Build Community Councils ?

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WSL Rally campaigns for Councils of Action The emergence of councils But there is a more serious of action would mark the rise side to it. To create such a diverof a dual power situation in sion from the fight for strike Tom Sellars reviews "About Looking", by John Berger (Writers and Readers, £2.95)

He shows them not as only the destruction of capitalLocal Government Act of 1973.

There are over 90 of these in Glasgow alone and they are concerned with such socially useful tasks as promoting local galas, organising sports teams and bands and complaining about the state of disrepair of the pavements.

These are no doubt very praiseworthy efforts to improve the quality. of local life-but are not in any sense the central political questions facing the working class today.

When these councils were established, activists in the labour movement were well aware that they were regarded by the authorities as substitutes for independent working class organisation on such questions as housing, jobs, social security rights etc.

Imagine the puzzlement of workers in Scotland, therefore, when they are faced with the call from the Political Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party to "Build Community Councils"

How, can such confusion have come about? There are two possibilities. Either Gerry Healy and the WRP leadership at Clapham High Street are totally ignorant of the Scottish political scene (which is understandable considering the total decline of the Healyites in that area; or they are well aware of In terms of his political activity-the only significant criterion-John Berger is not a revolutionary.

He has, however, trained himself to see through the eyes of a particularly perceptive Marxist-a way of seeing that is almost unique to him among writers on the visual arts..

• His best-known work to date, the television series and book Ways of Seeing, was evidence of his ability to dispel the mystifying and deathly smoke which everywhere obscures the social nature of art.

Not that he looks only at what the professors and auctioneers call art; in this book his eye takes in family snapshots and newspaper photographs, as well as the clothes people wear and the animals they stare at in ZOOS.

Photography and photographs obviously fascinate Berger-perhaps because they are the most universal and inescapable source of visual representation in the world today;

perhaps because bourgeois ideology has taken over as its own instrument the machine which "cannot lie'; perhaps because some photographers have nonetheless used the camera to reveal, consciously or not, aspects of the reality' which that ideology shapes, disguises and warps.

Walter Benjamin wrote, in an essay Berger knows well, that• the debate about whether photography is an 'art-form' was fundamentally misconceived; the real thing to understand was how photography had actually and radically affected all visual. artforms.

It is the same sort of thinking, seeing things as part of a complex whole-a social, human the existence of community councils but do not give a damn that their slogans are nonsensical in a Scottish context.

If the latter is the case, then we must conclude that the leadership of the WRP is imbucd with an arrogance and contempt towards the Scottish working class that is insufferable.

Councils of Action 'But why do they call tor community councils at all! What has happened to the tried and tested revolutionary socialist demand for councils of action (i.e. soviets) put forward strongly and correctly by the Socialist Labour League in the 1970s?

Is this only a difference ot nomenclature? -No, there is more to it that "The [community] councils" we are told, "would represent all the people affected by the Tory slump policies, irrespective of their race, religion or past affiliations (emphasis added).

Can this mean that long serving but: recently lapsed members of the National Front will be welcomed on to these councils?

This is no joking matter. The WRP specifically invite reactionwhole-which entitles Berger's writing to be called Marxist.

Isoline in hie iritina ie the , Lalamy " no vulnerly to tire 'marxist' phrase-marking and jargon which is too often the only proletarian feature of self-styled Marxist writing op the arts.

And, fortunately, also lacking (for the most part) in Berger's non-fiction is that pretentiousness and self-conscious sincerity which usually characterises his poems and ary "ratepayers associations" to join their campaign. This slipshod attitude towards serious political questions is extended even further when we consider who is to establishe these councils.

Wait for it!

"Borough councils must initiate the campaign to build Community Councils."

We take it that these are the same borough councils who are closing hospitals, schools, old people's homes etc. throughout the country.

But the WRP leadership have a special concern for the Labour Party led borough councils. They are in "a special dilemma" they have the "best intentions"; they are trying to "make ends meet"

Slashed Our hearts bleed for them. Glasgow workers. seeing the budget for their children's education slashed by £9million in the current year, with school meals up to 40 pence a day. have tougher political skins than the faint hearted petty bourgeois who now rule the roost at Clapham High Street.

They will tell the Strathclyde Regional Councillors that they were elected on a mandate of defending the social services, novels.

Most of the objects Berger Inake at in this collection of short essays are paintings-by Turner, Courbet, Magritte, Lowry and others.

While some of the essays are fairly understandable if you have even a vague idea of the painter in question, many will leave readers at a loss unless they already have a knowledge and recollection of the paintings ing He he discusses, unless they refer that they must refuse to implement either social service cuts or rates increases but instead let the budget go into déficit and send the bill back to the Tories.

But the WRP addresses no such demands to the Labour Councillors. In fact they offer no perspective of struggle to militants either within the Labour Party or the trade unions.

Having lost all confidence in the ability of the working class to transcend the limitations of social democracy through struggling within the established organisations of the labour movement, they search for some formulation, some kind of organisation, outside of the movement itself.

Certainly in the course of the class actions now underway it is not inconceivable that some labour councillors-and : even whole councils-under the pressure of the mass movement, will go so far as to support the establishment of councils of action to carry through a struggle against the Tory government.

Possibilities But to restrict one's perspecve to that avenue alone is to be : politically blind to the possilities now opening up within to better illustrated books-an effort that would generally be worthwhile.

The essays on photography are, however, adequately illustrated, and it may be this which makes them possibly the most interesting.

This lack of illustration is a great pity, because to see these pictures, etc., with Berger as a guide is often profoundly revealing. the workers' movement. rish.

the country, emerging out of the independent struggle of the working class to defend their conditions through class action.

To decree that such councils of action must receive the stamp of official approval from borough councils reveals the bureaucratic caste of the architects of the scheme.

And what are the WRP's community councils going to do anyway?

"The Community Chancils would negotiate a moratorium on these [mortgage, repayments to stop families being thrown on to the streets.

We trust that the gentlemen who run the Woolwich and the Abbey National will show suitable understanding in such negotiations.

By now readers may have concluded that this latest political stunt by the WRP is little more than political gibbeobjects of purchase or of mystical reverence or of absurd structuralist analysis, but as human products-thus as social products which find their only life when they are consumed (seen, understood and appropriated) as such.

And because Berger sees things as they exist in their complex and manifold interconnexions with other aspects of society, he is very aware that action and occupations agamst the cuts at this time when political clarity is essential for workers going into struggle is nothing short of reprehensible.

Talking Shops The WRP's "Community Councils". • as they are conceived would be nothing more than talking shops dominated by petty bourgeois politicos sounding out their nostrums for the crisis.

They sound remarkably like local replicas of the Political Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party. ism and the creation of a society which would bring forth the free development of humanity could allow for a truly human relationship between people and their products. Until then, what can be done for the visual arts is limited.

He writes of photography: "Today no alternative professional practice (if one thinks of the profession of photographer) is possible. The system can accommodate any photograph. Yet it may be possible to begin to use photographs according to a practice addressed to an alternative future. This future is a hope which we need now, if we are to maintain a struggle, a resistance, against the societies and culture of capitalism.

"Photographs have often been'used as a radical weapon in posters, newspapers, pamphlets, and so on. I do not wish to belittle the value of such agitational publishing. Yet the current systematic public use of photography needs to challenged, not simply by turning round like a cannon and aiming it at different targets, but by changing its practice"

But this passage suggests that 'hope' and 'resistance' is really all that is possible in the larger Elsewhere in this book Berger writes of his despair following the defeats of the revolutionary struggles of 1968.

This despair of his, and his coming sometimes perilously close to finding in art a unique source of human values protesting against a brutal and dehumanising society, is the non-revolutionary Berger.

Revolutionaries, though, if they take the trouble to read these essays patiently and thoughtfully, will come away enriched, and better able to see some of the things which bourgeois ideology leaves veiled, or distortingly disconnected, or merely blandly unquestioned.