Shades of Red: Maoism and Radical Politics in 1970s Salient

Words by Max Nichol (he/him)

A spectre is haunting Wellington. The spectre of communism. 

It’s the 1970s, and on the campus of Victoria University of Wellington, competing communist factions vie for the levers of student political power. 

The battlefield: the pages of Salient.

The battlelines: inscrutable and esoteric.

The stakes: extremely low. 

The communist faction power struggle was a regular fixture of Salient’s content in the 1970s, an extension of the wave of student political activism of the period. In the early 1980s, those involved moved on from student politics and the groups they represented faded from view. But for a few years, it was a defining feature of the culture and discourse which surrounded Salient.

In the red corner, we have the Maoists of Salient. Many, though not all, of the editors of Salient and a number of regular contributors in the 1970s were ardent Maoists. They were associated with a semi-secret group called the Wellington Marxist-Leninist Organisation, later the Workers’ Communist League. These individuals, as well as a handful of VUWSA executive members, were part of a global wave of young communists who drew inspiration from the disruptive teachings of Mao, rejecting the staid bureaucracy of the USSR. During this period, a number of VUWSA members and Salient editors were part of state-sponsored visits to China, organised as part of China’s international diplomacy. 

In the other red corner, we have the Trotskyist Young Socialists. They were the youth wing of the Socialist Action League, a Trotskyist political party founded at Vic in 1969. They rejected both the conventional Communist Party of New Zealand as unimaginative and conservative and thought other emerging communist groups such as the Salient Maoists were brash and disorganised. 

It was along these lines, informed largely by international communist theorists and the distinctions between them, that much of the disagreement between these groups proceeded.

The Maoists had a significant degree of control over Salient, where editors and contributors were aided by allies on the VUWSA executive. As a result, Salient essentially blocked the Young Socialists from accessing the paper. 1975 editor Bruce Robinson wrote that nothing his Trotskyist opponents submitted was worth publishing: “They treat their readers and supporters as having the level of intelligence of children.” 

But editors did frequently publish their opponents’ letters of protest. Much of the drama unfolded in the Salient letters page. Young Socialist Tony Lane wrote to Salient in 1975, accusing Robinson of the “narrow-mindedness peculiar to followers of Mao in refusing to print articles that presented the views of your political opponents on the left.” Robinson responded with a snarky and dismissive editor’s note. It was this basic pattern of accusation and dismissal that characterised much of the discourse between the Maoists and the Trotskyists in the pages Salient. 

In 1977, fed up with not getting a fair share in Salient, the Young Socialists started an opposing newspaper, titled Censored Salient. Here they let their antagonists at Salient know what they thought of them, to balance the record for Salient’s readers: “Students who have been reading Salient this year will have noticed the hostile attitude of the editors towards the Young Socialists group on campus … Salient has become the factional rag of [1977 editor] David Murray and his buddies.”

At least some of the animosity came across as polemical posturing, more tongue-in-cheek than hammer and tongs. The tone of the rivalry was captured in a single image: an ice-pick hanging in the public window of the Salient office in 1973. The Salient editors hung it there as a niche but deliberate provocation—Leon Trotsky’s killers allegedly used an ice-pick to assassinate the communist theorist at his home in Mexico City in 1940. 

Photo: “JGH” (probably John Henderson, a Salient regular in the mid-1970s) and “BR” (1975 editor Bruce Robinson) having a high-minded and meaningless conversation about communist theory in Issue 22 Salient 1975.

In amongst this in-fighting, plenty of principled and meaningful political action took place. Many of those contributing to Salient during the 1970s were dedicated activists to causes such as opposition to the Vietnam War, anti-Apartheid, women’s rights, and anti-nuclear action. During this period, editor Roger Steele also inaugurated the first two editions of Te Ao Mārama, which focused on Māori issues. These issues, now guest-edited by Ngāi Tauira, have become an annual staple of Salient. 

Likewise, the Young Socialists were involved in activism and protest in Wellington across many of the same issues. Both groups were closely attuned to politics overseas, seeking to contextualise these currents for a student audience in New Zealand. 

Salient and the Young Socialists also had close links into trade unionism in Wellington.

Throughout the 1970s, articles about trade unionism and class politics were practical expressions of Salient contributors’ communist ideology.

Its contributors were staunch advocates for the rights of working people, encouraging solidarity between students and workers. 

Not everyone involved in Salient fell along these factional lines. Some were friends with one or another faction, but drew their political views from other experiences. Others explicitly rejected the dogmatism their peers engaged in. The 1976 Salient editor John Ryall made it clear that he would not indulge in mud-slinging. He wrote that in previous years, “Salient’s role has been to keep pushing the ‘correct line’ until those who dare to rebel are so tired of fighting that they submit … You either accept the analysis and become a radical, or reject it and become a reactionary.” An active trade unionist, Ryall carried this view forward in Salient, which stayed largely independent of factional tussling. 

For many students, the disagreements between campus communists were unintelligible and alienating. Some students resented that their compulsory student union membership fees were being used to represent a political view they didn’t agree with.

Whether they were conservative, or simply not as radical as those writing for Salient, not all students were interested in buying what Salient was selling, nor in their beef with other campus communists.

One student in 1978 instructed Salient editor Simon Wilson to resign immediately, “or your office will be terminated by the glorious revolution, a group of people who believe truth and honesty not the leftist bullshit dribble that you shit out of your screwed up mind.”

Andrew Beach also eschewed factional divisions during his editorship in 1979. He helped form the Progressive Student Alliance, a group intended to bring all leftists on campus under one banner. This new group felt that divisions between leftist groups had caused progressives on campus to become “more self-centred rather than trying to enlist mass support … The resulting split, while important, was along fairly intricate lines.”

Despite the efforts of the PSA, a strong rejection of Salient’s politics came in 1982. A loose coalition of student politicians who ran as “the Moderates” swept to power in the 1982 VUWSA elections. Their platform was simple. They felt it was an open secret that VUWSA and Salient were stacked with radicals associated with the Workers’ Communist League. It was time for an executive which would focus on issues more relevant to students. Clearly their message found a willing audience amongst the student body, or at least those who bothered to vote. 

By the time the Moderates took power, the influence of communist factions of all colours was already declining at Vic. Those involved had graduated and moved on. Salient maintained a broadly progressive, left-wing stance throughout the 1980s, but it was no longer so influenced by communism or trade unionism.

In the 1980s, with the threat of user-pays education becoming more pressing, VUWSA was reformed to focus more on lobbying for student interests in education policy. The new constitution curbed its ability to take strong political positions across a spectrum of issues. This is, by and large, the state of affairs VUWSA still abides by. 

For most of the 1970s, the mode of political analysis in Salient centred around consistent support for trade unionism and class politics. While the Maoists of Salient never had total control over the publication, much of this analysis stemmed from the efforts of Maoist editors and writers who used Salient as a platform for their ideas. Though often high-handed and arguably detrimental to the cause, their stoush with their Trotskyist rivals reflected a sincere belief that the issues at play were existential to the future of communism in New Zealand. The ideological tension which littered the pages of Salient, and the principled political action both sides engaged in, stands as testament to a fascinating and important moment in the history of communism and organised labour in this country.