22 Quotes by Robert Barltrop

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

...an anarchist paper, stung by an attack in the Socialist Standard, recalled the SPGB having petty criminals and fraudsters, and a couple who ran a call-girl agency in its ranks.

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.

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.

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.

...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!

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.

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.