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.

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).

Book Review: 'William Morris on History' (1996)

'William Morris on History'. Edited by Nicholas Salmon. Sheffield Academic Press. £6.95.

This is yet another book published to take advantage of the fact that this year is the centenary of William Morris's death. Not that we are complaining. Far from it. The cause of socialism can only gain from the wider diffusion of Morris's political writings.

Morris didn't claim to be a historian. He was, in this context, just a socialist writer and speaker who from time to time wrote and spoke on historical (as on other) subjects. All the pieces included in this book were composed after he had become a socialist. They cover such subjects as English society before and after the Norman conquest, the Middle Ages, the medieval guilds, the Peasants' Revolt, and the rise of capitalism.

After reading them nobody will be able to claim, as some still do, that Morris proposed "a return to the Middle Ages". He did think that skilled craftsmen had enjoyed somewhat of a golden age for part of the Middle Ages, and did want to revive this but in a socialist society, not by going back to feudalism where he was well aware most producers were not guild craftsmen but serfs exploited by a class of feudal lords.

Morris became a socialist when he was nearly fifty, so it was only normal that he already had set views on certain subjects. One of these, for instance, was that the moral attitudes of the "Teutonic" peoples of Northern Europe -what he called their "manly" virtues- were superior to those of the Roman Empire.

Despite such personal views (and despite one bad talk in which he gives out good and bad points to the various English kings of the feudal period after the fashion of conventional history textbooks) Morris's general approach is that of the materialist conception of history.

In other words, he starts from the premise that it is the way humans in any society are related to each other, with regard to the production and distribution of the material means by which society and its individual members survive, that in the end determines the ideas and political structure of that society; and that social change occurs when advances in technology change these basic social relations of production and give rise to a new economic class which struggles against the established ruling class to consolidate the new mode of production economically, politically and ideologically.

Book Review: 'William Morris - The Man and The Myth' (1965)

William Morris as a socialist
'William Morris - The Man and The Myth', by R. Page Arnot
William Morris, the poet and designer of the Victorian era, is not generally thought of as a Marxian Socialist. He is either praised for his artistic contributions or pictured as a Utopian sentimentalist. In fact Morris was a prominent and active member of one of the pioneer Marxist organisations in Britain, the Socialist League, which was founded in 1884 by a group of people who broke away from the Social Democratic Federation because of the dictatorial attitude of its founder, H. M. Hyndman.
The League, in the words of its manifesto, advocated "the principles of revolutionary international socialism." This manifesto was written by Morris. Morris also served on the League's executive committee, edited its official journal, wrote pamphlets and leaflets, addressed indoor and street-corner meetings and sold its literature. An examination of his writings will show that Morris had a clear grasp of the theory of exploitation and the materialist conception of history.
Economics, and history were not, however, his specialities. Where Morris can be said to have made a real contribution to socialist theory is in bringing out the positive side of Socialism. Anyone who regards his News from Nowhere as mere Utopianism misses the point altogether. Morris was not painting a detailed picture of the future society rather was he outlining what he saw as the possibilities of Socialism. He was attempting to describe what relations between people could be like when freed from the cash nexus. Other of his writings such as Art, Labour and Socialism and Useful Work versus Useless Toil explains why is a drudgery under capitalism and how it can be pleasure under socialism.
William Morris's views are interesting for another reason. The early Marxian Socialism movement in Britain and North America spent much time in discussing whether a Socialist party should have a programme of immediate demands, of parliamentary reforms. This question came up for discussion at the annual conference of the Socialist League in 1887.
The League contained many diverse elements including out-an-out anarchists. Some of the branches (supported incidentally by Engels) were in favour of trying to get into Parliament and drawing up a list of "palliatives" as a parliamentary programme. The anarchists, naturally, were opposed to this. So was William Morris, but for different reasons. While not opposed to parliamentary action altogether, Morris was opposed to the League acquiring a programme of palliatives or reforms.
In his opinion there was a need of "a body of principle" to abstain from such opportunism. He suggested that for a Socialist organisation to contest elections on such a programme would end in the election of Socialists on non-Socialist votes. Morris was, however, prepared to work with those who favoured a reform programme and after he had resigned from the League following its capture by the anarchist section he signed a manifesto, together with Hyndman and Bernard Shaw, calling for a united socialist party.
Twenty years after the breakaway of the Socialist League from the SDF, another break occurred—and for the same reasons, Hyndman's dictatorial attitude and the organisation's opportunism. Those who broke away were to form the Socialist Party of Great Britain. From the very beginning, after the benefit of further discussions of the issue of a reform programme especially in America, the Socialist Party was—and still is—uncompromisingly opposed to a programme of immediate demands.
It would be ungenerous of us not to recognise that William Morris usefully contributed to the discussion among early socialist which led to the adoption of this principle by our party. Morris was quite conscious of the fact that his position was a departure from that of German Social Democracy.
This book contains further information on Morris' position on this question, with the publication for the first time of some of his letters to J. L. Mahon, who was for a time the secretary of the League. Page Arnot has done some useful research but the commentary in this book, despite the new material, is incredibly bad.
Arnot creates a new myth, one of Morris as a forerunner of the so-called Communist Party of which he (Arnot) is a member. We are told that because of his position on reforms Morris was a "leftist" of the sort attacked by Lenin in his Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (incidentally a type which has always been given short-shrift by the Communist Party). Surely the choicest piece of distortion is that which tells us that the British Road to Socialism, the current programme of Arnot's party, is a detailed version of News From Nowhere!
Adam Buick

Book Review: 'William Morris & News from Nowhere' (1990)

News from Nowhere
William Morris and News From Nowhere: A Vision For Our Time. Edited by Stephen Coleman and Paddy O'Sullivan. Green Books, 1990, 8.95
As 1990 is the centenary year of the publication of the utopian novel News From Nowhere, this book is a timely assessment of one of William Morris's most inspiring works. Nine writers have contributed chapters on topics as diverse as architecture, socialism, love, and ecology, each demonstrating how much William Morris had to offer a world that was, to him, getting drabber and more divided as the capitalist system subordinated everything of worth to the dictates of profit.
The first chapter, written by Christopher Hampton, sets News From Nowhere in the context of the wider utopian literary tradition, whilst recognising some of the features that set it apart from earlier utopian works, not least of all Morris's commitment to socialist change:
    "It was the shock of his reaction to the material conditions determined by a rapacious economic system at work and the devastating consequences for the people of his world that drove him towards commitment and from that to the writing of News From Nowhere."
In providing a vision of a socialist society of common ownership and democratic control without class division, money or the state, News From Nowhere is without doubt a literary milestone as far as the socialist movement is concerned, but the conception of socialist revolution outlined in it by Morris is not without its faults, emphasising as it does the role of insurrection and civil war. John Crump, in Chapter Two, makes much of the fact that the socialist revolution described by Morris involved the use of organisations akin to "workers' councils", set up so that the "irrelevant" Parliament could be by-passed. However, it is also worth mentioning that this is a view which later in his life Morris rejected in favour of capturing control of political power and the state machine through Parliament. In truth, Morris had a tendency to simply associate Parliament with reformism and was wary that activity geared towards Parliament could lead a genuine socialist party off course.
As John Crump states, "News From Nowhere derives its reputation more from its wonderfully attractive description of communist society than from its account of how communism is achieved". In Chapter Three, Stephen Coleman investigates one of its most attractive features, namely the contrast between the inhabitants of the socialist society envisaged by Morris and the inhabitants of our own, present-day capitalist society. Coleman describes how News From Nowhere challenges the traditional Judeo-Christian ideology which states that human nature must always act as a barrier to lasting harmony and freedom. In doing so he shows how Morris can not only depict a changed social organisation, but a changed people with different outlooks and behaviour to our own:
    "Morris was too imaginative a materialist to presume to have discovered a single, finalized, human nature; he understood that human behaviour—relationships, culture, feelings of self-identity—are fundamentally historical. Stripped of capitalist education, capitalist work routines, capitalist legislation and morality, Morris allowed himself to depict humans freed to behave beyond the limiting confines of the money-wages-profit system."
Ray Watkinson develops this theme further in Chapter Four, arguing that Morris saw creative work, liberated from the confines of the wages system, as an essential feature of "living society". He persuasively argues against the idea that Morris was completely opposed to the use of machinery, stating that "what Morris is against is not the machines, but the alienation, that under capitalism, they produce." In socialism, humans were no longer to be appendages of machines, but machines were to be subordinated to the real needs of labour.
The fifth chapter concerns itself with how Morris views women and sexuality, with Jan Marsh arguing that in this sense News From Nowhere tends to reflect some of the attitudes of the period in which it was written. With some justification, Jan Marsh labels News From Nowhere "a masculine vision of paradise", but comments that:
    "It is all very well for there to be no jobs in Nowhere for lawyers or army commanders, for example—and we can all agree that in an ideal state these are unnecessary—when women have never had the opportunity to select or reject such work."
This comment would suggest that this particular author's commitment to a truly socialist society is rather token. After all, the choice between a system of common ownership and peace on the one hand and a competitive war-oriented society with a few women generals on the other is hardly a difficult one for those with a real commitment to equality.
The next two chapters, written by Colin Ward and Mark Pearson, discuss Morris's vision of housing, design and architecture—the "mother of the arts"—while Chapter Eight reverts to discussing the specific type of socialist society envisaged in News From Nowhere, this time from the standpoint of how the inhabitants of this society organised to satisfy their needs. In this chapter, Adam Buick argues that implicit in News From Nowhere is the idea of common ownership rather than government ownership. For in the society of News From Nowhere there is no state machine with its police and prisons and consequently no government to oversee its affairs. And, of course, along with common ownership goes direct democratic decision-making without recourse to government or leaders, free access to wealth without monetary payment, and voluntary co-operative work free from the coercion and exploitation of the wages system. In a particularly important section of this chapter Buick considers whether such an economic arrangement is feasible, concluding that contrary to the myths propagated by economists, human needs are not limitless and that a potential abundance of wealth exists in the world with which to satisfy those needs.
The final chapter by Paddy O'Sullivan deals with Morris's vision from an ecological perspective, arguing that his commitment to ecology was more than just an aesthetic reaction to the disfiguration of the environment, but involved a consideration of how the implementation of his political ideas would affect nature. This chapter, however, is a little disappointing as O'Sullivan confuses what some environmentalists term "surplus production" (the socially useless production of cheap "throw-way" commodities) with the Marxian concept of surplus value (the unpaid labour of the working class) and this tends to cloud the analysis of the chapter.
William Morris And News From Nowhere: A Vision For Our Time is an interesting and important book which contains arguments which can inspire new generations of workers to look beyond the confines of the profit system, a hundred years after Morris's original work did the same.
DAP

'William Morris. His Life, Work and Friends' (1974)

Revolutionary Art & Socialism
'William Morris. His Life, Work and Friends', by Philip Henderson. Penguin. 90p.
'Political Writings of William Morris', ed. by A. L. Morton. Lawrence and Wishart. £1.
William Morris was a Victorian poet and designer and it is as such that he is probably best known to the general public. But for the last ten or so years in his life he was also a revolutionary socialist and pioneer Marxist in Britain. He was born in 1834, the son of wealthy capitalist parents and as a result enjoyed an independent income all his life. Not that he chose not to work. Far from it. He interested himself, and tried his hand at, nearly every craft from dyeing to printing (setting up a business to sell the products of such crafts to the "swinish rich”), a living proof of the proposition that men will choose to work even if they are not forced to.
Work was always central to Morris’ whole outlook, even before he became a Socialist. While at Oxford in the 1850’s he became involved with a group of romantic artists known as the pre-Raphaelites because they reckoned that painting had degenerated after the Middle Ages with Raphael, the first Reformation painter. Morris, naturally, tried his hand at painting but became more famous as a poet. The general tenor of the pre-Raphaelite criticism was that mediaeval society was better for "art” than the industrial society which followed it. However “art” was not used in the sense just of paintings, sculptures, etc. but was defined by John Ruskin as the expression of man’s pleasure in his labour. Morris wholeheartedly endorsed this definition of art, with its implication that men would spontaneously produce beautiful things — things of everyday use, not mere decorations — if they enjoyed their work. This product of enjoyable work Morris called “popular art”. It was a recognition that capitalism denied most men pleasure in their work that led him to become a socialist in 1883, not long before he reached the age of 50.
Before that he had been on the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, first taking an active part in politics in the agitation against war with Russia following Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria in 1876. Morris became the treasurer of the Eastern Question Association and wrote a manifesto on its behalf addressed "To the Workingmen of England”, thus showing that even at this time Morris relied on the working class to carry out his political ideas. In the 1880 election he worked for the return of Gladstone, but soon became disillusioned with the new Liberal government. He made contact with various trade unionists and working-class political organisations and in 1883 joined the Democratic Federation. This was an association of working-class radical clubs formed in 1881.
Soon after Morris joined, it changed its name to the Social Democratic Federation, proclaiming Socialism as its aim and Marxism as its theory, though in fact it never did outlive its radical-Liberal origins as it continued to advocate also the same reforms of capitalism it always had. Morris set about studying Marx, reading Capital where, understandably in view of his background, he preferred the historical parts on the rise of modern capitalist industry and its effect on the working class rather than the abstract economic theory. Nevertheless there can be no doubt at all that Morris did master sufficient of Marx’s ideas — on history and society as well as economics — to be regarded as a Marxian socialist. A reading of Morton’s selection of his political writings will confirm this
Hyndman, the man who had been largely instrumental in founding the Democratic Federation, was an authoritarian and tried to run the SDF as his personal organisation. This led to discontent and eventually, at the very end of 1884, to a split in which Morris, somewhat reluctantly, became the key figure in the breakaway Socialist League. Unlike the SDF, the Socialist League had no programme of reforms, which it regarded as mere palliatives; it saw its task as simply to “make Socialists”, as William Morris put it, thus in many aspects anticipating the policy of the Socialist Party of Great Britain when it was founded twenty years later as another breakaway from the reform-mongering SDF.
William Morris found himself as the main theorist of the anti-reform, make-socialists policy of the Socialist League. At times this brought him to the verge of an anti-parliamentary position since he thought that to enter parliament would be to become bogged down in reformist politics, but he never did deny that in the course of the socialist revolution the working class would have to capture political power including parliament. This refusal to advocate the use of parliament to get reforms upset a group, including Marx’s daughter Eleanor, who in the end broke away from the Socialist League. This left Morris at the mercy of the real anti-parliamentarians and anarchists, who eventually came to dominate the League with their advocacy of violence and bomb-throwing. In 1890 Morris and the Hammersmith branch seceded, carrying on independent socialist activity as the Hammersmith Socialist Society.
During these six years Morris was a real Socialist activist. Besides being editor of Commonweal, the League’s journal, he spoke indoors and outdoors up and down the country. A number of these talks (including some while he was still in the SDF) are reprinted in Morton’s book. They can leave no doubt as to Morris’ socialist understanding:
       "Our business, I repeat, 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 into practice. Until we have that mass of opinion, action for a general change that will benefit the whole people is impossible" ('Where Are We Now?', 1890, p. 226).
     "Intelligence enough to conceive, courage enough to will, power enough to compel. If our ideas of a new Society are anything more than a dream, these three qualities must animate the due effective majority of the working people; and then, I say, the thing will be done" ('Communism', 1893, p. 229).
Part of Morris’ first public profession of his socialist views, a lecture delivered at University College Oxford in November 1884, was republished by the SPGB in 1907 and again in 1962, under the title Art, Labour and Socialism. This, like many of his earlier lectures, was addressed to his fellow-members of the bourgeois middle class rather than to the working class, but it still makes good reading (though, in this writer’s opinion, two of his other lectures, whose titles Useful Work versus Useless Toil and How We Live and How We Might Live speak for themselves, are better). Morris’ message was that enjoyable work should be available to all men and women but that capitalism denies such “popular art” to the propertyless working class and that only Socialism, a classless society of equals, can provide it. Morris also wrote two books, in the form of utopian romances, which are again good socialist — and Marxist — propaganda: A Dream of John Ball (a brilliant application of the materialist conception of history to the Peasants Revolt of 1381) and of course News from Nowhere.
Towards the end of his life, it must be pointed out, Morris modified his attitude to the use of parliament to try to get reforms and become reconciled to the SDF, though he never rejoined it. But he still insisted that such action must only be a means to the end of creating a determined Socialist majority, which alone could establish Socialism. He died in 1896.
Henderson’s biography is now reprinted as a paperback. Readable enough, it shows little sympathy for Morris’ socialist views, criticising him for supposed inconsistency in being a Socialist and art-lover. This perhaps is because Henderson accepts the myth that Russia is socialist. But, surely, Russia is the “state socialism” — or, as we would say today, state capitalism — Morris always disliked. He certainly would not have regarded Russia as socialist.
Adam Buick