This year is the hundredth anniversary of the passing away of Robert Noonan ( familiar to us as Robert Tressell).He died in the workhouse hospital and was buried in an unmarked paupers grave.
This year also sees a stage version of his book ( published after he was long dead) by a very talented duo playing the various characters of this classic iconic tale.
You can get a preview of the production in the video below:
Alas Noonan does have flaws representative of the UK left which it has failed to shake off , hence the reason , along with other left movements in the West and Continental Europe , the left have failed to be an effective counter-balance to the Right.
Noonan joined up with the Boers in South Africa to fight the British , the oddity of the conflict was both sides were fighting for the right to dominate the Natives and exploit the natural resources of the land for their exclusive benefit.
Noonans leadership of the Trade Union Movement brought to prominence his only high profile strike action , he led strikes to exclude Black skilled Labour taking the jobs of the Whites.
It is in this context his place as a Hero of the Working Man has to be seen , along with such other heroes as H.G.Wells ; George Bernard Shaw and others who wanted equal rights for the British Worker , but , as Edward Said has identified , had no intention of ever seeing the British Empire or the wealth generated from the Colonies put under threat , a position which reached its heights when the British Left almost universally supported the War Effort , including Noonan himself in what turned out to be WW1 on the basis that German expansion , especially Naval , would threaten British livelihoods generated from domination of the Seas and Trade Treaties resulting from imperial Empire policies.
Noonan is much to be admired for what he is , though he should not be elevated to what he was definitely not.
The review of his Novel in the Guardian gives a good account of what the strength of the Book is , identifying the nature of industrial capitalism , though the article is deft to say the least on the counter-balance of the great money trick passage ("The Great Oration"), which reads more like a sales pitch for an Albanian Pyramid selling scheme than a world wide universal alternate to the unjust blight of capitalism.A White Labourers Manifesto would be a more accurate description.Unironically the play also misses out on the "solution" element of the "Great Oration" as well , though not a surprise to me at all.
The video below concerned a passage "The Great Money Trick" from his Book in which he is in his best element:
All of this does lead to a very serious point of the great fallacy of the Left in that its heroes of yester-century did have these un-universal views ( and therefore solutions) on Society and Justice.As E.L. Doctorow pointed out in his Book of Daniel an Activist is only as good as his Analysis , if the foundation rocks of the Lefts dogma are flawed , so will any projects , no matter how sincere to re-visit and re-invent Marxism be equally fundamentally flawed.
This is especially true in the preposterous romantic notions the left have based their mirages on based around 68 , as Eammon McCann has pointed out those events are best understood in the context of a global mass civil rights movement , not a cusp of a Trotskyite Revolution.The various Governments of the time were never really threatened with collapse , The British and French retained power in subsequent elections and in the US took a turn to the right.If anything the organised Left stiffled universal progress by joining up with the Right to restore block party political status quo at the expense of allowing the mass movements to grow organically.
If the Left want to leave the later 19th Century and challenge successfully in the 21st they best leave Marx in Peace and have a good look at Bolivar ( to do this they need to escape the cycle of Marx having wrote of Bolivar in disparaging terms , even though Bolivar was successful where Marx did not even get off the ground).A Good starting point for the would be to read Gabriel Garcia Marquezs "The General In His Labyrinth" and his views on Debt and External influences in developing Regional mass Movements with Universal Goals.
The Greens , with progress in Germany and our very Own Scotland show what can be done with good analysis and being a bone fide participant in a mass movement.Rather than the dismal performances of the Left and its pre-occupation of occupying and trying to control the public for their own dogmatic out of date ends.
