A waterfall does not ask permission.

The water was held. It held because the shape of the land demanded it. Then the land changed, or the water found a crack, or the pressure of what was dammed up finally exceeded what the dam could hold — and it fell. Not as a protest. Not as a strategy. As the only honest response to accumulated pressure.

Tangi o te Tāheke. The cry of the waterfall. The sound of things falling that were held too long.

This is how we are running Course 6 of the AI Warrior thinkers series — the course that closes everything. Not because Bakunin has the final word (he doesn't; no one does), but because he is the one who refuses to let the other five thinkers settle into safe conclusions.

Gramsci says: build counter-hegemonic institutions from within.

Bakunin says: the institutions will eat you.

Kropotkin says: mutual aid is the deep logic of evolution.

Bakunin says: at what scale does it federate, and who controls the structure that federates it?

Graeber says: debt is the original political relation.

Bakunin says: and the state is what issues the debt and calls in the enforcers.

Freire says: dialogue and critical consciousness will liberate the oppressed.

Bakunin says: and when you have your consciousness, what then?

Deleuze says: draw the rhizome of control and find the exits.

Bakunin says: walk it. Now.

We are here because the waterfall is overdue.

Who was Bakunin?

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was born 30 May 1814 on his family's estate in Tver province, Russia, into minor nobility, and died 1 July 1876 in Berne, Switzerland, broke and exhausted and still arguing (Wikipedia: Mikhail Bakunin).

In between: Berlin Hegelian circles, the Dresden barricades (alongside Richard Wagner, before Wagner became respectable), six years in tsarist cells with scurvy eating his teeth, exile in Siberia from which he escaped the long way — Japan, San Francisco, the United States, London. He was expelled from the First International by Marx in 1872, and Marx spent the following year writing private margin-notes answering Bakunin's arguments he could not answer in public. He is the person the left has spent 150 years alternately dismissing and returning to.

The mature theoretical statement is Statism and Anarchy (1873), his last completed major work. The most-read work in English is God and the State (1882, posthumous) — the argument that God and the State are structurally identical, both demanding submission, both sustained by institutions that legitimate inequality.

anarchist-collectivism. Not bomb-throwing, not chaos, not the nihilism the word "anarchism" has been deliberately confused with. Here is what it actually means:

The means of production held collectively by the workers who use them.

Local communes federate voluntarily into regional bodies — always from below, never by delegation of authority downwards from above.

The state is not reformed. It is dissolved.

In his own words:

"I mean that liberty of each which is not limited or restrained or curtailed by the liberty of another, but is strengthened and enlarged through it: the unlimited liberty of each through the liberty of all, liberty through solidarity, liberty in equality." (Marxists.org)

"Freedom can be created only by freedom — that is, by a universal revolt of the people and free organisation of the toiling masses from the bottom up." — Statism and Anarchy, 1873 (Anarchist Library)

why this course, why now

We are in Aotearoa in 2026. The Crown is in active retreat from Te Tiriti obligations. The AI Strategy is titled Investing with Confidence — confidence for investors, not for the communities whose data is being extracted. Social media platforms hold our organising histories, our community relationships, our political communications, on terms set by corporations answerable to no one we elected. The state mediates all of this and calls it normal.

Bakunin's question is: why do we keep accepting these terms? Not as a psychological question — as a structural one. What is the form of organisation that reproduces our submission, and what would we have to build to get free of it?

The algorithmic platform is the new state-form Bakunin was diagnosing before it existed. It claims authority from above. It manages populations from the centre. It is not accountable to those it manages. It extracts value from workers' social lives and calls it a service. Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019), calls this "a new form of power... that has migrated outside of democratic reach." Bakunin would recognise it immediately. He would not be surprised.

This course does not offer a neat Aotearoa application. Bakunin does not translate cleanly. What it offers is harder: the practice of holding his question — where does power actually live, and what do we have to refuse to keep it living there? — against the specific conditions of this place, this time, these relationships.

On resonances and limits: a note before we begin

This course draws resonances between Bakunin's federalist, anti-authoritarian socialism and Māori political philosophy as expressed in He Whakaputanga, Te Tiriti, and the ongoing struggle for tino rangatiratanga. These are resonances, not equivalences.

Bakunin's federalism is a European revolutionary socialist theory, universal in its ambitions and rooted in the Enlightenment. Māori rangatiratanga is rooted in whakapapa, tikanga, and specific historical relationships between peoples and land. When Moana Jackson (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Porou) writes about the myth of sovereignty — arguing that the Western concept of absolute authority held and transferred is itself incoherent, and that Māori political ontology is built on something different — he is not making Bakunin's argument. He is making a deeper one, from a different foundation.

Margaret Mutu (Ngāti Kahu, Professor of Māori Studies) is clear that tino rangatiratanga is not a variant of socialist theory — it is a specific, legally and historically grounded claim that Māori authority was not surrendered under Te Tiriti, and that the Crown has systematically misrepresented what was signed.

We will read Jackson and Mutu directly. We will not paraphrase them as support for Bakunin. We will sit with both traditions and notice where they think in parallel, and where they do not — and treat the differences as important rather than inconvenient.

This is not a Pākehā socialist project that invites Māori to participate on its terms. The pātaka must be built in partnership.

The tāheke motif

The waterfall tāheke is the course's central image. Use it as a Pākehā writer's metaphor — a feature of Aotearoa landscape that makes Bakunin's European-abstract concept of creative destruction visible and local.

Water held is energy waiting. The dam does not destroy the water; it arrests it, extracts from it, makes it serve a purpose not its own. When the dam breaks or the water finds the crack, it falls — and what was held becomes movement. The awa (river) below is fed. The sound of the waterfall is both lament and announcement. It is the cry of something becoming.

Bakunin's famous sentence, from "The Reaction in Germany" (1842, published under the pseudonym Jules Elysard):

"Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!" (Marxists.org)

This is not nihilism. It is a Hegelian-inflected argument that what must be overcome contains within it the seed of what supersedes it. The destruction he calls for is the destruction of institutions — the state, the church, inherited property — not of people. What the waterfall tears down, it feeds.

The six lessons

Lesson 1 — Ko wai a Bakunin? The man Marx feared. We read the life: the estate, the barricades, the tsarist cells, the Siberian exile, the oceans, the First International, the Hague expulsion, the Conspectus Marx wrote in private. We introduce the central tension: state power as a transitional instrument, or the state as the thing that must be dissolved? The disagreement is alive today. Bring it to your own organising.

Lesson 2 — Mana motuhake: federation from below. Bakunin's federalist principle — authority originates in the commune, is delegated upward conditionally, never downward — held alongside He Whakaputanga 1835 and Te Tiriti 1840. We read Moana Jackson on the myth of sovereignty and Margaret Mutu on tino rangatiratanga directly. We mark the resonances between federated self-governance as a political principle and tino rangatiratanga as a specific historical and legal claim. We do not collapse them.

Lesson 3 — Te Tāheke: the passion for destruction is a creative passion. The 1842 essay, the full sentence in its context, the distinction between Bakunin and the nihilism he is usually confused with. What does "destruction" mean in an organising context in 2026 Aotearoa — not violence but unmaking? What are the institutions that need to be unmade before something better can be built? We write 200 words on this in the chat thread, and we read them together.

Lesson 4 — Caracoles in the kāinga: a Zapatista reading. On 1 January 1994, the day NAFTA came into force, the EZLN declared: Ya Basta! — Enough. The Zapatista autonomous governance structure — the caracoles, the Juntas de Buen Gobierno, the principle of mandar obedeciendo (to govern by obeying) — is the most sustained working example of Bakunin's federation-from-below in the modern world. We read the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (2005) and the 2023 reorganisation communiqués. We ask what these structures look like alongside the marae, the papakāinga, the rūnanga — and we are careful not to import one indigenous tradition into another.

Lesson 5 — The algorithmic Leviathan: anarchism in the age of AI. Bakunin's structural critique of the state — any institution that manages populations without being accountable to them reproduces domination — applied directly to the platform corporation. James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State (Yale UP, 1998) on legibility and the destruction of local knowledge. Zuboff's surveillance capitalism. Te Mana Raraunga's Charter and Karaitiana Taiuru's work on Māori data sovereignty as a living form of the federalist principle — data governance originating in communities, not in the Crown or the platform. The NZ AI Strategy 2025 read against all of the above.

Lesson 6 — Arm the class: closing the thinkers series. Six thinkers, one through-line: domination is reproduced, and can be undone. We synthesise: where do these six — Gramsci, Kropotkin, Graeber, Freire, Deleuze, Bakunin — contradict each other, need each other, and produce, together, a toolkit for organising in Aotearoa in 2026? The final action prompt is not theoretical: join, build, refuse, federate. Before the next Sunday.

The course context

This is the sixth and final course in the AI Warrior thinkers series. The series has covered:

Course 1 — Gramsci: hegemony and counter-hegemony

Course 2 — Kropotkin: mutual aid as evolutionary fact

Course 3 — Graeber: debt, bullshit jobs, direct democracy

Course 4 — Freire: the banking model of education, conscientização

Course 5 — Deleuze: control societies and the rhizome

Course 6 — Bakunin: federation from below, creative destruction, the refusal of the state-capital machine

Each course works as a standalone read. Each is better for having read the others.

the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, and why it matters

This course is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. That is not legal boilerplate.

The ShareAlike clause is an anti-enclosure mechanism written into copyright law. You can take this material, translate it, adapt it, run it at your union branch, your kura, your marae, your library, your kitchen table. You cannot take it private. Derivatives must stay in the commons under the same license. The knowledge stays common.

This is, in small but real form, Bakunin's principle applied to the means of teaching: "the means of production held in common by the workers who use them" — applied to the means of education. If AI Warrior trains the organiser, AI Literacy for Families trains the household — and both refuse to call the chatbot a friend.

That's the refrain. Both courses are yours. They were always yours.

Lesson 1 drops Sunday 5 July 2026, 19:00 NZST. Subscribe to The Kiwi Dialectic and claim your Pou Tohu badge in the chat thread when you complete the course. Join the thread below and bring one answer to this question: In your organising or your community life right now, is power moving from below to above, or from above to below? One paragraph. We start from there.

Sources: Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (1873); Mikhail Bakunin, God and the State (1882, posthumous); Mikhail Bakunin, "The Reaction in Germany" (1842); Mikhail Bakunin, Selected Writings, Maximoff ed. (1953); EZLN, Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (2005); Moana Jackson, "The Myth of Sovereignty" (University of Auckland, 2022); Moana Jackson, "The United Nations on the Foreshore" (2006); Margaret Mutu, "Call it what you want, co-governance isn't going away" (E-Tangata); Te Mana Raraunga, Charter (2016); Karaitiana Taiuru, AI Ethics and Indigenous Data Sovereignty (ACE Aotearoa keynote, 2025); Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2019); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (Yale UP, 1998).

Welcome to the third course in The Kiwi Dialect’s free socialist education series. This course is about David Graeber — one of the most original and unsettling thinkers of the last thirty years. His work is not comfortable. It names things that most people feel but are not supposed to say. That is precisely why it matters.

Who was Graeber?

David Rolfe Graeber was born in New York in 1961, the son of a plasterer and a garment worker who had both been involved in left politics. He became an anthropologist, spending years doing fieldwork in Madagascar studying village politics and resistance to state power. He completed his PhD at the University of Chicago and taught at Yale before being denied tenure in circumstances his supporters attributed to his political activism. He moved to Goldsmiths in London and then to the London School of Economics. He died in Venice in September 2020, aged 59.

In between he wrote some of the most widely read political theory of the early 21st century, helped organise the Occupy Wall Street movement, and spent decades in anarchist politics and direct action organising.

What anthropology does

To understand why Graeber thinks the way he does, you need to understand what anthropology does — particularly the kind of anthropology Graeber practised.

Anthropologists spend time living in communities very different from their own, learning their languages and participating in their daily life. What this does, over time, is make the familiar strange. When you have seen societies organised without money, without states, without permanent hierarchies, without wage labour — you come back to your own society and you stop being able to take it for granted.

The things that are supposed to be natural and inevitable — the fact that some people own and others work for them, that debt must always be repaid, that there must be a government with a monopoly on violence, that most people spend most of their lives doing things they would not do if they had a choice — start to look like particular historical arrangements rather than facts of life.

This is Graeber’s most fundamental contribution: the application of anthropological defamiliarisation to capitalism. He kept asking: is this how it has to be? And the evidence from human history kept answering: no.

Graeber and anarchism

Like Kropotkin, Graeber was an anarchist. But his anarchism was less about programmatic demands and more about what he called the anarchist imagination: a disposition toward building non-hierarchical structures, practising direct democracy, and prefiguring the world you want to live in through the way you organise.

He was deeply suspicious of vanguard politics and the idea that a small group of enlightened people should lead the masses to liberation. He argued that the most interesting and transformative political experiments of recent decades — the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the Kurdish liberation movement in Rojava, the global justice movement, Occupy Wall Street — had all been organised around anarchist principles of horizontal decision-making and direct democracy, not Leninist ones of centralised direction.

The three big ideas

Graeber’s work circles around three related problems, each of which gets a lesson of its own:

Debt: Graeber showed that debt is not a neutral financial instrument but a historically constructed tool of domination. The moral weight we attach to debt repayment — the idea that a debt must always be repaid, that owing money is a form of moral failure — is not natural. It is an ideology that serves those who lend.

Bullshit jobs: Graeber observed that capitalism, which claims to be the most efficient system for allocating labour, has produced an economy in which a large and growing proportion of work is experienced by those who do it as pointless. This is not an accident. It serves particular interests.

Bureaucratic violence: Graeber argued that the bureaucratic structures of the modern state and corporation are not neutral administration. They are forms of violence — slow, grinding, humiliating — that fall disproportionately on the poor and marginalised.

Why Graeber matters for socialist politics in Aotearoa

New Zealand is a small, highly administered society with a large state apparatus, a significant financial sector, and an economy in which a growing proportion of jobs are in management, compliance, administration, and financial services rather than in producing things of tangible value.

Graeber’s questions cut through the ideological fog of this economy. He asks: what is actually valuable? Who actually creates it? Why are the people who create the most value — nurses, teachers, cleaners, care workers, tradespeople — paid the least, while those who create the least — financial traders, corporate consultants, compliance managers — are paid the most? And what would it mean to organise an economy around actual human need rather than around the extraction of value for those at the top?

Questions for you

Have you ever had a job that felt pointless — where you spent most of your time on tasks that seemed to have no real purpose? What did that feel like?

Can you think of a way in which your own society is organised that would look bizarre or unjust to someone from outside it? Something that only makes sense if you are already inside it?

Reply or comment. The course gets richer the more people bring their experience into it.

Next up: Lesson 2 – Debt: the first 5,000 years and why you should never feel morally obligated to a bank.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

Last lesson we met Graeber and the defamiliarising power of anthropology. This lesson we go into his most ambitious and historically sweeping argument: his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

The standard story of debt

We are told a particular story about the origins of money and debt. It goes like this: in the beginning, people bartered — they traded goods directly. But barter was inefficient, so they invented money as a medium of exchange. Credit and debt came later, as financial instruments built on top of money.

Graeber spent years in libraries and archives looking for evidence of this barter economy. He found none. Not a single anthropologist or historian has ever found a society that operated primarily through barter between strangers. The barter story is a myth — a just-so story invented by economists who needed a simple origin narrative for markets.

What actually happened

What the historical and anthropological evidence actually shows is this: debt came first. Long before coins or notes existed, communities operated through systems of mutual obligation, credit, and debt. The earliest written records we have — clay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, around 3,500 BCE — are not trade records. They are debt records: lists of who owes what to whom.

Physical money — coins — came much later, and Graeber traces its invention to a specific historical moment: the age of warrior states that needed to pay armies. Rulers minted coins, paid soldiers, and then demanded taxes back in those same coins. This forced the population to enter the money economy in order to pay their taxes. Markets, in this account, were not a natural outgrowth of human exchange. They were created by states to service military expenditure.

Debt as a moral weapon

Graeber’s most politically powerful argument is about the moral weight of debt. In English and many other languages, the word for debt is closely related to the word for guilt or sin. In German, Schuld means both debt and guilt. The idea that a debtor is morally compromised — that owing money is a form of wrongdoing that must be made right — is extremely old and extremely powerful.

Graeber asks: why? When someone lends you money, they do so because they expect a profit. The interest they charge is their compensation for the risk. If they get their money back plus interest, they have been fully compensated. There is no moral wrong. The debt relationship is a financial transaction, not a moral one.

But the moral framing is enormously useful to creditors. It means debtors feel shame rather than anger. It means the politics of debt are framed around individual responsibility — you should not have borrowed what you could not repay — rather than around the structural conditions that force people to borrow: low wages, high housing costs, inadequate welfare, predatory lending.

Debt in Aotearoa

New Zealand has some of the highest household debt levels in the world, driven overwhelmingly by housing costs. Mortgage debt is the defining financial experience of a large proportion of the working and middle class. Student loan debt has loaded a generation of graduates with obligations that shape their career and life choices for decades. Consumer debt fills the gaps left by inadequate wages and welfare.

The moral framing of debt in New Zealand public life is intense. People who cannot make mortgage payments are talked about in terms of poor choices and financial irresponsibility. Students who struggle with loan repayments are told they should have thought harder before studying. Beneficiaries who fall into debt with WINZ — through overpayments, recoverable grants, or the punitive advance payment system — are chased for repayment even when they have no income.

Graeber’s intervention is to denaturalise all of this: to show that debt is not a law of physics but a social relationship, that its moral charge is historically constructed, and that the question of who owes what to whom is always a political question, not a financial one.

Sovereign and colonial debt

Graeber also has crucial things to say about sovereign debt — the debt of nations. He traces how international debt has been used as a tool of imperial control: indebted nations are forced to implement structural adjustment programmes, privatise public assets, cut welfare, and open their economies to foreign capital in order to service debts that were often incurred under conditions of duress or corruption.

For Aotearoa, this connects to the history of colonial land purchase, where Maori were often pressured into selling land to repay debts incurred through the colonial credit system — a direct mechanism of dispossession through financial obligation.

Questions for you

Have you ever felt guilt or shame about debt? Where do you think that feeling came from? Does it feel different now that you know the moral framing of debt is historically constructed rather than natural?

Who do you think is owed a debt in Aotearoa, and who owes it? Think beyond individual financial relationships to historical and structural ones.

Reply or comment. These are not abstract questions.

Next up: Lesson 3 – Bullshit jobs: why so much work under capitalism is meaningless by design.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

Last lesson we saw how debt is not a natural law but a political and moral construction. This lesson we turn to work itself — and Graeber’s argument that under capitalism, enormous amounts of human labour are not just exploited, but completely pointless.

The book is Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), and it is one of the most widely shared and debated works of radical social criticism of the past decade.

What is a bullshit job?

Graeber’s definition is precise: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence — and yet feels obliged to pretend otherwise.

Note what this definition is not. It is not a description of bad jobs, hard jobs, or low-status jobs. Graeber is clear that many jobs that are socially essential — rubbish collectors, care workers, nurses, teachers — are underpaid and undervalued. His argument is about a different category entirely: jobs that produce nothing of social value, and whose practitioners know it.

Graeber identified several types of bullshit jobs:

Flunkies — people whose role exists to make someone else look or feel important

Goons — people employed aggressively on behalf of employers in ways that harm others (certain lobbyists, PR consultants, corporate lawyers)

Duct tapers — people whose job is to fix problems that should not exist

Box tickers — people whose role exists to allow organisations to claim they are doing something they are not really doing

Taskmasters — people whose role is to assign work to others who do not need it

Why does this happen?

This is Graeber’s most provocative claim: we tolerate and even produce bullshit jobs not because capitalism is efficient, but because capitalism requires that people work. Work has become a moral value in itself, entirely separate from whether it produces anything useful.

In this sense, Graeber turns the standard economic story on its head. Economics teaches us that markets are efficient allocators of resources. If a job exists, the logic goes, it must be producing value — otherwise why would someone pay for it?

Graeber’s answer: because powerful people benefit from others being kept busy and feeling dependent. Because full employment is politically necessary. Because we have built an entire moral framework — a theology of labour — that says idle hands are dangerous and a job, any job, is better than no job.

The spiritual damage of pointless work

Perhaps the most important part of Graeber’s argument is psychological. He collected testimonies from people in bullshit jobs and found a consistent pattern: people doing pointless work suffer. Not just boredom. Deep, corrosive misery — the particular torment of being paid to pretend that what you are doing matters when you know it does not.

Graeber calls this a form of spiritual violence. Work is one of the primary ways humans find meaning, purpose, and connection. When that work is hollow, something essential is damaged.

Meanwhile, the people whose work is genuinely meaningful — who teach children, care for the elderly, grow food, maintain infrastructure — are systematically underpaid. The less bullshit a job contains, Graeber argues, the less it tends to pay. The more bullshit, the more it pays.

Bullshit jobs in Aotearoa

New Zealand is not immune. Our public and private sectors have grown extensive layers of compliance, communications, strategy, and coordination roles — many of them recognised by the people doing them as not producing much that is real.

There is a particular irony in the expansion of managerial and administrative roles in the public sector during decades of austerity. Frontline teachers, nurses, and social workers were cut. Middle management layers grew. The people doing the actual work — teaching, healing, supporting — were stretched. The people monitoring, reporting, and administering multiplied.

This is not simply waste. Graeber argues it is structural. It reflects who has power, and who gets to define what counts as productive.

The political stakes

If Graeber is right, then the standard debate about work — how to create more jobs, how to grow the economy, how to reduce unemployment — misses the point entirely. The question should not be how to create more work. It should be: what kind of work, for what purpose, decided by whom?

This connects to movements for a Universal Basic Income, a four-day week, and for genuinely democratic workplaces. If work as such is not inherently good, then we are free to ask what would actually make lives worth living — and to organise politically to get there.

Questions for you

Honestly: have you ever done a bullshit job? What did it feel like?

Why do you think we treat employment as a moral value, even when the work produces nothing useful?

What work do you think is genuinely valuable and genuinely undervalued in Aotearoa right now?

Reply or comment. These are not abstract questions.

Next up: Lesson 4 – The Utopia of Rules: why bureaucracy didn’t end with the welfare state, and why the left needs to take it seriously.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

This lesson we come to the last and in some ways the most ambitious book Graeber wrote — The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, co-authored with archaeologist David Wengrow and published in 2021, just over a year after Graeber’s death.

It is a big book in every sense. It covers tens of thousands of years of human history. It draws on decades of new archaeological and anthropological evidence. And its argument is simple but radical: almost everything we think we know about the deep past — about where inequality came from, about whether hierarchy is natural, about the range of social arrangements humans are capable of — is wrong.

The stories we tell ourselves about the past

Graeber and Wengrow begin with a puzzle. Why do we believe that social inequality is inevitable? The most common answer, across both the political left and right, goes something like this: for most of human history, people lived in small, relatively egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Then came agriculture. Agriculture created surplus. Surplus created property. Property created hierarchy. And hierarchy — kings, classes, states, capitalism — followed naturally and inevitably.

This story appears in Rousseau. It appears in mainstream social science. It appears in popular books about human nature. It is so widely shared that it feels less like an argument than a fact.

Graeber and Wengrow argue it is a myth — and a politically dangerous one, because it makes hierarchy seem like the inevitable product of complexity, and therefore beyond challenge.

What the evidence actually shows

The archaeological evidence accumulated over the past few decades paints a completely different picture. What it shows is that early human societies were astonishingly diverse. Some were egalitarian. Some had hierarchy of a kind, but only seasonally — chiefs and ceremonies in winter, dispersed and relatively flat organisation in summer. Some built large cities with no evidence of palaces, kings, or concentrated wealth. Some had slavery. Some clearly did not.

The key point is this: early humans were not locked into a single social form determined by their technology or their mode of subsistence. They experimented. They chose. They debated. They built radically different kinds of society, sometimes across distances of a few hundred kilometres.

Graeber and Wengrow give particular attention to what they call the indigenous critique — the documented encounters between European colonists and indigenous North American thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These encounters produced serious, sustained critiques of European society by indigenous intellectuals. Figures like the Wendat leader Kandiaronk argued, with documented sophistication, that European society was characterised by a kind of poverty of freedom: people were materially dependent in ways that made them servile, unable to simply leave arrangements they found unjust.

Graeber and Wengrow argue that the European Enlightenment — including its concepts of freedom, equality, and democracy — was significantly shaped by these encounters. The ideas did not flow only westward.

The political stakes

The argument of The Dawn of Everything is not nostalgic. Graeber and Wengrow are not saying we should return to some prior state. They are saying something more important: the range of social possibilities available to humans is vastly wider than we currently imagine.

If hierarchy, states, and concentrated wealth are not inevitable consequences of agriculture and complexity, then they are choices — or rather, the results of specific historical processes that imposed them, often through violence. Which means they can be undone. Which means other arrangements are possible.

This is what the book calls the dawn of everything: not a single origin point from which all subsequent history necessarily followed, but an ongoing, unfinished human project of experimenting with how to live together.

What this means for Aotearoa

For readers in Aotearoa, this framework has particular resonance. Te ao Māori — the Māori world — contains within it a rich tradition of thinking about collective organisation, about the relationship between people and land, about the obligations that bind communities together. These are not museum pieces. They are living frameworks that have survived colonisation and are being actively renewed.

The Dawn of Everything offers an intellectual context for taking these traditions seriously not just as cultural heritage, but as genuine political knowledge. As evidence that the forms of organisation that colonialism sought to destroy were real and functional — and that their principles have not disappeared.

It also invites us to ask: what would Aotearoa look like if it drew more fully on the political wisdom of the people who have lived here longest?

Questions for you

Does it change how you think about the present if you believe that hierarchy and inequality are the results of specific historical choices rather than inevitable consequences of complexity?

What aspects of Māori political and social organisation do you think offer the most important resources for thinking about a different kind of future?

What does it mean to say that another world is possible, when you are living inside this one?

Reply or comment.

Next up: Lesson 6 – Synthesis: what Graeber’s whole body of work means for how we think and act in Aotearoa today.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

This is the final lesson of the course. We have covered five books across five weeks, moving from the nature of anthropology to debt, work, bureaucracy, and the deep past. Today I want to try to draw these threads together — and to ask what Graeber’s work, taken as a whole, means for people living and thinking in Aotearoa.

The thread that runs through everything

Graeber was not simply a critic. He was not just pointing at things that were broken. He was doing something more demanding: trying to show that the stories we tell about why things are the way they are — about human nature, about history, about what is possible — are not neutral. They are political. They serve particular interests. And they can be changed.

Each book in this course has turned over one of those stories:

Debt showed that the moral weight of financial obligation is not a natural law but a historically constructed tool that serves creditors against debtors.

Bullshit Jobs showed that the moral value we attach to work itself is not a natural law but an ideology — one that keeps people occupied, dependent, and unable to imagine alternatives.

The Utopia of Rules showed that bureaucracy is not primarily a product of the welfare state but of markets and private power — and that the left needs a different relationship with it.

The Dawn of Everything showed that human social arrangements are not determined by technology or ecology but are the results of conscious choices, experiments, and struggles — and that the range of possible arrangements is far wider than we are usually told.

Taken together, these books constitute a sustained argument for what Graeber called the radical imagination: the capacity to think seriously about social arrangements other than the ones we currently have.

Why this matters in Aotearoa

Aotearoa is a particular place, with a particular history. It is a settler-colonial society in which the foundational dispossession of Māori has never been adequately addressed. It is a society with one of the highest rates of household debt in the world. It is a society whose public services have been extensively restructured along market lines since the 1980s. It is a society with high rates of both overwork (among the privileged) and underemployment (among the precarious).

It is also a society with rich resources for imagining otherwise. The tikanga and mātauranga Māori — the values, knowledge systems, and customary practices of tangata whenua — encode ways of organising collective life that prioritise relationships, obligations, and the long term over individual accumulation and short-term profit. Tino rangatiratanga — Māori self-determination — is not just a political demand but an alternative social vision.

Graeber’s work does not speak directly to any of this. But it provides a set of intellectual tools that make it easier to take these alternatives seriously: to see them not as romantic nostalgia but as evidence of the genuine range of human social possibility.

What does it mean to act?

Graeber spent his life not just writing but doing. He was a central figure in the anti-globalisation movement, in Occupy Wall Street, and in movements for debt cancellation and worker cooperatives. For him, the point of radical thinking was always radical action.

But action does not mean everyone must be in the streets. It means something simpler: being willing to act as if another world were possible, even in the circumstances of this one. It means refusing the learned helplessness that the current order encourages. It means finding, or building, spaces where different rules apply — where care matters more than efficiency, where the long term matters more than the quarterly result, where collective wellbeing matters more than individual accumulation.

It means asking, in every situation: who does this arrangement serve? And what would it look like if it served someone else?

A final thought

Graeber died in September 2020, at the age of 59, of sudden illness in Venice. He left behind an extraordinary body of work, a generation of students and collaborators, and a set of questions that feel more urgent with each passing year.

The questions he kept asking — what are we doing, why are we doing it, who benefits, what else is possible — are not academic questions. They are the questions of anyone who has ever looked at the world and thought: this is not right, and there must be another way.

Thank you for taking this course. I hope it has been useful. I hope it has given you at least one idea that you didn’t have before, and at least one question you didn’t know you needed to ask.

Questions for you

Of the five books we covered, which spoke most directly to your own experience? Why?

What is one idea from this course that you plan to carry with you — into your work, your community, your thinking?

What would you do differently, in your own sphere of life, if you genuinely believed another world was possible?

Reply or comment. The conversation does not have to end here.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect

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.

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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