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

William Morris and the Hammersmith Socialist Society (2003)

The Hammersmith Socialist Society was created out of the old Hammersmith Branch of the Socialist League after the latter's demise in 1890. The Hammersmith Branch chose to form a new body, in which William Morris was undoubtedly the greatest influence. One of the largest branches of first the Social Democratic Federation and then the League, Hammersmith Socialists were enthused by the socialist vision and sheer effort of Morris. Clearly the HSS felt that it had something distinct to offer the socialist movement. This something was simple revolutionary clarity.
Morris has been cited as ending or declining his interest in socialist activity from 1890; the evidence suggests otherwise. It was Morris's socialism that was largely enshrined in the Statement of Principles (1890) of HSS which he wrote. By the early 1890s it was the parliamentary and increasingly reformist route that was emerging as the dominant strategy; electoral requirements meaning reformist minimum programmes. It was against this trend that Morris fought a rearguard for revolutionary clarity and it was this fight that Morris bequeathed to the later “impossibilists”.
From the late 1880s, by which time legislation allowed working people to stand for election to municipal authorities, school boards, boards of guardians, and so on, the socialist and labour movement turned increasingly away from the necessity of revolution and began to appeal to the working class on electoral terms. Thus direct appeals to workers and efforts to bring about a socialist majority went by the wayside as efforts shifted from direct presentation of the socialist case and towards elections and the immediate improvement of social and material conditions by legislative action. Morris and the HSS sought to redress the balance, to restore the movement to definite socialist aims. For the HSS, the use of the state as a central means was misguided. While representatives of a united and strong socialist party might, in future, be sent to parliament, the situation in the early 1890s simply demanded that more socialists be made.
While resurgent trades unionism and radicalism had created a generation of workers who were demanding improvements to working and social conditions, their demands stopped a good deal short of anything like definite socialist aims. Many in the movement saw the growth in trades unionism and a declining hostility to socialism from working people as an indication that a socialist society was evolving or that new attitudes would allow representation in the legislature. Political opportunism, it was thought, based on these developments would gradually increase the demands made by the working class. It was these strategies that Morris and the HSS feared would lead to an electoral emphasis and piecemeal social and material improvements becoming the ends rather than the means of socialists. While use of the state may be the route chosen by some social-reformers, it should not be used as a veil of expediency by genuine socialists.
In its Statement of Principles the HSS states that without definite socialist aims the working class radicalism which had revived in the late 1880s would come to no greater end than the partial improvements that were being sought:
“as Socialists, we would remind our brethren generally that, though we cannot but sympathise with all the struggles of the workers against their masters, however partial they may be, however much they fall short of complete and effective combination, yet we cannot fail to see that of themselves these partial struggles will lead nowhere; and that this must always be the case as long as the workers are the wage slaves of the employers.”
Thus, by pursuing electoral success and partial reforms the wider movement was at best deferring socialism by abandoning socialist propaganda for the new radical reformism of the working class. In fact, rather than encouraging the working class movement to increase its demands, it was socialists who were reducing their demands in the face of working class radicalism. Faced with this, for the HSS, the strategy of socialists needed to be firmly set on the society of the future and definite aims to this end. The Statement of Principles outlines clearly how the HSS saw its role in the socialist movement:
“. . . it should be our special aim to make Socialists, by putting before people, and especially the working classes, the elementary truths of Socialism; since we feel sure, in the first place, that in spite of the stir in the ranks of labour there are comparatively few who understand what Socialism is, or have had opportunities of arguing on the subject with those who have at least begun to understand it; and, in the second place, we are no less sure that before any definite Socialist action can be attempted, it must be backed up by a great body of intelligent opinion – the opinion of a great mass of people who are already Socialists, people who know what they want, and are prepared to accept the responsibilities of self-government, which must form a part of their claims.”

The Socialist League, from which came the Hammersmith Socialist Society
Definition of socialism was therefore important. In the opening paragraph of the Statement of Principles the HSS defines its socialism in clear and cogent terms:
“By Socialism, the Hammersmith Socialist Society understands the realisation of a condition of society all embracing and all sufficing.
It believes that this great change must be effected by the conscious exertions of those who have learned to know what Socialism is.
This change, it believes, must be an essential change in the basis of society: the present basis is privilege for the few, and consequent servitude for the many; the future basis will be equality of condition for all, which we firmly believe to be the essence of true society.”
Given the aim of the HSS and its definition of socialism that were both uncompromising, how did the Society propose to achieve the formidable task it had set itself? The Rules of the Hammersmith Socialist Society give the answer. Essentially the Rules state that only definite socialists who could demonstrate their understanding could join, that it would rely on direct contact with the working class to propagate socialist understanding, and would be democratic with elected officials and committees but no leader.
In a revealing lecture of 1895, Morris argues that the labour movement was, as the HSS had feared in 1890, now concerned simply with limited material and social improvements. Socialists, according to Morris, should go beyond these aims – to socialism itself. While he now accepted that a socialist party should send delegates to parliament, he qualified this by saying that they would be delegates under the instructions of a socialist party and would be there not to run capitalism but to abolish it. Morris had clearly revised his earlier strongly anti-state position but retained socialist principles at the heart of any policy of sending socialist representatives to parliament. Morris now claimed that what was, above all, important was socialist unity and the building of a strong, genuinely socialist, party. There was room for differences of opinion amongst socialists but these had to be subservient to the central socialist aim, “to the old teaching and preaching of Socialism pure and simple”. It was the desire to bring this about which inspired the range of lectures and established Kelmscott House as a centre of socialist activity. It also resulted in an attempt at practical unity between the HSS, the SDF and the Fabian Society.
In December 1892 discussion between the organisations took place with the result of the formation of a Joint Committee consisting of five members from each body. Morris, George Bernard Shaw and Hyndman were given the task of drawing up a manifesto that could be the basis of united socialist action. The resulting Manifesto of English Socialists was issued on May 1st 1893. On the face of it the text could have provided the basis for some sort of unity. It suggested a programme of palliatives to satisfy the “stepping stones” of the SDF and the gradualism of the Fabian Society whilst, for the HSS, making clear that these were merely temporary measures not detracting from the ultimate need to abolish capitalism and establish socialism. It is probable that the SDF and HSS might have coped with the document but the revolutionary tone was probably too harsh for the Fabian Society to work with. The attempt at unity by the Joint Committee was at any rate a resounding failure with very little in the way of practical unity coming from their efforts.
Despite it emphasis on “socialism-and-nothing-but” the HSS was confused on the issue of political action and was prepared to compromise for the sake of socialist unity by advocating reforms provided they were firmly shackled to the socialist aim:
“The first step towards transformation and re-organisation must necessarily be in the direction of the limitation of class robbery, and the consequent raising of the standard of life for the individual. In this direction certain measures have been brought within the scope of practical politics . . . as tending to lessen the evils of the existing regime; so that individuals of the useful classes, having more leisure and less anxiety, may be able to turn their attention to the only real remedy for their position of inferiority – to wit . . .”
This position was clearly at variance with the general position of the Society with regard to support for political action that, according to the HSS, was futile for the ends sought. Clearly tension existed on the point at which socialist revolution was compromised by political expediency. In 1891 a member was lost through resignation after the Society agreed that individual members of the Society could help an SDF candidate standing for election to a school board. Also the Society did not discourage electoral voting as the League had done. Whilst allowing individual members to assist at elections for other socialist bodies and encouraging workers to use their votes at elections, the HSS still maintained a hostile attitude to involvement of the HSS itself in electoral activity. And there was still a strong opposition to the support of “futile” reforms. This is evident particularly in John Carruther's pamphlet Socialism and Radicalism (1893) which stressed, as Morris did, that political action was useless unless a strong socialist party existed, that is, one that could achieve a majority in parliament.
On Morris's death in October 1896 the Society, dependant as it had been on Morris's ideas, efforts and, not least, premises, decided to continue. But the activities of the Society had been declining from its early years. Minutes and reports indicate a declining enthusiasm from members, increasingly brief minutes through 1896, and, most importantly, declining audiences at outdoor pitches. Even publishing activity was stopped by the end of 1896 and the last meeting, a social gathering, was held in January 1897, the business of the Society having been wound up the previous month.
In the face of a socialist and labour movement continuing to move away from the course advocated by Morris and the HSS, the Society's impact was as small as its aim had been demanding of its members and resources. Throughout its course the Society attracted only a small number of new members besides those who had already been in the old Hammersmith League Branch. There were a small number of little known stalwarts of the Society but the Society also contained a high proportion of notable members such as Walter Crane, Philip Webb, Gustav Holst and others, all no doubt attracted to some extent by the association of the Society with Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement.
Despite the intellectual vitality of the HSS it remained both a geographically and politically isolated group and its activity, although impressively prolific from few members, was hopelessly small for the task it had set itself. It is unfortunate, from the standpoint of the early twenty-first century, that Morris's socialism and the activity of the HSS did not succeed in its revolutionary object with other contemporary radical organisations and the working class. It did, however, influence the 1904 “impossibilist” revolt in the SDF, forming a tradition of socialism-and-nothing-but that extends to the present-day Socialist Party of Great Britain.

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: Pioneer Socialist (1996)

At the present time “Socialism” is a dirty word. It is something that is supposed to have failed in Russia and East Europe and something that the Labour Party is said to have rejected as archaic. The word has become a turn-off associated with bureaucratic control, regimentation and lack of freedom.

Some positive associations remain, however, and one of them is William Morris who died a hundred year’s ago this year. Morris’s positive image stems from the fact that he was someone concerned about the ugliness of capitalism and about arts and crafts, which are two themes that people are concerned about today.

Revolutionary socialist

Morris was indeed a Socialist, but not just some moderate or milk-and-water social reformer. He was a revolutionary socialist who got many of his ideas from Karl Marx. He was also someone who stood for something quite different from the things which the word “socialism” has come to be associated with thanks to the activities of the Labour Party and Russia. Things such as state control and lack of freedom.

As a matter of fact Morris stood for a society in which there would be no coercive state machine, and in which people would work voluntarily to produce what was needed and would then have free access to it without having to hand over money or any other means of exchange. In other words, he stood for what we in the Socialist Party have always meant by socialism. Indeed what, at the end of the 19th century, the vast majority of those calling themselves Socialists meant by it.

Morris’s main contribution to socialist literature is undoubtedly his “utopian romance” (as he called it) News from Nowhere, though he was also the author of a number of Socialist pamphlets such as Useful Work versus Useful Toil, How We Live and How We Might Live and Monopoly, or How Labour is Robbed which are still worth reading.

News from Nowhere describes social relationships in a society of “pure Communism” from which private property, buying and selling, money, government over people, armies, prisons and police forces have disappeared. This is the exact opposite of the state capitalism which the Labour Party and Russia used to stand for and would be described by them as some form of anarchism. In so far as an anarchist society is a society without a coercive central government that can impose its will on the population, this is true. But then this is what socialism always meant to people like Marx and Engels too. For them socialism was necessarily an an-archist, i.e. a non-state society, though not of the kind advocated by most anarchists in that it was to be based on common ownership and democratic control rather than on rampant individualism.

So by “socialism” Morris meant a moneyless, wageless, stateless society based on common ownership, a classless society of free and equal men and women where social affairs are conducted through voluntary cooperation.

What about the lazy man?

Those who advocate such a society are faced with objections which occur again and again. “It’s against Human Nature”. “What about the Lazy Man”, “What would be the incentive to work?”, “What about the Greedy Man?”, “If things were free wouldn’t people take too much?”, “How would you deal with violent behaviour?”

All of these questions – which Morris encountered as an outdoor speaker and indoor lecturer during his period of intense socialist activity from 1884 to 1890 – are dealt with in News from Nowhere either in the narrative or in question-and-answer sessions with an old socialist.

Morris’s answers didn’t differ from those we ourselves would give. That human behaviour was not something fixed by our biological make-up but something that depends on the kind of society we live in. Why should people take more than they need when they would know that the stores would always be stocked with what they needed for them to take as and when they wanted them? But Morris’s major contribution here lay in his answer to the Lazy Man objection. A whole chapter (XV) is devoted to this entitled “On the Lack of Incentive to Labour in a Communist Society”. In fact all his socialist talks and writings revolve around this theme.

Morris regarded work – the exercise of a person’s physical and mental faculties – as a basic, natural human need. His main criticism of capitalism – what made him become a socialist, in fact – was that it denied the vast majority of humans satisfying and enjoyable work.

Under capitalism work, instead of being the enjoyable activity of creating or doing something useful, became a boring and often unhealthy and dangerous burden imposed on those who were forced to get a living by selling their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary.

This criticism of capitalism followed from Morris’s concept of “art”. Which he defined, not as some specialised activity engaged in by some fringe group of “artists”, but as ”the expression of a person’s joy in their work”; people who enjoyed their work would produce beautiful things. He had inherited this definition which is that of John Ruskin from his pre-socialist days. And when he realised that the nature of capitalism meant that most producers were denied any enjoyment in their work – or, put another way, that it meant the “death of art” – he became a socialist.

No hope under capitalism

His theory of what capitalism did to work shaped his idea of what tactics socialists –indeed anyone concerned about the fate of “art” – should pursue. For in saying that capitalism, as a competitive system of production for sale on a market with a view to profit, necessarily meant the death of art because it had to put the pursuit of profits before the enjoyment of the producers, he was saying that nothing could be done to revive “art” until capitalism had been overthrown. In other words, that what was called for was root-and-branch change not piecemeal reform.

This point has been lost by most of his successors and admirers in the “arts and crafts” movement. Morris was involved in this, but was under no illusions as to what he really doing: training others to provide beautiful things for the “swinish rich” as he described the work of his furniture-making and wallpaper Firm. Art, being the expression of the producers’ enjoyment in their work, could never be revived under capitalism. This could come only after a social revolution had abolished the tyranny of seeking ever cheaper and quicker ways of production imposed by the profit system.

Morris’s radical criticism of capitalism also led him to take the side of Revolution in the “Reform or Revolution?” controversy within the socialist movement. When he became a socialist in 1884 he joined the Social Democratic Federation, the first organisation in Britain to publicise Marx’s ideas. But he soon left, in large part over the issue of whether or not a socialist organisation should seek reforms within capitalism. Morris thought it shouldn’t and the new organisation he helped found, the Socialist League, pursued a policy of “Education for Revolution” and “Making Socialists” rather then advocating reforms.

'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

William Morris 1834-1896 (1934)

"A life in which every human being should find unrestricted scope for his best powers and faculties."

When Morris proclaimed this as his hope and ambition for the future he was treated as a silly dreamer; the mere idea was dismissed as puerile fantasy. But there was nothing dream-like about Morris's sturdy propagandist methods of fighting to achieve this, his strongest desire, and nothing fanciful about his acceptance of the hard fact that its achievement was bound to be a long and often disillusioning process. However, for a persistent stresser of the class issue, as Morris was, misrepresentation is inevitable. What is our view? We know, as he did, that such an extension and encouragement of individuality throughout society is historically possible; we hold, with him, that its attainment is well worth the struggle; he constantly maintained, as we do, that the oppressively different conditions prevalent to-day are the result solely and only of the division of society into classes, exploiting and exploited, and that the one possible means of changing those conditions is to do away with class society.

Who, then, was this William Morris? Contemptuously referred to in his day as the "poet upholsterer" or the "craftsman Socialist", he presents to our study one of the most admirable personalities and complex intellects of the nineteenth century. Orthodoxy knows him best as artist and craftsman, reviver of dead or dying arts such as tapestry, weaving, dyeing, and the staining of glass, a maker of dignified furniture, rich textiles and fine books. But, alas for orthodoxy, here was an artist who would not conform to artistic tradition and spurn the affairs of this world. He knew, and cried it from the housetops, that art is a social phenomenon, and that for an artist to attempt to divorce himself or his works from society is mere childishness. To Morris art was inseparable from the everyday life of society, or else it was poisoned at the roots; and the underlying cause of the sordid "eyeless vulgarity" of current everyday life was, he saw and insisted, simply the private ownership of the means of life. His art and his Socialism are inseparable. (It must, of course, be understood that, although in many respects his "Socialism" was a good deal nearer to our position than that of most of his contemporaries, he naturally had by no means a complete grasp of the Socialist case as we understand it. In particular he was no student of economics, and admittedly found the subject bewildering apart from broad essentials.)

Born in 1834, two years after the Reform Bill, he grew up in the period of definite capitalist ascendancy and consequent smugness. His family was well-to-do; he had, however, the good fortune to run wild considerably and thus both gathered reserves of vitality and escaped much of the conventional training and discipline. A great deal of his childhood was spent roaming Epping Forest (wilder then than now) where he acquired a deep love of open air and stored up rich memories of the shapes, colours and movements of wild plants, which, years later, were incorporated in his designs and decorations. Early in life, also, he showed a fondness for studying architecture, particularly the simple, massive, spacious Gothic.

He was sent to Oxford to take Holy Orders, but religion seems to have slipped almost unperceived from his life after his early days at college. He found there a group of unconventional friends, and, before long, had decided on architecture as a career. His Oxford friends, the chief of whom was Burne-Jones, were all connected with the Pre-Raphaelite movement in painting, and in revolt against the ugliness of contemporary life. The emotional reaction against drabness and dirt was expressed by means of glowing colours applied to subject-matter deliberately archaic, as far removed as possible from hated industrialism. Morris, on leaving Oxford, worked in London as an architect, living with his friend Burne-Jones, in close association with Rossetti, the leader of the Pre-Raphaelite school. Presently he gave up architecture and began learning to be a painter, writing poetry meanwhile; but his real career started when, after his marriage in 1859, he attempted to furnish a house, but failed to find any goods on the market fine enough either in design, material or workmanship to suit his taste. Characteristically undaunted, he decided to design personally, with the enthusiastic help of a group of friends, not merely the furniture and decorations, but the house itself. So the Red House at Upton was built and furnished. In the course of its building the firm of Morris & Co. was founded. The firm's history is one of magnificent technical achievement in every branch of decorative art, the details of which are not, however, relevant to our purpose here. Suffice it to say that Morris always resented the fact that the competitive and exploiting social system made it impossible for his beautiful products to reach the mass of the population, although it was not until the firm had been in existence for some fifteen years that he began to realise that, with the Socialist movement, lay the explanation of his difficulties and the solution of his problems.

His first appearance on public platforms was in connection with the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, which he helped to found, and which he facetiously nicknamed the Anti-Scrape. A little later he joined the Eastern Question Association, then the National Liberal League, and, finally, in 1883, the Democratic Federation. There followed a period of strenuous political activity, lecturing, writing and street-corner propaganda. The DF became the SDF and produced a weekly paper, Justice, but it was not long before Morris and Hyndman found themselves unable to agree. Continual dissension as to tactics, principles and authority led to the secession of Morris, at the end of 1884, and the formation of the Socialist League. This body held that the time was not ripe for Parliamentary action, and that the business of the moment, and, indeed, of some time to come, was simply to make Socialists, however slow and unspectacular that task might prove.
When a sufficient number of Socialists had been made, they said it would be time enough to consider taking political action. In 1886 and 18867 a number of "Free Speech" demonstrations, and, in particular, the events of Bloody Sunday, when an unemployed demonstration was broken up by force of arms, helped to make the Socialist League's name known for its propagandist activities on these occasions, and Morris became a prominent political figure. But opportunism was creeping in; Morris found his policy opposed, he was considered too slow; Anarchist tendencies also began to show themselves. In 1889 he was deposed from the editorship of the Party journal, the Commonweal, and, in the following year, he withdrew from the League, his local branch forming itself into the independent Hammersmith Socialist Society. The League rapidly degenerated into loud-mouthed Anarchism, while the Hammersmith Socialist Society never achieved much more than a local influence except in so far as the lectures delivered there by Morris were subsequently published and had a fair sale.

It must be remembered that, throughout his life, even at the height of his political activities, he continued to make beautiful objects of every kind, to lecture frequently on art, and to write romances, poems and translations from Greek, Latin and Icelandic. All his work is outstanding for its consistent high quality; in nothing is he less than good. He was a man of superb energy, of unconquerable vitality, beset by an ever-present conception of things as they might be, as they some day would be, and yet always able to take a youthful delight in the homely pleasures of cooking, camping or playing hide and seek. "An incorrigible dreamer, if you like, but master of his dreams; not drifting hither and thither on the tide of his emotions, but navigating his imagination with a port in view; no visionary enveloped in an atmosphere of vague idealism, but a sane level-headed man if ever there was one."

His theories on art have been much discussed of late. His—rather Ruskin's—definition of art as man's expression of joy in his labour has been so bandied about and manhandled that it is not easy to strip off all recent associations and discover what Morris was really trying to convey. Art, he declared, cannot be produced by someone who is unhappy in their work, whereas people whose general everyday occupation gives them joy will consciously, or unconsciously, find means of embodying that joy in the products of their labour and attempting to convey it to others. It does not follow, and Morris certainly did not mean, that everything that anyone has found pleasure in making must be a work of art. He applied the definition in a general social sense rather than to each particular product. He always emphasised the social foundations of art, and, by means of this definition, he wished to make it clear that capitalism, by its ruthless exploitation of the mass of mankind, by forcing almost all men to toil at uncongenial occupations, is destroying all possibility of genuine widespread artistic creation.
It must be repeated that, to Morris, art, if confined to a small leisured class, did not deserve the name. He was very much influenced by the art theories of Ruskin, particularly by his conception of the intimate relationship between beauty and utility. Ruskin had declared, in special reference to unnecessary ornamentation in architecture, that a thing that is not useful cannot be beautiful. This is also true in a sense which, perhaps, neither Ruskin nor Morris intended, that is, that beauty—for example, rich and varied colours, rhythmic movements, harmonious sounds, graceful lines, intertwining patterns—is physically useful to us in that it exercises and develops our five senses, our "best faculties". It gives us "life, and that more abundantly". But, apart from that, Morris very astutely perceived that this same distinction between beauty and utility has as its basis the class factor; it can only arise in class-divided society. Abolish classes and establish production for use instead of profit, and you destroy for ever this arbitrary distinction between use and beauty.

To assess Morris's Socialism, taken as a whole, is a confusing task. At first sight his avoidance of any but the most generalised economic problems, and his exuberant claim that the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were something of approaching a Golden Age, make him appear no more than a muddled-headed old Utopian with his heart in the right place and his head in the clouds. But go a little deeper and you find that, on many points, he took up a position similar to that of the SPGB. He never ceased to maintain that the fundamental cause of all present social problems was class-divided society, production for profit and not for use. He insisted that the only true practical task for many years to come must be simply, to use his famous slogan, "Education towards Revolution". He disliked seeing untaught masses rushed hither and thither by hotheads and careerists: "Of course", he said, "as long as people are ignorant, compromise plus sentiment always looks better to them than the real article." He early learned, from experience of the slow progress of the one important work of making Socialists, that "Socialism in our time" was a vain hope. Nevertheless, though he gave the social reformers credit for the best of intentions, he steadfastly repeated that no amount of reform could give us Socialism. Neither did he advocate that strange hybrid, "State Socialism"; by Socialism he meant common ownership of the means of life, production not for profit, but for use, and he was not to be put off by any fake or substitute.

To sum up, we may say that William Morris was, indeed, a man of contradictions. He glorified in the past, but dreamed of the future; too energetic to be thoroughly reflective, he was yet too reflective not to see the limitations inflicted on his energies by capitalism; an idealistic view of history and a bourgeois life of honest industry and artistic endeavour led him to Marxist Socialism and soap-box propaganda; he detested capitalism's "sordid, aimless, ugly confusion", yet he was fascinated by such things as railway organisation; his personality was assertive, emphatic, virile; none the less, the main bulk of his literary work (The Earthly Paradise, The Life and Death of Jason, and the many prose romances), though its quality is always good and his writing is outstanding for its melodious clarity in a rather pretentious period, is yet inclined to be discursive, lacking in concision, in that terse economy of phrase that gives lasting virility to style. His books always paint a colourful and pleasing picture; his craftsmanship maintains a fine level; yet from a man of his extreme vigour and bluffness this general impression of sunny meadows, serene rivers and calm-browed heroes comes, somehow, incongruously. This is not to dismiss his work as anaemic; and, in short poems here and there, in many descriptive passages in his longer works, his manner is as forthright as anyone's. The main flavour of his literary work, however, is pleasantly satisfying rather than stimulating, graceful rather than incisive. Similarly, with much of his decorative work, the detail of his designs has a grand robustness, but the total effect is over complicated and inclined to monotony, though this, of course, is more apparent to modern taste than it would be in his own day.

But all these contradictions fail to detract at all from his vivid, simple exuberance; they serve, in fact, to show up the directness and simplicity of his personal relationships as yet another contradiction, for such characteristics seem strange indeed in one who embodied so many conflicting tendencies. The man himself was an unresolved contradiction, personifying the contradictory forces ever present in capitalist society, but only in the 1850-1890 period becoming crystallised and apparent to all careful observers. It has been said that he was born as the tide of bourgeois ascendancy was setting in, but capitalism bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and it is in the time of capitalist expansion and complacency that those seeds begin to take firm root, ready, in course of time, to produce class-conscious Socialists and ultimately a Socialist working class. Just at that epoch of industrial consolidation and political criticism came Morris, in truth, "a wanderer between two worlds". His life, inasmuch as it condenses within itself innumerable streams of nineteenth century thought and feeling, is an illuminating study. Many of his theories seem strangely remote from us, though it is not yet forty years since his death, but it may be that capitalism has so blunted our senses that we can no longer appreciate his meaning. Most of his Socialist propaganda is clear enough, however, and there is nothing dreamlike or effeminate about this:-

"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."