Irish Socialists

"Those who wish to live in imagination through the daily round of the unorganised worker and the casual labourer, to share its racking anxieties, its bitter humiliations, its joyless excitements, should turn from statistics and sociological generalisations to the poignant self-revelation of one of their own members. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressall, house-painter and sign-writer, is not only a precise and careful record, written with a realism and a firmness of touch that are almost French, of a certain section of working-class life, but it also enables the thinking reader to form some conception of the immense revolution which the war must have caused in thousands of working class minds and households."

"What we call civilisation—the accumulation of knowledge which has come down to us from our forefathers—is the fruit of thousands of years of human thought and toil. It is not the result of the labour of the ancestors of any separate class of people who exist to-day, and therefore it is by right the common heritage of all. Every little child that is born into the world, no matter whether he is clever or dull, whether he is physically perfect or lame, or blind, no matter how much he may excel or fall short of his fellows in other respects, in one thing at least he is their equal—he is one of the heirs of all the ages that have gone before."

"What I actually lent him was The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. This is the one work of genius which Socialism has produced, and about which our Tory press, well-bred and aloof when it suits them, has maintained a conspiracy of silence. It represents Capital as putting its foot on the face of Labour, and stabbing it in the guts to make sure. It is by a house-painter who made a first-hand indictment of the state of affairs on the lowest rung of the ladder, and died. It is quite unanswerable, and for that reason has never been answered."

"There is the most remarkable of all books about working-class life, Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It too is written from the inside — "Hell, by One of the Damned". Like Jack London's work, it has been immensely popular among working men. Its failing is that Tressell was not a writer; he did not know how to select, to do away with the superfluous and make his material work to its best effect."

"This novel ought to be read by all social reformers, and even more so by those who cannot be so classed."

"Tressell's artful depiction of the sheer physical privation and terror of what it is like to work too long, too hard, with too little food in your stomach will bring a chill to the heart of anyone who has ever been in a remotely similar situation. In such a setting we might expect to see a group of sub-human automatons stumbling about “the Cave.” Such a presentation would meet current artistic standards and we might pass them on the street with just such thoughts. Tressell knows better. He knows his men from the inside. Novels live or die by the amount of life in the people in them. Tressell's housepainters are as rich and juicily human a collection of people as has been seen in an English novel since the days of Charles Dickens."

"I'm reading Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists for the umpteenth time. And not just because I am going to record it as an audiobook. It was the first novel to encourage me in the working-class fight. It's an encapsulation of what's endemic in capitalism and the nobility of struggle for socialism."

"Almost the last book he Hubert Parry] read, in August 1918, was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressall, which greatly moved and impressed him."

"The secret of the book's endurance is its art and truth. Noonan was a master of working men's speech. Writing about his own environment to the extent that much of the feeling of his book is clearly autobiographical, he never lets passion or indignation mislead his ear. In his preface he takes the trouble to declare that the purpose of his novel is to proclaim socialism. That need not put the reader off. From the moment, on the first page, when you join the gang of builders and decorators who are renovating the three-storyed house "The Cave" you enter a world which though now largely past is vivid and real. It is a world of cut-throat wages, of fear and hatred of the foreman (himself terrified of his boss), of the spectre of unemployment, which rules almost all the men's actions and is the real villain. There are also vestiges of Dickensian kindness, a human comradeship among the working men, a Samaritan attitude to the families of each other... The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists rings far more true than many of the better known "condition of the people" novels of its day. That is why it has lasted."

"The best British working-class novel, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists."

"I fear that if I say what I think it may appear extravagant; while if I moderate my words I shall feel that I am doing scant justice to what has seemed to me the most remarkable human document that has appeared in my time. It is a masterpiece of realism. The work of a craftsman, it is true, unerring and pitiless in its delineation of men and life. Were Zola and Tolstoi living, I am sure they would look upon this common house-painter with envy, as one whose novice hand had outdone them. I am sure that Gorky and Jack London would confess frankly that the work of Robert Tressall surpasses theirs. Certainly, London's The Call of the Wild cannot be as true to life as these ragged philanthropists."

"Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, one of the most moving stories ever told of the plight of the working class in Britain."

"The book [The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists] is a realistic description of the building trade in the early years of this century and a powerful exposition of socialist ideas, written by a working-man, Bob Noonan, under the pen-name of Robert Tressell. In my youth it was passed from hand to hand among people in the Labour movement and had a remarkable effect on our thinking."

"Just as the place of Chartist literature within the cultural heritage was never defined, the reasons for the great success of Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists were never laid bare. This is even more surprising in view of the fact that this novel, which was reprinted twice in the Thirties, had, in its adaptation for the stage, already been a major success of the Workers' Theatre Movement, was read by workers and sold during the first forty years of its 'censored' publication more than 100,000 copies – an almost unbelievable figure, if one considers that the average edition of a working-class novel in the Thirties was 1,500 copies, of which less than two-thirds were sold."

"The proletarian life which is described in the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists—the most authentic novel ever written about British workers—is the same that George Lansbury knew in Poplar. The Mugsborough builders were half-starved, swindled by their employers and by the authorities, the prey of charity-mongers, narks and even their fellow-workers, corrupted and brutalised by the conditions of Edwardian employment."

"I am afraid that this bald summary may create the impression that the book is simply a Socialist tract, a flagrant instance, that is to say, of the appropriation of a specific form of literary activity for the purposes of propaganda. That would be grossly unfair to the author and his work, which is not a treatise, but a pungent, intimate, scaring and profoundly realistic study of the lives, the environment, the opinions and outlook of the working-classes. The book does not step beyond the building trade, of which Tressall obviously possessed a meticulous knowledge, but the portrait of the builders is the portrait in miniature of the English working-classes. And the last thing in the world that Tressall did was to idealise them. The book is in fact a fierce, almost a savage attack upon their apathy, their shoddiness, their servility, their hopeless inadequacy to emancipate themselves from their wretched conditions, their willingness to perpetuate a system which degrades their class as a whole to the level of beasts of burden. And with what extraordinary insight and power of presenting and individualising his characters he does it! He simply lets them speak for themselves, as, at the dinner hour, they discuss politics, unemployment and poverty. There is no extenuation, no compromise, no romancing. These men are not abstractions or personifications of their creator's ideals or antipathies. They are the living human material of to-day, so debased by the squalor, futility, waste and despair of their lives, that they will ridicule any effort to make new and finer ones."

"Tressell's statement in his preface to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists that his book "is not a treatise or essay, but a novel", the main object being "to write a readable story full of human interest and based on the happiness of everyday life", represents nothing less than an aesthetic revolution in the proletarian-revolutionary novel."

"A less sane man would—as many men, indeed, have done—have set out to harass us, and laid the horror and the sentiment on so thick that the reader would have revolted against the misrepresentation of life. Tressall, on the other hand, sticks—as far as his workmen are concerned—to the facts; does not sentimentalise over his characters; and succeeds, consequently, in "getting there." We recommend the book to everyone, and it will do especial good to those who have an inadequate conception of what workmen in general and men in the building trade in particular have to put up with (a) when employed and (b) when unemployed. But it should be avoided by all those innocent journalists who seem to hold that the word Mr. Shaw uses in Pygmalion should be reserved for the private use of themselves and their friends."

"It was at the turn of the century that Robert Tressall, a house-painter, wrote the story of working-class life which he called The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Since that time much paint has been spilled and grumbled over. But Tressall's evocation of the talk of a gang of Cockney workers is as intimate, as amusing—and as touching—as it was then. Nor has there been anything else quite like it, though perhaps Mr. Maugham came nearest in some passages of Liza of Lambeth."

"It was a big step forward when the facts of working-class life were first got on to paper. I think it has done something to push fiction back towards realities and away from the over-civilised stuff that Galsworthy and so forth used to write. I think possibly the first book that did this was The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, which has always seemed to me a wonderful book, although it is very clumsily written. It recorded things that were everyday experience but which simply had not been noticed before."

"Without sensationalism and almost without plot it sets to record the actual detail of manual work and the tiny things almost unimaginable to any comfortably situated person which make life a misery when one's income drops below a certain level... It is a book that everyone should read. Quite apart from its value as a piece of social history it leaves one with the feeling that a considerable novelist was lost in this young working-man whom society could not bother to keep alive."

"The action takes place during one year in the lives of a group of working men in the town of Mugsborough, and the novel is a bitter but spirited attack on the greed, dishonesty, and gullibility of employers and workers alike, and on the social conditions that gave rise to these vices. Debates on socialism, competition, employment, and capitalism are skilfully interwoven with a realistic and knowledgeable portrayal of skilled and unskilled labour in the decorating and undertaking business, and with the human stories of the families of the workers... the book has become a classic text of the Labour movement. The ironically named "philanthropists" of the title are the workers who for pitiful wages "toil and sweat at their noble and unselfish task of making money" for their employers, while making no effort to understand or better their lot."

"I remember one in particular whose title, because it looked so strange and terrifying, nearly gave me nightmares just to look at it. It was called The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's strange that when I did come to read it, much later in life, it knocked me sideways. I've never read a book, before or since, which made such a profound impression on me, and I still think it's one of the greatest books that's ever been written."

"The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a book to be read by any who want an insight into the conditions of working-class life as its average, with its virtues, its vices, its courage, its intolerable piteous anxieties."

"The bitterness of mood in which such a book must have been written by a man who saw so intelligently the stupidities of the life around him and yet was completely unable to find any other milieu, produces fierce touches of satire. But like all good satire, its exaggerations are really searing truths. Neither his irony, nor his bitterness blinded the writer to seeing the world as it really was. That the book is veracious in atmosphere and expression, no one who has seen the deplorable frowziness of English proletarian life, or tasted that peculiar quality which makes British squalor the filthiest in the world, can doubt. This is no book for the squeamish. And yet the coarseness of British working-class life is sketched in broad strokes and outlines, rather than plastered on the canvas in the manner of a Zola; and there is a British silence as to sexuality."

"If the book is not for the squeamish, it is not for the tender-hearted either. From an artistic standpoint or view, the absence of sentimentality is one of the most admirable features, but those who are accustomed to have their literature of poverty and misfortune sugared with pity and sentiment will find this unadorned veracity repulsive. The book must therefore depress and then outrage our comfortable classes. We are not accustomed to see the life of the workingman from his own point of view. Our literature is carefully insulated from the economic interpretation of life, with its sense of the bestial struggle for existence and its slow and interminable fight against filth and disease. It must make our comfortable class uneasy to see the whole remorseless mechanism of shoddy capitalism so unsparingly revealed, and to see men so palpably the victims of economic forces. Even the most woolen-headed of our reactionaries can hardly fail to feel the ironic sting of the phrase, "ragged-trousered philanthropists." Such a story is a scathing critique of the whole of British civilization, and incidentally of our own individualistic and plutocratic democracy. He must indeed be a tough Englishman who can eat a good dinner after finishing it."

"I read Jack London and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Those were the books that formed my political opinions."

"I have been an English artisan, engaged in the building trades, too, and I know that the book does not exaggerate in the least."

"My favourite book, which I buy and give away quite often, is The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, a pseudonym for a fella called Robert Noonan. The book is about the building trade at the turn of the century and is a classic... In this book he tells the story of a group of artisans and their struggle against low wages and appalling working conditions. It is a really vivid portrayal of the contradictions of capitalism. When I was in Leicester prison in 1974 following the builders' strike during which I led the pickets, the governor of the prison, who was once a bricklayer, asked me if I had read it and when I said no, gave it to me. I have always had a copy since."

"Tressell's strength is not in the conscious exposition (its problems of identity and relationship are in fact unresolved). His strength is in the anonymous, collective, popular idiom through which a working world is strongly, closely, ironically seen. What is then interesting is that despite this vigour the final judgment is ironical: the ragged-trousered philanthropists—those who in the end accept exploitation; the inhabitants of Mugsborough. It is a generous irony, from within the working class, and as such humane."

"If we care about human rights we will suspend relations with the criminal apartheid state of Israel until they stop the genocide of the Palestinian people and until Palestine is free."

"Meanwhile, the EU and our friends are immune from criticism and when you have armed contracts with totalitarian regimes, who carry out terrible atrocities, you look the other way. I will take seriously the concern expressed in here for US-paid journalists imprisoned in Vietnam when you deal with the millions of starving and dying children in Yemen and demand they be free from Saudi-UAE aggression and free from the fear of the weapons of the US, Canadian, UK, French, German, Swedish Spanish and Belgian countries blowing them to pieces."

"The US and their allies claim to be fighting a war on terror whenever they drop bombs and kill people. Here they have taken out some of the people who have done more to fight ISIS than anyone else that we know. They have been asked to get out of Iraq, are they going to get out of it? Are they going to recognise the democratic decision? They claim to have brought democracy to Iraq; are they going to respect it now?"

"El-Sisi is a brutal dictator. Do the French have any problems selling him weapons? No. Do the French have any problems selling weapons to the Saudis who are committing genocide in Yemen? No. Does the EU do anything about it? No. This European Union has sanctions, which are a form of terrorism, against Venezuela, Syria, Iran. You do business with murderers. What’s going on with you?"

"We know who is increasing the tensions in the Persian Gulf. It isn’t Iran; the Saudis, with the nice backing of Israel and, of course, the US. Why don’t we call it as it is and stop playing footsie with words? They have a problem with the powerful nature of Iran, with the independence of Iran, and Europe does need to put its arm around Iran and be more welcoming. Iran is not feeling the love from Europe. You have the potential to do more and welcome them more into the international community."

"Energy poverty is first and foremost a political failure which requires an adequate political response which tackles the root causes of injustice while ensuring a fair and sustainable future for all. Energy is a public good, but we need to start treating it as such – because we haven’t been doing so."

"The G7 and NATO-aligned countries, which collectively represent a minority of the world’s people, want to contain Russia and China and stop EU-Asia integration. The BRICS countries, which represent a larger portion of the world’s people, are not calling for this break – for isolation or for containment. They are clear that they want to maintain a world where multilateral institutions such as the UN are respected. The EU seems to want world domination. The Global South really wants genuine multilateralism. We should listen to them."

"Is the US a functioning democracy? Well, let’s have a look at it. It cost 2 billion to become president. They have 25% of the total prisoners in the world. They spend over 800 billion a year on arms, which is more than most of the world put together. They’ve been at war for 250 years since their state was formed 275 years ago. But they can’t afford universal health care. They can’t afford a 1.7 trillion debt forgiveness for students. They can’t afford for a programme for the 17 million children that go to bed hungry. Is this a functioning democracy? What’s your idea of a democracy? Bernie Sanders wasn’t even allowed to win the nomination for the Democrats. The Americans couldn’t spell democracy."

"What is democracy anyway? Is it having a vote every four or five years? No, it's not. It's your people having a say in the society they live in. And most of the American people have no say in the society they're living in."

"We all know exactly what NATO is: a post—war mechanism designed to maintain US dominance and control over Western Europe, advance US geostrategic interests and violently suppress socialism. To pursue these aims, NATO has partnered with right—wing terrorists and fascists to conduct long campaigns of bloody terror and destabilisation, both in and outside Western Europe. Everywhere it conducts operations, it leaves a trail of destruction and destabilisation behind it, and persists often for decades after the initial act of aggression."

"Why are we choosing an aggressive position with China? Why are we not choosing cooperation instead of aggression? Why are we not respecting the principle of state sovereignty and non-interference? We should be working for peace with China. It's in our interest. But you know what? I can't help feeling that we are being led along by the nose by the Americans who have a vested interest in challenging China at the moment not because China is a threat to the security of the American people... But China is a threat to their financial supremacy"

"We must question, as the Pope has done, the wisdom of sending arms to Ukraine. We must stop executing the war on Yemen. We must stop the use of sanctions as a weapon of war in Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, Venezuela, Yemen and elsewhere. These medieval weapons are killing women and children, the sick, the old and the vulnerable the most. We must end Fortress Europe and extend the compassion we rightly have for the Ukrainian women and children to all refugees and internally displaced people. Selective humanity is not humanity at all."

"Many people are asking, what is democracy? Democracy is where the people have a say in how their society is organised. There isn’t much of it around. In Member States, it’s been watered down dramatically by the weakening of local government – one of the best vehicles that the people had for connecting with those that were ruling them."

"Mr President, of course we should legislate to stop all forced labour. But how many times have we had to listen to accusations about China, backed up by nothing more than the say—so of weapons—industry—funded think tanks and groups on the payroll of CIA cut—outs like the National Endowment for Democracy? Where are the full and rigorous investigations, the evidence? Screaming, unsupported accusations is not how to conduct international relations. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has just visited Xinjiang, has had discussions with many groups and representatives there, and hopes this is the start of a fruitful process towards transparency and high human rights standards in China."

"We need more diplomacy, not less. We have two powers. The US and Russia have an awful lot in common. Both are run by monopoly capital, run by oligarchs on both sides. We have two imperialist powers fighting each other in Ukraine, and only working-class people are dying."

"The only complaint I have heard from nationalists or anti-unionists is that he was not shot 40 years ago."

"The Brighton bombing was an inevitable result of the British presence in this country. Far from being a blow against democracy it was a blow for democracy."

"That ageing geriatric whizz-kid seems intent on starting World War III."

"There haven't been any attacks by the IRA on Protestants."

"I have no involvement in terrorist activity."