>>Well that's an interesting story, isn't it? Why, in more-or-less
>>democracies without death squads has there been so little resistance
>>to neoliberalism? How'd the ANC get away with it? There's a
>>tremendous intellectual and rhetorical vacuum on our side. Jesson was
>>onto something, and not just about NZ.
A capsule-sized version of Jesson's argument is in New Left Review 192 (March-April 1992), by the way. If anyone wants a pdf I can send it off list.
Jesson was a bit of a hero for me as an NZ student in the late 90s. Not only was he on to it theoretically, but was a good publicist and politician. He got elected to the Auckland Regional Council, openly as a Marxist. The party he was associated with, the Alliance, got 18% of the national vote in the 1993 elections, but first-past-the-post turned that into two seats. This was one of the factors behind the move to a proportional system, and they polled well into the 20s for a while. That was the peak: in 1996 they got 10% (partly because of the rise of the right-populist New Zealand First), and the following year the Green Party split from the Aliiance, though they remained friendly and the split increased their combined vote to 13% in 1999.
Tragically the 'war on terror' pulled the Alliance apart in 2002, with much of the Parliamentary party backing war in Afghanistan while the base opposed. Leader Jim Anderton formed a new party which has basically been subsumed back into Labour, and the Alliance proper lost all its seats with a vote of about 1%.
Cheers, Mike