Cracking the problem!

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SOMETIMES 1 can scarcely resist gloating over the problems of the US Nuclear Power Industry (USNPI). It's a self-satisfied "We told you so!" syndrome that those on the left and in the environmental movement have a tendency to exhibit, being rarely involved in making decisions about industrial or environmental policy.

Anyway, they (the USNPI) are in more trouble. The Director of Safety Technology for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Dr. Thomas Murley, says that radiation is fast making reactor steel brittle and liable to crack under stress.

Dr Murley would go so far as to say "we'd get very nervous after another year or so." Now, you would imagine that, since radioactive fuel tends to produce radiation and since the steel containment vessels tend to be subjected to rather a lot of radiation, containing as they do, the radioactive füel, nuclear plant constructors would check thoroughly the long term effect of this radiation on this steel. Well, apparently not so.

The 8-inch thick steel shells were designed to withstand operating temperatures of 550 degrees Fahrenheit and about 150 times normal atmospheric pressure and to last the lifetime of the reactor - about 40 years.

Sometimes the reactor shell is rapidly cooled (when the emergency core cooling system comes into action, for example and it is then that the steel is likely to burst if it has become brittle.

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people and where, therefore, (Manifesto: A Radical the labels this society uses to Strategy for Britain's Future define and channel • sexual by Francis. Cripps, John and emotional capacities - Griffith, Frances Morrell, al" , "bisexual" wither away end and Stuart Weir, Pan "homosexual", 'heterosexu- Jimmy Reid, Peter Towns because they are no longer paperback, £1.95. WHEN reading 'Where We critique of the Erfurt programme of the German Social Democratic Party (at the time the leading vanguard party of Marxism), specifically on the question of the monarchy.

Engels considered it vital that the party should be clearly seen as republican, saying "After all it is inconceivable that our best people should serve as ministers under a Kaiser."

The SPD only declared a republic in 1918 because they were scared that if they didn't. Karl Liebknecht and the Spartacusbund would.

The British monarchy is serving the capitalist system well as an opium for the masses as shown by the Silver Jubilee and the Royal Wedding.

And, of course, with the monarchy is the House of Lords, that Tory watchdog of the system. The abolition of both must be included in our platform.

Socialist Organiser has itself recognised the absence of republicanism from the Labour Party. We must fight against it, and the illusions that cause it.

Comradely greetings CHARLIE SARRELL JOHN • SHIERS contributes the Labour Campaign for Gay Rights column this week.

THERE WILL be much argument on the left about whether the recently published book, "Manifesto. A Radical Strategy for Britain's future" does, or does not. constitute the beginnings of transitional, socialist strategy and the basis for the policies of a left-wing Labour government.

One issue which will hardly be discussed is the exclusion of any strategy in the short or long term, for ending discrmination against lesbians and gay men and establishing the precondi tions for gay liberation.

In the book, the words "lesbian" "gay" even "sexuality" do not figure at all in the index. Homosexuality is mentioned in passing once, with reterence to the liberal reforms implemented by the Wilson government.

This presumably means the private members bill, introduced in 1967 by Leo Abse, which the Labour Government generously 'found time' for. It legalised male homosexual relationships provided they were in private, over the age of 21 in England and Wales but not at all in Scotland and Northern Ireland and not in the armed forces or the merchant navy.

The whole purpose of the legislation was to tolerate those men who, by 2e had become "helpless cases so long as they "did it" in private and didn't "flaunt themselves" in public or encourage others in their "perverted ways"

It rigidly upheld the superiority and normality of heterosexuality and continued to perpetuate the conspiracy of silence surrounding lesbian sexuality which was the reason why lesbian relationships were not criminalised in the first place. Homosexual equality was the furthest thing from the minds of our enlightened liberal reformers at this time.

Considerable effort is made in Manifesto to recognise that the labour movement, traditionally, has been predominantly white and male dominated. It recognises that there must be positive action to redress discrimination against ethnic minorities and women.

Encouraging greater involvement in the Labour Party and the trade unions is also seen as a priority, as the following passage shows.

"The Labour Party of the future must adopt again a class strategy and accord a full place to the groups of people who most feel themselves oppressed by the shape of the post-war society - especially women, ethnic minorities and the elderly.

'These are just as imporant as the male manual workers and dissident middle class who have hitherto comthe party, Main strength of (Manifesto, pp.118/9)

Disregarding whether "the shape of post-wat society" can be regarded as the primary element in these oppressions, it is clear that the authors do not consider it affects lesbians and gay men significantly enough for us to be included as one of the groups accorded a full place in the newly invigorated Labour Party.

The central problems of all this is that the left, as a whole, with a very few notable exceptions such as Ken Livingstone, simply does not understand what sexual politics is all about.

Civil rights for sexual minorities, which is gay rights implies, just does not seem important when compared with major structural inequalities like those between classes, races and the sexes.

Yet "gay liberation" was the first political expression of the current wave of gay self-organisation in Western Europe, and the USA, and remains the goal of lesbian feminists and the radical wing of the gay male movement, even it the means by which this is seen as being achieved have changed.

Gay Liberation always about a lot than gay rights and was more Socialist Organiser, Thursday very directly into the socialist feminist current of the women's liberation movement.

It is the failure of Manifesto to develop a socialist feminist analysis in relation to the oppression of women which is not only closely connected, but actually accounts for its silence on the question of gay oppression.

There is no account in the book of sexism, beyond a statement of the persistence of massive discrimination against women, reinforced by the State throughout society.

Providing equal opportunities for women, it necessary by positive discrimination, and removing all discriminatory laws and prastices are seen as the actions a left Labour government must take to advance women's rights.

Important as taking these actions quite clearly is, they are only the beginning, not the end. Without a strategy to attack sexism and the processes through which pender roles are created and reinforced through the family, education, the media and culture, male dominance will not be removed fron society.

This is the insight of feminist movement that left ignores at its peril.

It is also the key to understanding what gay liberation is all about. We are working towards a society in which heterosexuality, as an exclusive sexual orientation is no longer coerced onto girls and boys by a socialisation process which at the as it creates "masculine" and "feminine" personalities through gender roles, makes human sexuality procreation-centred by teaching us only to eroticise the opposite unless something goes "wrong"

To live together as equal human beings we need to be able to love one another regardless of our gender and part of this includes. the capacity to eroticise our own sex.

Gay liberation, then, is needed.

Achieving "gay rights" for the "gay minority" is, therefore, just the beginning of a long process, just like achieving "women's rights" through the means outlined in Manifesto is just the start for women's liberation.

Manifesto's model of transition to socialism and, it seems, socialism itself, uncritically hetersexual family oriented as the concluding chapters of the book make clear time and time again.

Women, having got their rights, are presumably now happy to build democratic socialism in partnership with their husbands. Lesbians and gay men are consigned to their ghettos somewhere else, well away from the children.

Perhaps we may even have been benevolently given our legal rights in the later phases of the transition when there's time between all the other priority issues.

If I sound angry, it's not because Manifesto is a particularly bad book. I probably agree with far more of its general economic and political strategy than the average reader of Socialist Organiser does.

Integrate

It's because we in the gay movement are tired of always having to literally be present in a room for you on the left to ever take our needs and concerns seriously.

"Soft left", "hard left"; Bennites, Trotskyists, libertarians: it's the same old story. The body of theory and action which has emerged from the socialist feminist current of the women's movement and the gay liberationist current of the gay movement continues to be largely unread and ignored by the mainstream left.

Tacking us on at the bottom of a long statement about all the groups who will be liberated by socialist revolution isn't enough. We want you to integrate an awareness of our oppression into your theory and polit-

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-Gay Rights. A Manifesto that leaves out sexual oppression

the monarchy