The Refusal to Work and the Representation of Political Subjectivity in the 1920s and 2020s

Abstract

This essay analyses the use of the 1926 General Strike as an enabling 'myth' within a range of literary texts from the 1920s and also examines the legacies of such early twentieth-century engagements with a collective refusal to work for later articulations of the 'problem with work'. The essay begins by considering Harold Heslop's The Gate of a Strange Field (1929), and Ellen Wilkinson's Clash (1929), focusing on individual and collective representations of identity and their consequences for political subjectivity. It then considers poetic engagements with the General Strike, particularly the section of Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) that is known as 'The Ballad of the General Strike', but also Naomi Mitchison's 'Remembering 1926'. This section argues that poetic forms produced in response to the General Strike offered new representations of the complexities of national myth. The third section analyses D. H. Lawrence's 1926 essay, 'Return to Bestwood', as well as Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), focusing on the relationships between the General Strike and the individual and collective impacts of modern forms of labour. The essay concludes with an analysis of common concerns about the corrupting impacts of industrial labour and the search for radical imaginative articulations of a ‘refusal of work’ that can be found both in the 1920s and in the twenty-first century.