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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol 35 no. 11. 31 May 1972

[Letter from David Los]

Sir,

I must confess to being relatively uninformed on the art of revolution so, should any of the following comments prove to be inaccurate I would welcome correction from any of our well-informed resident revolutionaries — be they of the crypto, quasi, or real variety.

One of the major dictums of revolution would appear to be "do not isolate yourself from your base" i.e. workers, proletariat, peasants. This would seemingly account for the success of Ben-Bella and the F.L.N. in Algeria, Mao in China, Castro in Cuba and so on. It would also account for the Middle East and the imminent failure of the I.R.A. in Ireland.

As a student that has to work for a living (i.e. worker) to support a family and who comes into continual contact with other members of the working public my observations compel me to conclude, using the above mentioned dictum as a criterion, that the New Zealand Revolution has failed — and miserably.

Instead of our revolutionaries (crypto, quasi and real) devoting their surplus energy to masochistic beer-hall putsches a la PBEC and as the task of dialogue with the workers is apparently too arduous may I recommend a less demanding alternative: read Kafka's letters to Max Brod. Somewhere will be found the following pearl of wisdom: "The revolution evaporates and leaves the slime of another bureaucracy".

David Los.