A respectable failure

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The attempt to declare crudities and shabby journalism. tible" with Marxism and deceived by the intriguing title of Freudianism is too simple or, lating or challenging. tic. But we are in any case qualities: it is rarely interesting, not obliged to adopt Freud- and never important. ianism. It is a working hypo- with all the self-absorbed confithesis that can nroduce and dence of the eclectic. psychoanalysis "incompasimply turn one's back on more accurately, too simplisSTUDEN ... undoubtedly does produce deductions and conjectures that proceed along the lines of materialist psychology. The experimental procedure [of Pablov] in due course will provide the tests for these conjectures. But we have no grounds and no right to put a ban on the other procedure, which, even though it may be less reliable, yet tries to anticipate the conclusions to which the experimental procedure is advancing only very slowly'.

Culture and Socialism Since Trotsky wrote this in 1926, a series of commentators and critics has attempted to reconcile, synthesise or variously combine Marxism and Freudian psycho-analysis.

The results have almost invariably abandoned Marxism and distorted the work of Freud to no useful purpose.

This latest offering takes its place in a long proci ission of respectable failures, tawdry - 1s friend of the Tory candidate. We see him at first ridiculing the ideas on military rule put But when the chips are down, the employer uses the NF to defend his profits.

In the final stages of the play he and Rolfe meet Cleaver and Turner to discuss more long term co-operation. With 23% of the vote in the election and the attack on the picket line behind them the fascists have shown the employers they have so mething to offer.

Relationship

The employers won't produce financial support straight away but want a continuing relationship.

The attitude of the employer to fascism is summed up neatly when he says "one doesn't like the dentist but perhaps to save a tooth .

In this final scene as Turner and Cleaver discuss Comrades should not be Ann Foreman's book into expecting a work that is stimuSadly, it has neither of these Foreman marshalls her forces MUIIYY VI SIM YUEN Marx and Freud are rolled out to the front, to be flanked by such Marxists and pseudoMarxists as de Beauvoir, Fromm, Lukacs, Marcuse, Mitchell, Reich and Sartre.

These are then backed up by a very thin (and not at all red) line of bourgeois anthropologists and sociologists.

Random forays

Backed with this imposing regiment, she launches random forays into history and literature, but captures only a miserable handful of well-worn weapons that she then deploys with neither strength nor accuracy.

There is little point in analysing this work. Its conclusions amount to little more than a claim that the women's movement could humanise the revolutionary workers' movement by transforming the "traditional form, content and limited location of political struggle"

Where these proposals assume any clarity, they advocate the old familiar concept of an 'autonomous' women's movement—a mystical concept beloved of selfwith the employer and Lewis Rolfe it emerges that Rolfe's company is Metropolitan Trust.

Turner is shattered to find he is being used by people who ruined him. He breaks from the fascists.

Weakness

A weakness in the play was that there was no treatment of Labour's role in paving the way for Fascism by refusing to provide a socialist answer to the crisis.

This could have been done in the scene where fascist and socialist confront each other in the prison cell.

While the point made at the end as to the necessity of crushing fascism in the cradle is clearly correct and a central focus in the anti-fascist fight the exclusion of any suggestion of the need for policies to answer the effects of capitalism's crisis detracts from the political strengths in the play.

Finally, perhaps the most

ANN FOREMAN

Femininity as Alienation Women and the Family in Marxism and Psychoanalysis Pluto Press £2.40 By David Whitfield styled 'socialist feminists' It requires more than goodwil! and energy to place the partial gains of psycho-analysis at the service of the working class in its historic task of reconstructing society on a socialist basis. And the value these gains could hold should not be under estimated.

A deeper understanding of the complex process by which ideology is reproduced within individual members of bourgeois society, can enable revolutionaries to combat all its reactionary features far more sharply whereever they appear as sexism, racism or any of the multiple forms of chauvinism. But Femininity as Alienation does nothing to advance that development, except in one respect.

Foreman argues that provision for a dependent wife, working in the home, came to be included in the wages for the skilled male workers, who formed the aristocracy of labour in British industry of the late 19 century.

Although it is based here in a bizarre and confused misunderstanding of the valve of labour power, this approach certainly opens the possibility of a far more thorough analysis of the ways in which the oppression of women has been structured within the working class.

This volume might have some limited value in encouraging readers to move on to Marx or Freud themselves. But the time and cash required for this book could be far better spent on the works of almost any other writer cited in its pages. important point to draw out of the play is that it avoided a common attitude on the left that the white working class is being swept away on the fascist tide.

A white worker on strike alongside the immigrant workers appeals for forces to help the picket. He explains that it is necessary to stand together on a class basis.

David Edgar's play is a weapon in the struggle to build such a working class opposition to fascism.

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