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 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.

Share this

If you know someone who would benefit from this course — a workmate, a student, a community organiser, a person who is quietly building something cooperative and wants a theoretical language for it — send them this link and ask them to subscribe.

You can also share on socials with something like: “Free Kropotkin course from The Kiwi Dialect — six lessons on mutual aid, cooperation, and working-class solidarity. Arrives by email. Sign up here: [your substack link]”

The first lesson arrives shortly.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

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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

You made it to the end of the course. This final lesson does not introduce new theory. It connects everything we have covered and asks: what do we actually do with this?

A quick recap of the toolkit

Over six lessons we have worked through five core ideas from Gramsci, each one a tool:

Hegemony: Power is not just force. It is the organisation of consent. The ruling class maintains its position by making its arrangements feel like common sense — natural, inevitable, and reasonable. The first task of socialist politics is learning to see through that manufactured inevitability.

Organic intellectuals: Every class produces people who give it self-understanding and direction. The working class needs its own organic intellectuals — people rooted in working-class and Maori experience who can think, communicate, and organise. These people are not born: they are made through education, practice, and political community.

Civil society: The state is not just parliament and police. It includes every institution that shapes how people think: schools, media, churches, NGOs, arts, unions. These institutions are contested terrain. They reproduce the ruling order, but they can also be sites of counter-hegemonic work.

War of position: In a society like Aotearoa, with a dense civil society and no immediate revolutionary situation, the primary task is the long, patient work of building counter-hegemonic institutions and shifting common sense. This is not a retreat from politics. It is the most realistic form of transformative politics available to us.

Historic bloc: Change requires building a broad alliance of social forces united by a shared analysis and vision. In Aotearoa, that means workers, Maori, Pasifika, environmentalists, feminists, the precarious, the excluded — not just an electoral coalition but a genuine social bloc with its own institutions and culture.

What this looks like in Aotearoa right now

The current political moment in New Zealand is one of intensifying inequality, eroding public services, accelerating housing unaffordability, and a government actively dismantling what remains of the post-war social settlement. At the same time, Maori resistance to treaty rollbacks is growing, climate movements are radicalising, and there is a new generation of workers who have no memory of the pre-1984 economy and no investment in defending its compromised successors.

Gramsci would say: this is not yet a revolutionary situation, but it is a moment of hegemonic instability. The ruling class is having to work harder to maintain consent. Its common sense is cracking in places. This is the moment to accelerate the war of position.

Concretely, that means:

Join or build a union that does political education, not just bargaining. Read and discuss theory with your workmates. Support independent socialist media — including publications like The Kiwi Dialect. Get involved in local counter-hegemonic institutions: community land trusts, tenants unions, food cooperatives, kaupapa Maori education, community radio. Stand for local government with a clear class analysis. Build relationships across the historic bloc — with Maori organisers, with climate activists, with precarious workers, with people who are not yet politicised but are experiencing the same conditions you are.

None of this is glamorous. Gramsci wrote most of his theory in a prison cell, in poor health, under surveillance, knowing he would not survive. He still believed the work was worth doing. He still believed ordinary people could change their world. And he still insisted that the intellectual work of making power legible was not a luxury but a necessity.

What comes next

This course is the first in a series from The Kiwi Dialect. The next course will look at Pyotr Kropotkin and the tradition of mutual aid — asking what it means to build cooperative power in communities rather than waiting for the state to provide. After that we will look at David Graeber: on debt, bureaucracy, and the politics of everyday life.

If you want to be notified when those courses go live, make sure you are subscribed to The Kiwi Dialect’s Courses section. They will arrive in your inbox, the same way this one did.

And if this course was useful to you — share it. Send it to a workmate, a student, a comrade, a person who is angry about what is happening in Aotearoa and wants a language for it. That is the war of position. That is how common sense changes.

A final question

After six lessons, what is the one idea from Gramsci that you will carry with you into your work, your community, or your political life? And what is the one thing you want to do differently because of it?

Reply to this email or leave a comment. We read every one.

Thank you for reading, arguing, and thinking alongside us.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

We have now built up a picture of Gramsci’s world: hegemony operates through civil society, maintained by both traditional and organic intellectuals, and it works because it makes ruling-class arrangements feel like common sense. Now the question becomes: what do we do about it?

This lesson is about Gramsci’s strategic answer: the war of position.

War of manoeuvre vs war of position

Gramsci borrowed these terms from military strategy. A war of manoeuvre is a frontal assault — the revolutionary seizure of state power in a single decisive blow, as in Russia in 1917. A war of position is a long strategic struggle to control terrain — the equivalent of trench warfare, where what matters is holding and extending ground over time.

Gramsci argued that the war of manoeuvre might have been possible in countries like Russia, where civil society was underdeveloped and the state rested almost entirely on force. But in the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe — and, we can add, Aotearoa — civil society is thick, complex, and deeply woven into everyday life. A frontal assault on the state would fail because the ruling class has far too many fallback positions in civil society.

In these conditions, he argued, the primary task is a war of position: a long, patient effort to build counter-hegemonic institutions, shift common sense, develop organic intellectuals, and create the conditions under which a different social order becomes thinkable and then achievable.

What this means in practice

The war of position is not passive. It is not waiting for conditions to ripen, or retreating into pure theory, or building a perfect socialist subculture that has no contact with the mainstream. It is active, strategic, and deeply political.

It means contesting every institution where working-class and Maori people are present: schools, workplaces, unions, local government, media, arts, sport. Not by pretending those institutions are neutral, but by working within and against them — building alternative capacities and relationships while refusing to be fully absorbed.

It means developing what Gramsci called a historic bloc: a broad alliance of social forces — workers, Maori, environmentalists, feminists, small farmers, the precarious and the excluded — united not just by shared interest but by a shared analysis and vision. This bloc is not built through proclamation. It is built through sustained work in civil society over years and decades.

War of position in Aotearoa

New Zealand is a small, geographically isolated country with a relatively thin civil society compared to larger capitalist states. This cuts both ways. The ruling-class apparatus is less consolidated, which means change can happen faster. But the counter-hegemonic infrastructure is also thin — few independent working-class media, a union movement that has not fully recovered from the 1991 Employment Contracts Act, limited socialist political organisation, and a left intellectual culture that is often disconnected from working-class communities.

The war of position here involves:

Building union education programmes that go beyond industrial relations. Developing independent socialist media that reaches people outside the existing left. Supporting kaupapa Maori education as an alternative to colonial schooling. Creating study circles and reading groups that develop organic intellectuals in workplaces and communities. Fighting for genuine worker representation in governance. Building solidarity economies: housing coops, worker coops, community land trusts.

None of this is spectacular. None of it will be resolved in one election cycle. But Gramsci was explicit: without this long work of building counter-hegemony, any political victory will be temporary and reversible. The ruling class will simply rebuild its common sense in a new form, as it has done repeatedly throughout New Zealand history.

The risk of the war of position

Gramsci was aware of the dangers in this strategy. The war of position requires working within existing institutions, which always risks transformism — being absorbed rather than transforming. It requires patience, which can become passivity. It requires building broad alliances, which can dilute the sharpness of analysis.

There is no formula for avoiding these risks. What Gramsci insists on is clarity of purpose: always knowing what you are building toward, and always asking whether today’s compromises are bringing you closer to or further from that goal.

Questions for you

Where in your own life or work are you engaged in something that could be described as war of position — building alternative capacities, shifting common sense, or developing working-class leadership?

What are the institutions or spaces in Aotearoa you think most need a counter-hegemonic challenge right now? And who is doing that work?

Reply or comment below. Final lesson next.

Next up: Lesson 6 – Gramsci in Aotearoa today: putting it all together.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

So far in this course we have looked at hegemony as a process, and at organic intellectuals as the people who build or challenge it. This lesson we look at the terrain on which that struggle plays out: what Gramsci called civil society.

Two faces of the state

Gramsci made a crucial distinction that most political theory misses. He divided the state into two dimensions:

Political society: the coercive apparatus — police, prisons, courts, military, government bureaucracies. This is the state in the narrow sense: the machinery that can force compliance.

Civil society: the network of institutions that operate with relative independence from the state but still reproduce its logic — schools, universities, churches, media organisations, trade unions, NGOs, arts institutions, sports clubs, professional associations, and political parties. This is where consent is manufactured, not just enforced.

For Gramsci, the “complete state” is political society plus civil society. Hegemony is exercised through both, but its most durable form is through civil society, because force breeds resistance while consent breeds compliance that feels like freedom.

Why civil society matters more than it looks

Most left analysis focuses on the state in the narrow sense: who controls parliament, what the police do, what the courts decide. Gramsci doesn’t dismiss this, but he insists we are missing most of the picture if we stop there.

In countries with developed civil societies — like Aotearoa — the ruling class does not primarily rely on force. It relies on a dense network of institutions that do the work of normalisation: teaching people their place, managing their aspirations, channelling their dissatisfaction into acceptable forms, and defining the limits of reasonable politics.

Civil society in Aotearoa

New Zealand has a rich civil society that does a great deal of this normalising work. Consider these examples:

Schools: The curriculum teaches national history in ways that emphasise reconciliation over dispossession, individual achievement over class analysis, and global citizenship over class consciousness. NCEA and university entrance systems sort students by their usefulness to the economy.

Media: The major New Zealand media — even publicly funded outlets — operate within a framework that treats markets as natural, defines economic growth as shared benefit, and frames labour disputes primarily in terms of disruption and cost.

NGOs and community organisations: Many of these do genuinely important work, but they operate within a funding environment controlled by the state and philanthropic capital. This shapes what they are able to say and demand. Organisations that challenge structural causes of poverty risk losing contracts. Those that manage symptoms are rewarded.

Unions: Gramsci considered unions part of civil society. At their best, unions are counter-hegemonic institutions building working-class power. At their worst, they are absorbed into industrial relations machinery that channels class conflict into manageable negotiations rather than structural challenge.

Marae and iwi institutions: These occupy a complex position. They carry genuine counter-hegemonic potential as institutions organised around values and obligations that predate and challenge colonial capitalism. But they also face intense pressure from the settlement process and co-governance frameworks to become managers of Crown assets and administrators of state services. This is transformism operating at the level of an entire people.

The contested nature of civil society

Here is the hopeful part of Gramsci’s analysis: civil society is not simply a tool of the ruling class. It is a contested terrain. Because it is where consent is organised, it is also where consent can be withdrawn, redirected, and rebuilt around different values.

A union that genuinely educates its members about class power, rather than just negotiating conditions, is doing counter-hegemonic work in civil society. A community radio station that names structural causes rather than individual failings is doing the same. A study circle in a Dunedin community hall. A kaupapa Maori school that teaches te reo, tikanga, and a different account of New Zealand history. A socialist publication that reaches workers who have never read theory before.

All of these are operating in civil society. And all of them are, in Gramsci’s terms, building the foundations for a different kind of hegemony.

Questions for you

Which institutions in your community or workplace do you think do the most work to make inequality feel normal or inevitable?

Can you think of institutions in Aotearoa that are genuinely counter-hegemonic — that build a different kind of common sense about power, land, and class? What makes them different?

Reply or comment below — your examples are invaluable.

Next up: Lesson 5 – War of position: building counter-power from below.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

Last lesson we looked at hegemony — how ruling ideas become common sense. This lesson we ask: who does the work of building and maintaining that common sense? And who has the potential to challenge it?

Gramsci’s answer involves a distinction between two types of intellectuals: traditional and organic.

What is an intellectual?

Gramsci’s definition is much broader than the usual image of a professor or writer. For Gramsci, all people are intellectuals in the sense that everyone thinks, reflects, and makes sense of the world. But not everyone functions as an intellectual in society.

To function as an intellectual means to play a social role: organising ideas, managing consent, giving a class or institution its self-understanding and direction. Teachers, journalists, priests, managers, lawyers, political advisers, artists, and NGO workers all function as intellectuals in this sense. They don’t just do a job — they reproduce a way of seeing the world.

Traditional intellectuals

Traditional intellectuals are those who appear to float above class society — academics, clergy, certain professionals — presenting themselves as neutral, objective, or universal. They claim to speak for everyone, or for civilisation itself.

Gramsci was suspicious of this claimed neutrality. Traditional intellectuals are almost always tied to existing power, even when they don’t know it. Their detachment is an ideology in itself: it naturalises the existing order by making it look like the only rational or reasonable one.

In Aotearoa, think of the Reserve Bank economist explaining why wages must be suppressed to fight inflation. Or the academic who insists that Treaty claims need to go through the correct legal process. Or the media commentator who says class politics is outdated and divisive. These are traditional intellectuals: their authority depends on appearing to stand above politics while actually defending a particular set of arrangements.

Organic intellectuals

Organic intellectuals, by contrast, grow directly out of a social class and give it self-awareness, coherence, and direction. They don’t pretend to be neutral. They are openly of and for a particular class.

The ruling class produces organic intellectuals constantly: managers, economists, think-tank analysts, PR professionals, political strategists. Their job is to organise capitalist society, rationalise its priorities, and make its interests appear universal.

But the working class also produces organic intellectuals — or has the potential to. Union organisers who can articulate why the pay system is rigged. Community workers who can connect individual hardship to structural causes. Teachers who help students read against the grain of their textbooks. Writers who make the experience of working-class life visible and legible to those living it.

The problem Gramsci identified is that working-class organic intellectuals are constantly under pressure to be absorbed into the ruling class’s institutions and rewarded for making themselves useful to power. The organic intellectual who becomes a manager. The union leader who becomes a Labour Party adviser. The community activist who lands a government contract. This is not necessarily individual corruption — it is a structural pressure that Gramsci called transformism: the systematic absorption of potential opposition into the status quo.

Organic intellectuals in Aotearoa

New Zealand has a specific version of this problem. The welfare state, Te Tiriti settlement processes, and co-governance frameworks have created pathways for Maori leaders, union officials, and community advocates to enter state institutions. This is not nothing — real gains have been made. But it also means that many of the most capable organic intellectuals from working-class and Maori communities are employed by the very institutions that manage inequality rather than challenge it.

This doesn’t mean those individuals are sellouts. It means the terrain is structured so that the most talented people from subordinate classes are systematically redirected toward managing the system rather than transforming it.

What this means for socialist organising

Gramsci argued that the working class needs to develop its own organic intellectuals — people rooted in working-class experience who can think strategically, communicate clearly, and build institutions. This is not about producing an elite vanguard. It is about a class developing its own capacity to understand and act on its situation.

Study circles, union education, independent media, kaupapa Maori education, community arts — these are all spaces where organic intellectuals can develop. This course is one small version of that project.

Questions for you

Who are the organic intellectuals you have encountered in your own life — people who gave your class or community a language for its experience?

Can you think of someone who started as an organic intellectual of the working class or Maori community and was absorbed into the institutions they once challenged? What happened?

Reply to this email or leave a comment. Your answers are part of the course.

Next up: Lesson 4 – Civil society, the state, and who controls the institutions.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

Last lesson we asked why capitalism holds together even when it clearly fails people. We introduced Gramsci’s basic problem: power doesn’t just rest on force. It also rests on consent.

This lesson we dig into the word Gramsci used for that process: hegemony.

What is hegemony?

The word comes from the Greek for leadership or dominance. Gramsci gave it a specific meaning: hegemony is the way a ruling class maintains its power not just through force, but through winning the active consent of those it rules over.

It is not brainwashing. People are not simply tricked. Instead, the ruling class offers a version of the world that feels like common sense — a story about how society works, what is fair, what is possible, and what is off the table entirely.

That story gets taught in schools, repeated in newsrooms, reinforced in workplaces, blessed by churches, decorated by culture, and recycled in everyday conversation until it feels less like an argument and more like reality itself.

Hegemony in Aotearoa

Here are some examples of hegemonic common sense in New Zealand:

“Hard work is rewarded.” This frames poverty as personal failure, not structural inevitability. It makes inequality feel like a sorting mechanism rather than a design feature of the economy.

“We’re all in this together.” Used repeatedly during austerity and COVID, this phrase papers over class divisions by appealing to national unity. It asks workers to sacrifice while capital is protected.

“The Treaty process is working.” This positions the current pace of treaty settlement as reasonable and fair, delegitimising tino rangatiratanga as impatient or extreme.

“There’s no money for that.” Applied selectively to housing, health, and education but never to tax cuts, stadiums, or military spending. It naturalises fiscal choices as if they were laws of physics.

None of these are simply lies. They carry enough partial truth to stick. That is what makes hegemony durable: it incorporates real experiences and real grievances while steering them away from structural conclusions.

Hegemony is never total

This is a crucial point that gets missed in simpler readings: hegemony is always contested, incomplete, and requires constant maintenance.

The dominant class does not simply install its worldview and walk away. It has to keep working at it — updating the story, absorbing challenges, co-opting critics, rebranding old hierarchies in new language.

Think about how “wellbeing” language was absorbed into Treasury frameworks in Aotearoa. Or how sustainability rhetoric is used by mining and agribusiness. These are hegemonic manoeuvres: taking the language of challenge and putting it to work for the status quo.

Counter-hegemony: building a rival common sense

If hegemony is how ruling ideas become ordinary life, then counter-hegemony is the project of making alternative ideas feel equally ordinary, equally real, equally like common sense.

This is not just about making arguments. It is about building institutions, relationships, and cultures that carry a different story about the world.

Unions that educate members about class power, not just negotiate wages. Marae that organise around economic sovereignty, not just cultural preservation. Publications like this one that name things plainly without dressing inequality up as complexity. Study circles where workers read and argue together. These are all counter-hegemonic projects, small or large.

The goal is not to win one argument. It is to shift the terrain on which arguments are made.

Questions for you

Before the next lesson, sit with these:

Which phrases or ideas in New Zealand public life feel like “just common sense” to most people, but strike you as political choices in disguise?

Can you think of a moment when dominant common sense shifted — when something that used to feel inevitable suddenly felt like a choice? What caused that shift?

Reply to this email or drop a comment below. These questions are not rhetorical — we genuinely want to hear what you are thinking.

Next up: Lesson 3 – Organic intellectuals: who speaks for the working class, and how?

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist, journalist, and organiser who spent much of his life studying a stubborn problem: if capitalism is so unstable and brutal, why doesn’t it simply collapse under its own contradictions?

Why do so many people adapt to it, defend it, or treat it as the only realistic option?

Gramsci looked at moments when the ruling class was clearly failing, yet the old order held on. He wanted to know how power manages to feel normal even when it is obviously harmful.

Beyond force: power that gets inside everyday life

The usual story about power is simple: states use violence, bosses use discipline, police and prisons do the rest.

Gramsci didn’t deny that. But he argued that force alone can’t explain stable domination.

Ruling classes also govern through leadership, culture, habits, and belief. Power gets inside daily life. It shapes what counts as respectable, sensible, or “just the way things are”.

People accept arrangements that hurt them because those arrangements are backed by a whole web of ideas, institutions, and routines that make them feel inevitable.

Why this matters in Aotearoa

In New Zealand, we’re soaked in the language of moderation and realism.

• Inequality is “regrettable but necessary”.

• Landlords are “providing a service”.

• Private schools are “just another choice”.

• Austerity is “fiscal responsibility”.

• Māori demands are “special treatment” if they go beyond symbolic recognition.

Behind that soft language sits colonial land theft, wage labour, landlord power, class hierarchy, and a social order that sorts people by postcode, school, accent, and family wealth.

Gramsci is useful here because he teaches us to look at how this order becomes common sense, not just how it is enforced.

Institutions that teach us what’s “normal”

Gramsci’s big move is to treat schools, media, churches, NGOs, universities, and culture as part of the political battlefield.

They don’t just sit outside politics describing the world. They help produce the world as it is — by repeating, decorating, and normalising particular ways of thinking.

From a New Zealand socialist perspective, that means asking questions like:

• How do schools teach us to see success and failure?

• How do news outlets frame strikes, welfare, and housing?

• How do arts institutions rely on corporate or philanthropic money that shapes what is “acceptable”?

• How do NGOs and “community leaders” soften demands to fit what funders and officials find comfortable?

Gramsci gives us language for this: hegemony — the active work of organising consent around a ruling-class project.

We’ll dig into that word properly in Lesson 2.

How we’ll use Gramsci in this course

This series is not about treating Gramsci like an academic monument.

We’ll use him as a toolkit:

• to read New Zealand institutions with sharper eyes;

• to think about education and culture as terrain of struggle, not neutral service delivery;

• to ask what it would mean to build counter-hegemonic institutions of our own: unions, media, schools, arts spaces, marae-based education, and study circles that don’t simply reproduce the ruling story.

Throughout, the question is practical: what can socialist organisers, teachers, workers, students, and artists actually do with this?

Questions for you

Take a minute before you close this tab:

• Where in your own life do you most often get told to “be realistic” about inequality, housing, pay, or climate?

• Which institutions (school, workplace, media, arts, church, NGO, whānau) did the most work to teach you what a “normal life” should look like?

If you want to, reply to this email or drop a comment with a short answer. Part of this course is collecting those experiences, not just sending you theory.

Kia ora,

The Kiwi Dialect now has a Courses section: a study stream for free, email-based socialist courses built from Aotearoa outwards.

We’re starting with Gramsci for Aotearoa — a short, grounded course on ideology, “common sense”, education, culture, and class power in New Zealand. You subscribe once, and each lesson arrives in your inbox like a letter from a comrade, not a platform.

What this course covers

Over six lessons we’ll look at:

• Who Gramsci was, and why his questions still hit home now.

• Hegemony: how ruling ideas become ordinary life.

• Schools, media, NGOs, and arts as machinery of consent.

• “Traditional” vs “organic” intellectuals in Aotearoa.

• War of position: building counter-power from below.

Each lesson is short enough to read on the bus or in a stolen half-hour between shifts, but pointed enough to argue with.

How it works

• It’s free. You just need to be subscribed to The Kiwi Dialect.

• You’re in already if you’re reading this via email in the Courses section.

• New readers can sign up via the button below and will start receiving lessons as they’re published.

• Lessons will run twice a week for three weeks.

If you ever feel overwhelmed, you can turn off course emails in your Substack settings without unsubscribing from everything else.

Why Gramsci, why here?

New Zealand political life is saturated with the language of moderation, “what works”, and “just being realistic”. Behind that sits colonial land theft, landlord power, managerialism, and a whole apparatus that makes inequality feel normal.

Gramsci gives us a way to study that apparatus — not as detached theory, but as a toolkit: for teachers, unionists, artists, public servants, students, and anyone who’s sick of being told there is no alternative.

This is not a neutral course. It’s openly socialist, working-class in tone, and suspicious of respectable bullshit.

What you can do now

• Hit subscribe (if you’re not already) so you get every lesson by email.

• Forward this post to one person — a co-worker, student, comrade, or mate who might want to read along.

• If you’re on socials, share the link with a line like:
  “Free Gramsci course from The Kiwi Dialect — sign up and get it by email.”

The next post in this series will be Lesson 1: Who was Gramsci, and why read him now?

In solidarity,
The Kiwi Dialect