S.A.P. 20 Dr Wayne Hope

Martin Hirst, Geraldene Peters and Janet Bedggood are not the only socialists training our future journalists at the Auckland University of Technology.

My latest Socialist Academic Profile looks at Dr Wayne Hope, principal lecturer in communication studies at AUT.


In the late 80s/early '90s Dr Hope was a Political Science lecturer at Auckland university. He was also a leading member of Jim Anderton's crypto-communist New Labour Party.

After the NLP merged with the Greens and Mana Motuhake to form the Alliance Party, Dr Hope stood for Auckland City Council in the 1992 elections on the Alliance ticket.

Dr Hope's principal research interests are critical theory (a Marxist concept), political economy, and media–sport relations. He writes for leftist commentator Chris Trotter's "Political Review" and is a regular radio and television commentator on broadcasting issues.

Dr Hope is the author of the 2002 book "Selling the Market Economy: The History of the New Right and the News Media in New Zealand"

In 2006 July 2006 Dr Hope presentated a paper at the International Association for Mass Communication Research, American University in Cairo, Egypt-entitled "Global Capitalism, Temporality and Oppositional public Spheres".

In general, global interconnectedness necessarily embodies the exercise of structural power. This may take the form of exploitation, immiseration, colonization, military conquest, slavery, and related tribute systems. From these insights, capitalism can be broadly understood as a globalizing, colonizing system comprised of various class-based logics of accumulation and exploitation.

In recent years Dr Hope has been a consulting editor to the Auckland based leftist journal "Red&Green", alongside Marxists and socialists such as Jane Kelsey, Jim Flynn, Gay Simpkin, Chamsy el-Ojeili, Bill Rosenberg, Celia Briar, Mike Beggs, Bernard Gadd and Scott Hamilton.