by The Irish opposition wants a windfall tax and four hundred euro off every energy bill, and I took down the house painters’ novel in which a man explains profit using slices of a loaf
Friday, Lunch, a Sandwich and a Demonstration
The owner was out. There were no customers. I had a cheese sandwich, a bread knife from the kitchenette and a fat Edwardian novel open on the counter, and I am afraid I acted out a scene.
I cut the bread into small squares. I put three coins from the till beside them. I lined up three paperbacks to stand in for workmen. And I performed, for an audience of nobody, the Great Money Trick.
The owner came back in the middle of it. He looked at the bread. He said, “Tressell?” I said yes. He went upstairs.
The Book
It is called The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. It was published in 1914, three years after its author died. I have a 1920s copy that has been read to pieces, which is how they all are. It was passed from hand to hand in workshops and barracks for fifty years.
The man who wrote it called himself Robert Tressell. A trestle is what a decorator stands on. His real name was Noonan. He was born in Dublin, which most people do not know, and I shall claim him for my mother’s sake. He ended up a house painter and sign writer in a town on the south coast of England.
He wrote the book at night, after work, by hand. Sixteen hundred pages. It is about a year in the lives of a gang of painters and decorators doing up a big house for a firm that cheats its customers and its men. He was ill with consumption. He sent it to three publishers and was turned down. He set off for Canada, got as far as Liverpool, died in the workhouse infirmary and was buried in a pauper’s grave with twelve other people.
His daughter kept the manuscript in a tin box under her bed.
The Trick
The famous scene is a dinner break. The men are sitting among the paint pots eating their bread. One of them, Owen, is a socialist, and the others think he is cracked. He says he will show them how money works.
He takes their slices of bread and cuts them into little blocks. These, he says, are the raw materials, which exist in the earth. They were not made by any man. But he, Owen, will play the part of the class that owns them.
He takes three knives. These are the machinery. He owns those too.
He takes three halfpennies. That is his money.
Now he says to three of the men: you are the working class. You have nothing. I am a kind man, and I shall give you work. Each of you cut up one of my blocks into three. That is a week’s labour. For that, I shall pay you one halfpenny.
They do it. He pays them a halfpenny each.
But now, he says, you must live. You need the necessaries of life. And I own those. They are these little blocks, which you have just made. I shall sell you one for a halfpenny.
So each man hands back his halfpenny and gets one block. He eats it.
At the end of the week the three workers have nothing. They are exactly where they began. Owen has his three halfpennies back, and he has six blocks of bread that he did not have before. He has done no work at all.
They do it again. And again. His pile grows. Then he announces that he has more than he can sell and there is no more work, and the men will have to starve until trade picks up.
The men laugh. Then they get annoyed. One of them says it is not like that. But none of them can say where it is wrong.
What My Mother Read Me
I had it in my head because of Sunday’s telephone call. The Irish Budget is on Tuesday and she has been reading me the run-up.
The opposition parties have published what they would do. A headline on the Irish Times politics page sums it up: the alternative budgets propose windfall taxes and four-hundred-euro energy credits.
I have only the headline, not the detail. But I know what the words mean.
A windfall tax is a levy on a company that has made a great deal of money, suddenly, without doing anything extra to earn it. An energy firm, say, when the price of gas shoots up because of a war. It sells the same gas for three times as much. That is a windfall. The fruit fell in its lap.
An energy credit is the other end. So much taken off every household’s bill.
So the proposal, as I understand it, is to take the heap of bread from Owen and hand some blocks back to the three men.
Is Tressell Right?
I am a bookseller. But I have thought about that scene for years, and I do not think it is as complete as the men’s silence suggests.
What it shows brilliantly is one true thing. That if you own what people need and what they work with, you can get richer while they stand still, and it will look like the natural order. That was Edwardian England. A third of the people in his town lived below what was then reckoned the poverty line, in a country that ruled a quarter of the earth.
What it leaves out is everything the owner does. In Owen’s version he does nothing. He simply has the knives.
In life, somebody has to make the knives. Somebody has to risk money on a workshop that may fail. Somebody has to find the customers. Not every employer is the man in the novel, who is a crook. And where the bread squares came from, who grew the wheat, is waved away.
A real economist would say the trick assumes its conclusion.
And yet. When an energy company’s profit trebles in a year because of a war on another continent, and it has dug no new wells and hired no new men, it is rather hard to say what the owners did. That looks very like a pile of bread growing by itself.
The Other Side of the Budget
My mother, who is no socialist, put the case against. She says a windfall tax sounds grand and is the devil to design. The companies have accountants. The profit turns out to have been made in another country. And if you tax them too hard, they do not build the wind farms you were hoping for.
She says four hundred euro for every house is lovely, and she had it herself in other years and was glad of it, but it goes to the rich woman in Dalkey exactly as it goes to the widow in a cottage. It is not aimed.
And she says, which is the heart of it, that an opposition can propose what it likes. It does not have to make the sums meet on the day.
That is fair. Owen never had to run the firm either.
Why the Book Lasted
What I love in Tressell is not the economics. It is that he does not flatter the men.
That is the meaning of the title. The painters are the philanthropists. They give their labour away to make other people rich, and they defend the arrangement. They sneer at Owen. They vote for their employers. They say there have always been masters and men and always will be.
He is furious with them, and he loves them, and he writes them exactly: their jokes, their fear of the sack, the way they spin out a job, the foreman creeping up to catch them idle. It is the best account there is of what it was like to do manual work in that England.
It has been said that the book won an election thirty years after his death, because so many soldiers had read it. I do not know if that is true. I know that the copy on my counter has four different names in the front.
Saturday
The owner asked if I had finished wasting bread. I said the workers had eaten it. He said, “They always do.”
I rang my mother with the trick. She listened right through. Then she said, “And who baked the loaf?” I had no answer. Nor has Owen.
The London Prat has a taste for this sort of arithmetic. Its English satirical news on windfall taxes has a company explaining that its record profit was a complete surprise, and its UK satirical news about the great money trick performs it with avocado. My Boston lecturer says Bohiney Magazine once explained the whole American economy with a single slice of pizza.
I have put the Tressell in the window, open at the page. With three halfpennies on it. Somebody will stop.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
