Health care-American

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Barbara Gordon is a successful TV producer in the USA, her work has won her a clutch of 'Emmy' awards, she is at the peak of her career, and has a wide circle of friends and a kind, intelligent lover.

Perfection? Well it would be, but for the fact that over the previous ten years Barbara has become hooked on Valium.

Her analyst lin Barbara's milieu you'd sooner run around naked than do without an anałyst) to whom she went to ease the passage through her marriage break-up, has been prescribing it for her in increasingly stronger doses.

This harrowing autobiographical story opens when Barbara has just completed a documentary film about the death from cancer of a woman of about her own age, and, shaken by the impact the woman's death has made on her, she decided single-handed to kick the Valium cold-turkey style.

She is plunged from here on into a series of nightmares. Her boyfriend' tries to pull her through the inevitable withdrawal symptoms-only to act out a macabre version of 'Gaslight' as he masks his own neuroses by persuading her that she is evil and mad, and imprisoning. her in her apartment.

From here she endures two lengthy stays in mental hospitals with an interlude out of hospital as the patient of yet more kooked-out analysts.

Anxieties Slowly and painfully, Barbara is taken back through her childhood anxieties in a high-achieving middle class Jewish family which have affected her life ever since, and we leave her trying to re-establish her career and convince prospective employers that a discharged mental patient is not a total liability as an employee.

Barbara's experiences, horri. fying as they are, are accentuated by the insights her story gives on to the American way of health.

Barbara admits that without her family's resources to pay for her treatment she would probably be dead if left to the mercy of state medical care During her first hospital stay she lèarns from a seasoned campaigner about the workings of the thirty day health insurance schemes.

Your insurance will pay for a thirty day stay in hospitalafter that either you make sure you're well enough to leave, or you go onto state care, and if it comes to that, one gets the impression, you'll probably not be seen or heard of again.

And in the midst of her voyage of self-discovery, Barbara's doctor has to . mind her that the bill is ticking up like a cab meter in a traffic jam, and could she arrange for her bill to be met if she wants to be well again?

This gruesome interdependence of health and money makes one start to sigh 'Well, it couldn't happen here-thanks to the NHS' ... but one only has to look at the increasing number of prescriptions handed out for tranquillizers by harassed doctors and contrast a state mental hospital with a private nursing home to realise that it can and does happen here.

Barbara story shows how a health system based on the ability to pay destroys not only those who can't afford the fees, but destroys equally those who can, when for a doctor to lose a patient means losing the income as well.

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•Feminist politics can become preoccupied with living a liberated life style rather than becoming a movement for the liberation of women"

Groups on the left have a responsibility to respond to the question of personal relations. "After the revolution" arguments are quite rightly seen as bankrupt by members of any oppressed group.

"We have no clear alternative of how to combine the advantages of autonomous movements with the strengths of a more general combination. But at least we must now recognise it as a problem to face. Leninism does not know' the answer. It merely asserts an ideal transcendance.

There remains then no effective guarantee within Leninism that the groups who are in a dominant position in capitalism won't bring their advantage into the party"

nise that a complete change in social relations is impossible under capitalism, comrades should attempt not to oppress each other.

Unfortunately this argument 's weakened by the impressior given by one of the authors, Sheila Rowbotham that Leninism is the major obstacle to though this is not what

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One of the jobs of myth is to transiate social contradictions into a battle of ethical absolutes called Good and Evil.

In this way, the true complexity of those contradictions can be simplified, masked

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Makers of Modern Marxismi

Impossible Although the authors recog-