Hammersmith and Islington (1985)

William Morris’s Socialist Diary, edited and annotated by Florence Boos, (Journeyman); “Don’t Be A Soldier!” – The Radical Anti-War Movement in North London 1914-1918 by Ken Weller (Journeyman)
Both of these books are worthy additions to the library of working-class historical scholarship. Too often so-called labour history amounts to little more than the uninspiring story of how Labourism and/or Leninism made their impact on the workers of Britain. Beyond these two main currents of Leftism there are aspects of the history of working-class thought and action which have received insufficient attention.
Morris’s socialist ideas and activities were long ignored or distorted by historians on the Left, but there can be no doubt that his politics and the history of the Socialist League (which began its effective existence exactly one hundred years ago) offer us a valuable insight into the evolution of socialist thinking and activity. William Morris’s Socialist Diary was compiled between January and April 1887. It contains a record of Morris’s work as a propagandist (addressing indoor and outdoor meetings and writing and editing socialist literature), his activities within the League (which at the time was debating whether or not to become a “parliamentarian” organization) and his impressions of the political scene of the time.
In his diary Morris conveys a degree of pessimism about the effectiveness of socialist propaganda which socialists today can understand, but would not agree with, particularly since Morris was able to convince a solid body of workers to become revolutionary socialists. Describing a lecture which he gave on the class-war at the Chiswick Club on 4 February, Morris commented that “. . . the men at present listen respectfully to Socialism, but are perfectly supine and not in the least inclined to move except along the lines of radicalism or trades unionism” (p.26). Again, commenting on an outdoor meeting which he addressed at Beadon Road, Hammersmith, Morris wrote that “a very fair audience . . . gathered curiously quickly” but, not quite believing that they were attracted by what he was saying, he noted that the workers were “listening attentively trying to understand, but mostly failing to do so” (p.27). How could Morris be so sure of this? After all, in Hammersmith he was able to recruit quite a few conscious socialists to the cause – workers who would remain untempted by reformism for years to come, as shown by the records of the Hammersmith Socialist Society in the 1890s. On 27 March Morris gave his lecture on “Monopoly” at the Borough of Hackney Club, which had 1,600 working-class members, but here again, despite reporting in his diary that “the audience was civil and inclined to agree”. Morris goes on to write that “I couldn’t flatter myself that they mostly understood me, simple as the lecture was” (p.45). Unlike the conceited and pompous old devil, Hyndman, from whom remarks of the sort mentioned would have been an indication of typical arrogance, in the case of Morris it was more likely undue modesty which led him to underestimate the effect which his propaganda work had on the working class. For example, Jack Fitzgerald, a young worker whose revolutionary enthusiasm was a major contribution to the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904, was one socialist whose ideas were formed, at least in part, as a result of listening to Morris talk about socialism.
Florence Boos is clearly not a remote academic, picking a few extracts from Morris’s writings out of apolitical curiosity; it is clear from her very interesting and readable sixteen-page introduction to the diary that she has more than a little sympathy with Morris’s political outlook. On page 2 she refers to Morris as leader of the Socialist League, which is inappropriate considering Morris’s professed disinclination to be a political leader and his clear non-leadership conception of socialism, but apart from that minor fault the introduction makes several useful points. She deals with Morris’s “deep opposition to electoral politics” (p.6), but explains that this did not amount to opposition to socialists entering parliament “as rebels”, but to their using it as a body for reforming capitalism, supposedly in the workers’ interests. Morris is quoted writing to Joseph Lane on 20 March, 1887:

“. . . I believe all palliative measures like the 8 hours bill to be delusive, and so, damaging to the cause if put forward by socialists as part of socialism: though of course they will put forward and carried at some time by some party, and we shall then have to take the good and the bad of them. But we should be clear that they are not our measures. I think the duty of the League is educational entirely at present, and the duty is all the more important since the SDF has entirely given up that side of things. (p. 7; Morris’s emphases)

Boos provides a valuable analysis of Morris’s anti-reformism which avoids the error made by E.P. Thompson, whose biography of Morris tends to go in for the usual Leftist incomprehension of revolutionary principle, which is dismissed as “purism”. A useful supplement to the Diary and to Boos’s introduction is the article entitled “Morris and the problem of reform and revolution” written by ALB in the February 1984 Socialist Standard.
Ken Weller’s history of the North London anti-war movement between 1914 and 1918 contains the kind of careful details which one expects from serious historical research. It is clear from the book that Weller knows North London and has spent years collecting information on the political activists of the period, most of whom have been neglected for too long. Although he claims to deal with North London it would be truer to state that the book is about Islington with occasional references beyond. Without doubt, the references to the history of Islington exhibit a wealth of useful knowledge about “those thousands of ordinary men and women who fought against the 1914-1918 holocaust and who, without a thought for their own future prospects, made enormous sacrifices for what they knew was right” (p.7).
But this review would not be complete without a serious criticism which throws into question the historical bias of his work. Why, in a book seeking to explain the opposition to the First World War, is there so little reference to the one party which unequivocally opposed the war from the moment of its outbreak: the Socialist Party of Great Britain? There are several footnotes referring to ex-SPGBers who joined other anti-war bodies, but, despite the inclusion of a whole chapter dealing with the IWW – whose existence in North London was insignificant compared with that of the Socialist Party – there is not a single reference to the ideas and activities of our party in the entire text. The Socialist Party receives one single reference – in a footnote to chapter 3:

"It is difficult to integrate the Socialist Party of Great Britain into any account of wider working-class politics because its policy of hostility to all other political groups, and rejection as an organization of participation in any partial economic or social struggles, effectively excluded it from association with other tendencies. But no account would be complete without some reference to them. Before the War, they were a substantial presence in the area. Their Tottenham Branch had over 100 members, and there were also effective branches in Islington and Hackney. The SPGB also had a very high proportion of the ablest open-air speakers, notably Alex Anderson of Tottenham, who by common consent was the best socialist orator of his day. The SPGB’s principled Marxism had perhaps a wider influence than it would like to admit. (p.23)

This is acceptable as far as it goes (although the final sentence is based on a peculiar assumption), but there can be little excuse for excluding detailed reference to the sole British anti-war party active in the North London area.

Book Review: 'The Day is Coming' (1944)

The above is the title of a book by William Cameron (MacMillan, New York). It is the story of a craftsman who commenced work in the 'eighties. The story finishes just before the outbreak of the present war. The book is divided into three periods: the first is concerned with the establishment of the Arts and Crafts Guild in the East End of London; the second describes the transfer and establishment of the Guild in the beautiful little old town of Westencote in the Cotswold Hills, where it flourished for ten years and then collapsed, killed by commercial competition: the third period covers the privations of the craftsman and his family back in London, and the way he climbed up to comfort again.
It is the life of a man singularly fortunate in the beginning who, immersed in the early crafts revival and in an almost self-contained community, loses contact with the world until he reaches middle age. Then, on the dissolution of the craft community, he returns to face the pitiless world of capitalist competition and cheap production into which he has difficulty fitting. He sinks for a time into despair, passes through the horrors of a great war, loses his treasured possessions, loses his faith in the possibility of social change, and, finally, accepts and fits into a cheap and nasty world for the sake of economic security. As an escape from the things that he hates, he builds himself a dream world of his own which goes back to mediaeval times. Into this world he retires in his leisure moments, letting the world of reality go by and accepting all its evil manifestations with an "of course and of course." In his old age the ominous rumblings that herald the impending catastrophe of 1939 set him searching for a safe place to live in the country, and he goes back to Westencote. But the town has become almost unrecognisable. The motor car, the aeroplane and the jerrybuilder have swept away the beauty he used to enjoy. The reaction drives him to the bottle, and in a drunken dream on the hillside above the town he is revisited by William Morris and the old circle of craftsmen, who show him a vision of the hell to which civilisation is heading, reproach him for his supineness, and urge him to take up again the struggle for social change lest the people, and their capacity for beauty and happiness, sink to utter destruction. Waking, he makes the great decision that converts him to a man again.
Reading this book brings back to the mind memories that crowd of times long since gone by. The vigorous and youthful 'nineties, the beginning of the new century with its hopes and promise. 1914 and the shattering of a world; the hansom cab, the motor car, and the aeroplane; dreams, enthusiasms, and the starkness of reality. The author has told his story well, and his vivid descriptions of the East End, its people and its ways are excellent. So also are the criticisms of society, social movements and social products which are threaded through the book—sometimes with gentleness, sometimes with savagery, and sometimes with cynicism. It is a pity that nearly all the characters he has chosen to make these criticisms are the less cultured working men, thus giving some support to a false idea of the intellectual capacity of workers, which will inspire in some readers a sympathetic and patronising pity.
We would like to have given some representative selections from the book, but our restricted space will not permit it. We will, however, give one extract from the first few pages as a specimen.
The story opens with an account of a meeting held by the Socialist League on a foggy November night in 1887 in the East End. A beer crate is set up in the market place in the midst of fish, whelk, tomato, cabbage and old clothes stalls, and the meeting is accompanied by drunken brawls and the stall-holders shouting their wares. William Morris is the speaker, and his audience consists of a few poverty-stricken and decrepit people of the neighbourhood. To these people Morris addresses burning words, of which the following is an extract:-
    "France is arming and Germany arming! The whole civilised world rumbles with the threat of war on the most monstrous scale of modern times! At this period of crisis, this is the message of the Socialist League to the working men of England: Turn a deaf ear to the recruiting sergeant! Refuse to be dressed up in red and taught to form a part of the modern killing-machine for the honour and glory of a country which gives you only a dog's share of many kicks and few halfpence!"
There are many other meetings, lectures and conversations in which Morris and others of his group express in forthright language their condemnation of present society and their propaganda in favour of a new social order from which poverty and ugliness will be banished. A social order in which the things that are made will be useful and beautiful and the makers will work happily because they will find joy in their work. One of the main threads woven into the story is a hatred of ugly, scamped, and shoddy work.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain appears in a few places in the story, and there are quotations from our principles and our 1914 War Manifesto. We are sorry that its chosen representatives should belong to the less cultured group to which we have already referred. They drop their aitches, put them in where they don't belong, and express themselves in language that does not suggest great reading. This does not convey a correct impression. The early members of the Party were bent on building a higher form of society and made great efforts under difficult circumstances to acquire as much culture as they could in all directions because they wished to be worthy of a place in the society they intended to build. A few of those active in the early days were Watts (a carver), Fitzgerald (a bricklayer), Anderson (a house-painter), Elrick (a civil servant), Gray (a railway clerk), Jacomb (a compositor), Kent (a commercial traveller), and Lehane ( we forget what he was except a wild Irishman!). Some of these men were genuine craftsmen. They did not use the pronunciation of Oxford or Earls Court, but plain, accurate and forcible English, and their aspirates were in the right place!
A further criticism we would make concerns certain remarks that could have been left out without marring the pictures of a character or an event—in fact, in places the picture would have been strengthened without them. We will give an illustration of what we mean.
When the Westencote community collapsed and the craftsman realised a dream had vanished and he would have to go back to the old grind, he packed up and then went for a walk up the hill for a last look back at the little own.
    "He was glad May wasn't with him—or the children. He wanted no one. He sank down on the grass, and peered down into the great valley below. At that moment, if the most beautiful woman in the world had been lying naked with him in that lonely spot, he might have thrust her aside as a nuisance.
    "'Might,' he thought with a grin, as he saw once again the bodies of the girls and women with whom he had shared adventures since his marriage." (Page 328.)
Imagine a man who has just seen the bottom fall out of his world having thought to spare such a grin. Curse, foam at the mouth, shake his fists at the sky—yes, but a sly leer? We cannot imagine it.
Again, after the birth of the craftsman's child, another craftsman said to him, referring to the former's wife :—
    "She's a good cow, Arthur; just like my ol' missis. . . . A woman, Arthur, ought to be a good, well-fed cow. If she ain't—why, then, she's udderly useless!" (Page 294.)
Does it sound credible that a member of the Socialist League would talk like this at a time when woman's position in society was a burning question?
For some peculiar reason, modern novelists who aspire to "Leftishness" feel that they must indulge in his kind of thing. Perhaps they fear a charge of squeamishness, or they are staking a claim for popularity: When it was necessary to shock the reader there was some ground for it, but modern readers are past shocking. Fortunately, Cameron has not allowed much of this to creep in, but we wish he had kept it out of this type of book altogether, as it is a blemish here and brings the reader up with a nasty jerk.
We make these criticisms because the book was well worth doing, is well done, and is well worth reading. It is a vivid and authentic picture of a vital section of the life of the last fifty years. It should stand the ravages of time.
Gilmac

Book Review: 'William Morris - Journalism, Contributions to Commonweal 1885-1890' (1996)

Journalism, Contributions to Commonweal 1885-1890. By William Morris. Thoemmes. £18.75.

As is now well known William Morris was a socialist. From 1885-1890 he spoke at indoor and outdoor meetings throughout Britain for the Socialist League. He was also the editor of the League's official journal Commonweal. In this capacity, he not only contributed regular articles but also wrote a weekly column commenting on current events from a socialist point of view. Until now these comments have only been available to those with access to the bound volumes of Commonweal. His articles have already been published separately in a companion volume.

What makes these comments particularly interesting is that they reflect the basic position of the Socialist League, shared by Morris, that as capitalism could not be reformed to benefit the working class socialists should not waste their time campaigning either for reforms or to get people elected to parliament to press for them; they should rather concentrate exclusively on campaigning for socialism, with a view to building up a majority movement for it as rapidly as possible.

Morris's name has often been hi-jacked by Labour MPs but in fact he was opposed to the whole idea of a parliamentary Labour Party. He thought that such a party would have to resort to unprincipled vote-catching to get into parliament and that once there it wouldn't be able to do much for the workers and could end up helping the governing classes to govern.

Someone writing from this perspective is bound to throw a different light on the politics of the period 1885-1890 than can be found both in conventional history books and in the works of "Labour historians". It is this that makes this 670-page collection of short articles so fascinating.

The issue which dominated politics for most of this period was the Irish Question. When it opened Gladstone was the Prime Minister but he was twice defeated when he tried to get a Bill giving Home Rule to Ireland through Parliament. His Liberal Party in fact split over the issue with a section going over to the Tories.

The Tories and their Liberal Unionists allies won the July 1886 General Election. Lord Salisbury took over as Prime Minister. The new government, which had already "played the Orange card" to get elected, proceeded to pursue a policy of "coercion" (the official word for it) in Ireland.

As a socialist Morris was naturally on the side of the exploited (in this case the Irish peasantry) against their exploiters and oppressors (the Anglo-Irish landlords and their protectors, the British government), but that did not mean that he supported the Irish Nationalists. Far from it.

Morris realised that the Irish Nationalists represented Irish capitalism and that, if successful, they would merely impose a "new tyranny" on the peasantry by turning them into "a fresh Irish proletariat to be robbed for the benefit of national capitalists".

Morris was not opposed to "home rule" as such since the term could be used to describe the high degree of decentralized decision-making and self-administration that people living in a particular area would enjoy in socialism. Home Rule under capitalism, however, he regarded as something quite different; it would merely be a change of masters: "Undoubtedly when there is a parliament in Dublin the struggle of the Irish people for freedom will have to be begun again".

In his view, the most that could be said for it was that it would provide a framework within which the oppressed people in Ireland could come to see more quickly that the real conflict was not between "the Irish" and "the English" but between workers (of whatever nationality) and capitalists (of whatever nationality). It was for this reason (which turned out to be wrong) that Morris and the Socialist League were nevertheless prepared to go along with the proposal for Home Rule for Ireland.

Morris writes here on much else besides Ireland and the manoeuvrings at Westminster in connection with it. This was the period of the first demonstrations of the unemployed in Trafalgar Square, the fight to hold outdoor meetings without being obstructed by the police, the declaration "that we are all Socialists now" (by the Liberal politician, Sir William Harcourt, in August 1887), the execution of the Haymarket Martyrs in Chicago, the Bryant & May matchgirls strike, the strike for the dockers' tanner, and Jack the Ripper.

Morris comments on all of these as well as on trade unionism, the cooperative movement, Henry George's Single Tax panacea, women's rights ("As long as men are slaves, woman can be no better. Let the women's rights societies adopt that last sentence as a motto - and act on it"), war ("the interests of the workmen are the same in all countries and they can never really be enemies of each other"), vegetarianism (he wasn't one of course, being more into medieval banquets), Sunday closing (he wasn't a teetotaller either and was all for workers being able to drink on Sundays as long as it was real ale and not the slop that was all they could normally afford), and prisons (which he repeatedly denounces as barbaric places of torture).

Morris wrote as a Socialist in the SPGB tradition. Those who might be inclined to doubt our claim here should read the book. They will find that no other conclusion is possible.

Socialism, Saints and Muffin the Mule (1996)

William Morris lived from 1834 to 1896. During his lifetime he involved himself in a bewildering array of activities. The last quarter of his life was spent in the cause of socialist revolution and he left a considerable body of socialist writings when he died.
Saint William Morris? It had to be a hoax. Actually, it wasn't. The Church of England, in its pathetically opportunist bid to recruit anyone with a credible image to its side, proposed canonising Morris, the nineteenth-century Marxist revolutionary who resolutely rejected all gods and religions. When he died in the late morning of 3 October 1896, Morris's last reported words were "I want to get mumbo-jumbo out of this world." Hardly the stuff of which saints are made. If it weren't for mumbo-jumbo every clergyman would be on the dole looking for real work.
In an age when, as the Stranglers reminded us, there are no more heroes (we're all cynics now), the present writer readily confesses to more than a passing admiration for William Morris. Here was a man born into affluence and opportunity: educated at Marlborough public school, where he famously stated that he learned nothing except by walking in the local countryside and observing nature and reading useful books in the local library, and then Exeter College, Oxford, where he was sent to train for the priesthood and left stating: "I won't sign the 39 Articles" (1855) because he had seen through the sham of the Church's authoritarian morality. Like many others of his age and class he could have become just another time-wasting ponce, living in thoughtless indolence upon the hard work of the majority. But Morris took a different course.
Talented Artistic Creation
Morris's belief was that art and society are inseparable. How often do we meet those dullards of the artistic establishment who, cocooned like monks in their galleries, pontificate about art as if it is something to be hidden behind bullet-proof screens: either a purchasable indulgence for the rich or a thing of beauty for school groups of working-class kids to be allowed to gawp at as a spectacle. Morris hated this idea of art. For him, art was about making things which were useful and accessible and beautiful to look at and to touch. He was, to be sure, a man of immensely varied talents: probably the most versatile and talented artistic creator of the last century. As an architect Morris revolutionised house design, with his building of the Red House near Bexleyheath. as a designer of textiles and wallpapers Morris revolutionised the skill, reviving approaches to colour and inventing methods of production. With Burne-Jones, his closest artistic friend, he did the same with the design of stained-glass windows in which their productions were unsurpassed in their splendour. As a poet of the second Victorian generation Morris was respected as being a superb writer, not only composing great long works such as 'The Dream of John Ball' (with its invigorating sense of how history changes in ways often unclear to those living through it), but also translating Greek classical poetry as well as the Icelandic sagas which so inspired him. When Tennyson was offered the poet laureateship in 1892 it had been planned to offer it to Morris who, needless to say, would have no part in being appointed to write flattering ditties for royal parasites. Not content to write poetry, Morris was a pioneer in the field of typography in which during the latter years of his life, he devoted himself to revolutionising printing methods and building up his own press which could produce words pleasurable not only to read but to look at.
What kind of man embodied these talents? Yeats, who came to know Morris in his London days (and was even tempted for a while by his revolutionary ideas until the folly of the fairies drew him to the mysticism of Irish nationalism which ended in a personal attraction to fascism), wrote of William Morris that "You saw him producing everywhere organisation and beauty, seeming in the same instant helpless and triumphant; and people loved him as children are loved." By all accounts, Morris seems to have been one of the most undisliked men of his century. When he died, only in his early sixties, a century ago, the doctor declared that he died of simply being William Morris. It is understandable that vicars, usually noted for adding little to the world and most in their element when burying the dead rather than energising the living, might look at the enormous vivacity of Morris's character and assume that he must have been superhuman, fit for sainthood. Morris would have hated such an idea of himself. For him, there was nothing that he could do which, given the opportunity, others could not learn to do also. Unlike the precious artists, so often second-rate, who surround themselves with a mystique of creative specialness, Morris's achievements were always intended as inspiration, not exclusivity.
For most of his life Morris was just a critical complainer against the effects of capitalism, but, like so many others, one who never knew what capitalism was or even that it existed. At first he bemoaned the loss of true arts in the nineteenth century, pursuing the criticisms of his teacher, Ruskin, against the regimentation, waste and tackiness of urban, industrial squalor. But he knew not what caused this to be. As a supporter of the radical wing of the Liberals (the equivalent of Labour today, as the anti-Conservative but pro-capitalist party of his time) he joined the Eastern Question Association in protest against the atrocities being committed in the Balkans to which the rest of the world turned a cynical blind eye. (What changes?) As Treasurer of the EQA Morris was forced to look in the face the hypocritical posturing and limited vision of the capitalist politicians. Meanwhile, as a founder of SPAB (the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings), Morris and his friends were fighting a losing battle to preserve some of the beauties of the pre-industrial world from the ravages of vandalism for profit.
Socialist Activist
William Morris was over fifty when something important developed within his thinking. He came to realise that all of these hideous acts of destruction against art, beauty and human life were not accidents of history or the consequences of wrong government. They were the inevitable effects of the capitalist system which can no more put beauty and life before rent, interest and profit than the church could put science before superstition. What was wrong with the times in which he lived was the system. Morris was no less energetic about this revelation than he had been about any of his other occupations. He set himself to read Marx (in French, for Capital was yet to be translated into English) and became an active member of the newly-formed Social Democratic Federation, the first revolutionary socialist body in Britain.
Within a year of joining the SDF (and giving it time, money and enthusiasm hitherto reserved for artistic creation) Morris found himself in a majority on its Executive Council refusing to endorse some of the policies being pursued. Firstly, there was the arrogance of the Eton-educated self-appointed leader, Hyndman, whose belief that the SDF was almost his own personal property, and whose contemptible imperialism and anti-Jewish racism, was too much for those like Morris, Eleanor Marx and Belfort Bax to stomach. Then there was the question of reform. Hyndman and his supporters took the view that a socialist body should advocate reforms of capitalism under the illusion that these would be "Stepping Stones to Socialism". Morris had read Marx too well to believe that the inherent class robbery of capitalism could be reformed in the interest of the robbed. He took the view that only by educating those who are robbed by capitalism of the cause of their miseries and the hope of a real alternative could socialism ever be achieved. Like Marx, Morris maintained that there could be no socialism without conscious socialists to bring it about. So, in December 1883 Morris and the others, though a majority on the EC of the SDF, resigned from it and established the Socialist league. Soon they had their own journal, Commonweal: the political contributions made to it by Morris have now been collected in two volumes in the William Morris Library (edited and introduced by Nicholas Salmon) and these, together with A.L. Morton's excellent little edition of the Political Writings of William Morris are amongst the finest socialist writings ever produced. (Every socialist owes it to themselves to read these.)
In 1890 Morris took upon himself the task, tried by others but never with anything close to the same force of clarity and imagination, to depict what a socialist society might look like. More than that, what it would feel like to live in. Morris's News From Nowhere is more than just a pretty picture of utopia. Readers may like bits and discard others, and Morris the libertarian would respect them more for doing so: he was no prophetic author of blueprints for the future. What Morris attempted to do - and succeeded with brilliance - was to show that a society based upon common ownership and democratic control could exist; that free access to wealth without the existence of the market or money as social fetters upon human freedom could work effectively; that a society could exist co-operatively and humanely without the need for the state, with its governments, police and prisons; that human nature is not opposed to human decency in the world. What had happened to the world to allow this great transformation to happen? It did not require the coming to earth of some miracle-making messiah who, in line with infantile religious belief, would purify the earth so that Saint Morris could write about it. No such claptrap for Morris: his depiction of the new age of humanity depended upon the assumption that workers had united to get rid of capitalism. There was no other way to bring about the socialist alternative.
It was once said of Morris that whereas the reformers had told people what to want, Morris had told them how to want. He had attended to the education of desire, teaching people that their dreams of a better world could only be realised as visions to be enacted if they would organise on the basis of knowledge and co-operation. He was right. How much more refreshingly right than those sad relics of the museum of political postures on the British Left, marching not to the socialist Nowhere but the capitalist nowhere being planned for by that emblematic nobody, Tony Blair.
There is something of an irony that in this year of the centenary of his death, vast numbers of people will file past the great Morris exhibition at the Victorian and Albert Museum and many more will remember him with self-deceiving selectivity: every Sunday supplement is running something about Morris, but they will neglect to mention that he dedicated his later life to the creation of a moneyless, wageless, stateless society. Not only did he write about it, but he gave endless lectures and speeches, from Secular Halls to open-air platforms across the country. He talked to striking Northumbrian miners and small gatherings of drunks and autodidacts in damp rooms and windy street corners. He was a fighter and an inspiration to many of us who were born long after he died.
Better than any saint, it could be argued with some force that Morris's contribution to the sum of human history was rather greater than that of Muffin the Mule. Not so according to the Post Office which has rejected a proposal to produce a commemorative stamp to mark his death on the grounds that "William Morris was not of sufficient stature". (Instead, stamps with pictures of Muffin the Mule and the glove puppet, Sooty, will be produced.) There has been a minor outcry from a few Labour MPs (currently led by a human glove-puppet, operated with much dexterity by the Stock Exchange) which is the usual respect paid by Labour leaders to long-dead socialists. Had Morris been alive today, advocating the revolutionary abolition of the market and production for profit, his condemnation as "irrelevant", "utopian" and "not in line with practical politics" would be churned out by the very Labour MPs who like looking at Marxists as long as it's only on a stamp.

Pioneers of socialism (1998)

The Socialist League, a breakaway from the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), which was established in the 1880s by William Morris, Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling and other pioneering socialists, was remarkably close to the Socialist Party in its ideas and aims. However its confused position on parliament and the ballot box despite its correct opposition to campaigning for reforms led to it being overrun by anarchists and to the resignation of genuine socialists such as Morris.
The strategy of Morris and the others was the "making" of socialists who understood and wanted an end to capitalism and wanted the establishment of a socialist society. This ran counter to the object both of anarchists who simply wanted to destroy the state, and of those "socialists" who wanted to concentrate on building a large party with its roots in the trade unions which could somehow reform capitalism out of existence. Some fourteen years after the Socialist League was overrun by anarchists in 1890, the Socialist Party of Great Britain was founded. Like the League, it was a breakaway from the SDF but, while echoing the League's call for revolution and nothing less, addressed the issues which had led to the League's failure.
Revolution not reform
The Socialist League was founded in 1884 after the resignation of a number of socialists from the SDF which had taken the position of working gradually for socialism through the winning of reforms, so-called stepping stones to socialism. Disgruntled with the undemocratic nature of H.M. Hyndman's leadership and seeing the absurdity and inevitable failure of trying to change capitalism and its essential profit-making drive through legal changes, William Morris, Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling, Belfort Bax and others established a separate body committed to socialism and nothing less. Morris wrote:
"The palliatives over which many worthy people are busying themselves now are useless because they are but unorganised partial revolts against a vast wide-spreading, grasping organisation which will, with the unconscious instinct of a plant, meet every attempt to bettering the conditions of the people with an attack on a fresh side."
The Manifesto of the Socialist League, drafted by Morris and Bax and adopted in 1885, stated firmly the stance of the League against reformism and for social revolution and nothing else:
"As to mere politics, Absolutism, Constitutionalism, Republicanism. All have been tried in our day and under our present system, and all have failed in dealing with the real evils of life.
Nor, on the other hand, will certain incomplete schemes of social reform now before the public solve the question.
Co-operation so-called—that is, competitive co-operation for profit—would merely increase the number of small joint-stock capitalists, under the mask of creating an aristocracy of labour, while it would intensify the severity of labour by its temptations to overwork.
Nationalisation of the land alone, which many earnest and sincere persons are now preaching, would be useless so long as labour was subject to the fleecing of surplus value inevitable under the Capitalist system.
No better solution would be that State Socialism, by whatever name it may be called, whose aim it would be to make concessions to the working class while leaving the present system of capital and wages in operation: no number of merely administrative changes; until the workers are in a possession of all political power, would make any real approach to Socialism.
The Socialist League therefore aims at the realisation of complete Revolutionary Socialism, and well knows that this can never happen in any one country without the help of the workers of all civilisation."
After a century and more of failed attempts at reforming capitalism, the position of Morris and the League has been proved correct, as has its position against what they called "state socialism" (more accurately described as state capitalism) which has only succeeded in dividing the working class and replacing the issue of class with the issue of supporting one capitalist "nation" against another.
The ballot box
The League, however, was opposed to the idea of achieving socialism via the ballot box and parliament. This was not on the grounds of wanting to lead the working class to revolution in the belief that a socialist majority could never exist, but on the grounds that campaigning for election to parliament inevitably meant advocating reforms of the present system. This mistaken conclusion was drawn due to the number of so-called socialists in this period who were turning away from social revolution and towards gradualism. Parliament, according to the League, was a capitalist institution which would only be strengthened by reformist policies and which would subvert a socialist party from a body which campaigned for social revolution to a corrupt body which would inevitably campaign for election on a reformist programme. Even so, Morris did envisage that, at some stage, socialists would enter parliament as rebels to dissolve capitalist power:
"I believe that the Socialists will certainly send members to Parliament when they are strong enough to do so; in itself I see no harm in that, so long as it is understood that they go there as rebels, and not as members of the governing body prepared to pass palliative measures to keep Society alive."
It was its opposition to the use of elections by connecting them to the policy of reformism which was the weak link in the League's armour. Opposition to parliament and elections led to the increasing membership of anarchists, who saw the problems of society not as connected to capitalism but to the institution of the state itself. They did not seek to remove capitalism (the disease) by making socialists but sought to destroy the state and authority (the symptom) by acts of violence. It was this section of the League which grew in strength and eventually displaced the genuine pioneer socialists who had established an organisation and produced literature which still remain an inspiration to socialists today. It has to be said, however, that many of these pioneer socialists were beginning to turn to gradualism themselves, as the working class seemingly turned to this course (but in reality only opting for small improvements now rather than any conscious socialist idea).
The Socialist League collapsed in the early 1890s with the departure of William Morris in 1890 (who formed the Hammersmith Socialist Society). After this its publication Commonweal, with the party in general, declined to an ignominious mess after control passed to the anarchists whose squabbles were an irrelevance to the working class.
Thus, the voice of socialism (despite the League's few inconsistencies) was lost until the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904 and its solving of the problems of earlier socialists. Formed after a group of socialists grew disillusioned with the reformist stance of the SDF (as the League pioneers had been twenty years earlier), the Socialist Party solved the problem of reform or revolution by a unique commitment to the use of the ballot box and the democratic sending of socialists to parliament with the sole aim of abolishing the profit system; a possible socialist minority in parliament being committed to opposition to all policies that would help prolong capitalism.
The Socialist Party has stood for socialism and nothing but ever since. A bastion of socialist consciousness in a political wilderness of capitalist party against capitalist party; free market or nationalisation, private ownership or state ownership, left or right, tweedledum or tweedledee. Capitalism is capitalism whichever mask it is attempting to wear and the Socialist Party is the only party to have stood for socialism throughout the twentieth century despite the diversions of Lenin, Keynesians and a host of others attempting to change capitalism without a socialist majority that understands and desires it. Capitalism's appearance may have changed in the last hundred years but no amount of tinkering can change the essential labour-fleecing and profit-seeking which makes it tick and which socialists understand must be removed before socialism can exist. Socialism remains as relevant for humanity today as it did then.

Stepping Stones to Nowhere (1996)

Reform and Revolution. Three Early Socialists on the Way Ahead. William Morris, John Carruthers, Fred Henderson. Edited and introduced by Stephen Coleman. Thoemmes Press. £9.75

The first organisation in Britain to put forward Marxian views was the Socialist Democratic Federation which had been founded in 1881 as a federation of Radical (i.e. leftwing Liberal) political clubs and which two years later adopted socialism as its aim and added “Social” to its title. The second was the Socialist League, formed as a breakaway from the SDF in 1884.

The main difference between the two organisation was over reforms (legislative measures within capitalism aimed at improving social conditions or extending political democracy). The SDF believed that a socialist organisation should advocate reforms as “stepping stones to socialism”, but the reforms it advocated were the same as it used to when it had still been a leftwing Liberal organisation.

The concept of reforms as stepping stones to socialism implied that socialism would come about as a result of a gradual accumulation of reforms passed by parliament. The Socialist League disagreed with this position, arguing not only that reforms were not stepping stones to socialism (they were more inclined to regard them as measures to consolidate capitalism) but also that a socialist organisation should not advocate reforms at all but should concentrate exclusively on propagating socialist ideas with a view to building up a mass class-conscious working class organisation to challenge capitalism.

Until now, with the publication of this book which reproduces three contributions by members or ex-members of the Socialist League with a modern introduction, the anti-reformist arguments of the League have not been readily available. Many people have heard of Morris the poet, Morris the craftsman, Morris the wall-paper designer, even Morris the socialist, but few will be aware of the grasp of political realities and analysis that Morris revealed as the main defender of the Socialist League’s anti-reformist position, Morris the socialist theoretician, if you like.

In his talk “The Policy of Abstention”, first given in 1887 and reproduced here, Morris argues against the SDF position of trying to get elected to parliament in order to get reforms passed as supposed stepping stones to socialism. Socialism, he argues, would not come through parliament (which he regarded as part of the government of capitalism) but through the mass action of workers outside parliament. This was why, in his view, socialists should “abstain” from parliamentary action and seek instead to build up a mass anti-capitalist workers’ organisation. This would be political but not parliamentary and have socialism as its aim. As a mass organisation able to organise strikes and demonstrations it would be in a position to extract reforms from the ruling class, though not as stepping stones to socialism but as concessions to try to stop its growth. Reforms, in other words, could be obtained (if that was what was wanted) without needing to go into parliament, as a by-product of uncompromising agitation and organisation for socialism.

Although he came close to it, Morris’s position was not totally anti-parliamentary (he clashed with and opposed the anarchists, who eventually took over the Socialist League and committed it to “propaganda of the deed” as they called bomb-throwing). He always envisaged the possibility, as he repeats here, of the mass Socialist organisation sending delegates into parliament on the eve of the socialist revolution, with a view to neutralising it and depriving the pro-capitalist minority in society of any legitimacy for violent resistance to the establishment of socialism that having a parliamentary majority might give them. What Morris was saying was that socialists should abstain from going into parliament to get reforms rather than they should abstain from going there altogether.

John Carruthers, in his talk on “Socialism and Radicalism” that was published as a pamphlet by the Hammersmith Socialist Society in 1894, argues that, even were the sort of reforms advocated by the SDF, ILP, the Fabians and others to be achieved (as they had been to some extent in countries like New Zealand), this would not solve working-class problems as their cause – the capitalist ownership of the means of production – would be left unchanged.

Carruthers saw clearly that nationalisation of certain industries would only benefit the rest of the capitalist class and not the working class, and so should not be supported by socialists. As to political reforms, he made the point that sufficient political democracy already existed in Britain for workers to be able to use it to gain power peacefully to establish socialism once they had come to want it. So there was no need for socialists to campaign for political reforms either. The real issue was that most workers didn’t yet want socialism, and that was what socialists should concentrate on trying to remedy.

Fred Henderson’s contribution “The ABC of Socialism” was written some fifteen years later, long after he had ceased to be a member of the Socialist League and indeed long after the League had gone out of existence. By then he was a member of the ILP – he was later to become the Labour Lord Mayor of Norwich – and so was not opposed to campaigning for reforms. But even he argues that as long as the cause of working-class problems remains – the private, or class, ownership of the means of production – then so will the problems. Reforms, in other words, can’t solve these problems; only Socialism can do that.

Henderson’s contribution to this book is in fact a basic exposition of the case against capitalism and the case for socialism, a reminder that before the First World War the argument was not so much about what socialism was but about how to get there. Henderson’s definition of socialism is clear enough: “community ownership of the land and of the means of producing and distributing wealth; and the organisation of industry under that common ownership as public service for the benefit of all; directed to social ends and the equipment of the life of the whole people instead of, as now, to the private enrichment of a privileged class of owners”.

Mixed Media: William Morris and His Legacy - Anarchy and Beauty (2015)

The William Morris exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London was curated by Fiona McCarthy, author of William Morris: A Life for Our Time where she describes Morris's politics as 'Marxism with visionary libertarianism.'
For socialists, the exhibition contains a cornucopia of delights, and fleshes out what WB Yeats wrote in The Trembling of the Veil: 'I cannot remember who first brought me to the old stable beside Kelmscott House, William Morris's house at Hammersmith, and to the debates held there upon Sunday evenings, by the Socialist League. I was soon of the little group who had supper with Morris afterwards. I met at these suppers very constantly Walter Crane, Emery Walker, in association with Cobden-Sanderson, the printer of many fine books, and less constantly Bernard Shaw, and perhaps once or twice Hyndman the socialist and the anarchist Prince Kropotkin. There, too, one always met certain more or less educated workmen, rough of speech and manner, with a conviction to meet every turn.'
The portrait William Morris by GF Watts gives Morris a Dionysian quality, of which Yeatswrote 'a reproduction of his portrait by Watts hangs over my mantelpiece... its grave wide-open eyes, like the eyes of some dreaming beast... while the broad vigorous body suggests a mind that has no need of the intellect to remain sane.' When Morris lay dying one of his doctors diagnosed his fatal illness as ‘simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men.'
Of special interest is the Gold tooled binding of William Morris's copy of Marx's Le Capital. Morris started to read Marx in 1883 and by 1884 'the book 'had been worn to loose sections by his own constant study of it' and had to be rebound. It is always a pleasure to see the Hammersmith Socialist Society red banner which dates from Morris's departure from the Socialist League to form the Hammersmith Socialist Society in 1890.
Roger Fry's Edward Carpenter is a portrait of the gay socialist who was a comrade of Morris in the SDF, and later joined Morris, Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling in the Socialist League. Carpenter advocated free love, women's emancipation, and linked gay emancipation with social transformation. Carpenter lived openly with a working class lover near Sheffield for 30 years.
The oil painting of anarchist communist Prince Peter Kropotkin by Nellie Heath was commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society in recognition of Kropotkin's scientific achievements. Oscar Wilde described Kropotkin as 'a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ' (De Profundis).Significantly for socialists, Kropotkin concluded in The Wages System: 'a society that has seized upon all social wealth, and has plainly announced that all have a right to this wealth, whatever may be the part they have taken in creating it in the past, will be obliged to give up all ideas of wages, either in money or in labour notes.'
Bernard Partridge's portrait of Bernard Shaw reminds us that Lenin was right when he described Shaw as 'a good man fallen among Fabians' (Six Weeks in Russia, Arthur Ransome). Shaw was on the point of joining the Marxist SDF but instead joined the Fabian Society. Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism was republished in 1937 and Hardy in the Socialist Standard wrote that Shaw's views were ‘essentially utopian – that there will be money incomes under socialism, and that the capitalist foundation can be made to support a socialist system of society.'
The iconic Gilman photograph gelatin silver print of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas is featured in the exhibition. Unlike Shaw, Wilde understood socialism, and under the influence of Kropotkin he wrote in The Soul of Man Under Socialism 'with the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live.'
Socialist women comrades of Morris are featured in the exhibition such as the pencil drawing of Eleanor Marx by Grace Black. In The Woman Question Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling identified that ‘the position of woman rests on an economic basis’ with ‘no solution in the present condition of society’ but in socialism ‘the woman will no longer be the man's slave but his equal.' The carbon print of Annie Besant by Herbert Rose Barrand portrays the author of the 1888 article White Slavery in London whichdescribed conditions of work in the Bryant & May match factory in London's East End and led to the successful London Match Girls strike.
William Morris and His Legacy: Anarchy and Beauty is to be recommended if only to give modern audiences an introduction to socialist ideas. As Morris wrote 'Our business... is the making of Socialists, i.e. convincing people that Socialism is good for them and is possible. When we have enough people of that way of thinking, they will find out what action is necessary for putting their principles in practice. Therefore, I say, make Socialists. We Socialists can do nothing else that is useful' (Commonweal 15 November 1890).