Robert Tressell (1911) The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

It’s been over thirty years since I’ve read this book. And it’s over a 100 years,  two world wars, the Holocaust, use of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, countless other wars, great depressions (including this one) since the working conditions that Tressell descibes so well have receded into the past. When I first read this book I remember feeling angry and somewhat excited that somebody understood that life didn’t have to be that way. Now I’m more bemused than angry. I try to think of comparisons with the puns for names that Tressell (real name Noonan) adopted for the leading members of the ‘Shining Light Chapel’. One of the things that I didn’t remember was the way that Tressell yoked together the facade of piety that church members adopted with their ruthless exploitation of  working men and women. Mr Sweater  made his fortune handing out piece-work  rates to the tens of thousands of women hopelessly sewing for him for eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, whole families, including children, swept up in trying to pay the rent and stay alive, reminded me very much of Boris Johnston. There is, of course, the political connection. In the book Sweater the supposed Liberal canditate beats the Tory Sir Dencloseland to win the seat to the Houses of Parliament. God help us, Johnson described in the narrative as, more or less, a pig on legs, looks like leading the Tory party in the next election and into government.  Johnston’s mantra that ‘greed it good’, however, is so Michael Douglas 1980s. But it also the guiding philosophy of the members of  the ‘Shining Light Chapel’. Good greed is when Mrs Starvem (Thatcher) minimises the costs of her household by making sure that servants, such as Ruth, gets up three hours before her and works three hours after the household goes to bed,  doesn’t eat too much and works-efficiently- in her workplace or home. Mr Didlum (Clegg) Mr Grinder (Osbourne) Mr Botchit (Cable) Mr Leavit (Duncan Smith) Mr Smeeriton (Hague) are presided over by the Rev.Mr Bosher (Cameron). Good greed, or God’s greed is good when applied to the monopolies of money and wealth they have established. Bad and sinful greed is when they are challenged by members not of their caste, not of their class. The worst kind of greed comes from those that are desititute, demanding enough money to subsist on, and cannot find work in Mugsborough.  Charity cases were to be treated as  criminals, by Dauber and Botchet, Guardians of the Poor, and in echoes of the Atos soloution to Healthcare and Welfare, Rev Bosher commends Mr Sweeter’s solution to beauracriticise the process, keeping the numbers that can go through the sluice of their penal system of those in need, those greedy enough to demand help, to wait, indefinetly, until their betters can decide their fate. Owen the Socialist sympathiser—and  Noonan surrogate—whose  relationship with others provides the narrative thread of the book, several times ponders suicide, and killing his wife and son Fredrick, as being a rational decision. I had no memory of this, if not socialism, suicide solution. But anecdotal evidence would suggest that those no longer in work, or in receipt of welfare benefits certainly take that option. The average life expectancy of the working class has since 1910 stayed behind those of their better off counterparts. Those in Bearsden for example, can expect to live ten or twenty years more than those in Maryhill, which borders it.

The landscape has however, changed. Owen’s working-class proleteriat are midgets in the modern world. Quite simply, the manufacturing sector in the UK economy has been dismantled and shrunk. We are largely a service economy. Amazon provides a template for the kind of employee/employer relationship that Owen knew so well. The legal minimum wage is paid. They do not need to employ a Hunter to sneak and monitor and harrass employees, an electronic drongo does that job more effictively. No need for a Crass to act as a grass on his fellow workers about someone not working hard enough or taking too many toilet breaks.  The number of steps the employee has taken and were s/he has went is being constantly monitored.  Lunch breaks are a far-away-place and by the time the employee gets there it’s time to go back to work. Hours of work can be extended at a moments notice. Termination of contract can take place the same day. These are all aspects of working life Owen takes us through in his narrative. The threat of being sacked is also held above the worker’s metaphorical head. Zero contract hours contract, you work when we ask you to work and you stop when we want you to it now also the norm for us in these more enlightened times. The carrot of full-time work is held out, but there’s always a Mr Leavit, acting as middle-man, an agency promising work and work and more work, in a way that would have been quiet familiar to Owen.

Rushton, Owen’s main employer, was he recognised no different from other employers, part of a system that oppressed the working man and woman. The cabal of the ‘Shining Light Chapel’s’ fight with the Gas Corp has some of the hallmarks of modern business practice.  Amazon, for example, employing over 20000 in the United Kingdom, but, for tax reasons, paying negligible Corporation tax in the Netherlands were they employ less than 400 is seen by both as part of the great game. The excluded, the  losers,  have no influence over such standard practice.

 Something I also hadn’t remembered was Owen’s view of charitiable insitutions as being a loin cloth over the body of capitalism, but I’m sure he would recognise charities such as Grand Central Savings, were my partner, formally worked, as being as much sweated labour as anywhere else. Jackie Cropper, the cheif executive being paid four or five the times the wage of those doing the actual work of moving money from the bank, to the customers behind the teller’s window, being the Grinder norm.  Cameras, at work, for example, monitoring the employees every movement are not only Amozianain they are Owenian. Afternoon teabreaks being no longer seen as being appropriate, are both. The creation of ‘soft targets’ in paper work for the sake of more paperwork, being seen to be busy, when there were no customers to serve, as being the same kind of logic as Crass continually stirring the same colour of paint.  The logic of a worker not in fear of being caught out by his boss, and his betters, as not being a decent kind of  worker is not a twentieth-century invention.

Owen also recognised ‘brotherly love’ as a fig leave covering the relations between different types of workers. The philanthropist in the title is used ironically, a person who seeks to promote the welfare of others, especially by the generous donation of money to good causes, is a play on the idea of the proleteriat who produces wealth giving away that wealth to the leisured class. Thinking was not for the likes of us, was their mantra. Barrington, the socialist convert, is made to feel like a criminal because of his warm clothing and because he is well fed. Grand Central Savings is not the only charitable institution to grow in twenty-first century Britain. We also have the growth of food banks and children haunted with the spectre of hunger. The hatred of the proleteriat for the socialist ideal and their love of the Liberal and Tory land-owing class is on the page and more often on the screen with television shows, such as Jeremy Kyle, that demonise those receiving welfare benefits to a jeering crowd.    The likes of us, do not need to think, is the mantra, poor people are poor because they want to be poor. The answer is in the image. Rich people are rich because they want to be rich.  Contemporay baiting of welfare receipents finds its match in the fights between Liberals and Tories over who should do their thinking for them.  If poor people want to be rich they need more work—that is the great throughthread of Owen’s book. Again and again he shows it to be laughably untrue. I’m not sure why we believe such rot now. I’m not going to click my heels together and wish I was rich, I’m going to buy a lottery ticket. Tressell/Noonan in the dystoipan past never thought of that trick. Orwell in the dystopian 1984 did. Nearly 2014 and like Tressell/Noonan I can see the future and it’s no utopia. The rich will get rich and the poor, like me, will get poorer. God, and the the contemporary members of the  Shining Sepulchre Church, help us.