AI Warrior Course 6 · The closing thinker of the series · Six lessons · Sundays 19:00 NZST from 5 July 2026
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).