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When Hippes Meet Unionists

Extracted from Workers Playtime

A new book investigates how links between politics and culture reached a high point in the 1970s

	When Hippes Meet Unionists

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Red Ladder was not alone in deciding not to 'stay on the outside'. In Australia, the APG in Melbourne and the Brisbane-based Popular Theatre Troupe (PTT) formed close informal alliances with particular union officials to establish touring circuits of working-class venues, particularly workplaces.

This set in train the slow process of breaking down the distance between theatre workers and the audiences they aspire to influence. In Britain and Australia, this movement towards the unions as the site of working-class organization was facilitated by the public presence of trade unions in politics, in the British Labour Party and the Australian Labor Party. The route was more or less directly charted, although the journey wasn't always quick or easy, and the resistance was not all on the side of unionists. Allen Lyne, originally from the Popular Theatre Troupe, was still complaining of an 'us' and 'them' attitude in companies by the mid 1980s:

Most people working in the field know nothing about their own union, let alone anyone else's; or about the trade union movement generally � its history, its direction, its strengths and weaknesses. In two supposedly political theatre companies I've had to insist that the staff become unionised. (Lyne 1987: 48)

In North America, the route to union solidarity was less direct but equally inevitable. Canadian groups like the Mummers Troupe came into contact with unions as the consequence of reaching out to 'the people', part of a widespread postcolonial quest for cultural authenticity which sought popular sources. The Mummers Troupe went from agitprop to revivals of traditional Newfoundland mummers plays, and from there to documentary 'people's histories'. This brought them into a direct contact with local unions in small communities.

The difference in national context, which we outline in the next chapter, gave rise to particularised strategies, as our case studies show. But in each case we see aspects of the political education of a generation, as hippies became political activists, bringing their different politics to the elaborate and extensive organisational structures of a class-based movement with a long history.

Exhuming 'Working-Class Theatre': The Second International

The working-class culture that theatre activists sought in their initial encounters with labour was comprised of diverse, often tenuous practices and expressed a vast range of local and regional traditions which frequently intersected with other spheres of popular culture. Within labour traditions, cultural activism showed the formative influence of the Second International workingmen's Association Congress in Paris in 1889, a loose worldwide alliance of trade unions and social organizations. The intellectual orthodoxy established by the Second International held sway within the labour movement until its collapse with the outbreak of war in 1914, and vestiges of this orthodoxy have never gone away. The short-term plan was that the affiliated groups would organise themselves into political parties to fight for reform through conventional political channels. While this would not produce socialism in itself, it would prepare the working class to take power when the revoluntionary moment inevitably arrived. A characteristically simplistic reading of Marx suggested this would happen when the proletariat was sufficiently consolidated, organised and, above all, educated, and once the European Depression of the 1890s had deepened into a 'crisis' of capitalism.

Essential to the Second International was an assumption spelt out by Polish historian Leszek Kolakowski" 'Workers who were left to the mercy of capitalists, deprived of education and stupefied by toil, would never be capable of playing their part in the socialist revolution' (Kolakowski 1978.8). This placed an immediate stress on the educative role of an intellectual vanguard that had not been 'stupefied by toil', in short, a disaffected bourgeois intelligentsia, or what in Canada were referred to as 'brainworkers'. In Britain, Australia and Canada, it also led to the formation of political parties which saw socialism as a matter of gradual social reform through parliamentary means. In Germany, on the other hand, where the biggest socialist party in the world, the Social Democratic Party, was essentially illegal, it produced a much more radical line, led by a formidable group of bourgeois intellectual Marxists. In all cases, though, the task of education was taken on in full seriousness, and the late nineteenth century saw the emergence of an elaborate network of workers' education organizations, self-education groups, social clubs, amateur drama clubs, workers' choirs, debating societies and the like.

Art and culture viewed in a very particular way had a central role to play in all this. As British historian Raphael Samuel has claimed, the Second International 'worshipped at the shrine of art; it conceived itself as a messenger of high culture, bringing education and enlightenment to the masses' (Samuel, MacColl and Cosgrove 1985: xvii). Art, thus envisaged, was largely the province of a bourgeois intellectual vanguard, that brought to its task high art models, reflected in the iconography of the union banners of the period. Samuel argues that the literary and artistic origins of British socialism in particular were characterised by a 'vision of the socialistic future' oddly linked to the 'Golden Age of the past' revealed in the visual art of William Morris and Walter Crane ( whose iconography dominated the earliest banners), and the enthusiasm of socialist orators for larding their speeches with citations from Shelley, Whitman and particularly Shakespeare. Socialism, like art, 'exalted the masses; it transported them from the mean conditions of their everyday existence to a state of imaginary transcendence' (Samuel, MacColl and Cosgrove 1985:4). Art and culture, and theatre other than 'popular' forms like melodrama, were seen as a means of emancipation from working-class experience under capitalism. This was not a case of art recruited to the cause of class struggle, but of art as a means of humanising a degraded class.

The theatre which emerged as part of this project was essentially amateur, and modelled on the high art theatre which working people could not afford to see. It was seen as an antidote to the more affordable populist melodrama, on the grounds that popular culture was corrupting and intellectually demeaning. The strongest manifestations of this reformist zeal can be seen in the attempts by theatre workers on the fringe of the labour movement to establish various forms of 'People's Theatre', particularly in France, during the period of the Second International (Bradby and McCormick 1978: 30-44). These were predominantly the work of bourgeois sympathisers rather than party activists, often more concerned with the rejuvenation of the theatre and the consolidation of 'the nation' than with furthering the cause of the working class (Kruger 1992: 31-82). Similar projects in Germany produced the Volksbuhne, a vast organisational structure of union based subscriptions to the mainstream theatres. Although this was not the source of a distinctly radical theatre, it did help the construction of an audience for the work of new playwrights like Ibsen and Hauptmann (Davies 1977). Most of the theatre generated by these movements has disappeared, and was, in any case, of little interest to theatre practitioners in the 1970s who sought specifically working-class traditions of performance. They were drawn towards the more radical tradition produced when, following the collapse of the Second International and the disappearance of the international solidarity it was meant to reflect (or at least sustain), it became clear that socialism had to be made rather than just waited for. This meant that working-class consciousness had to be rebuilt, consolidated and maintained. Under the influence of these new felt imperatives, a more radical and instrumentalist view of culture emerged, nowhere more clearly than in the theatre.

In the 1970s, artsworkers exhumed or inspired the exhumation of this material, largely to discover radical labour movement traditions within which to work. The substantial literature that emerged on a hitherto neglected area of theatre history coincided with a new interest in the experimental theatre practice of Brecht and Piscator, with the former becoming a theoretical touchstone for most left-wing theatre practice and the latter received as the principal prophet of a theatre specifically aimed at militant working-class audiences. What emerged was a picture of a vital and radical cultural tradition which reached its zenith in the 1930s.

A significant feature of this new work was that it rejected the notion of theatre as a civilising extension of a national culture to which the working class had been denied access. Instead, the value of theatre lay in the extent to which it expressed a distinct transnational working-class culture. Under such a notion, 'high' art became�as popular culture had been for the Second International�a means of ideological control, an apparatus for the generation of the 'false consciousness' which legitimated the dominance of a ruling class. There are signs of such a view emerging towards the end of the period of the Second International, for example within the Volksbuhne, which constantly split and reformed over the issue of whether art should be viewed as a means of spiritual and moral uplift, on the one hand, or more instrumentally as a means of political activism on the other. By 1910, the Freie Volkksbuhe journal published an internal debate, which prefigured some of the major debates on the Left in the post-war years. In it a member proposed 'proletarian art' as an antidote to the Freie Volksbuhne, which, he claimed had become a 'consumer association for the retailing bourgeois art' (Davies 1977: 74). While this position received little support at the time, and the Volksbuhne held to the orthodoxy of the Second International, it signalled a growing tendency to view theatre as part of a broader, class-based political project.

Workers' Playtime: Theatre and the labour movement since 1970 by Alan Filewood & David Watt is published by Currency Press

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»	Calls for ALP Fundraising Code
»	Mad Monk Keeps IR
»	Ignored Warnings Bring Tragic Results
»	ACTU Executive To Mark Union Bounce Back
»	Workers Will Lose from Unfair Contract Changes
»	Tassie On Top, While NSW And WA Slip
»	Costa Gets First Union Call
»	Hamberger in Hot Water
»	Egan to Pay for Welfare Win
»	Sweet Victory for Sugar Workers
»	Selectron Demise Spells Death of Tech Inustry
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»	Workers Force Council Backdown
»	New Dili Project Launched
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»	No News is Bad News for the Bush
»	Getonboard Closes Doors
»	Activists Notebook
»	Organiser of the Year Nominations Open

»	The Soapbox
»	The Soapbox
»	Trades Hall
»	Tool Shed

»	The Cost a Costa
»	Unionism and the ALP - a Workers View.
»	Is 60-40 Good Odds?
»	Ancient OHS - The Wergild Sysstem

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