Kropotkin & Mutual Aid: Free email course from The Kiwi Dialect
Six lessons on cooperation, solidarity, and the power of people helping each other — rooted in Aotearoa, relevant everywhere.
Kia ora,
Our first course on Gramsci explored how power operates through culture, institutions, and manufactured common sense. This course picks up a related thread, but from a different tradition.
Pyotr Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist, scientist, and geographer who argued that cooperation — not competition — is the driving force of human survival and progress. His 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution remains one of the most important and underread texts in the socialist tradition.
This course is for anyone who has ever:
Organised a neighbourhood food bank. Covered a sick workmate’s shift. Shown up to a picket line for a union you didn’t belong to. Helped a whānau member who couldn’t make rent. Joined a community garden, a housing cooperative, or a tenants union. Felt in your bones that the world doesn’t have to run on competition and individual self-interest.
Kropotkin gives a name and a theory to what you already know.
What this course covers
Over six lessons we will cover:
Lesson 1: Who was Kropotkin? Anarchism, science, and the idea of mutual aid.
Lesson 2: Mutual aid vs Social Darwinism — why “survival of the fittest” is a ruling-class myth.
Lesson 3: Mutual aid in working-class history — strikes, friendly societies, and solidarity networks.
Lesson 4: Mutual aid in Aotearoa — hapu, whanau, working-class communities, and cooperative economies.
Lesson 5: The state vs mutual aid — when welfare replaced self-organised solidarity, and what we lost.
Lesson 6: Mutual aid now — from disaster relief to food banks to climate response, and how we build further.
How this course works
It is free. It is delivered by email. You just need to be subscribed to The Kiwi Dialect’s Courses section — which you already are if you’re reading this.
Lessons will be published twice a week. Each one is short enough to read in fifteen minutes and pointed enough to argue with. There are discussion questions at the end of every lesson — reply by email or comment below. Your experience is part of the course.
This course is rooted in Aotearoa but draws on examples from across the world: from the commons of medieval Europe to the mutual aid networks of the COVID pandemic, from Maori tikanga to the cooperative movements of the global south. Kropotkin’s insight was universal even if our application of it is local.
Share this
If you know someone who would benefit from this course — a workmate, a student, a community organiser, a person who is quietly building something cooperative and wants a theoretical language for it — send them this link and ask them to subscribe.
You can also share on socials with something like: “Free Kropotkin course from The Kiwi Dialect — six lessons on mutual aid, cooperation, and working-class solidarity. Arrives by email. Sign up here: [your substack link]”
The first lesson arrives shortly.
In solidarity,
The Kiwi Dialect