Women from a woman's view

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Socialist League for submission to the pre-conference discussion of the USFI Xith World Congress - exposing the political bankruptcy and opportunism of both of the previous main factions within the WSL 1977 Summer School, this the USFI. Pointing out that the common article attempts to examine in more factor of each of the self-styled 'Fourth Internationals' is their departure from detail the departure from the Marxist method carried out by. Michel Pablo the method and principles on which the. and the majority of the International Fl was founded, this article calls for Secretariat of the Fl in the period serious steps towards the reconstruction following the Yugoslavian 'break' with Stalin in 1948. The article shows the Published in Trotskyism Today No 3, methodological connection between the July 1978: Price 60p plus 15p p&p. positions which led to the 1953 split in the International, and those which opened the door for the opportunist mouth Park Hill, London NW5 1HR pleasant, not only for. the Workers League, but for every organisation in the US which is opposed to capitalism.

"Therefore, we call upon every Trotskyist organisation, the labour movement in general, and concerned workers and students to participate in the investigation.

•The detailed descriptions of the gunmen which the Workers League has already furnished the 90th Precinct in Brooklyn need to be printed in their party organ, the Bulletin.

"There are several important questions that need to be answered in this investigation.

"In the first place, was the murder a political attack against Tom Henehan and the Workers WSL 'reunification' of 1963.

'Girlfriends' has been compared in the Tory press to the Woody Allen film 'Annie Hall'.

But this is a completely false characterisation.

Unlike 'Annie Hall' there is no real attempt at humour.

There are only a couple of jokes in the whole filmeach based not on wit but on the situation.

Photographer Susan Weinblatt and her friend Aspects of the History of the FI:

Based on a lecture by John Lister to Published in Trotskyism Today No march 1978. Price 50p plus 15p p&p.

reviews CI Anne share a flat and develop a real friendship. Then Anne moves out and marries a well-to-do man, has a baby and struggles to write poetry at home.

But neither Susan, who continues photographing Jewish barmitzvahs and fights to get her personal photographs accepted by magazines, nor Anne are happy.

Both however try to deny how much their friendship means-saying The Poisoned Well: of the International.

again and again how happy they are on their own. The film exposes the hollowness of this pretence. 'Annie Hall' ', directed by Woody Allen, was a film about a beautiful woman, a sparkling personality, seen from a man's viewpoint.

But Claudia Weill, director of Girlfriends' has examined each of the relationships from the woman's standpoint, portraying them with real sensitivity.

The document drafted by the Workers ioth available from the WSL, 'Thus the married man with whom Susan falls in love but who pulls back from a relationship because of his wife, is only an incidental character, whose feelings are not examined. The focus is on Susan and her response to the situation.

Gradually through its careful portrayal of personal relationships the film shows that the most important relationship is that between Anne and Susan.

In doing so it highlights how few films seriously portray women as anything other than • incidental characters, or as ornaments in a man's world, seen from a man's view.

The weakness however, is that as nearly always in such films, the characters are drawn exclusively from the privileged petty bourgeoisie.

Their feelings, emotions and relationships take place completely cut off from the real world, its struggles and its material problems.

Indeed in real life not even every petty bourgeois wants to become a photographer or a poet.

Some key sections, affected by the class struggle, come to recognise that human relationships can only flourish freely and sexual oppression be brought to an end, in the struggle for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. the killing by the US Socialist Workers Party-sympathising section of the "United" Secretariat of the Fourth International.

During the last year these self-styled "Trotskyists" have not found so much as a column-inch in their mammoth 36-page weekly paper The Militant, much of which is filled with civil rights issues and liberal protests.

Publicised

Yet the SWP itself has suffered bomb attacks and attempted assassinations of leading members-including election candidate Catarino Garza, which have all been correctly and heavily publicised in The Militant.

The murder of Tom Honehan fits into a pattern of growing violence by right wing and state forces against the US labour movement.

The SWP silence under these conditions is a scandal.

The campaign to expose the case to the labour movement and to draw out the lessons from the brazen police connivance at the murder of a leading Trotskyist could be substantially advanced by the convening of a labour movement inquiry, along the lines suggested by the SL (DC).

Our political. differences with the Workers League and the Healyite International Committee are well known and deepgoing.

But were the Workers League to take the initiative in such an inquiry they would certainly advance the fight for political clarity in the US class And any political grouping that refused to support such a move would stand exposed as tacitly accepting political murder of the leaders of oppos ing tendencies.

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