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1 During my PhD research, I interviewed old men & women who had once revered Stalin & his USSR, & who lost their god after the invasion of Hungary, revelations of gulags. Today, looking the news from Venezuela, I know how they felt. It's time for a Pacific socialism. (thread) 
2 I was an enthusiast for Chavez. I wrote a long, & obviously flawed, academic essay about him. Now yet another northern hemisphere experiment in socialism has failed, is it time for NZ leftists to consider their own region, its history, its models - to follow John Harris' lead?
3 John Harris was one of a crew of privileged young Christchurchians, Christ's College graduates, who sailed a ketch called the Waterlily out of Lyttleton in the '30s, on their way to the tropical Pacific. Harris didn't expect to discover socialism on the atolls of the north.
4 The crew of the Waterlily broke up in Tuvalu; their boat broke up soon afterwards. But John Harris spent long enough in the archipelago to be inspired by the egalitarianism of its people. He watched as catches of fish were shared equally; he marvelled at his hosts' happiness.
5 Harris returned to NZ a communist. He looked not to Stalin but to the egalitarianism of Tuvalu as his model. & he was not alone: during the '30s & '40s a series of NZ radicals, from RAK Mason to Gordon Watson to Bert Roth, drew succour from visits to the tropical Pacific.
6 It is important not to homogenise & romanticise Pacific societies. Some, like Tonga, are unequal, unjust. But others, especially on Polynesian atolls & on the islands of Melanesia, have deep & durable structures by which wealth is shared, tyranny avoided, colonialism resisted.
7 In the '70s, in the midst of their struggle for liberation from British & French rule, Walter Lini & other ni-Vanuatu activists put forward the concept of 'Melanesian socialism'. They proposed, like Harris, to pursue development through non-capitalist traditional institutions.
8 The concept of Melanesian socialism was developed further, in the '80s, by independent Vanuatu & by the FLNKS in New Caledonia, which liberated parts of its territory from France. Today NC's Labour Party & FLNKS & Vanuatu's Land & Freedom Party continue the tradition.
9 After winning a place in govt, Land & Justice Party leader Ralph Regenvanu set up a series of fascinating institutions, designed to foster development without surrendering to foreign investment & property developers. Regenvanu talks about his work here: academia.edu/2538494/Re-ima…
10 I'm not suggesting that the Pacific offers some sort of readymade model for very different societies. But I think it is interesting that Bolivia, whose experiment has been far more successful than that of Venezuela, has drawn heavily on indigenous ideas, social structures.
11 Pacific socialism is valuable not because it is a model Western nations like NZ can straightforwardly follow, but because it is a living tradition, the fruit of thousands of years of history. It was not dreamed up by a European intellectual, nor imposed by a populist leader.
