EC PAPERS NOVEMBER 2017

Morning Star

Workers’ Play Time

Doug Nicholls, General Secretary of the GFTU, introduces a new collection of brilliant plays covering key struggles in trade union history from the Combination Acts to the Trico dispute. To amplify our voice from workplace to society as a whole and across the world, trade unionists and their supportive cultural workers have sung songs, written novels created music, painted pictures, drawn cartoons, made films, and written and performed plays together. Our cultural work is central to and an essential part of our struggle, if you ignore it you blunt your campaign, deaden your organisation, dull your education programme. Going right back to the Middle Ages in Britain there has been a tradition of workers expressing their views of society and the evils of the ruling class in plays. Our best playwrights always hated the ruling class and social systems which alienate, exploit and treat people cruelly. They ridiculed pompous people, satirised the selfish and greedy and exposed the viciousness of the powerful elites while celebrating the noble virtues and courage of good people. No one did this better than Shakespeare who was our first great socialist playwright. He was socialist not because he used that word or believed that everything should be in public ownership, but socialist in the terms of his own day because the two great social systems that he was living through, the death of feudalism and the birth of capitalism both seemed inhuman to him. An alternative world must be possible he thought. So these plays collected here are genuinely in the Shakespearean tradition. The cover the whole historic epoch witnessing the growth and birth of industrial capitalism and the emergence from within it of a vision of a new socialist society. But of course they embellish this tradition with a modern twist. They are about the world created by the modern capitalism and imperialism that was only just beginning in Shakespeare’s day. And most importantly of all they are about the work of a class of people that did not exist in Shakespeare’s Britain – an organised working class. They are about the working class in an industrialised country, and the organisation of that class into the most fundamental of working class organisations, trade unions. These were outlawed at their start as Neil Duffield’s Bolton Rising and Neil Gore’s We Will be Free powerfully remind us. The seven plays in this volume are about the class conscious workers who recognise that power lies in our hands to change society, a power that did not exist until workers created it. It is a power that resides in collective action, bravery together, an indomitable sense of fighting for justice. The plays are about the importance of collective action and many of them lend themselves to various forms of communal performance and discussion in the popular education tradition. Two plays are very much linked to great trade union leaders identified with the GFTU, Mary Quaile and Will Thorne. It is great to feel their work immortalised in wonderful plays by Jane McNulty and James Kenworth and feel that their efforts are flourishing still today.