Workers Socialist League

Socialist Press, Trotskyism Today and the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, 1975–1984

Miss Uk as You Says Mrs Have Never Seem Her Before

Socialist Press no. 226, 3 December 1980 · scan pp. 7–8 · Mary-Ann Todd · about 604 words

Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 7 →

Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.

Scan page 7

50033 20: 30 torgene to sum ma Semsny'!

state bans but a call to action by:

the working class movement.

If it was felt that a film should not be released we would demand it be blacked by workers at the point of distribution; that projectionists refuse to show it together with a full supporting picket of consumers, trade unionists from local trades councils, etc.

There will of course be cries of protest at what appears to be a form of censorship. People Will say that they don't want to be seen "siding up with Mary Whitehouse"

But it would be totally wrong to equate the reactionary rantings of Mary Whitehouse with the decisions demanded by a committee of trade unionists based on the need to defend women, gays, blacks and other oppressed against denigration and violent attack.

Märy Whitehouse is completely against the interests of the working class.

She features in Thatcher's honours list, she is a vicious anti-abortionist. She seeks to censor not the obscenities of sadistic murder of Prom Night but any aspect of the media which she considers threatens the existing "morality' and religious ideals of the bourgeois state of which she is such an advocate.

She therefore has used the state to attack Gay News, precisely because they challenged the repressive conventional relationships through their anti-state, anti-church defence of homosexuality:

It is why she has come out so strongly against the National Theatre production of Howard Brenton's play 'Romans' because it portrays the British army in the six counties as SAS thugs and rapists.

British imperialist domination is symbolised through sexual domination and the play attacked-but Paul Raymond's Topless Revue Bar has survived years without a murmur. It is an integrated part THIS is the naked truth about Miss United Kingdom that the millions who watched the Miss World contest on TV nevér.:

IDENTITY MARANE A of capitalism.

Trotsky writes in 'Proolems of Everyday Life' ('Vodka, the Church and the Cinema'):

"The working class state is neither a spiritual order nor a monastery. We take people as they have been made by nature and as they have been in part educated and in part distorted by the old order.

We seek a point of support in this vital human material for the application of our party and revolutionary state lever. The longing for amusement, distraction, sightseeing and laughter is the most legitimate desire of human nature. We are able and indeed obliged to give the satisfaction of this desire a higher artistic quality at the same time making amusement a weapon of collective education, freed from the guardianship of the pedagogue and the tiresome habit of moralising."

Some may argue that Trotsky was speaking there only after the 1917 revolution.

They may argue that the important task for us is to concentrate on those struggles that will directly bring about the fall of capitalism like mass occupations, and national strike action and that we should not think about picketing •Prom Night' when there is so much else to do in the class struggle.

Trotsky also said however in the Transitional Programme:

"The Bolshevik-Leninist stands in the front-line trenches of all kinds of struggles, even when they involve only the most modest material interests or democratic rights of the working class."

If we do not take up the fight against sexist ideology now, we leave the fight completely up to the feminist movement, many of whom see it as solely a case of men (patriarchy) attacking women and not as the capitalist system dominating and oppressing the working class.

Next week:

further feature article On battered women.

Scan page 8

Wednesday

← Contents of Socialist Press no. 226, 3 December 1980