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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

...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 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.

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.