Robert Barltrop Quotes

The fundamental issue was the class struggle...its prosecution remained the vital principle...and even the scurviest expedient was seen in terms of possible gain by the working class from the masters.

Labourism was to be the bete noire of the Party, hated as much as the capitalist system itself. Its growth was to lead to the hardening of Party attitudes almost to the point where even the wish to improve everyday conditions was considered iniquitous. The resentment was heated by the fact that many of the rising Labour leaders had been fellow members of the Social Democratic Federation and once professed the revolution.No words were strong enough for the Party's contempt. In the the Socialist Standard they were 'fakirs', a strong allusion to self-seeking piety, and on the platforms 'Labour bleeders',...

What is most remarkable and disquieting about this dangerous organisation (SPGB) is that the members are unquestionably higher-grade working-men of great intelligence, respectability and energy. They are, as a whole, the best informed socialists in the country, and would make incomparable soldiers, or desperate barricadists. As revolutionaries they deserve no mercy; as men, they command respect.

A severe-looking man who always wore a stiff collar and dark clothes, he was a passionate revolutionary to whom work meant self-abasement before the capitalist class.

A socialist must be 'class-conscious', recognizing his identity as a member of the working class and understanding his interests as permanently against those of the master class.

...the Party member's books represented ammunition in the class struggle rather than any desire for knowledge for its own sake.

Little attention was paid to current events. The view was taken that if a man knew Marx's Theory of Value and the progress of society from early times he was equipped to analyze anything.

Everyone outside the Party was a fool or a knave. They wrote up Professor Joad in the Standard, and a gentle reader complained of the epithets - 'ignoramous', 'fathead', etc; the EC informed him that they thought the words precise and correct.

Bill Read, an East London speaker who kept a workmen's eating house, used to bellow that vegetarianism was a capitalist plot to lower labour costs by making the working-class feed on grass.

What distinguished these revolutionary socialists from other 'characters' was the seriousness with which they practised unconventionality and assailed the world around them. Rebels and bohemians were confused emotionalists; only scientific socialism showed morality, respectability and conventional learning as despicable props of the capitalist system.

...he composed his own quotations from Marx and Engels to confound the most learned communist, and recommended others to do the same. 'Twist the book', he would yell: 'Twist the book, so the Party always wins!

The road to the new society had lengthened and become overgrown sadly since 1904. The working class in many thousands had been shown its errors in thinking, but persisted in them. Very well: the working class must have the rigours of capitalism, and if the rigours were harsh - it serves them right for not accepting socialism.