BOOKS BY TROTSKY

Where is Britain Going?

Paperback 37гp › Problems of the British Paperback 35p " Lessons of October Paperback 60p In Defence of the October Pamphlet 15p Marxism and the Trade Unions Pamphlet 25p Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International Pamphlet 10p Postage: 10p per book, 5p per pamphle Order from: NEW PARK PUBLICAT 186a Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UG Therefore, although painfully accurate in one sense, the play was in fact a distorThe makers' intention • was presumably to wın sympathy for the lot of the poorer sections of the working class who are locked in a life of misery by bad conditions and educational and cultural backwardness.

Instead, the play was in danger of provoking contempt for the individuals portrayed because of their passive acceptance of their wretchedness and down-troddeness.

The hopelessness of the life of the Thornley family living in northern Slum was totally convincing and a considerable artistic achievement.

Five minutes in the company the whining cowardly bully quired to be mentioned. Works of art cannot be made that way.

But it is valid to ask the writers how • they arrived at this very pessimistic view of working-class life and where they think such an attitude will lead.

The questions are worth asking because the play was too powerful to serve as mere reminder for any middle-class viewers who might have forgotten the fact that life at the bottom is in some ways as squalid, brutal and degrading as it ever was in Dickensian Britain.

One could. have enormous pity for Mrs. Thornley silently suffering a life of skivvying at home for a pig of a husband; skivvying at work for a mean middle-class woman who doles miserable.

None of these things are surprising in themselves. All of them are not unusual phenomena in the working class. But is there not a danger that in lumping all of them together in one play, and in showing only these phenomena, that the audience could write off the working class as being too pathetic to bother about?

In attempting to draw attention to the human waste caused by the capitalist system. 'Hard Labour' runs the risk of reinforcing prejudices about the lower paid by relentlessly stressing the abject condition of this one family. Leigh and Garnett may have achieved the opposite of their intention.

Press, Tuesday March 20, BBC 1 REGIONAL TV

SLL LECTURE

SERIES Socialist Revolution Middleton Manchester] ley Community Centre Aiddletor Sundays: March 25 April 1 and 8 Lectures given by Cliff Slaughter (SLL Central Committee) The Socialist Revolution In Britain:

Political tasks facing the British working class. Marxism and the revolutionary role of the working class. Lessons of the history of the working class in Britain. 2. The roots of capitalist crisis: Marxism and the contradictions of capitalism. Britain and the world crisis. 3. The state and revolution. Reformism and revolution in Britain. The fight for democratic rights today means preparing for working-class power. Basic reading:

Perspectives for transforming the SLL into a Marxist Analysis of the Crisis. Problems of the British Revolution (Trotsky) .

Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, Communist Manifesto.