Ronald Paul

Striking Back: Novels of Class Conflict by Two Proletarian Women Writers

For the first time since the General Strike in Britain in 1926, the two biggest member unions of the national Trades Union Council (TUC), Unite and Unison, which together organise over three million private and public sector workers, have called on the TUC to prepare for a general strike to protest the Conservative Government’s brutal austerity policies. The leader of Unite, Len McCluskey, said this would be an “explicitly political strike [that] would be a landmark in our movement’s recovery of its morale, strength and capacity to play a leading part in a society crying out for credible and honourable leadership.” This call to action in Britain follows on from the one-day European general strike that took place on 14 November 2012, involving workers from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the Baltic states, in protest against the economic, political and social counter-revolution that the European Union and International Monetary Fund are pushing through in the wake of the world financial crisis. Sporadic general strikes continue to break out across Europe, an indication that the class struggle is sharpening and the trade unions are being compelled by the rank-and-file to respond in a much more overtly political way. In this article I want to discuss in more detail the function and significance of the mass strike in relation to works written by two proletarian women writers in the 1920s: Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s This Slavery (1925) and Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash (1929). I have chosen these two novels for several reasons. First, they are both compelling depictions of big strikes, which make up the core of the narrative: This Slavery is based on the great Lancashire lockout and strike of weavers in 1911–12, while Clash is centred around the general strike in Britain in 1926. Second, not only are strikes the setting of these novels, they also portray the active participation of women as the

“I Whitened My Face, That They Might Not Know Me” Race and Identity in Olaudah Equiano's Slave Narrative

The aim of this essay is to explore the process of racial adaptation to the image of the Other—of the “White Mask” that is adopted by the Black man—as it is revealed in one of the most famous early slave autobiographies: Olaudah Equianos The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Over the years, critics have reiterated the historic, documentary significance of Equianos work. The author instead looks more critically at the contradictions in racial consciousness—alienation and identification—that Equianos self-portrayal tries to resolve. He also argues that Equianos condition of psychological dualism corresponds to what Frantz Fanon, in his seminal work Black Skin, White Masks, sees as a denial of the Black self and adoption of the false racial identity of the White Other.

Fears of Fragmentation

In his controversial study of the decline of capitalism, How Will Capitalism End? (2016), Wolfgang Streeck, Professor of Sociology at the University of Cologne, envisages the termination of today’s “failing system” not with a revolutionary bang, but more as a tortuously protracted demise in which society as we know it will fall drastically apart, creating a chronic condition of social and political limbo:

Representing the Working Class: Two Plays by John McGrath

In his collection of essays entitled The Bone Won’t Break: On Theatre and Hope in Hard Times, the Liverpool-born playwright John McGrath (1935–2002) points to the systematic social, political and economic marginalization and cultural misrepresentation of working-class people everywhere, a strategy that seeks to keep them from realizing their own collective interests, organization and power. At the same time, as part of a much needed countercultural movement of resistance, McGrath also reasserts the role of radical theatre in helping to combat this constant process of denigration of the working class:

Terror and the Individual in B.S. Johnson's Last Two Novels

B.S. Johnson (1933–73) remains a marginalised figure in 20thcentury British literature. Both as a novelist and documentary filmmaker, his working-class background and socialist convictions made him a constant thorn in the side of the political and cultural establishment. He always had great difficulties getting his books published and after his death his novels went quickly out of print. He belongs therefore to a tradition of revolutionary writers whose work has to be continually recovered from the selective memory of literary history. The recent revival of critical interest in his experimental fiction has, for example, been made at the expense of his commitment to a socialist aesthetic. This essay is in part an attempt to redress that political imbalance and reassert the radical significance of Johnson’s writing. In Trawl (1966), Johnson’s combined wartime memoir and workplace reportage on the fishing industry, he recalls not only his own difficult working-class childhood and youth, but also how this social background and experience influenced his view of society, creating a tangible awareness of class and the class struggle: