Our readers speak out

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Dialectics

Dear editors, I have read the series of five articles by Cliff Conner with interest and appreciation. As a professor of history, I appreciate the very simple, easy-to-understand writing style.

The columns read like a lecture given to students in an undergraduate course, easy enough to understand the basics of the philosophies discussed and, at the same time, using real-life examples to enhance that understanding.

Unfortunately, I have lost the first three of the five columns. I am enclosing a contribution which, I hope, will also cover the cost of sending me clippings to replace my lost columns.

Lee L. Schreiber Lansdale, Pa.

A new wind?

Dear editors, I'm a bus driver in San Francisco. We've suffered one takeback after another on the job. Our wages have been frozen for two years, and the schedules get faster and faster.

In a few months, the city is planning to raise fares and cut bus service. But that's not all. City officials are also considering a proposal to privatize the system. One hopeful entrepreneur has promised to make the service "profitable" by hiring new drivers at a fraction of our current wages.

Our union—once the strongest city workers union—is now just a shell. Our last local president was kicked out for stealing from the members' trust fund.

But a fresh wind is blowing. I read that in our sister union in New York, TWU Local 100, a pro-democracy New Directions slate made gains in the last union elections, getting one-third of the votes for local president. Ron Carey's victory in the Teamsters may be a sign of the times.

W.L.

San Francisco, Calif.

New Zealand Dear editors, I very much enjoyed Joseph Ryan's article on "Why can't everyone have a job" in the February issue of Socialist Action.

Of course, as you know, our distant islands are subjected to the same inhumanity, whose scale is only less because there are less people here. However, the crudity of the onslaught by the state and the bosses is exactly equal.

I thought the front page of our local paper was sufficient to drive these points home. The Americas Cup becomes the case in point, funded and enjoyed by the bosses as a conspicuous display of their wealth. Meanwhile, their own workers are cast out with no redundancy pay, and their disabled children have to rely on tents for their educational facilities.

Hope this is of some use. Since I have not seen anything in your paper on the Americas Cup, I thought this might be an inducement.

Charles Sedgwick Christchurch, N.Z.

Soviet Art Dear editors, I want to congratulate you and your staff of journalists for continuing to put out an eminently readable paper with contents that match and often surpass.

I was particularly surprised— and pleased—to find you could spare room among more current concerns for your recent write-up of the avant-garde theatre desighs of the early Soviet Union days exhibited at San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor.

While the subject was not of the contemporary importance as; say, Sylvia Weinstein's powerful article on Cuba and the United States, as a theatre specialist, I was delighted to find Michael Schreiber covering the exhibit.

I assume that had he felt free to use a bit more space, he might have pointed out—as he surely knows-that the Moscow Art Theatre, which influences our American theatre mightily, did Baltimore P.O. Box 16005 Baltimore, MD 21218 Boston P.O. Box 1046 GMF Boston, MA 02205 (617) 497-0230 Chicago P.O. Box 578428 Chicago, IL 60657 (312) 327-5752 CIncinnati P.O. Box 20109 Cincinnąti, OH 45220 (513) 751-1597

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