22 Quotes by Robert Barltrop

A package holiday abroad may be a pleasurable change, but its social status is on a level with a trip to Brighton. The proletarian stigmata is not permitted to be erased.

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.

The pressures and penalties of existence in the modern capitalist system are intense; and they are penalties not for what is consciously chosen, but for ways of life which are forced like strait-jackets on people. At its superficial level, there is a common feeling of being conned by mass communications, extorted by commerce, lied to by politicians and treated like dirt by bureaucrats.

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 first premises of the Party...were two rooms above a corner junk shop, up two flights of rickety stairs. 'One felt' said a veteran member forty five years later in the Socialist Standard, that one was entering 'the heart of deep red revolution'.

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.

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.

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.

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.