While the 1889 Dockers’ Strike was a triumph for the ‘New Unions’, it proved difficult to replicate its success in the 1890s. As the country moved into another economic depression it was the unskilled who tended to be the first to be laid off and strikes became less effective when high unemployment guaranteed the availability of ‘black-leg’ labour.
When dockers and seamen at Hull attempted to reproduce the success of the London dockers in 1893 the strike failed dramatically. As The Times reported, “At Hull, as elsewhere, the New Unionism has been defeated, but nowhere has the defeat been so decisive, or the surrender so abject.”
Another "Kafkaian Image"-Translated from Pavel Campeanu
The predilection towards the tragic comedy relies in the contrast between lucid rationality and the scarcity of action. The artist sees the monstrosity of the world but not the possibility to change it. He is strong enough not to adapt to it, but too weak to change in resonance with his human demands. The situation is at the same time tragic and comic too, as the artist is dominated on the plane of reality by what he tends to determine on the ideal one. It is because of that that he feels the need to detach himself from his own condition by distancing himself and to reconsider it with a relentless lucidity. Kafka was born in a period when the last remains of the political credibility of the Jew community living in Böhmen were destroyed as a social unity in the course of the chauvinistic chase. The respect for oneself disappeared entirely, too. There was a real anti-Semitic feeling even among the Jewish people. The absurdity in Kafka’s short-prose writing marks its...
Comments