because they were fitter. The poor were poor because they were weaker. Inequality was natural, even beneficial. Helping the poor would only interfere with the healthy operation of competition and slow human progress.

This was enormously convenient for the ruling class of Victorian Britain and Gilded Age America. It dressed exploitation and inequality in the language of science. It made the suffering of workers and the colonised not a political problem to be solved but a natural process to be accepted.

Social Darwinism today

Social Darwinism never went away. It just changed clothes. Neoliberal economics is Social Darwinism in a suit: the idea that markets are natural, competition is inevitable, the strong survive, and the rest adapt or perish. You hear it every time someone says:

“If they can’t afford rent, they should have made better choices.” “Businesses that fail deserve to fail.” “You can’t fight human nature — people are just selfish.” “Welfare creates dependency.” “The market knows best.”

In Aotearoa, this logic has been deployed relentlessly since the 1984 economic reforms. The Rogernomics revolution was not just a set of economic policies. It was an attempt to permanently install a Social Darwinist common sense: that competition is nature, cooperation is weakness, and anyone who can’t survive the market has only themselves to blame.

Kropotkin’s counter-argument

Kropotkin took the Social Darwinists on directly, on their own scientific terrain. He was not arguing from sentiment or morality alone. He was arguing from evidence.

His years in Siberia had given him an extraordinary natural laboratory. The conditions were so harsh that if competition were truly the dominant force in evolution, nothing should have survived. What he found instead was cooperation at every level: animals warning each other of predators, sharing food stores, huddling for warmth, caring for injured members of their groups.

He then traced mutual aid through human history: in indigenous and peasant communities, in medieval guilds, in the solidarity networks of the early labour movement. In every case, the communities that survived and flourished were not those where the strongest individuals dominated. They were those where cooperation was most developed.

His argument was straightforward: mutual aid is a factor of evolution. Not the only factor, but a decisive one. Species and communities that cooperate outcompete those that don’t, over the long run. Cooperation is not against nature. It is one of nature’s most powerful strategies.

The political stakes

Why does this matter so much? Because if human beings are naturally competitive and selfish, then capitalism is simply the political expression of human nature, and any alternative to it is utopian or authoritarian. But if cooperation is equally or more fundamental to human nature, then capitalism is not the natural order. It is a particular historical arrangement that has to be actively imposed and maintained — exactly what Gramsci’s concept of hegemony describes.

Kropotkin and Gramsci, read together, make a powerful argument: the ruling class maintains its power by making competition and selfishness feel natural, while actively suppressing and delegitimising the cooperative practices that have always been the real basis of working-class survival.

Every time a community organises a food bank, every time workers cover each other’s shifts, every time neighbours form a collective to resist eviction — they are not doing something sentimental. They are doing something scientifically sound, historically grounded, and politically subversive.

Questions for you

Where do you encounter Social Darwinist thinking in everyday life — in news coverage, political speech, workplace culture, or social media? What language does it use?

Can you think of examples from nature or from your own community that contradict the idea that competition is the dominant force in survival?

Reply or comment below. These questions connect the theory to your daily reality — that connection is exactly what we are building.

Next up: Lesson 3 – Mutual aid in working-class history: strikes, friendly societies, and solidarity networks.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

Our first course on Gramsci explored how power operates through culture, institutions, and manufactured common sense. This course picks up a related thread, but from a different tradition.

Pyotr Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist, scientist, and geographer who argued that cooperation — not competition — is the driving force of human survival and progress. His 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution remains one of the most important and underread texts in the socialist tradition.

This course is for anyone who has ever:

Organised a neighbourhood food bank. Covered a sick workmate’s shift. Shown up to a picket line for a union you didn’t belong to. Helped a whānau member who couldn’t make rent. Joined a community garden, a housing cooperative, or a tenants union. Felt in your bones that the world doesn’t have to run on competition and individual self-interest.

Kropotkin gives a name and a theory to what you already know.

What this course covers

Over six lessons we will cover:

Lesson 1: Who was Kropotkin? Anarchism, science, and the idea of mutual aid.

Lesson 2: Mutual aid vs Social Darwinism — why “survival of the fittest” is a ruling-class myth.

Lesson 3: Mutual aid in working-class history — strikes, friendly societies, and solidarity networks.

Lesson 4: Mutual aid in Aotearoa — hapu, whanau, working-class communities, and cooperative economies.

Lesson 5: The state vs mutual aid — when welfare replaced self-organised solidarity, and what we lost.

Lesson 6: Mutual aid now — from disaster relief to food banks to climate response, and how we build further.

How this course works

It is free. It is delivered by email. You just need to be subscribed to The Kiwi Dialect’s Courses section — which you already are if you’re reading this.

Lessons will be published twice a week. Each one is short enough to read in fifteen minutes and pointed enough to argue with. There are discussion questions at the end of every lesson — reply by email or comment below. Your experience is part of the course.

This course is rooted in Aotearoa but draws on examples from across the world: from the commons of medieval Europe to the mutual aid networks of the COVID pandemic, from Maori tikanga to the cooperative movements of the global south. Kropotkin’s insight was universal even if our application of it is local.

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1. What Tamaki is doing in this post

Here’s the post in question, from 3 News’ leading story slot via X:

I’ve always been crystal clear: mass unvetted immigration without real assimilation will destroy the Kiwi way of life. We must protect this nation for our children and grandchildren…that’s not hate, that’s basic patriotic & parental instinct.

So why are we tolerating this?
Why do we stay silent while Modi’s India burns churches and kills Christians?
Why do we accept child brides in Modi’s India still existing in 2026?

God has always been clear: false gods and their religions anger Him, and the land must be purged of them (2 Chronicles 24:3). That’s why I use strong language. When a man sees danger to his women and children, he doesn’t whisper…he roars.

And watch what happens when I speak up, exercising my right to freedom of speech...
The demons come out to play: they attack Kiwis like us, defend the immigrants, and when challenged, they fully manifest through the media…exposing themselves for everyone to see.

It’s clearer every single day: politicians, police, and media no longer care about everyday Kiwis or Patriots. Their priority is immigrants and minorities only.

What do you think, New Zealand?
Should we still be allowed to love our country and protect our way of life?

Strip away the piety and patriotism and the structure is very familiar.

• He invents a mortal threat: “mass unvetted immigration without real assimilation will destroy the Kiwi way of life.” This is a localised “great replacement” narrative: demographic change is recoded as existential war.[centaur.reading.ac]

• He recasts politics as instinct: “basic patriotic & parental instinct.” If it’s instinct, it can’t be racist; it’s just “natural.” That move is central to right‑wing populism, which claims a monopoly on “the people’s” gut feelings against out‑of‑touch elites.[pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]

• He demonises a racialised religious “Other” with imported outrage: “Modi’s India burns churches and kills Christians… child brides… false gods… the land must be purged of them.”

  • 1.4 billion people are collapsed into “Modi’s India.”

  • Hindus, immigrants, and “false gods” fuse into a single contaminating enemy.

  • Scripture is drafted as divine licence to purge “them.” This is Christian nationalist eliminationism, not neutral theology.[surface.syr]

• He casts himself as persecuted truth‑teller: “When a man sees danger… he roars… The demons come out to play… they attack Kiwis like us… politicians, police, and media no longer care about everyday Kiwis or Patriots.” That’s the standard populist pose: a lone hero “roaring” on behalf of a pure people against corrupt elites and coddled minorities.[tandfonline]

• He flips victims and perpetrators: power structures in Aotearoa – Pākehā majority rule, Crown sovereignty, corporate ownership – vanish. In their place, “immigrants and minorities” suddenly become the ones with all the power, backed by media, cops and politicians.[centaur.reading.ac]

The moral universe this speech constructs looks like this:

• “Kiwis like us” = pure, endangered, righteous.

• “Immigrants, minorities, false gods” = dangerous, coddled, demonic.

• Violence (symbolic or literal) is sanctified as self‑defence to “protect women and children.”

That’s not an accident. It’s a formula.

2. The strongman formula: Modi, Trump, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Tamaki

Tamaki is not improvising in a vacuum. Comparative research on Modi, Trump, Bolsonaro, Netanyahu, Orbán and others shows a shared ideological architecture.[jstreet]

The ingredients

1. A mythic “people” and “way of life”

   • Trump talks about “real Americans” vs migrants, Muslims, “coastal elites.”

   • Modi’s Hindutva project treats “real Indians” as Hindu, with Muslims cast as infiltrators and demographic threats.[pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]

   • Bolsonaro moralises “good citizens” against Indigenous land defenders, leftists and the urban poor.[surface.syr]

   • Netanyahu glues “Jewish state” to “Jewish security,” with Palestinians framed as demographic or terrorist threats.[theconversation]

   Tamaki’s “Kiwi way of life” plus “Kiwis like us” and “Patriots” reproduces that structure. The implied default Kiwi is conservative, Christian and Pākehā‑coded; Māori, Pacific and migrant Kiwis become background characters at best.

2. A constructed enemy within The target shifts by country – Muslims in India, migrants in the US and Europe, Indigenous activists in Brazil, Palestinians in Israel – but the function is the same: an internal enemy who is criminal, culturally polluting, and demographically dangerous.[research.vu]

   • Criminal: framed as gang members, terrorists, rapists, paedophiles.

   • Polluting: “won’t assimilate,” bring “alien values.”

   • Demographic threat: out‑breeding “us,” replacing “us.”

   Tamaki’s “mass unvetted immigration” plus the talk of “false gods” slots immigrants and non‑Christians into that enemy role, with “Modi’s India” as a symbolic stand‑in for any brown migrant neighbour.

3. Anti‑pluralism in democratic clothing Populist scholars call it anti‑pluralism: the claim that only one group is truly the people and everyone else is suspect.[pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]

   • Trump and Bolsonaro spoke as if opponents were un‑American and illegitimate.

   • Modi’s camp brands dissenters, especially Muslims and leftists, as anti‑national.

   • Netanyahu’s rhetoric dismisses critics and Palestinians who demand equal rights as existential dangers to Israel.[internationalaffairs.org]

   Tamaki does a NZ version: politicians, police and media “no longer care about everyday Kiwis or Patriots” because they allegedly prioritise “immigrants and minorities only.” If minorities count, “real Kiwis” supposedly vanish.

4. Religious or civilisational framing to bless repression

   • Hindutva ideologues describe India as fundamentally Hindu, with religious minorities as guests who must not overstep.[opendemocracy]

   • Netanyahu draws on religious parties and a civilisational Jewish‑vs‑Arab framing to justify ongoing occupation and apartheid‑like conditions.[jstreet]

   • Bolsonaro courted evangelicals and used Christian language to frame Amazon Indigenous territories as obstacles to God‑sanctioned development.[pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]

   Tamaki fuses NZ nationalism with a hardline Christian identity. Quoting 2 Chronicles about purging “false gods” on the same page as immigration panic is not devotional Bible study; it’s ideological construction of a Christian nation that must cleanse itself of wrong religions and their carriers.

5. Permanent mobilisation through emotion Comparative work on populist communication shows these leaders deliberately saturate politics with fear, disgust, anger and pride to keep their base mobilised and resistant to factual correction.[tandfonline] Tamaki pushes the same buttons:

   • Fear: threats to “women and children.”

   • Disgust and demonology: “false gods,” “demons” manifesting in media and critics.

   • Pride and martyrdom: he “roars” while others “stay silent,” he’s the one brave enough to say what “everyone” supposedly thinks.

What the formula does in practice

This isn’t just ugly language; it clears political space for concrete policies that:

• Restrict rights and movement for migrants, religious minorities, and Indigenous peoples.

• Criminalise protest and dissent as “extremism” or “anti‑national.”

• Expand police, military, and allied militias’ powers.

• Funnel public resources to the leader’s base and corporate allies.[research.vu]

Examples:

• In Brazil, anti‑Indigenous and “development” rhetoric justified gutting protections for Indigenous territories and opening the Amazon to agribusiness and mining.[surface.syr]

• In India, Hindutva messaging has marched alongside discriminatory citizenship laws and mob violence against Muslims and Christians.[opendemocracy]

• In Israel, Netanyahu’s security narrative has sustained settlement expansion, dispossession and repeated large‑scale assaults on Palestinians.[theconversation]

• In the US, Trump’s anti‑migrant rhetoric underpinned family separations, Muslim‑majority travel bans, and escalated border violence.[centaur.reading.ac]

Tamaki is operating within that same ideological ecosystem, just scaled down for the 6pm news and the X feed.

3. Aotearoa’s landscape: settlers, sovereignty, and “everyday Kiwis”

In Aotearoa, this rhetoric lands on a landscape already shaped by colonisation, Te Tiriti, and a long history of forced assimilation. That context is everything.

• “Kiwi way of life” is not neutral.
  For two centuries, the dominant “Kiwi” identity has been built by sidelining Māori sovereignty, tikanga and reo, and centring Pākehā norms as common sense. When a Pākehā church leader claims immigration will “destroy” that way of life, he is defending an order born from land theft, broken treaties, and racist law – not some innocent barbecue culture.[nature]

• Indigenous erasure is baked in.
  Tamaki’s “we” – “Kiwis like us,” “Patriots,” “everyday Kiwis” – is opposed to “immigrants and minorities.” Māori are both tangata whenua and, under the settler census logic, a “minority.” His binary pushes Māori out of the “real people” category even when they’re not named. This echoes Bolsonaro’s use of “good citizens” language while treating Indigenous communities as obstacles to progress.[surface.syr]

• Settler paranoia recycles itself.
  Early settlers wrote about “Māori threats” to the colony, then about Māori as wards needing civilising, then as “special interests” getting privileges. Today, the same paranoid style is repackaged: Muslims, Indians, refugees and Māori activists are the new targets. Tamaki’s talk of “false gods” to be purged is an updated version of missionaries demonising tikanga and atua – now with a podcast link at the bottom.[nature]

A socialist, decolonial politics in Aotearoa starts somewhere else:

• It recognises rangatiratanga and tino rangatiratanga as foundational, not optional extras.

• It sees many migrants as themselves displaced by imperial violence and economic dispossession – potential allies in dismantling capitalism and settler colonialism, not competitors for crumbs.

• It focuses fire upwards: landlords, bosses, corporations and state institutions that profit from cheap labour, stolen land and division – not the people stuck at the bottom fighting over rent and groceries.[pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]

Tamaki’s language tries to lock Pākehā and some Māori into a cross‑class alliance with local capital against migrants and minorities. It’s the oldest trick in the reactionary book: punch down and sideways so nobody punches up.

4. A clear rebuttal, from below

Point‑by‑point, here’s what a working‑class, Indigenous‑affirming response looks like.

1. Immigration isn’t what destroys lives – exploitation is.
   Wages are low, housing is obscene, services are stretched because capital is protected and wealth is hoarded, not because your neighbour prays differently or was born elsewhere. Bosses and landlords gain when workers mistrust each other; they lose when we organise together.[nature]

2. “Assimilation” has meant cultural death for Indigenous and minority communities.
   After generations of forced assimilation against Māori – in schools, churches, courts, media – any call for “real assimilation” should ring every alarm bell. The alternative is not chaos; it’s genuine pluralism and power‑sharing grounded in Te Tiriti, Māori self‑determination, and robust protection for all cultures in this place.[pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]

3. Scripture is no excuse to dehumanise.
   Once you start talking about “false gods” that must be “purged,” you are in the rhetorical territory that has justified pogroms, witch‑hunts, crusades and colonisation for centuries. Faith can be a source of solidarity and liberation; it becomes authoritarian when it turns human beings into targets.[jstreet]

4. Free speech is not freedom from consequences.
   Tamaki can say what he likes; others can call it racist, eliminationist and dangerous. When he rebrands criticism as “demons” attacking him, he’s not defending free speech; he’s demanding a monopoly on it.[pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]

5. “Everyday Kiwis” includes the people he’s targeting.
   The dairy owner working 15‑hour days. The Muslim nurse on night shifts. The Māori solo parent. The Indian Uber driver. The Pākehā teacher. These are all “everyday Kiwis,” all part of the working class of this place. The people attacking them are not “demons”; they are demagogues doing the boss’s work for free.

A politics worthy of Aotearoa in 2026 refuses the fake choice between “protecting our way of life” and welcoming newcomers. It asks instead: whose life, whose land, whose power? And it answers: uphold Māori sovereignty, dismantle the economic structures that grind everybody down, and build thick solidarity across cultures so imported strongman scripts – from Modi to Trump to Tamaki – find no audience.

Selected sources

• Right‑wing populism, nationalism and anti‑pluralism:

  • “Populism, Nationalism, and Nationalist Populism” – NIH/PMC[pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]

  • “The ‘Will of the People’: The Populist Challenge to Democracy” – PMC[pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]

  • “Populism and nationalism in comparative perspective”[centaur.reading.ac]

• Emotional and communicative strategies of populists:

  • “The emotional logic of populist communication”[tandfonline]

  • “The Persuasive Power of Right-Wing Populist Rhetoric”[research.vu]

• Anti‑Indigenous and far‑right rhetoric:

  • “Anti-Indigenous Sentiment and Right-Wing Ideational …”[surface.syr]

• Global far‑right alliances and Netanyahu:

  • “Netanyahu’s Global Far-Right Alliances” – J Street[jstreet]

  • “It wasn’t just politics that led to Netanyahu’s ouster” – The Conversation[theconversation]

• Background on Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro:

  • “Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi: anti‑migration, ecocide, and …” – openDemocracy[opendemocracy]

  • “The Trump–Bolsonaro Strategic Alignment” – AIIA[internationalaffairs.org]

Let’s break down the sleight of hand.

THE “MMP FIXED IT” LIE The site claims MMP solved Māori representation, so the seats are now redundant. This is a half-truth — which is the most dangerous kind of lie.

Yes, more Māori MPs sit in Parliament today. But who do they answer to? Party lists are controlled by party hierarchies — predominantly Pākehā, predominantly capital-friendly. The Māori electorates are one of the only structures where Māori communities have direct, unmediated electoral leverage over their representatives. You can’t vote a list MP out. You can vote out your electorate MP.

Representation in numbers is not the same as structural power. A socialist understands this. The bosses have always been happy to put brown and women faces in high places — as long as the system underneath doesn’t change.

“LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE” IS NOT DEMOCRACY — IT’S MAJORITARIANISM

There is a reason we don’t put minority rights to majority votes. We learned this the hard way, through centuries of struggle.

Should we have had a referendum on women’s suffrage — where only men voted? Should Jim Crow laws have been settled by a Southern majority vote? The logic of “let everyone decide on the rights of a specific group” has a name: the tyranny of the majority. It is not democracy. It is democracy’s enemy.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi established a relationship — a contract — between Māori and the Crown. Māori did not cede sovereignty in 1840 to have it put to a popular vote in 2026 by a coalition government that has spent the past two years systematically dismantling every Treaty-based protection it can find.

We have already seen exactly what happens when you force a majority vote on indigenous representation rights. In October 2025, 24 out of 42 New Zealand councils abolished their Māori wards after this government legislated to force binding polls on all councils that had established Māori wards since 2021. This was a coordinated campaign. ACT Party candidates worked directly alongside Hobson’s Pledge, running ads featuring Māori people without their consent. The result? Rural majorities voted to strip Māori representation from local government, even though a nationwide majority (54 to 46 percent) actually favoured keeping the wards. That is majoritarianism. Not democracy.

And in Australia in 2023, the same playbook was used against the First Nations Voice to Parliament referendum. Despite overwhelming evidence that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians suffer profound structural disadvantage, more than 60 percent of Australians voted No — denying Indigenous peoples a constitutional right to be heard on matters affecting them. The No campaign was funded and amplified by right-wing networks, using deliberate confusion and fear about “special rights.” The result: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples remain, as legal scholar Professor Megan Davis wrote, a group for whom laws can be made with no effective form of political representation through which they can be heard.

THIS IS A GLOBAL PLAYBOOK — AND WORKERS NEED TO RECOGNISE IT

What Hobson’s Pledge is doing here is not unique. It is part of an international pattern of nationalist, capital-serving political movements using the language of democracy, equality and “one law for all” to roll back indigenous rights. Let’s name them:

BRAZIL — JAIR BOLSONARO (2019–2022)

Bolsonaro explicitly pledged during his 2018 campaign that he would not demarcate “one more centimetre” of indigenous land, and he delivered. His administration gutted FUNAI, Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency, by removing experienced staff, appointing military officers and evangelical missionaries to key positions, and halting all processes to identify and demarcate indigenous territories. The result was catastrophic: record indigenous land invasions, killings, child mortality, and the worst invasion of Yanomami territory in 30 years — with approximately 20,000 illegal miners flooding the territory. Human Rights Watch documented systematic, policy-level attacks on indigenous rights. The APIB (Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil) formally submitted a communication to the International Criminal Court in 2021 documenting crimes against humanity. The language was different from Hobson’s Pledge — Bolsonaro talked about “development” and “modernisation” — but the logic was identical: indigenous rights are obstacles to the nation; the majority economy should come first.

AUSTRALIA — THE VOICE TO PARLIAMENT NO CAMPAIGN (2023)

In October 2023, Australians voted 60 to 40 percent to reject a constitutional amendment that would have established an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament — a body that would have advised Parliament on matters affecting Indigenous people. This was not a radical proposal. It was a listening mechanism. The No campaign, backed by conservative and right-wing networks, successfully framed it as “divisive,” “risky,” and granting “special rights.” Research from the Australian National University found that No voters were more likely to believe that land rights and native title were unfair, and that if Indigenous Australians “tried harder” they could be as well off as non-Indigenous Australians. Those are not neutral political opinions. They are the ideological building blocks of settler colonial capitalism: if you’re poor and dispossessed, it’s your fault. The result of the No vote was that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples remain a group for whom Parliament can make laws with no protected right to be heard on those laws.

NEW ZEALAND — THE ACT-NATIONAL-NZ FIRST COALITION (2023–PRESENT)

This is the closest analogue to the current Referendum Now campaign, and it is happening right now. Since taking office in December 2023, this government has: abolished the Māori Health Authority; directed Pharmac to stop applying Treaty principles to funding decisions; legislated to force binding polls on Māori wards in local government; fast-tracked legislation that bypasses Waitangi Tribunal obligations; and introduced a Treaty Principles Bill (since withdrawn under pressure, but the intent was laid bare) that would have redefined Treaty principles to mean “one law for all” — i.e., no Treaty obligations at all. The ACT Party’s position, as stated by David Seymour as early as 2018, is to simply abolish the Māori seats outright — no referendum needed. NZ First’s Winston Peters has introduced a Member’s Bill in February 2026 to hold a binding referendum on Māori seats at this year’s general election. Hobson’s Pledge is the ideological and organisational ground crew for all of this.

HUNGARY — VIKTOR ORBÁN AND FIDESZ (2010–2026)

Orbán’s Hungary is the template for what happens when nationalist-capitalist governments get sustained power. Under the banner of “illiberal democracy,” his government systematically dismantled minority rights — particularly for Roma people — while rewriting the constitution and electoral laws to entrench Fidesz’s power. Hungary’s minority parliamentary system, while it technically guaranteed seats for recognised minorities, was structured so that minority voters who used their minority vote forfeited their right to vote for any political party. Roma people, Hungary’s most marginalised community, had no realistic path to full parliamentary representation under this system. The European Court of Human Rights found violations of the right to free elections. The lesson: nationalist governments don’t need to outright ban minority representation — they can simply structure the system so it is permanently toothless.

USA — PROJECT 2025 AND THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION (2025–PRESENT)

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for the second Trump administration, explicitly targets tribal sovereignty and indigenous rights. Cultural Survival documented that the first year of Trump’s second term caused “deep harm through policies and actions that erode the rights, dignity, and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples.” This includes ICE detention of Native citizens, gutting funding to Tribal programmes, and treating Native sovereignty as an obstacle to resource extraction. The framework is always the same: indigenous rights are “special treatment,” national unity requires a single standard, and the market should decide land use.

The pattern is not a coincidence. It is a coordinated international project of nationalist capitalism, and Hobson’s Pledge is Aotearoa’s franchise.

A WORD ON THE “RACE-BASED” FRAMING

Every time you hear “race-based seats,” replace it with what it actually means: seats that exist because of a history of dispossession, broken treaties, and deliberate exclusion.

The Māori seats were not created because someone thought Māori were a special, superior category of human. They were created in 1867 because the Crown imposed a property-based voting system — after having systematically stripped Māori of their land through raupatu (confiscation), legislation, and fraud. The cause was colonial theft. The seats are a partial, limited, and long-overdue remedy.

Calling the remedy “race-based” while ignoring the original crime is like breaking someone’s leg, then complaining they’re getting “special treatment” from the doctor.

This framing is not accidental. It is the core rhetorical strategy of every nationalist-capitalist movement that targets indigenous rights: erase the history, flatten the structural analysis, and reframe the remedy as the problem. You hear it from Bolsonaro’s team in Brazil. You heard it from No campaign spokespeople in Australia. You hear it from David Seymour, Winston Peters, Don Brash, and now from the polished website of Referendum Now.

WHAT WORKERS AND SOCIALISTS NEED TO UNDERSTAND

Divide and rule is as old as capitalism itself. When Māori workers and Pākehā workers fight each other over electoral structures, who wins? Not us.

The same government pushing this referendum agenda is the one cutting public services, attacking worker rights, and handing public assets to private capital. They want us arguing about Māori seats. They do not want us talking about who owns the land, who owns the housing stock, who owns the power companies.

Tino rangatiratanga — Māori self-determination — is not the enemy of working class solidarity. It is part of it. You cannot build a genuine workers’ movement on a foundation of colonial dispossession. That contradiction will break you every time. History proves this: in South Africa, in the United States, in Australia, wherever settler-colonial capitalism tried to build a labour movement on top of indigenous dispossession without addressing it, that movement was ultimately limited, divided, and co-opted.

We are being asked, by a lobby group backed by the same capital interests that have always opposed Māori rights, to spend our political energy on removing one of the few structural protections Māori workers have in the parliamentary system. Meanwhile: housing unaffordability is at a record high. Hospital waitlists are blowing out. Wages are stagnant. The cost of living crisis grinds on.

This is the oldest trick in the book. Don’t fall for it.

DON’T SIGN THE LETTER. HAVE THE CONVERSATION INSTEAD.

If someone you know is tempted to sign — have the conversation. Not with contempt, but with clarity. Most people who sign petitions like this aren’t racists. They’re people who’ve been fed a tidy story about “fairness” and haven’t had the historical context to interrogate it. That’s on us, not just on them.

Education is not separate from struggle — it is the struggle. Art, writing, music, community — these are the tools we use to build the consciousness that makes collective action possible. Share this. Debate it. Add to it. Correct it where it’s wrong.

But do not let Hobson’s Pledge and its parliamentary allies set the terms of the conversation.

Kia kaha. Tūturu whakamaua.

—

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

• Hobson’s Pledge — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_Pledge

• The Māori ward vote in New Zealand contains important lessons for Canada — The Conversation (April 2025): https://theconversation.com/the-maori-ward-vote-in-new-zealand-contains-important-lessons-for-canada-268434

• New Zealand: Māori rights in the firing line — CIVICUS Lens (August 2024): https://lens.civicus.org/new-zealand-maori-rights-in-the-firing-line/

• David Seymour says he wants to abolish Māori seats — The Spinoff (August 2018): https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/12-08-2018/david-seymour-says-he-wants-to-abolish-maori-seats-can-he

• NZ First Member’s Bill on Māori seats referendum — Winston Peters Facebook (February 2026)

• 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice Referendum — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Australian_Indigenous_Voice_referendum

• Detailed analysis of the 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum — ANU/Polis (2025): https://polis.cass.anu.edu.au/research/publications/detailed-analysis-2023-voice-parliament-referendum-and-related-social-and

• In the aftermath of the Voice referendum — Equal Times (2025): https://www.equaltimes.org/in-the-aftermath-of-the-voice

• Brazil: Indigenous Rights Under Serious Threat — Human Rights Watch (August 2022): https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/08/09/brazil-indigenous-rights-under-serious-threat

• APIB Communication to the International Criminal Court (2021): https://apiboficial.org/files/2021/08/APIB_ICC_.pdf

• Atrocities Crimes in Brazil Under Bolsonaro: The Yanomami Case — ECR2P Leeds: https://ecr2p.leeds.ac.uk/atrocities-crimes-in-brazil-under-bolsonaro-the-yanomami-case/

• Hungary’s minorities lose parliamentary representation in 2026 election — EURAC (April 2026): https://www.eurac.edu/en/blogs/midas/hungarys-minorities-lose-parliamentary-representation-in-2026-election

• After the No Vote: The Endurance of Indigenous Political Representation — Indigenous Constitutional Law (April 2025): https://www.indigconlaw.org/home/the-endurance-of-indigenous-political-representation

• What Project 2025 has to say about Native communities — High Country News (October 2024): https://www.hcn.org/issues/57-1/what-project-2025-has-to-say-about-indigenous-affairs/

• This Presidents’ Day, Stand with US for Indigenous Rights — Cultural Survival (February 2026): https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/presidents-day-stand-us-indigenous-rights-5-ways-act-now

• India’s Indigenous peoples under attack by Modi — Survival International: https://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/India-indigenous-under-attack

The Kiwi Dialectic

Where ideology meets pedagogy and the arts.

By Robert McCall

A six-post short course for The Kiwi Dialectic

This package is written for readers who want theory that can do some work. The goal is not to make philosophy look fancy, but to make it usable: a set of posts that explain the stakes, a set of lessons that can be rerun, and a structure that helps the ideas travel like a recipe rather than die as jargon.

In this series

1. Why introduce Gilles Deleuze now?

2. Gramsci and the fight over common sense

3. Paulo Freire and the pedagogy of liberation

4. Graeber, Bakunin, and Kropotkin on organisation

5. Deleuze, art, and the classroom as experiment

6. Building a campaign pedagogy for educators and tamariki

1. Why introduce Gilles Deleuze now?

Gilles Deleuze was one of the major philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work on difference, multiplicity, becoming, and concept-creation gives educators and artists a language for thinking beyond fixed identities and standardised outcomes.[plato.stanford]

In educational writing influenced by Deleuze, learning is not treated as the simple recognition of the right answer; it is pushed by encounters, problems, experimentation, and the shocks that make thought move.[onlinelibrary.wiley]

That matters in a period where schools, arts institutions, and unions are pressured to measure everything, flatten complexity, and confuse compliance with learning.[tandfonline]

Key takeaway: Deleuze helps explain how thought escapes institutional scripts without pretending institutions do not exist.

Lesson recipe

Objective: Introduce Deleuze as a thinker of experimentation and relation rather than static identity.[blogs.ed.ac]

Materials: Whiteboard, scrap paper, one artwork or image per group.

Method: Ask: what does schooling usually reward—recognition or invention? Then have groups analyse an artwork by asking not “what is it?” but “what can it do?”[hekupu.ac]

Transfer: Rewrite one assessment, workshop, or arts prompt so it rewards experimentation rather than reproduction.

Source links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Gilles Deleuze

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Gilles Deleuze

• Learning, teaching and thinking in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze

• Working conceptually with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy in relation to children’s artwork

2. Gramsci and the fight over common sense

Antonio Gramsci’s account of hegemony shows that ruling power in advanced capitalist societies works not only through force, but through the shaping of culture, common sense, and political leadership.[plato.stanford]

That makes education central, because schools and public debate help decide what counts as normal, sensible, professional, achievable, or blameworthy.[iep.utm]

For campaign work, this means a union or arts organisation does not just chase policy wins; it also fights over the words and stories used to define children, teachers, learning, and public value.[erudit]

Key takeaway: If movements do not contest common sense, they enter every struggle already losing ground.

Lesson recipe

Objective: Show how “common sense” is socially made and politically contested.[plato.stanford]

Materials: News headlines, policy documents, coloured pens, sticky notes.

Method: Highlight repeated words in media and policy language, then ask whose interests those assumptions serve and what alternative language could replace them.[plato.stanford]

Transfer: Create a hegemony audit for one institution, campaign, or arts programme.

Source links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Antonio Gramsci

• Britannica: Antonio Gramsci

3. Paulo Freire and the pedagogy of liberation

Paulo Freire’s educational philosophy centres dialogue, critical consciousness, and the rejection of authoritarian models that treat learners as containers to be filled.[pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]

Freire’s contrast between banking education and problem-posing education remains useful because it reframes teaching as a collective investigation of the world rather than a one-way transfer of approved facts.[youtube][pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]

That is why Freire matters for union organisers and artists as much as for teachers: the work is to build spaces where people can name oppression, analyse it, and act together against it.[mathsnoproblem]

Key takeaway: A campaign that does not teach people to read the world critically will struggle to change it.

Lesson recipe

Objective: Practise problem-posing pedagogy instead of one-way instruction.[iep.utm]

Materials: One local issue, paper, pens, a space for group discussion.

Method: Turn statements into questions: who benefits, who pays, what assumptions hold the issue in place, and what forms of collective action are possible?[youtube][mathsnoproblem]

Transfer: Convert one lecture, staff briefing, or arts workshop into a dialogue-based inquiry session.

Source links

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Paulo Freire

• Profound Love and Dialogue: Paulo Freire and Liberation Pedagogy

• Paulo Freire: The pioneer of critical pedagogy

4. Graeber, Bakunin, and Kropotkin on organisation

David Graeber’s writing on direct action links democracy to the capacity of people to act through their own collective power rather than outsourcing change to distant authorities.[krystal-strong.squarespace]

Bakunin’s anti-authoritarian warning and Kropotkin’s emphasis on mutual aid sit inside the broader anarchist tradition that criticises domination while insisting that cooperation is a real social capacity.[plato.stanford]

Taken together, these thinkers are useful for educational leadership because they show that structure is necessary, but structure without accountability can quickly turn into another little bureaucracy.[erudit]

Key takeaway: Radical organisation is not chaos; it is coordination built without domination.

Lesson recipe

Objective: Distinguish leadership from domination and coordination from bureaucracy.[krystal-strong.squarespace]

Materials: Sticky notes, butcher paper, a campaign or team process to analyse.

Method: Map how decisions currently get made, mark bottlenecks and gatekeepers, then redesign the process with delegated roles, transparency, and recallable responsibility.[plato.stanford]

Transfer: Draft a one-page decision-making protocol for a staff team, classroom collective, or arts organisation.

Source links

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Anarchism

• David Graeber, Democracy, and Social Studies Curriculum

• Direct Action, Anarchism, Direct Democracy

5. Deleuze, art, and the classroom as experiment

Work in philosophy of education and arts education has drawn on Deleuze and Guattari to challenge representational thinking and reopen the classroom as a site of experiment, encounter, and conceptual creation.[pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]

That shift matters because it treats art not merely as expression and learning not merely as mastery, but as ways of sensing, relating, and thinking otherwise.[digibug.ugr]

For educators under pressure to standardise everything, the Deleuzian move is simple and provocative: ask whether a practice creates movement, relation, surprise, and new capacities rather than whether it fits the template.[blogs.ed.ac]

Key takeaway: Art can move thought where policy language gets stuck.

Lesson recipe

Objective: Use artistic experimentation to disrupt rigid learning habits.[hekupu.ac]

Materials: Found objects, paper, markers, collage material, music if useful.

Method: Give a prompt with no single correct answer, ban literal illustration for the first round, then discuss where surprise and stuckness appeared.[blogs.ed.ac]

Transfer: Design one low-cost arts activity that helps participants analyse power without beginning from abstract jargon.

Source links

• A pedagogy of generosity: On the topicality of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought

• Working conceptually with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy in relation to children’s artwork

• Genuine Movement Learning Through a Deleuzian Approach

6. Building a campaign pedagogy for educators and tamariki

Read through our courses - Gramsci, Freire, Deleuze, Graeber, Bakunin, and Kropotkin (will be added soon) and create a framework for contesting common sense, building critical analysis, enabling experimentation, and growing collective organisation at the same time.[plato.stanford]

For educators and tamariki, the point is not simply better messaging, but new forms of learning and organising that change who gets to speak, who gets to decide, and what education is for.[pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]

Key takeaway: Effective campaigns do not just communicate; they teach people how to govern struggle together.

Lesson recipe

Objective: Build a campaign pedagogy that links union growth, political education, and practical action.[erudit]

Materials: Campaign brief, stakeholder map, timeline template, evaluation sheet.

Method: Choose one live issue, map the dominant story and leverage points, then build a six-session cycle of inquiry, education, action, reflection, adjustment, and escalation.[krystal-strong.squarespace]

Welcome to the second course from The Kiwi Dialect. If you did the Gramsci course, you already have a framework for understanding how power maintains itself through culture and common sense. This course is about the other side of that story: how ordinary people resist, survive, and build power through cooperation.

The thinker we are working with is Pyotr Kropotkin. His big idea is mutual aid: the practice of people helping each other as a fundamental strategy for survival and flourishing.

Who was Kropotkin?

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin was born in Moscow in 1842, into one of Russia’s oldest noble families. He had every material advantage the Russian ruling class could offer. He chose not to use them.

As a young man Kropotkin became a geographer and scientist, spending years in Siberia and Manchuria on geological expeditions. What he saw there began to change him. The land was extraordinarily harsh. Animals and people faced brutal conditions. But what struck him was not the competition for survival. What struck him was the cooperation.

He watched animals help each other through hard winters. He watched peasant communities organise collectively to survive conditions that would have destroyed any individual or family acting alone. He read Darwin, but he came to a different conclusion than the Social Darwinists who were then dominating European thought.

Kropotkin became an anarchist, was imprisoned in Russia, escaped, and spent decades in Western Europe writing and organising. His masterwork, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, was published in 1902. He died in 1921, refusing honours from the new Bolshevik government and warning that centralised state socialism would become a new form of tyranny.

What is mutual aid?

Mutual aid is the practice of people voluntarily cooperating to meet each other’s needs, without the mediation of the state or the market. It is not charity. Charity flows from those who have to those who do not. Mutual aid flows between equals who recognise that they all need each other.

The distinction matters enormously. Charity maintains hierarchy. It positions the giver as superior and the receiver as grateful. Mutual aid refuses that hierarchy. It says: we are all vulnerable, we all have something to contribute, and we are stronger together than apart.

Kropotkin’s argument was that mutual aid is not idealistic or utopian. It is a hard biological and historical fact. Cooperation is how species survive. It is how human communities have always organised in conditions of scarcity and threat. The idea that human nature is fundamentally competitive and selfish is not a scientific observation. It is a ruling-class ideology.

Kropotkin and anarchism

Kropotkin was an anarchist, which in his tradition did not mean chaos or disorder. It meant the abolition of coercive hierarchy — particularly the state and capital — and the organisation of society through voluntary association, federation, and mutual aid.

This course does not require you to be an anarchist. Marxists, democratic socialists, and many others have drawn deeply on Kropotkin’s work on mutual aid without adopting his full political programme. What he offers is not a blueprint for the future state but a lens for understanding existing cooperative practices and their potential.

Where Gramsci asked how we build counter-hegemony through institutions and culture, Kropotkin asks how we build cooperative power through direct relationships and practice. The two traditions are complementary, not competing.

Why read Kropotkin now?

The COVID-19 pandemic produced an explosion of mutual aid networks around the world. In Aotearoa, in the UK, in the US, in India, in South Africa — ordinary people organised food, medicine, childcare, and support for their neighbours without waiting for the state. Many of these networks outlasted the pandemic. Many people who participated in them were radicalised by the experience.

At the same time, decades of welfare state erosion have left working-class communities more dependent on self-organised support than at any point since the mid-twentieth century. Food banks, community pantries, neighbour networks, and informal support systems are filling gaps that the state has deliberately vacated.

Kropotkin helps us understand both the depth of this tradition and its political stakes. Mutual aid is not a stopgap while we wait for better politics. It is a form of politics in itself — a practical demonstration that a different kind of world is already being built in the cracks of the existing one.

Questions for you

Think of a time when you or your community survived something difficult through cooperation rather than individual effort. What made that possible? What did it feel like?

What is the difference, in your experience, between receiving charity and being part of a mutual aid network? Have you experienced both?

Reply to this email or leave a comment. Every response is part of the course.

Next up: Lesson 2 – Mutual aid vs Social Darwinism: why survival of the fittest is a ruling-class myth.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect