[Marxism] Fw: William Morris and Socialism

["Graham M." <gkmilner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Graham M. 
To: Socialist Alliance 
Sent: Saturday, April 21, 2007 3:02 AM
Subject: William Morris and Socialism


Dear Comrades,
                       William Morris (1834-96) is one of the grandest figures 
in the history of the world socialist movement.   Already famous as a great 
poet, artist and designer, Morris at mid-life threw himself into the work of 
the revived socialist movement in England in the 1880s, committing himself 
wholeheartedly to the struggle for social liberation.

   After Morris's death there were attempts to neutralise the revolutionary 
thrust of his ideas, and to render him harmless to the established order.   The 
'bourgeois' myth of an apolitical Morris, and the 'Menshevik' of Morris the 
sentimental, 'ethical' Labourist, were the two faces of this project.   But 
three post-war works on Morris: E.P. Thompson's 'William Morris: Romantic to 
Revolutionary'; R. Page Arnot's 'William Morris: the Man and the Myth', and 
Paul Meier's 'William Morris: the Marxist Dreamer' together scotched these 
myths and reestablished Morris's position firmly in the revolutionary Marxist 
tradition.

   Born into an upper-middle class family, Morris was sent to a public school 
and studied at Oxford University.   His rebellion against the grimy, industrial 
capitalism of mid-Victorian Britain was informed by romantic literature and by 
the medievally-oriented social criticism of the thinkers Thomas Carlyle and 
John Ruskin.   Morris's poetry and prose works made him famous, and his 'Firm' 
produced fine materials, fabrics and furniture, in opposition to the shoddy 
trends and tastes of the times.

   Morris's involvement in politics began with his participation in the 
agitation against Turkish atrocities in the Balkans in 1876-78, and the British 
government's complicity with these.   Morris soon saw through the bourgeois 
radicals in control of the campaign, and when Gladstone returned to government 
in 1880 and attacked Egypt, he began to look for a socialist organisation to 
join.

   Morris joined H.M. Hyndman's Democratic (later Social Democratic) Federation 
in 1883.   Hyndman was ostensibly a Marxist, but his leadership style was 
highly arbitrary and a split in the organisation occurred in 1884-5.   The 
Socialist League was then formed with Morris as its central leader.

   Morris had thrown himself into all aspects of party work in the SDF and then 
in the Socialist League, including street-selling of the party press and 
engaging in an arduous round of public speaking and lecturing, indoors and 
outdoors.   The Socialist League's politics were coloured by a conflict between 
a parliamentarist right-wing and an anarchist left.   Finally the anarchists 
succeeded in driving out their opponents, and Morris in 1890 formed a separate 
group around his SL branch in Hammersmith, London.

   'Commonweal', the paper of the Socialist League set a very high standard in 
socialist journalism while it was under Morris's editorial control.   The 
education of many individual members in socialist ideas was probably the finest 
achievement of the SDF and the SL; many who went through these groups would 
have taken their socialist ideas into the broader community.

   As well as his good record as a socialist party activist, William Morris 
left a largish corpus of political writings and writings on art and society.   
His Marxism speaks to us today especially, as its emphases are very 
contemporary, especially in its concern with the theme of alienation and 
alienated labour.

   In my view the central preoccupation of Morris, and a theme that runs like a 
red thread through all his writings and lectures, is the problem of the 
degradation of work (or labour activity) under the capitalist mode of 
production, and the urgent requirement for a socialist transformation of 
society to remedy this.   Ultimately Morris's aim was the birth of a communist 
world, where the division of labour has been superseded and replaced with 
authentic human relations based on free interchange.   Closely related to this 
vision of the future was his belief that art, in the broadest understanding of 
the concept, should be reintegrated with life activity in general and labour 
activity in particular.

   These themes are absolutely central to the Marxist tradition.   The concept 
of 'alienated labour' is crucial for an understanding of Marxism.   Morris, 
writing and thinking to a certain extent in a different tradition from the one 
that formed the matrix of Marx's intellectual development, reached conclusions 
essentially similar to those of the early Marx and the Marx of the chapters on 
commodity fetishism and the division of labour in 'Capital'.   Morris 
undoubtedly made major contributions to the Marxist theory of alienation, 
particularly in its aesthetic dimension.   The concepts he developed were 
enriched by a profound grasp of history, which is clear from a reading of such 
works as the lecture 'Art and Labour' (1884) and the book he coauthored with 
Belfort Bax: 'Socialism: its Growth and Outcome' (1893)

   Morris's vision is best seen in the utopian romance 'News from Nowhere' 
(1891).   Paul Meier, the French scholar, attempted to establish the firm links 
between Morris's outlook in this romance, and the perspective of the communist 
future developed by Marx in 'The Critique of the Gotha Programme'.   Apart from 
its vision of a future communist society, which depicts the Thames Valley two 
hundred years hence, when the restraints of the division of labour have largely 
been overcome and where a totally new attitude to work and leisure prevails, 
the most striking feature of 'News from Nowhere' is the book's historical 
realism - the detailed description in it of the process of transformation from 
the old society.   A class struggle view is sharply in evidence here.

   The legacy of William Morris is to be found in his literary and other 
artistic work certainly, but his record as a socialist activist and publicist 
will surely also recommend Morris to those who continue today to fight for a 
socialist future for humanity.


                                           In solidarity,


                                                      Graham Milner
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