Letter: "Writing as an ex-member . . . " (1987)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Writing as an ex-member . . . "

Dear Sirs.

Writing as an ex-member of your party who has recently taken out a subscription to the Standard I think I will derive very little pleasure at what I have to say, nevertheless, having lived for 62 years I am now coming to terms with "the facts of life" and endeavouring to learn to live with them.

Like "the old days" you have some very forthright and amusing writers. Steve Coleman seeming to be a leading light; and his June 1987 article about "Post Election Blues" was in the usual format, excepting for the last sentence. Predicting that June 12th would be "a bloody miserable day" (and it was!) Comrade Coleman concludes by writing — "and for none will it be more miserable than for those who know how easy it would be to change the whole rotten set-up and establish a society fit to live in".

Apart from the serious error of grammar, whether one is of the chosen few (i.e. members of the SPGB) or the abysmally ignorant majority it is a gross exaggeration to state that any change from the capitalist system to a socialist society would be easy!

May I quote the General Election figures for Islington South and Finsbury? Tory 8,482, Labour 16,511, SDP 15,706, Greens 382, Humanists 56, SPGB 81. It is a reflection of the idiocy of human beings that only 56 people voted for a party which has more sense in one of its little leaflets than in the whole Conservative and Labour manifestos, but the fact that out of a total of 41.218 Islington and Finsbury electors only 81 voted for the SPGB merely proves that what the renowned Robert Tressell wrote over 70 years ago. is as true today as it was then. I have formed the opinion that the working class are more dumb than Dumbo ever was. There is far more insanity outside than inside "mental institutions" and on the whole human beings are much more obsessed with erotica and religious myths than their well-being and happiness. "Look at them". Robert Tressell's character said, with a contemptuous laugh. "Look at them! The people you are trying to make idealists! Look at them! Some of them howling and roaring like wild beasts, or laughing like idiots, others standing with dull and stupid faces devoid of any trace of intelligence or expression, listening to the speakers whose words convey no meaning to their stultified minds, and others with their eyes gleaming with savage hatred of their fellow men, watching eagerly for an opportunity to provoke a quarrel that they may gratify their brutal natures. Can't you see that these people, whom you are trying to make understand your plan for the regeneration of the world, your doctrine of universal brotherhood and love are for the most part — intellectually — on a level with Hottentots? The only things they feel any interest in are beer, football, betting, and. of course — one other subject. Their highest ambition is to be allowed to Work. And they desire nothing better for their children. They have never had an independent thought in their lives . . .!" And so the brilliant monologue goes on. and. like a surgeon's scalpel cutting into a cancerous growth it reveals the monumental task that the changing of society involves.

I work in a small post office-cum-general stores and apart from the usual vast majority of customers who can see nothing beyond their daily dose of Murdoch's law (i.e. the Sun). 20J.P. (i.e.. coffin, or is it coughing, nails) and a bar of Cadbury's for the weekend. I was appalled at the time of the General Election by the amount of people "on the Social" who voted Tory!

When I informed one elderly gentleman that I was a Socialist and would not be voting in my constituency, he told me to "get back to Russia" On June 12th he came up to my counter to draw his pittance of a pension triumphantly wearing a cheap blue rosette and sneered. "Well. I suppose you're laughing the other side of your face now that we've beaten you!”

I conclude with Robert Tressell's immortal words which sum up my feelings towards The Socialist Party of Great Britain. Although you are light years behind the razzamatazz of the Labour and the Tory parties and you are probably right in your analysis of society (based, of course, upon Karl Marx's) "your party persists in regarding people as rational beings, and that is where you make your mistake. Labour are just learning, the Tories knew long ago the sort of people they have to deal with; they know that although their bodies are the bodies of grown men. their minds are the minds of little children. That is why it has been possible to deceive and bluff and rob them for so long." (The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, 1905)

And please do not accuse me of arrogance. Anger, contempt, scorn — I plead guilty to these, but I make no claims to be proud of the fact that I belong to a species that will burn, blind and torture innocent animals for the sake of making a profit and kill and maim fellow humans in times of war.

Reg Otter 

Shepperton, Middlesex.

Reply

Before turning to the very real and understandable reasons for our correspondent's lack of hope, let us spell out what defeatism means. It means that you come to terms with a social system which you know to be exploiting you, restricting you, impoverishing your lifestyle and, with increasing ferocity, threatening you with destruction. Not only is capitalism doing that to you, but to your friends and family — people who you care for and want to help. And to millions you have never met. capitalism is doing even worse things. As a defeatist you accept that this is the way life must be. You give up on the struggle to transform society.

Reg Otter is clearly not a complete defeatist. He still tells fellow workers that he is a socialist. He no doubt argues with workers and may well be underestimating his ability to change the way some of them think. Our fellow workers do not always tell us directly when they have found socialist ideas convincing but we would not be surprised if there are a few workers scattered about who would say, "You've got to hand it to old Reg Otter, he talks a lot of sense about the problems of society".

What our correspondent most certainly does underestimate is the intelligence of the working class. After all, these creatures who are "more dumb than Dumbo ever was" make a pretty good job of running the trains, producing all the wealth in the factories, operating on bodies in hospitals, teaching children to read, delivering letters — and the thousands of other important and intelligent tasks which we, the workers, perform. Yes. plenty of workers are laughing like idiots and seem to have dull and stupid faces and appear to have eyes gleaming with savage hatred for their fellow men. Socialists do not romanticise the working class: we are of that class and know just how degraded the system can make wage slaves. But — and Reg Otter will know this very well — the human animal is highly adaptable. In a jungle s/he will behave like a beast. Given an incentive to leave the jungle society of capitalism workers could co-operate. Just as they are doing every day when it comes to producing and distributing wealth, just as workers are always doing when it comes to voluntary efforts to help make other people's lives better. Workers are not naturally programmed for capitalism; nor are we naturally programmed to forever reject the cooperative option of socialism.

Our correspondent is right if he is saying that now, in 1987, the political minds of the workers of the world are in a frightful mess. He is right if he says that this is dispiriting. He was right to feel miserable on 12 June. He is entitled to be angry, although it will do him little good. But should he dismiss the efforts of The Socialist Party as a waste of time? We perform an enormously important task in putting to workers the only alternative to the dangerous chaos of capitalism. We succeeded in persuading Reg Otter to join us and even though he later decided to leave, because he is not arrogant he will accept that there was nothing special about him which made him able to work for socialism while other workers could not understand. Every time we win one new worker to our cause it is proof that we could win a thousand more. And. in practical terms, each new member provides us with access to several workers who know him or her.

The 81 votes for socialism in Islington South and Finsbury was disappointing. We would like to have recorded all 41.218. We ran a great campaign in the area, as many workers living in Islington (even if they do not support The Socialist Party) will testify. Unlike any other party in the election, we consistently asked voters not to vote for us unless they agreed in full with our ideas. That 81 did vote for us — in a constituency which was a key Labour marginal, and in which the Green Party were there to take away the mere protest votes — is something to get working on. If we could persuade those 81 socialist voters to join our Islington Branch we would be very happy. Similarly in Swansea, where we recently recorded 50 votes in just one ward.

Of course, we could regard 81 and 50 votes as good reasons to give up and learn to live with capitalism. Well firstly, capitalism may not allow us to live with it for that much longer, because it is set to put an end to the live-in arrangement, and secondly society will one day change from production for profit to production for need and we are not going to waste a moment's time or withhold any energy to hasten that revolution. We are not defeatists and neither, perhaps, is Reg Otter: maybe he has made the comments which he has so that we can give him the answer he is waiting for. Get into the movement for socialism and do your bit to make history

Editors.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (2004)

Book Review from the November 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Penguin Books have published in their Modern Classics series a new edition of this working class classic by Robert Tressell. Price £8.99. Well worth reading if you’ve not got a copy already –  despite the odd choice, to write the introduction, of a one-time “ministerial adviser in the Labour government of 1997-2001”, odd because Tressell was a member of the SDF, whose members had some knowledge of Marxian ideas, enough anyway for them to see through Labourism.

Sting in the Tail: Hobson's Choice (1989)

The Sting in the Tail column from the August 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hobson's Choice

Walk down your local High Street and marvel at the choice capitalism gives to the consumer.

Just look at all the different stores and shops there are competing for our custom. Take shoe shops for example. There's Dolcis, Freeman Hardy Willis, Lllley and Skinner, Saxone, Manfleld, Cable, Trueform, Curtess and Shoe City.

Plenty of healthy competition there, eh?

Well, no, because all of them are owned by Sears which describes itself as "Britain's foremost speciality retailer with 3,600 outlets".

Some competition. Some choice!

Good News, Bad News

First, the good news for the government The 60,000 drop in unemployment in April was double the expected figure (cheers). The bad news Is that this will add to the pressure for higher wages and salaries (groan).

But what's bad about that? tf demand for labour is high then its price will rise and surely this is in line with the government's free market philosophy?

Ah, but THAT'S different! Why? Norman Fowler, the Employment Secretary, explains that the current increase in average earnings of over nine per cent "puts at risk our ability to compete" (The Guardian, 19 May)

Those who choose to run capitalism never have their troubles to seek, with even good news bringing gloom in its wake. Don't you feel sorry for them?

Intellectual Poverty

John Moore's claim that poverty has been abolished was probably meant to rescue his sinking political career, but did he have to make such a fool of himself by arguing that poverty should only be measured by Victorian standards?

But how should poverty be measured? Here's how Owen, the socialist house painter, did it In Robert Tressed's novel 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists":

What I call poverty is when people are not able to secure for themselves all the benefits of civilisation . . . If a man is only able to provide himself and his family with the bare necessaries of existence, that man's family is living in poverty. Since he cannot enjoy the advantages of civilisation he might just as well be a savage; better, In fact, for a savage does not know what he is deprived of.

This was written by a working man and Moore's argument is, by comparison, a measure of his intellectual poverty.

Racial Nonsense

Jewish and Aslan groups in Glasgow were upset recently over an invitation to take part in a TV debate with Lady Jane Birdwood, a veteran racist loony.

A spokesman summed up why both these groups boycotted the debate:

We were concerned that the programme would publicise the views of the far right. Their opinion is rarely reported In Scotland and we wish that to remain the case.

(Observer Scotland 7th May)

Leaving aside the undemocratic idea expressed here, do these people think that racist organisations don't exist in Glasgow? Their literature is openly sold in the city and they cannot be ignored out of existence.

The best way to deal with racist ideas is to publicly expose them for the nonsense they are, and those who refused to participate in the debate, which took place anyway, missed an opportunity the Socialist Party would have jumped at.

The Baby Killers

The world has ten per cent more food than it needs, but human error, neglect and complacency have left at least half a billion people hungry, a UN conference was told yesterday. "It Is . . . a question of distribution and imbalances created by International trade, not of shortage”, a conference report said.

Participants were told malnutrition, coupled with diarrohoea and Infectious diseases, kill an estimated 14 million children every five years. The conference reported that most malnourished people live in Asia and Africa.

(The Guardian 23rd. May)

Could any evidence be more damning? Capitalism, the mass killer without parallel, stands convicted yet again and only awaits its deserved fate. Come on, workers, what are you waiting for?

Adspeak

That capitalism is a wasteful society is nowhere better illustrated than in the advertising industry. The latest piece of madness from there is reported in the advertising trade magazine Campaign (19th. May)

Lyons Tetley Is introducing round tea bags In a bid to grab a bigger slice of a £300 million market, while trying to halt the relentless decline in tea sales.

The company has spent £9 million developing what it claims is its biggest product innovation since tea bags appeared in Britain 36 years ago. And It Is putting £3 million behind a TV campaign through D'Arcy Masslus Benton and Bowles.

The new round bags have been launched, because, according to the company, they give the consumer ”emotional satisfaction”. Deputy marketing director Ian Prutton said: *The shape Is such a neat fit with a cup, mug or pot there’s an immediate practical, tangible benefit.”

£9 million spent on developing and £3 million in advertising round tea bags.

It does not take much imagination to think of £12 million being spent on something a little more socially useful.

Like perhaps helping to avoid the death of 14 million children in the next five years. That would certainly give us more "emotional satisfaction".

T.V. Drama

The studio lighting is turned down. The subject is seen in silhouette. The voice has been distorted, so that the subject cannot be identified.

What's going on? Is it a Mafia supergrass, a sex offender perhaps an IRA bomber? Let's listen to the disguised voice. "I've been working on the railway for 15 years. My take home pay with overtime and working my rest day is £150 per week".

It's nothing more sinister than a member of the National Union of Railwaymen in dispute with the British Railways Board. But why the elaborate precautions to disguise the identity of the striker? It is because the BRB have issued a directive that forbids railway workers talking to the Press unless what they say has been cleared by the BRB. This is industrial relations 1989 style.

The government also have a representative in the studio. He is bathed in the full glare of the studio lights. The only distortion to his voice is the arrogant upper class accent of a public school education.

He is Mr. Paul Channon, Minister of Transport and millionaire. He doesn't need to work his rest day. In fact after the Lockerbie air disaster he flew off to the West Indies on holiday.

He is indignant about the "selfishness" of railway workers. He speaks angrily about "duty to the public".

He is a hypocritical parasite defending a class divided exploitative system. It is time the working class turned the lights out on him and all his class!

The Whole Loaf (1978)

From the December 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

“It's no good dealing with the symptoms. It's the whole system that’s got to be torn up by the roots.”
"Band together to take it back from them. Let’s band together not to bargain but to own."
“We’re not fighting for the crumbs between ourselves. You've got to go for the whole loaf.”
If we enter their House of Parliament on the backs of the Unions, they’ll just buy us off. We’ve got to hold out for the works — not the crumbs. Even if we force capitalism to eliminate poverty completely, the cancer will still be in the air. We’ve got to tear it out by the roots and build a new world.”
There are still erudite professors lecturing in colleges to-day who don't understand now in 1978. what Tressell the housepainter saw so clearly in 1911.

From “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists” by Steve Lowe, after the book by Robert Tressell, produced recently by the Joint Stock Theatre Group at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith.

Cooking the Books: The Nutty Philosopher (2006)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Tax breathing, not chocolate cake” ran the headline in the Times (30 May) of an article by a certain Jamie White, who was billed as “a philosopher”. It didn’t say of what but he seems to be a philosopher of taxation.

In any event, he advanced the view that the best things to tax are things people are prepared to pay for irrespective of the price. When the price of cakes reaches a certain level people will stop buying them, but whatever level a hypothetical price of air would reach people would still buy it.

“Privatising the air is the ideal solution”, wrote the philosopher. “Alas, it is difficult to arrange”.

Alas, be buggered. Fortunately, it is impossible to arrange. Not that some enterprising capitalist wouldn’t seek to own and sell air if they could, as in the nightmare situation envisaged by Owen in Robert Tressell’s classic novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists:

  They have monopolized everything that it is possible to monopolize; they have got the whole earth, the minerals in the earth and the streams that water the earth. The only reason they have not monopolized the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it. If it were possible to construct huge gasometers and to draw together and compress within them the whole of the atmosphere, it would have been done long ago, and we should have been compelled to work for them in order to get money to buy air to breathe. And if that seemingly impossible thing were accomplished tomorrow, you would see thousands of people dying for want of air – or of the money to buy it – even as now thousands are dying from want of other necessaries of life. You would see people going about gasping for breath, and telling each other that the likes of them could not expect to have air to breathe unless they had the money to pay for it (chapter 15).

While only a nutty professor would argue that the private ownership of air was an “ideal solution”, most people today accept that the private ownership of the productive resources needed for life – land, water, minerals and the instruments needed to fashion them into useful things – is reasonable. Actually, from the of view of meeting human needs, it is a quite unreasonable solution.

Why should the land, water and the other things that are just as essential to life as air be privately owned any more than the air we breathe? Why should a section of society be in a position to hold the rest of us to ransom and say “unless you work for us (for less than you produce) you can’t have access to what you need to live?”

Of course they shouldn’t. All the means and instruments of production should belong in common to the whole community as the only basis on which they can be used to satisfy the needs of every member of society.

The good news is that White will be regarded as a fruit cake by most supporters of capitalism too. Even Madame Thatcher baulked at the free buying and selling of body parts, inconsistent with her own nutty philosophy as this was.

Obituary: David Boyd (1979)

Obituary from the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The death occurred in February of Comrade David Boyd, just three weeks short of his celebrating forty years as a party member. His son has provided the following obituary:

David Boyd was born in 1903 in Larne, Northern Ireland. Grandfather was a foreman at the local aluminium works and although a devout Presbyterian he supported Irish Home Rule—an unfashionable if not dangerous viewpoint. His was apparently the only copy of the Daily News to arrive each day on the ferry boat from Stranraer (the republican minority presumably taking more subversive journals). Dad remembered when the windows were tarred over and only my grandfather’s senior position in the local Masonic Lodge preventing real violence and loss of job. Amid the conflict and stupidity of the 1912 Loyalist gun-running, the War and the ‘Troubles’, Dad learned about socialism from a Scottish lodger at their home and from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The Depression came early to Northern Ireland and Dad came to London. He took a variety of jobs and was sacked in about 1930 by the Co-operative Insurance Society for helping to organise a strike of fellow agents. A flirtation with the CP was followed by Orwellian disillusion and a home in the SPGB which he never left. “I thought about things’’, he told us “that’s why I am a socialist". Dad's ashes will rest in the local cemetery looking towards Mugsborough.

What's next for privatisation? (1989)

From the April 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

"They have monopolised everything that it is possible to monopolise: they have got the whole earth, the minerals in the earth and the streams that water the earth. The only reason they have not monopolised the daylight and the air is that it is not possible to do it. If it were possible to construct huge gasometers and to draw together and compress within them the whole of the atmosphere, it would have been done long time ago, and we should have been compelled to work for them in order to get money to buy air to breathe. And if that seemingly impossible thing were accomplished tomorrow, you would see thousands of people dying for want of air — or of the money to buy it — even as now thousands are dying for want of the other necessaries of life. You would see people going about gasping for breath, and telling each other that the likes of them could not expect to have air to breathe unless they had the money to pay for it. Most of you here, for instance, would think so and say so. Even as you think at present that it's right for a few people to own the Earth, the Minerals and the Water, which are all just as necessary as is the air. In exactly the same spirit as you now say: 'It's Their Land , It's Their Water'. It's Their Coal', It's Their Iron', so you would say ‘It's Their Air', 'These are Their gasometers, and what right have the likes of us to expect them to allow us to breathe for nothing?’”

— Owen to his fellow workers in Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

High on Tressell (1970)

Book Review from the October 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Robert Tressell and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, by Jack Mitchell: Lawrence & Wishart, 45s.

Interest in the scope and background of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has grown steadily since the publications, in 1951 and 1955 respectively, of F.C. Ball’s biography Tressell of Mugsborough and the full version of the book as Tressell—Robert Noonan -wrote it. Previously, little or nothing had been known about this most widely read of all books about working men since its appearance in 1914. Now, a further book on Tressell by Ball is promised: in 1967 The Times revealed that Tressell’s daughter Kathleen, thought to have been killed in an accident in 1919, was still alive: in August this year, The Guardian published details of surviving examples of Tressell’s decorative painting.

Mitchell’s book is an attempt at detailed critical analysis of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It has an astonishingly patronising foreword by Raymond Williams, and its endeavour is to place the Philanthropists among the great works of literature. Mitchell takes a classification suggested by Arnold Kettle, in an article called "Dickens and the Popular Tradition”, in which the classical nineteenth-century novelists are divided as belonging to "bourgeois critical realism” or “popular critical realism”. The difference is in “sensibility”, or the writer’s class awareness. The height of popular critical realism is "proletarian humanism”, and Mitchell sees this as reaching its peak in Dickens in the nineteenth century and Tressell in the twentieth.

In developing this theme, there are some interesting references to nineteenth-century working-class novels which are little known today. Mitchell says they failed because working-class sensibility was insufficiently developed before the last years of the century. Between 1889 and 1906, however: "The advent of imperialism revolutionised the situation.” The foundation of the Labour Party was a cultural as well as a political landmark: "It is not by chance that it precedes the break-through of the British working class in the narrower field of literary culture”— that is, the writing of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists—“by only five years”. The working class was about to wage fierce war. Mitchell writes: “By 1914 it was touch and go which would come first, world war or social revolution.’’ In this light, Tressell’s book is a vital self-criticism of the working class as it prepared for the struggle.

This is all dreadful nonsense. It throws into relief the weakness of Mitchell’s study of Tressell—that it is anything but critical. Starting thus from the belief that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was the expression of “a realisation that in the long run they (the working class) were destined to take over the cultural heritage and with it the human leadership of the nation”, Mitchell praises it on every count and in the highest terms. The comparisons in which it is eulogised are themselves breathtakingly uncritical at times. For example "The two greatest anti-capitalist writers in Britain at that time, Shaw and Tressell”—though later Mitchell speaks of Tressell’s implicit exposure of the Fabian propaganda whose popular exponent, in fact, was Shaw. And what of Dickens, to whom Mitchell continually returns as the genius of popular humanism before Tressell? George Orwell has pointed out that Dickens never penned a decent picture of a working man or woman; the case is strong that Dickens radicalism was rooted in fear of the mob.

All the same, there is a good deal which is interesting in Mitchell’s examination of the structure of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. As he says, its central situation is the labour process. The characters are carefully arranged to show all the stages of a manual worker’s life, from the apprentice to the discarded old man. Attitudes to labour are crucial points in the book’s criticism of capitalism. The boss-figures are Anti-Man, in Mitchell’s phrase, precisely because they are destructive of men’s attachment to and satisfaction from labour. Influenced by William Morris, Tressell made art part of labour: and in this sense Owen’s decoration of the drawing-room in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a symbolic victory.

One of Mitchell’s more telling comparisons is between Tressell’s work and that of the “Naturalist” writers of the late nineteenth century. At first glance, the insistent accumulation of detail—the minute descriptions of rooms, buildings. clothes—reminds one of, say, Zola. But Zola’s picture was always of a slice of life whereas Tressell, as Mitchell points out, aims to show life itself under capitalism. While Zola lifts stones to reveal the horrors under them, Tressell’s mass of detail points to “the abnormality of the normal”: the horror of the stones themselves. Mitchell draws attention too to the exclusion by Tressell of any human personal element which might admit the possibility of bridge-building between the classes. Tressell’s insistence always is on the capitalist system as the culprit; grotesque as his boss-characters are, they remain the system’s creations.

Those who are interested in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists will, and ought to, read this book. Despite the parallels it draws with Fielding, Bunyan. Swift, Gorky, Hardy and others—besides Dickens—it does not succeed in its intention of giving the Philanthropists an exalted place in literature. Nor is there any reason really for seeking to do so. Tressell’s work is a gem in its field. If it were a literary masterpiece, perhaps we should not lay claim, as we all do, to innumerable copies given away and lent to people at work. Mitchell lays on his claims thickly, apparently high on enthusiasm for Tressell. One sees, however, the political malpositions from which the claims arise - and wonders whether such a structure of illusion would have been tolerable to Tressell himself.

Robert Barltrop

The abolition of money (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

At first it is hard to envisage a world without money. It requires a considerable jump of the political imagination to think of life without banks, wallets, coins, bills, cheque books or financial worries. From birth to the grave, workers’ lives are conditioned by money. Without it we starve; because of it we are poor; to get it we are forced into wage slavery; if we steal it we can be locked away; people grow old before their time because of it.

In Robert Tressell's classic socialist novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the socialist, Owen, explained to his workmates the nature of money:

“Let us begin at the beginning”, continued Owen . . .“First of all, what do you mean by Poverty?”
“Why, if you’ve got no money, of course,” said Crass impatiently.
The others laughed disdainfully. It seemed to them such a foolish question.
“Well, that’s true enough as far as it goes,” returned Owen, “that is, as things are arranged in the world at the present. But money itself is not wealth: it’s of no use whatever.”
At this there was another outburst of jeering laughter.
“Supposing for example that you and Harlow were shipwrecked on a desolate island, and you saved nothing from the wreck but a bag containing a thousand sovereigns, and he had a tin of biscuits and a bottle of water.” “Make it beer,” cried Harlow appealingly.
"Who would be the richer man, you or Harlow?” (p. 29)

In short, it is not money as such which can satisfy needs, but money as a medium of exchange. According to Owen, "Money is the cause of poverty because it is the device by which those who are too lazy to work are enabled to rob the workers of the fruits of their labour” (p. 209). The significant point is that Tressell (or Robert Noonan, as he was really called) was not considered strange for making his socialist character advocate the abolition of the monetary system. At the turn of the century, when the Socialist Party of Great Britain was formed, socialists were frequently heard advocating a moneyless society. After all, how could one logically speak about a system of common ownership without referring to its logical consequences?

These days, those who pose as socialists, but in fact have no other purpose than to reform the capitalist system, are never heard to refer to the abolition of money. Benn, the SWP, the Communist Party and Co. are all united in their dismissal of the possibility of a moneyless society. The celebrated Clause Four of the Labour Party constitution states its aim as “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. The illogicality of such an objective betrays the Labour Party’s profound confusion about the nature of socialism: if resources are commonly owned, who is going to need money to buy anything and who will be selling it? The abolition of all property and the introduction of common ownership necessarily does away with the anachronistic social relationships of buying and selling. The confusion of the Communist Party of Great Britain is clearly demonstrated in its pamphlet. Time to Change Course; in the section headed “Where Will The Money Come From?” (p. 81), we are told about financing socialism:

Under socialism, with all the main industries, land, resources and financial houses publicly owned, it is from these sources that the main forms of revenue will be derived. Personal taxation will be simple and not too arduous for the majority of people. Indirect taxation would be kept to a minimum. The present rating system would go. Local authorities would rely on other steps to raise local revenue.

Clearly, the Communist Party has failed to liberate itself from the ideological assumptions of the money system. Its members would do well to read Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in which he states that Communists (or socialists) stand for “the abolition of buying and selling”. This revolutionary objective is a hallmark of any principled socialist. Anyone claiming to stand for socialism who rejects the need for a society without money (or the possibility of attaining it) is not a socialist and should be treated as an opponent.

Great ideas are of social origin and never the product of just one brain. In the months before Marx’s Communist Manifesto was published in English (in November 1850), a number of workers in Britain were discussing the idea of abolishing money. The correspondence on the subject, which appeared in the Chartist journal, The Red Republican, has never before been seriously examined by historians. Presumably, most of them have dismissed the correspondence as an insignificant exchange of views between harmless economic eccentrics; in fact, it is a highly significant discussion, showing that there were workers discussing the case for a moneyless society before the Socialist Party of Great Britain began to advocate it.

The first letter, from George Smith of Salford, was published in The Red Republican on 27 July 1850, under the heading “ABOLITION OF MONEY”. He argues that

. . . in order . . . to prepare the way for the absolute supremacy of the working classes, preparatory to the abolition of the system of classes, what should be done? Evidently something more than getting possession of political rights, or even destroying those twin monsters, rent and usury; for had we possession of the one and had successfully destroyed the other, there would yet remain in existence a monster which would reproduce its kind to torment humanity; and that monster is money! Sir, in my opinion, so long as mankind will agree to have a circulating medium — will allow everything in life to be measured by money — so long will they suffer the evil consequences springing therefrom . . .

By 10 August, Smith’s letter had provoked a response. The writer, who signed himself “A Wage Slave”, opposes the need to abolish money, stating that “What society wants is just social institutions”. He argued that capitalism survives because workers are not paid the full value of their labour power and that the real need is for an equitable distribution of money. (The modern Left, one hundred and thirty years later, has not advanced beyond such theoretical fallacies.)

The Red Republican of 24 August contains two letters on the money question, taking up three columns. The first is from RPP, who states that the abolition of money “is the most important subject for discussion at the present time”. He goes on to agree that money should be abolished:

I would root out and abolish a system that compels man to give the sweat of his heart’s blood to the great money-mongers, wasting his own time, strength and happiness, as wealth may command. It is the slavery of the many for the sake of the few. Such a state of things must no longer exist, for man was made to enjoy all things equally with his fellow-man.

But — just as the reader is thinking that the correspondent has hit the nail very close to its head — RPP proceeds to argue that “the working classes must return to barter”. The second letter is from George Smith, who initiated the correspondence, and contains some excellent answers to the arguments of “Wage Slave”:

Strange, that in the 19th century, any wage slave should be found to advocate the continuance, in any shape, of that which, whilst it shall last, must perpetuate his vassalage, to its “fortunate possessors”. Does not my friend see both the craft and the hellishness of money? Who produces everything which sustains life, and feeds our desires for luxuries? The workers! Through the instrumentality of their labour, and by no other means can these things be produced. Then by what chicanery do those who “work not, neither do they spin” obtain all they want to superfluity, whilst those who produce are kept almost without? Why, by the crafty invention and use of money, with which they, like true “philanthropists”, come to the producer, and assure him that the food he is taking home is not “the stuff of life” but that which they will give him in return for his food is the real sustainer of existence, and thus he is cheated out of his produce for a shadow.

Smith rather confuses cause and effect — it is not money which produces class division, but the other way round — but nevertheless he is clearly moving in the direction of the ideas later to be elaborated by Marx. Responding to “Wage Slave’s” advocacy of a “just commercial system”, Smith rightly states that:

For a man to dispose (or sell) of his labour at the “public mart” presupposes a buyer of that labour, and, according to our friend’s just commercial system, I am afraid that no buyers would purchase unless they could live out of such purchases. To live by buying and selling is to live nefariously.

“Wage Slave” replies on 7 September, stating that he can now see the importance of Smith’s idea, but doubts whether everyone else will be intelligent enough to live in a moneyless society. (A familiar argument from modern Leftists.) “Why propose to do that which is impossible at the present time?” asks “Wage Slave”. This question was asked of the SPGB when it was formed in 1904 and it was for this reason that our members were labelled “the impossibilists”. If those who took this view in 1850 and 1904 had spent less time running away from the need to convince people of a good idea, and telling its advocates that they were wasting their time, we would have achieved the seemingly impossible long ago.

On 14 September Alexander Bill contributed a letter to the correspondence, in which he argued (rather confusedly) that he was opposed to “the total and unconditional abolition of money”, although he did agree with Smith “when he says that our present monetary system is the basis of all those social evils under which we labour”. His answer was to introduce a “prohibition of private trading” and “the establishment of public marts”. Effectively, this was an argument for state capitalism.

The final letter on the subject was published on 28 September and came from George Smith. To “Wage Slave’s” claim that workers could not arrive at the point of intelligence which would make a moneyless society possible, Smith responds:

Intelligence! What is it? Walker says intelligence is “perception, understanding”. Now, will my friend say that it is impossible for the intelligent to excite the perception of the, at present, ignorant, and give them understanding?

No further letter appeared on the subject. Smith’s question remained unanswered. But since 1850, the post-Chartist Left has responded to the question in the negative. While claiming to be fully committed Marxists, they refuse to advocate the case for the abolition of money because they consider the working class too stupified by capitalist conservatism ever to accept or understand it. Instead, they argue in favour of state capitalism. It is because of this that socialists are fundamentally hostile to the left-wing parties and groups.

Genuine socialists stand for a society in which all factories, farms, offices, docks, mines — indeed, the entire means of producing and distributing wealth — will be owned by the entire world community. The resources of the earth will belong to everyone. No laws will exist to preserve the right of one section of society to use things and another section to be denied the use of them. World socialism will be a social order based on free access for all people to all the goods of the earth. In such a society money would by an out-dated relic. Nobody will buy anything or sell anything or pay for anything. Those who cannot easily imagine such an arrangement should remember that people in pre-capitalist societies would have found our present social order equally difficult to comprehend. Those who have made the mental leap from the prison of the money system to the freedom of world socialism are urged to join us now in our struggle to create the society of tomorrow. The objective is urgent; we have waited for too long.

Steve Coleman

Down with justice! (1989)

From the April 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are words of which people should have learned to beware. Liberation, meaning it is your allies who will try to kill you this time instead of your enemies. Prosperity, a sure thing you are about to feel the pinch more tightly. Progress, the development of new ways to exploit the majority of people and turn creativeness sour. And justice. In Britain, they say. it is the best that money can buy. Demands and pleas for it echo through history and every day's newspapers So do threats of it: as well as the grail of the oppressed, justice is the first refuge of every oppressor. With each invocation of the word goes the feeling that a moral principle is involved, that there is an over-riding consideration of rights. Is there justice to be had?

One answer might be that it is impossible to get under capitalism, or has to be fought for against odds. On that basis, working-class claims for justice acquire greater weight and passion, because sentiment favours assaults on the inaccessible. Unfortunately, it is a superficial and mistaken answer. The mistake is in the assumption that there is true justice which is simply being with-held or misapplied. If hands could be laid on it, the belief goes, wrongs would be righted and truth prevail. In fact, justice is a concept established and elevated by property society for its purposes alone. Or, as Marx and Engels addressed the capitalist mind in the Communist Manifesto:

. . . your jurisprudence is but the will of a class made into law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of your class. The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property — historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production — this misconception you share with every ruling class that has proceeded you.

What has to be realised is that there is no injustice — there is only justice. Does this mean that appeal is useless, that every personal and social oppression must be taken as inexorable and endured? By no means. But the argument and struggle had better be for concrete purposes, not for the phantom of a moral truth. Indeed, the Communist Manifesto points out that early major gains by organised workers were won "by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself” — not by appeals to humanity and justice. In criminal actions it is only the defendant who asks for justice in court. The police and prosecutors know it is there: what they ask for is the penalties.

The futility of seeking social redress in the name of justice was ridiculed by Engels in Anti-Duhring, in 1878:

If for the imminent overthrow of the present mode of distribution of the products of labour, with its crying contrasts of want and luxury, starvation and debauchery, we had no better guarantee than the consciousness that this mode of distribution is unjust, and that justice must eventually triumph, we should be in a pretty bad way, and we might have a long time to wait.

Underlying the belief that some better kind of justice can be had is, inevitably, acceptance of capitalism s yard-sticks and axioms. The idea of rights and freedoms, the idea of equal opportunity — they sound like emancipated thought, but they denote thought sadly fettered. In effect, they propose alterations and exceptions to the rules; the question not asked is who makes the rules, and why they exist. Robert Tressell's biographer. F.C. Ball, relates how the author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists would suddenly ask men in argument: "What makes you think you are entitled to food and clothing?", "Can you tell me why your children should have shoes on their feet?” This is going to the heart of the matter. When the very means of living are owned by a minority, what can be said of the majority's right to live? What is the point of believing that justice can come true?

This is the difference between the reformist and the revolutionary or socialist. The reformist hopes (at a later stage perhaps pretends, professionally) to find a soft heart and a love of truth in capitalist society. Of course by their own professed moral standards those who rule and dispose in capitalism are perenially cynical, vicious and low; but that reveals only the spuriousness of the standards. The socialist knows that Engels, again, wrote in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific:

According to this conception, the ultimate causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in the minds of men. in their increasing insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the mode of production and exchange: they are to be sought not in the philosophy but in the economics of the epoch concerned.

The socialist case holds no reference to justice or the rights of man. Its foundation, like that of capitalism, is in material interests. When the great majority who form the working class are ready to establish socialism, it will be not a matter of belief in eternal principle; but because they have had enough of deprivation, inferiority and modern barbarity as all capitalism can give, and propose to run society by themselves for themselves. That this society will be a thousand times better and more satisfying in every way is true — but the drive to it is not a moral one. So far from promising to inaugurate justice, opportunity and the recognition of rights, the revolutionary proposal is to do away with them and replace these slave-concepts with the human relationships of socialism. This too was one of the challenges laid down in the Communist Manifesto. Mimicking liberal-philosophical timidity, the authors say:

'There are. besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom. Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis: it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.'

And the reply:

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages. viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms . . .
   In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonism, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.

About Books (1953)

From the November 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some old-timers in the Trade Unions together with a few in the rebel fringe of the Labour Party, even a few of the older members of the S.P.G.B. have been heard to claim that certain novels read in their younger days were the means of guiding their steps in the direction of Socialism.

Foremost amongst the books which are accorded this honour is Robert Tressall's 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists." We have been asked a number of times to draw this book to the attention of younger readers of the SOCIALIST STANDARD, although, if a person is already a reader of the SOCIALIST STANDARD he will not glean much education from Tressall's book. But he will get a world of fun and a clear insight into conditions in the building and house decorating trades during the first decade of this century.

The book was first printed in 1914 and has been continuously reprinted ever since. It is a story written round the life and work of an imaginary Frank Owen, a house painter and a Socialist (if we excuse a little confusion in his theory) and the small band of his workmates. Owen takes every opportunity in arguments with his mates to expound his Socialist ideas, doing so very simply and effectively for the reader, but hopelessly for his mates.

Certain chapters in the book are more than humorous, they are uproariously funny and there is deep tragedy, too. It is argued by some that this is the story of Robert Tressall's own life. Certainly Tressall was a house painter and, from what little we know of his life there are grounds for the claim. If you are one of the very few who have not read this book, do so. It is still in print and in plentiful supply. If you are one of the old ones who read it years ago, read it again. We have just re-read it before writing about it and we had great fun.

Another book that gets commended for similar reasons is Jack London's "Iron Heel." This is an altogether different book from Tressall's. It has been published in many editions since it first appeared nearly fifty years ago and the latest is still to be seen on bookstalls.

Jack London tells his story through the mouth of the wife of a man called Ernest Everhard who was a "Socialist" who would fit very nicely into the present day Communist Party. It is a story of the development of Capitalism in America projected into the years ahead of the time of telling. It tells of the ever increasing exploitation and subjugation of the workers by a capitalist oligarchy called "The Iron Heel," of the hardening and sharpening of the class struggle and of two bloody insurrections that result in the defeat and massacre of the workers.

Despite the quite good lectures and arguments of Ernest Everhard and some of his associates, this book would never, on its own, convert anyone to Socialism. Its main appeal is emotional and by that means it might urge a man to study class society seriously. But a worker whose approach to social problems is purely emotional is ready prey for political parties which rely on the emotional upsurge of their supporters and not on a clear understanding of working class interests.

A third book in this category is Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," also still in print after forty-seven years. This book was mentioned in these columns in May, 1953. It os a story of the American stock yards and, although it is a remarkably fine story, the same criticism applies as to Jack London's book.

Whether these books are useful to put in the hands of a non-socialist worker with the hope of leading him, by their guidance, along the path to an understanding of Socialism, once he is on that path he will enjoy reading them and we have little doubt but that most convinced Socialists have read them. If they haven't, then we can recommend them to an honourable place on the book shelf.

W. Waters 

The Philanthropists (1965)

Book Review from the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (Panther Books, 7s. 6d.)

Robert Noonan spent the latter part of his life at Hastings working, when work was available, as a house painter and decorator and sign writer. He was a member of the local branch of the Social Democratic Federation. During the first decade of this century he devoted his leisure time to writing a novel which, in his own words, was to be " . . .  a readable story full of human interest and based on the happenings of everyday life, the subject of Socialism being treated incidentally." 

Noonan completed his task in 1910 and soon afterwards entered hospital, where he died of tuberculosis early in 1911. He left his manuscript to his daughter who, like many girls of her time, went into service, taking the manuscript with her. Three years later, following a chance conversation with a member of the staff of Punch, the work was brought out of her tin trunk and published under the author's title, The Ragged trousered Philanthropists and in his pen name, Robert Tressell. 

The earliest editions were abridged or, more correctly, emasculated.. Chapters were left out and the remainder rearranged, phrases were altered and deleted, characters omitted and a tragic ending imposed to meet the commercial demands of the publishers and pander to current literary and political conventions. 

Years later a group of enthusiasts recollected the missing chapters, reconstructed and rearranged them in the form the author originally intended. A more complete edition, with only one chapter missing, was published in 1955 and it is this fuller edition that is now published in paperback form. The original manuscript was presented to the TUC in 1959 and is now held at Congress House, London. 

A book that can command continuous editions and reprints for over fifty years must surely qualify for the title, of a Classic. Thousands of workers have claimed that their political ideas were first stimulated by reading it. 

In the story the author casts himself in the role of Owen, a house painter who devotes every opportunity to explaining to a group of workmates how they are exploited in all directions. Despite their abject poverty and insecurity of livelihood they defend capitalism with heat, using arguments that have long since disappeared from the vocabulary of all but the most stupid of anti-socialists. . 

Those who remember working class conditions during Edwardian days will know that Noonan writes fact into his fiction. He weaves into his story chapters on charitable organisations, religious bodies, unemployment, a parliamentary election, a workers' social outing, the Clarion cyclists, Public houses, public meetings and the seduction of a worker's wife, much of which was omitted from the earlier editions. 

But Noonan did not expound Socialism. When he does propose an alternative to capitalism it turns out to be the woolly reformism of the Social Democratic Party, now in part inherited by the modem Labour Party. The characters that Noonan portrays as Socialists are advocates of nationalisation as the solution to the workers' problems. They visualise a benevolent State operating industry in the interests of the whole of the people, reducing working hours, removing undesirable institutions and increasing wages so as to provide an equitable distribution of wealth. Noonan ridicules religious organisations but accepts the idea of a Great Spirit as creator of natural raw material.

It is astonishing that a man who so obviously realised that it is the private ownership of the means of wealth production from which stem the social evils about which he wrote so satirically, should halt his thinking on the threshold of the socialist alternative. 

We have read this novel a number of times and with this recent reading we find that age has not staled it. We still smiled at the antics of the workers on their beano, we were still sad at the death of Philpot and we were still angry at the stupidity of Crass and the schemes of Sweater and Sir Graball D'Encloseland. With all its faults and limitations we shall probably read it again someday.

W. Waters

The Philanthropists (1960)

From the November 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressell; edited text published by Grant Richards in 1914. Complete text published by Lawrence & Wishart in 1951

This novel may come to be recognised as one of the masterpieces of this century. A novel, after all, is a piece of fiction which tells us something of life and of society. Hazlitt said about the novel: "We find here a close imitation of man and manners: we see the very web and texture of society as it really exists, and as we meet it when we come into the world." And Sir Desmond McCarthy wrote: "It is extremely doubtful whether the aim of the novel is to make an aesthetic appeal. Passages in it may do so: but it aims also at satisfying our curiosity about life as much as satisfying the aesthetic sense." If there are the criteria by which we are to judge novels, then The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists must stand very high indeed. It tells us more about "society as it really exists," and about human beings and their relations with each other—"man and manners"—than you wind in many well-stocked libraries.

For the great central relationship in our society is that between employer and worker: by it, to a greater or less degree, almost all the other relationships in society are affected. And that is Tressell's theme. In a sparse, direct style (all the more remarkable when one remembers the level of popular writing in the pre-Great War era out of which his book came) Tressell tells the story of a group of men, painters and labourers who are re-decorating a house. He follows several of them (in particular the central figure, Frank Owen) to their homes, and shows how they live. Partly through the arguments among the men at work, partly through their experiences in their daily lives, Tressell lays bare the real nature of society.

One can marvel how apposite (despite changes in inessentials) the book's picture of society is today. You may get the flavour of the book from a random quotation:

"But money in itself is not wealth," returned Owen;—"It's of no use whatever."
At this there was another outburst of jeering laughter.
"Supposing, for example, that you and Harlow were shipwrecked on a desolate island, and you had nothing from the wreck but a bag containing a thousand sovereigns, and he had a tin of biscuits and a bottle of water."
"Make it beer!" cried Harlow appealingly.
"Who would be the richer man, you or Harlow?"
"But then you see we ain't shipwrecked on no dissolute island at all," sneered Crass. "That's the worse of your arguments. You can't never get very far without supposing some bloody ridiculous thing or other. Never mind about supposing things wot ain't true; let's 'ave facts and common sense.
"'Ear, 'ear," said old Linden. "That's wot we want—a little common sense."
What do you mean by poverty, then?" asked Easton.
"What I call poverty is when people are not able to secure for themselves al' the benefits of civilisation—the necessaries, comforts, pleasures and refinements of life: leisure, books, theatres, pictures, music, holidays, travel, good and beautiful homes, good clothes, good and pleasant food . . . If a man is only able to provide himself and his family with the bare necessaries of existence, that man's family is living in poverty. Since he cannot enjoy the advantages of civilisation he might just as well be a savage; better, in fact, for a savage does not know what he is deprived of . . ."

But one would have to quote the whole book to do it justice. It makes you laugh, it saddens you, but most of all it makes you angry. It is impossible not to be deeply moved by it. If you have read it already, you will not need to be told how good it is. If you haven't, then buy or borrow a copy as soon as possible.

Alwyn Edgar

A Slight Case of Censorship (1955)

Book Review the December 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressell: Lawrence & Wishart, 30s.

Forty-five years ago a house-painter named Robert Noonan died in a workhouse hospital in Liverpool. He left an 18-year-old daughter in Hastings, and two years later she sold for £10 the manuscript he had entitled The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists; Being the Story of 12 months in Hell, told by one of the Damned, and written down by Robert Tressell. It was first published in 1914. Not many people read it in the next four years, while the philanthropists of the world were killing one another, but from its republication in 1918 it has been a continual best-seller.

Until the appearance of Mr. F. C. Ball's Tressell of Mugsborough in 1951, little was known about the book or its author. It was plainly a piece of autobiography— most people, in fact, believed that the author had committed suicide, as his hero Owen had done. Least known of all was the fact that the entire book had never been published. The most widely circulated edition was known to be an abridgement; it was in fact an abridgement of an abridgment, the "complete" edition containing only about two-thirds of the book as Noonan had written it.

The original editor, Jessie Pope, gave no hint of what damage she had done. She wrote merely:

"In reducing a large mass of manuscript to the limitations of book form, it has been my task to cut away superfluous matter and repetition only. The rest remains as it came from the pen of Robert Tressell, house-painter and signwriter, who recorded his criticism of the present scheme of things until, weary of the struggle, he slipped out of it."

A better pointer to why such extensive cuts were made was given by the publisher. Grant Richards, in his Author-Hunting. After speaking of the length, he said:

"The book was damnably subversive, but it was extraordinarily real . . . Did I do harm by spreading such a book broadcast ? I do not think so."

The complete book has now been published for the first time. The "superfluous matter and repetition" amounts to eleven chapters and some material from the remainder. One main character was erased altogether— Barrington, the well-to-do sentimental Socialist. Several of the expositions of Socialism, always presented as Owen's "lectures" to his workmates, actually belong to the Barrington episodes. Mr. Ball's guess is that "it wouldn't have done to let it be thought that a gentleman might have wit enough to see through the Capitalist system."

The sub-plot about Easton's wife and the Bible-punching lodger is developed to much greater length: Ruth has a baby, parts from and is reconciled with her husband. The excision of this section is probably, as the Preface suggests, "out of consideration for the prejudices of the time." Its inclusion adds a great deal to the novel. Noonan's sharp eye saw how little chance there was of married happiness in poverty—the fault was not in human beings but in the conditions which made a mockery of human relationships. The episode, like many of the other deleted sections, carries a strong criticism of religion. Noonan was especially bitter about Christianity (though his fore-word specifies " no attack . . . upon sincere religion "). He describes feelingly the "charitable" organizations and the smug religious humbugs of Mugsborough— more than anything else, his target is the gross, money-grabbing materialism of the Shining Light Chapel, its pastors and its worshippers.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a remarkable book. Its author was not an educated man in the conventional sense: his writing was often crude, his grammar often bad. He was a craftsman, a member of the Social-Democratic Federation, who had read and learned a bit more than most—enough to make him indignant where others were submissive. His story of painters is the story of what he saw, experienced and knew need not happen: the humiliation and degradation of the working class. He chronicles the despair of the man who wants to make the others see it too:

" 'Oh, damn the cause of poverty!' said one of the new hands. ' I've 'ad enough of this bloody row' . . . This individual had two patches on the seat of his trousers and the bottoms of the legs of that garment were frayed and ragged. He had been out of work for about six weeks previous to this job, and during most of that time he and his family had been existing in a condition of semi-starvation ..."

This is more than a picture of conditions half a century ago, however. If it were merely that, it would have been forgotten along with The Cry of the Children and The White Slaves of England. It is still in a large measure true today. Building workers are better paid and better treated now—mainly because of the unions which Noonan urged his mates to join; they are still poorly paid and without any security of employment. People who discover painters earning £10 a week forget (or don't know) that a painter who gets 50 weeks' work in a year is lucky. Or that the bonuses which bolster a painter's (and many another workman's) pay are only means for him to work himself out of a job the faster. The words of Noonan's sacked workmen can be echoed in a good many places today:

'There it stands! ' said Harlow, tragically extending his arm towards the house. ' There it stands! A job that if they'd only 'ave let us do it properly couldn't 'ave been done with the number of 'ands we've 'ad in less than four months! And there it is, finished, messed up, slobbered over and scamped, in nine weeks! ' 'Yes, and now we can all go to 'ell,' said Philpot gloomily."

The scamping of work—the tears trickling down the paintwork "as if the doors were weeping for the degenerate condition of the decorative arts"—the rushing and paint-slinging because "the job's losing money" (the unvarying condition of every building job, according to the boss) are well-known to every workman. If he has never actually worked for firms named Smeariton and Leavit, Makehast and Sloggit, Dauber and Botchit, Rushem and Pushem, he knows them very well; as well as he knows Crass the foreman, and the employer who "saw only that there was a Lot of Work Done, and his soul was filled with rapture as he reflected that the man who accomplished all this was paid only fivepence an hour."

Times may have changed, but not so very much, and what has changed not at all is the exploitation of the working class. That is why no book of its sort has had as much popularity with working men as the Philanthropists. It is wrong, however, to suppose that the exploitation has to go on. Jessie Pope altered The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and made its hero commit suicide—the act of the man without hope. Robert Noonan knew better. His manuscript ends not with suicide but with optimism:

"Mankind, awaking from the long night of bondage and mourning and arising from the dust wherein they had lain prone so long, were at last looking upward to the light . . .The Golden Light that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism."

Noonan had not really learned enough: his Socialism was the hopeful reformism of the Social-Democratic Federation. It would, however—in this writer's view, at any rate—be churlish to make that a major criticism. Here was a man who lived, suffered and was angry; would that there were many, many more.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has always been worth anybody's money, and in its full version it is even more so. Readers of the Socialist Standard who have noted the price and think it steep will be interested to know that there is a special "Trade Union and Labour Movement" edition in limp cloth for 10s. 6d., for which application may be made to the publishers.

Robert Barltrop

Words, Words, Words . . . (1954)

From the September 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

"I am told that people say I bawl. Well, I allow it, I do bawl and I will bawl." So said a famous tubthumper of two hundred years ago, and in various tones, for various causes, they—we—have been bawling ever since.

Rhetoric under the sky is the oldest, most powerful form of persuasion. It was done in the agora, the market place that was the centre of social and political life in a Greek city. Petronius heckled an orator in Nero's Rome—"by a set of dribbling witticisms you found you could make audiences titter"—on his way to the bawdyhouse. In mediæval England John Ball stood on hillsides demanding freedom and justice for the poor. In Shakespeare's day news, scandal and sedition were put into ballads and sung in the markets, and old Saint Paul's was "the market of young lecturers, whom you may cheapen here at all rates and sizes"; Mark Antony—and his audience—had their prototypes. Through the centuries that followed, in the squares and open spaces they cried salvation and the rights of man—the revivalists, the Chartists and the rest.

The Socialist Party was founded when open-air meetings had never been more copious, when the sects and parties vied with one another in the streets for the attention of the working class. Different conditions engender different approaches. There was more rhetoric in those days—to the modern mind more "ham" perhaps, but it was necessary. The slick, confidence-making political speech belonged to the wireless-telegraph future. Aspiring speakers, practising declamation, tried "The Charge of the Light Brigade", "Men of England" and "The Bells" on one another.

Politically conscious people were more theory-conscious that they are to-day. Marx and Engels were not long dead, Kautsky, Luxemburg and Plechanov in their prime; Bernstein's revisionism and the Fabian Essays were argued fiercely. Socialist speakers had to know their theory and know it well. Many of them learned by heart what were considered key passages of important works: sections of The Communist Manifesto, the statement of historical materialism from The Critique of Political Economy, pages of Capital, of Darwin, Spencer and No Compromise, and bits of Shakespeare too. It was a fine thing to support the analysis of capitalism with

" . . . You take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live."

If the politicos were more learned, the others made up for it. A speaker too vigorous in attacking the prejudices of a prejudiced audience was asking to be thrown in a horse-trough, and not uncommonly he was. Robert Tressell describes the reception of a "Clarion" van by the ragged-trousered philanthropists of Hastings:

"The man on the platform was still trying to make himself heard, but without success. The strangers who had come with the van and the little group of local socialists, who had forced their way close to the platform in front of the would-be speaker, only increased the din by their shouts of appealing to the crowd to 'give the man a fair chance.' This little bodyguard closed round the van as it began to move slowly downhill, but it was completely outnumbered . . . 'We'll give the swines Socialism!' shouted Crass, who was literally foaming at the mouth." 

On most platforms, feeling carried the day. The Liberals and Tories could raise cheers with reference to the Empire and the Flag; the worst accusation against a policy was "it will ruin the country". Emotion was not altogether disfavoured by Socialists. Words like "traitor" carried a great deal; labour leaders were invariably called "Labour bleeders" or "fakirs", and there was even a Party song called "The World for the Workers".

The platform manner changed after the first war, at the same time as urban growth and road traffic began to eliminate meeting-places. The radio and the pictures arrived, and speakers had to compete with them. Some of the smaller parties were swallowed by the Labour and Communist Parties, so that theoretical argument gave place to "practical policies" and calls for "action now." In the 'thirties a new sort of political meeting appeared, with the speaker surrounded by microphones and no questions allowed. The rhetorical tradition of Parliament, too, suffered a blow when Labour came to power with Cabinet Ministers who were without oral grace; Gladstone, Balfour and their contemporaries could often be taken down verbatim to read as excellent prose.

Today audiences are more tolerant (and more knowledgeable too) and speakers, on the whole, more urbane and more discursive. Perhaps there are more wisecracks and fewer long quotations, because our age prefers the former as a condiment to learning. One tradition which the Party has always maintained is that of giving the platform to opposition. Other parties don't do it; the Socialist Party, which has everything to gain and nothing to fear from open discussion, never refuses, and many a truculent opponent has deflated himself trying to present a case against Socialism under the Socialist Party's own auspices.

The industriousness of Party speakers has always been remarkable. Before the first war, two dozen of them held something like a hundred and thirty open-air meetings a month in London alone. The numbers were similar in 1939, and today the meetings still are a vital part of the Party's propaganda. Debates, too: Liberals, Labour, Tories, Communists, pacifists, fascists, parsons, anarchists—all of them have had their petty panaceas atomized by Socialist speakers. Several debates were published as pamphlets, and they are remarkable examples of the Party's case in action.

Fifty years' speaking for Socialism—fifty years of writing for it, as well. The Socialist Standard is unique. It has never known a paid journalist; its writers and editors have been bricklayers, clerks, housewives, busmen—all sorts and conditions of working people in their spare time. The first page of the first issue said:

"In the Socialist Party of Great Britain we are all members of the working class, and cannot hope that our articles will always be finely phrased, but we shall endeavour to lay before you on every occasion a sane and sound pronouncement on all matters affecting the welfare of the working class. What we lack in refinement of style we shall make good by the depth of our sincerity and by the truth of our principles."

The Standard was too hard-hitting to have such refinement, and there was little room for fine phrases in Fitzgerald's relentless logic or the rumbustious onslaughts of Jacomb. Euphemism was scorned, and the contributors said just what they meant. When the Manchester Guardian slighted the Party, a Standard headline called it the "Liberal skunk press"; Lloyd George was a liar. Asquith an assassin, and their confreres hypocrites, frauds and political prostitutes. It seems that surprising that the Party was sued for libel only once.

The style of the Standard then, as now, owed to two principal sources: the sociological textbooks of the time, and popular journalism. From the latter it drew a peculiar Joe Miller waggishness that was part of the stock-in-trade of successful newspaper columnists, easier to exemplify than describe. Thus, the Editorial Committee apologizing for a writer who had not made himself clear to a correspondent: "He developed what he calls his style by studying a burr-walnut piano case in foggy weather". A debate with a suffragette was irresistible, and its report was resplendent with quips about "ye gallant knight Anderson" and "the poor girl". Perhaps the acme of this sort of wit was with a highly dramatic poem which had the refrain:

"Go! reckon your dead by your forges red,
        And in factories where we spin;
If blood be the price of your cursed wealth,
        By Christ! we have paid in full".

The poem was called "Gawd Struth We Have."

The writers on economics, socialist theory and political issues put forth their subject-matter lucidly and without frills or ambiguities; style which came naturally through close acquaintance with Engels, Kautsky, Plechanov and the other classical exponents of Marxism. The popularization of academic and technical subjects influenced later writers, and is still doing so—"science for the citizen" has made its mark. Just as on the platform, the people addressed are more widely informed and less concerned with theoretical questions. That does not mean, however, that the modern writer—or speaker—may neglect theory; it means that he must apply it more widely in a world with wider horizons.

And so it goes on; the business of persuading people to think straight, because that is what the Socialist wants. Words are our weapons. Words, words, words . . .

Robert Barltrop

The Condition of the Working Class (2013)

Film Review from the August 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The SERTUC Film Club at TUC Congress House in London recently screened The Condition of the Working Class, a new documentary film by Michael Wayne and Deirdre O'Neill who had previously worked together on the 2009 documentary film Listen to Venezuela. Over a period of eight weeks, the film follows a group of actors and non-professionals in The Ragged Collective (a homage to Robert Tressell) in Salford and Manchester as they work to put on a theatrical project based on their own working class experiences, and the Friedrich Engels book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.

The actors tell of working class life in Manchester in the age of austerity economics in capitalism where 'working class people are hurt by the cuts, there are attacks on collectivity, the bourgeoisie use divide and rule tactics, and people who have nothing want change'. Engels wrote 'the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared. People regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is that the stronger treads the weaker under foot; and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains'.

Like in Ken Loach's film Spirit of 45, some of the people in this film feel that Thatcher is to blame for everything, as if capitalism was only invented in 1979 but the reality is that she presided over the operation of capitalism during the worst part of the slump phase of its economic cycle, and was the head of an openly pro-capitalist government.

There are many differences between life today in Manchester and life at the time of the Engels book but fundamentally there is no change as the capitalist mode of production grinds relentlessly on. The film participants state that a person has to 'sell my labour or starve' (the working class sell their labour power to the capitalist), that 'society is divided into a bourgeois ruling class and a working class', the BBC is referred to as 'the Bourgeois Broadcasting Corporation', and 'the bourgeoisie are riddled with class prejudice, oppress the working class, and use the power of wealth and the state so that the rich look after the rich'. A reference is made to the gentrification of parts of Manchester such as the Docks where it is pointed out 'the working class built Salford Quays' which recalls Brecht's poem A Worker Reads History: 'who built the seven gates of Thebes?/the books are filled with names of kings/was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?'

The film demonstrates what Engels wrote, that 'the humanity of the workers is constantly manifesting itself pleasantly. They have experienced hard times themselves, and can therefore feel for those in trouble, whence they are more approachable, friendlier, and less greedy for money, though they need it far more than the property-holding class'.

Film International commented 'this is not a film, it's a rehearsal for revolution' which is true in a sense, but unfortunately no one mentions the word 'socialism'.

Steve Clayton