[workers on strike in July last year The…]

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workers on strike in July last year The arch-tactionalist could not, however, keep up appearances in this way.

At the Central Committee meeting which was supposedly to open the so-called "international" discussion - but without the presence of an IC representative, L. Sklavos was forbidden to speak on the political implications of the philosophical questions (such as for instance the participation of the WRP member White on the "corporatist' "joint management" bodies of Leyland.

Under these conditions L. Sklavos was forced to resign from his position of secretary and CC member, in order to deptive Healy and his factionalists of every excuse and to enable him to struggle for battles between Athens students and riot police.

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Brecht: 'Poems' Published by Eyre Methuen, 3 volumes, £1.95 each, paperback.

rkers' uprising 1953 - "Brecht was politically complicit with Stalinism; but the form of his art Bertolt Brecht is the greatest socialist artist of all time, and - many would claim - the greatest revolutionary theorist of art as well:

Influenced by the Bolshevik Futurists and Constructivists, Brecht remorselessly demystified the sacred, privileged status assigned to art by bourgeois idealism: art for him was a social practice rather than a visionary inspiration, a process of material production rather than a mysterious object.

Dismantling the bourgeois theatre of Illusion, which hypnotised its audience into emotional self-indulgence, Brecht producer instead a form of drama (epic' theatre) whose vety structure was dialectical - which played off scene against scene, script against song, actor against audience, in order to mock its observers into consciousness of mistorical contradictions.

Nothing in such a theatre was taken as "natural', taken for granted - not even the script, which Brecht and his collaborators sould constantly re-write on the basis of an indience's reactions.

Nothing was to be hidden: the actor ibowed himself as an actor, rather than prelending to be someone else, the stage acchanisms were on show to remind the Mudience that they were in a theatre rather than the real world.

Only by insisting on its own artifice could ine drama send its audience out of the theatre into political society, to put their shanged consciousness into practice.

Mest of Brecht's literary output, Dwe er, consisted of poetry; and these free volumes bring to the English reader for he i; st time roughly half of the thousand • so sems in the collected German edition.

For revolutionaries, then, this is a publishing event of some importance; for vourgeois literary critics, it can only add to heir = nbarrassment.

Fo: Brecht is clearly one of the major poets of the twentieth century: and for most vourgeois criticism it is simply self-contralictory that a writer can be at once as ipeniy agitational and as artistically superb • Brecht.

He can't be patronised, in populist ashon, as an artist who oversimplified his FOrk in order to 'bring poetry to the mople'; for what makes Brecht's writing so istantly communicable - its terse, oncrete, dramatic quality - is exactly what sakes it so artistically fine.

Nor can he be praised as some 'proletkult" tero sentimentally glorifying the masses; for As the pound collapses still wither on the foreign schanges, Callaghan This determination i another year of strict wage intral and the official econnic forecast predicts increasE unemployment, the 'lefts' the Labour Party have only • thing to say - the Labour Fraudent must be saved.

HT By guest reviewer, Terry Eagleton.

This poetry is always polemical, aggressive and ironsciousnes raemer than slavishly relearing it.

The first volume through the years of ship in Marxism, up to Street crash.

This 15 the period of the young, "bohemian' Brecht, more anti-bourgeois than anti capitalist, more pro-underdog than proproletariat; and accordingly between lyrical vision and deliberate crudity, sensual and sardonic by turns.

The second volume (1929-38) represents the hight point of Brecht's art, from the growth of German fascism to his exile; and as his writing becomes leaner and tougher under that political pressure, it reaches a peak of stark, almost intolerable dramatic power surely unrivalled in modern literature.

Yet the 'left' wing Tribune Group has recently published, under the name of Brian Sedgemore "The Alternative Strategy" for the Labour government, a document which concludes:

"We must choose now...between the catastrophe of current policies and the socialism of the alternative However a closer look at this "alternative strategy" of the Tribune Group reveals the answer (1913-28) takes us Brecht's apprenticethe point of the Wall poems oscillate The East German wol was a denial of all it s REFORMISM ¡tood for".

ONL to this riddie.

The 'lefts' do not disagree with Healey and Callaghan because they defend capitalist policies, but because the 'lefts' want to maintain capitalism in a different way.

Number one in their list of "alternatives' is the call for import controls. Import controls, they argue, would reduce unemployment, reverse the balance of payments deficit and lead Britain towards socialism.

Brecht Stripped of imagery, the poetry of this period can tind its artistry in what often seems simple reportage - as in the poem about the carpet-weavers of Kuyan-Bulak, who use the money they had scraped together for a bust of Lenin to fight swampfever instead:

"So they helped themselves by honouring /Lenin, and Honoured him by helping themselves, and /thus Had understood him well."

with typical resourcefulness, Brecht lakes use of every literary form that comes • hand - ballad, song, aphorism, Chinese pigram - in order to render the experience f the German masses in the 1930s.

His constant artistic emphasis is on what i usejui - on what will work, be of service, ‹pose contradictions. communicate and ansform. And it isn't surprising that the 'ork of the final yolume (1938-1956), the ears of his exile in America and return to ast Germany, should betray a certain The document carefully puts forward not one argument for this cure-all, but instead insists that the arguments are "well known"

What then are their arguments?

They claim: that 'unfair competition' by overseas competitors is undercutting the prices of British goods at home, forcing British manufacturers to close their factories and increase unemployment; that restricting imports would mean a larger market for British goods at home and more British workers employed while in impoverishment of poetic quality.

For how was Brecht to write in Los Angeles? And how was he to write in a Stalinist state?

Brecht was politically complicit with Stalinism; but the form of his art was a denial of all it stood for. Critical, experímental, interrogative, open-ended, ironic: nothing could be further from the closed dogmatism of the Eastern Europe to which Brecht returned.

That he was himself a man riddled with contradictions is clear: grim and angry yet impudently deflating, fiercely committed but always with a canny eye to his own practical shrewinest of thronist with the shrewdness of a tramp, a toughminded rationalist who relished humour and sensuality, a master of simplicity who dealt with the most complex contradictions of his time, a magnificent Marxist artist who didn't care whether his poems survived or not.

But it is precisely Brecht's acceptance of impermanency, his liking for things fluid and nall-finished, his hatred of deadening 'perfection', which shows us the deeply historical perspective which informs all his work.

It is a perspective which he is able to turn on himself, thinking of how future generations will remember him and his comrades:

"For we changing countries oftener /than our shoes Through wars of the classes, /despairing When there was injustice only, and no /rebellion.

And yet we know:

Hatred, even of meanness Contorts the features.

Anger, even against injustice, Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we Who wanted to prepare the grr lunc /fri ndl Could not ourselves be friendly.

But you, when the time comes at And man is a helper to man Think of us With forebearance."

to Brian Sedgemore addition reducing imports and improving the balance of payments; that within the protection of import barriers, full employment and industrial expansion would be brought about; and that, moreover, all this would be brought about without the need for the Labour Party or the lefts' to raise one finger against the profits of the capitalists!

The attractions of this 'strategy" for the 'lefts' , who are petrified at the prospect of raising even one finger against Healey and Callaghan,

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One of the last remaining The mood amongst dockert, therefore, is that it will bring un-