Profession: revolutionary

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This new pamphlet tells politickers'.

They talk romantically about 'the masses' and 'men who work with their hands' - and about at Peekskill in 1949, when indisputable proof of the existence of Stalin's own slave labour camps is already available and widely known. Many of the CP members are Jews, spiritual refugees from fascism: but Stalin's anti-semitism is already raging openly in the Czechoslovak and other East European purge trials, disguised as a campaign against 'Zionism' These CP members have gone through the war as American chauvinists, advocates of strikebreaking for the war effort, pioneers of the witch-hunt . against anti-war Trotskyists, anarchists, etc: that will finally engulf and shatter their own • seemingly imposing party. (it had 100,000 members in 1945).

The most moving thing in the film is the plight of the children.

The children's visit to Paul and Rochelle, who come to the prison waiting room one at a time, is scarcely bearable. Paul barely keeps control of himself, desperately trying to avoid looking the children in the face. Rochelle has io cope with the question from eight year old Susan, 'When are they going to kill you?' The ten year old Daniel tells his mother that he won't let them kill her. "I'll kill them first". . But the State is as powerful as nature itself, and when we meet the grown-up Daniel i dozen years later he is dormant and quiesrent.

"Daniel' is centrally about family feeling, about childhood loves and ties brutally ruptured, and about childish bewilderment and PROFESSION? "Proletarian" replied Auguste Blanqui, hauled into court for his activity in the French revolution of 1830.

It unconscious imitation, 'Katherine' ', heroine of last Saturday's Channel 4 TV film of that title, tells her jailers 'Profession? Revolutionary'.

Bui Blanqui had been active as a revolutionary for six years already in 1830, and remained dauntless until his death in 1881. The 'Weathermen' , the US revolutionary group to which Katherine belongs, disappeared without trace within a few years.

Some of its members - like Katherine — destroyed themselves in thur attempts to wage terroris, war against US capitalism. Some just faded away. Any still active lomov are more hakely to hr found in the ranks of left *tormisin than in revolutionary politics.

Blanqui represented the direct link to Marxism from the earliest forms of working-class socialism (which thought in terms of revolution by armed conspiracy only because, at that primitive stage of development of the working class, reality showed no uther possibility). The 'Weathermen' existed alongside a powerful working class, in a mature capitalist suciety.

The film depicts the split in the US radical student movement which created the 'Weathermen' • A speaker from the opposing faction tells them that they are trying to skip the necessary hard slug of convincing people.

And he is right. The 'revolutionary • impatience' of the 'Weathermen' was fated to flip over into defeatist impatience (since an immediate assault doesn't defeat the old order, all is hupeless), or reformist impatience (get what you can in the short term).

The self-sacrifice of the •Weathermen' deserved better. The rottenness of all 'established wisdom' - including the 'established wisdom' of the labour leaders and the Stalinistdominated Left - and the terrible weakness of authentic Marxism were to blame.

The film shows very little of that. US construction workers marched to support the Vietnam war at the same time as young radicals were most angrily goo movement in the 1960s, clearly helped shape the 'Weathermen' The opposing faction to the Weathermen in the radical student movement went for a naive Mauist "serve the masses' workerism.

But none of that enters the film. The story is of in ividual combat between Kathe ne and the US ruling class fru a which she comes and agai! « which she rebels.

That story - the development of a generous spirit from concern for civil rights to blazing fury against the whole system - is, however, told well and sympathetically. In the mean-spirited Britain of 1984, where commitment free of ifs' and 'buts' is so unfashionable, I found it refreshing.