PhD candidate
Thesis topic: Class Struggle in 21st-Century Aotearoa New Zealand
Supervisors: Associate Professor Brian Roper and Dr David Jenkins
Email barnaby.watts@postgrad.otago.ac.nz
Topic description: After an unprecedented upsurge in working-class struggle and interrelated protest movements in the 1970s, the last two decades of the 20th century in Aotearoa New Zealand saw a sweeping capitalist-class offensive. At the dawn of the new millennium, Aotearoa New Zealand was a country with greatly increased inequality, low rates of union membership, and a political economic system geared towards the enrichment of a select few at the expense of the majority. Using a Marxist framework, this thesis aims to examine the ways in which workers and the oppressed have sought to turn the tide back in their favour in the last 25 years, through strikes, protests, land occupations, hīkoi, and much more.