How I Became A Socialist

By William Morris

William Morris is famous as a designer, poet and artist, but his work as a political thinker and activist is less well known. This collection, the first of his political writings published for nearly 50 years, shows Morris as one of the most original and inspiring socialist intellectuals of his generation.

Covering essays and lectures ranging through the relation between art and politics, to his visions for a socialist society and his strident anti-imperialism, this is an essential volume which shows Morris as the engaged and committed socialist that he was.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso UK
• Release date: Nov 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781788736923

William Morris

William Morris (1834-1896) was an English designer, poet, novelist, and socialist. Born in Walthamstow, Essex, he was raised in a wealthy family alongside nine siblings. Morris studied Classics at Oxford, where he was a member of the influential Birmingham Set. Upon graduating, he married embroiderer Jane Burden and befriended prominent Pre-Raphaelites Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. With Neo-Gothic architect Philip Webb, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, he designed the Red House in Bexleyheath, where he would live with his family from 1859 until moving to London in 1865. As a cofounder of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co., he was one of the Victorian era’s preeminent interior decorators and designers specializing in tapestries, wallpaper, fabrics, stained glass, and furniture. Morris also found success as a writer with such works as The Earthly Paradise (1870), News from Nowhere (1890), and The Well at the World’s End (1896). A cofounder of the Socialist League, he was a committed revolutionary socialist who played a major part in the growing acceptance of Marxism and anarchism in English society.

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INTRODUCTION

BACK TO THE RED HOUSE –

WILLIAM MORRIS AFTER REFORM

AND REVOLUTION

Bexleyheath’, wrote the architecture critic Ian Nairn in 1966, ‘would be nobody’s first choice as the ideal London suburb.’¹ When you disembark from the railway station – a shabby Victorian building painted a pale off-purple – the first thing you notice is the fences everywhere. Spiked metal and barbed curves, nails, wire, all the various things that can tear human flesh, hallmarks of the paranoid security design so common in the suburbs. Walk through a scattering of low-density suburban houses, none of them designed or built with any imagination or care, along mostly treeless streets, and you will come to the Red House. Now owned by the National Trust, this is one of the places where the connection between socialism and architecture begins. Designed in 1859 by Philip Webb with the close collaboration of its client, William Morris, this small country house is not a utopian colony or an ideal village. These would generally follow the style of the day.² The stern classical tenements of Robert Owen’s early experiment in socialism from above at New Lanark are typical of the period for the Central Belt of industrial Scotland, and there’s little ‘new’ about the cottages that Chartist groups built for themselves so they could own property, and hence vote. The Red House was something else. It was going to mean living, and designing, differently.

The Red House itself is ‘traditional’ insofar as it uses red brick and wood and tile, and in its steep pitched roofs there is a dreamily medieval aspect; but almost everything about the house and how it has been planned and built is about making it pleasurable to live in. Not formal, not hierarchical, not about keeping up appearances or up with the Joneses. It is a house for living in – a revolutionary idea. Famously, in his 1936 book Pioneers of Modern Design, the German émigré architecture and art historian Nikolaus Pevsner started modernism right here, in William Morris’s warm south-east London house.

The reason why you or I can go there most days of the week and admire it is that it was given to the public in perpetuity by Ted Hollamby, a modern architect best known for his work at the London County Council, where he helmed the dramatic high-rise skyline of the Brandon Estate in Camberwell, and for his time heading up the Lambeth Council Architects Department, where he rejected standardised housing products in favour of mostly low-rise, intimate clusters of houses and flats, each one designed specially for its site. While he was doing this, he moved out to this much more suburban corner of south London, and put a house that had fallen into ruin back together. His will left it to the National Trust, and if you go there now you can still see Hollamby’s shelves of Marxist books. He, like Morris, was a communist.

William Morris, as he made very clear in his political writings, became a socialist because he thought everybody should be able to live in places like the Red House. This is why he needs to be seen both as designer and as socialist at once – a man who spent his life railing against the division of labour should not have his own labours so divided. As Graeme Shankland, another municipal architect and a member of both the William Morris Society and the Communist Party, once pointed out, when Morris signed his membership card for the Social Democratic Federation, he ‘wrote one word on it, Designer’.³ For one who worked in a staggering number of different disciplines – poetry, fiction, furniture, stained glass, wallpaper, architecture, printing, typography – it was as a designer that he saw himself, and this infused all of his politics.

By and large, socialists discussing Morris’s designs tend to overplay their exclusivity. Morris himself, and his firm Morris & Co., worked largely for the wealthy in his own lifetime, something that depressed him, but was the consequence of a refusal to lower his standards. Yet after he died, those inspired by him worked very often for the poor. In the London County Council of the 1890s and 1900s, miniature Red Houses were built for working-class tenants in Tooting and Tottenham. His fellow member of the Social Democratic Federation, Raymond Unwin, would design the first Garden City, at Letchworth, and the first Garden Suburb, at Hampstead – both of them more or less explicit attempts to implement Morris’s utopian London in News from Nowhere (1890), albeit without the revolution that he considered necessary for it to be built. Municipal employees like Hollamby and Shankland tried to build that in turn, right up until the 1980s. Meanwhile, designers, architects and historians of both disciplines tend to downplay the hard seriousness of Morris’s socialism, downgrading it to a utopian eccentricity rather than what it was: a commitment to class struggle and to the Marxian analysis of capitalism.

Morris was a reader of Marx and a friend of Engels, and though he took socialist theory seriously, he saw it as a rather Victorian productivist might, with little interest in abstraction; and he had a healthy scepticism towards the grander claims of theory. In ‘The Society of the Future’ (1887), he wittily outlines the differences between socialists as ‘visionaries’ and socialists as ‘theorists’, and explains his own willingness to dissent from the Marxian prohibition on making images of the future:

There are, in fact, two groups of mind with whom Social Revolutionists like other people have to deal, the analytical and the constructive. Belonging to the latter group myself, I am fully conscious of the dangers which we incur, and still more perhaps of the pleasures which we lose, and am, I hope, duly grateful to the more analytical minds for their setting of us straight when our yearning for action leads us astray, and I am also, I confess, somewhat envious of the beatitude of their dreamy contemplation of the perfection of some favourite theory; a happiness which we who use our eyes more than our reasoning powers for noting what is going on in the world, seldom or never enjoy.

However, as they would and do call our instinctive vision dreaming, and as they almost always, at least in their own estimation, have the better of us in argument when we meet in friendly battle, [yet] the theories of the analysts differ little from each other, and they are hugely interested in each other’s theories – in the way that a butcher is interested in an ox – to wit, for cutting up.

It was not because the march of history said so that he considered socialism a plausible and necessary thing, but because it was both just and possible, and because it offered a way of realising what he imagined life could be like as a designer.

The Extinction of Asceticism and Luxury

Given how much the Arts and Crafts world from which Morris emerged developed a reputation for the strictures of the ‘simple life’ – an enjoyment of hairshirts, the trappings of rustic poverty on the part of those who (like Morris) came from the comfortable commercial suburban bourgeoisie – it is bracing to read Morris on what he regards as ‘simplicity’. ‘I demand’, he writes in ‘The Society of the Future’ (1887), ‘the utter extinction of all asceticism. If we feel the least degradation in being amorous, or merry, or hungry, or sleepy, we are so far bad animals, and therefore miserable men.’ Where he goes next is also very much the argument of a designer and a socialist:

Well, but this demand for the extinction of asceticism bears with it another demand: for the extinction of luxury. Does that seem a paradox to you? It ought not to do so. What brings about luxury but a sickly discontent with the simple joys of the lovely earth? What is it but a warping of the natural beauty of things into a perverse ugliness to satisfy the jaded appetite of a man who is ceasing to be a man – a man who will not work, and cannot rest? Shall I tell you what luxury has done for you in modern Europe? It has covered the merry green fields with the hovels of slaves, and blighted the flowers and trees with poisonous gases, and turned the rivers into sewers; till over many parts of Britain the common people have forgotten what a field or a flower is like, and their idea of beauty is a gas-poisoned gin-palace or a tawdry theatre.

So Morris saw socialism as something sensual, to be enjoyed, but within this there are certain ideas of ‘nature’ and ‘manliness’ that are sometimes now hard to take. One does not have to fully subscribe to the tenets of Fully Automated Luxury Communism to feel an attachment sometimes more to the tawdry glamour, if not ‘beauty’, of a Victorian theatre or a 1930s cinema – and the generations of impossible hopes and thwarted dreams contained within it – than to the ‘natural beauty of things’, and to fields in general. But it is important to realise what Morris is doing here. He is not demanding poverty of the poor, or that they should simply have the things the rich have; he is arguing that asceticism and luxury are warped and fundamentally unfair ways of being in the world, one based on inflicting needless suffering, the other based on pointlessly excessive and rarefied pleasure for a few.⁴ This has an obvious appeal to us now, in a society which produces so much in the way of utterly useless, idiotic goods to a degree that even Morris would have been amazed by; a society which has attempted to make ‘inbuilt obsolescence’ into a principle of production and consumption.

Contained within this is the sharpest rejection from any writer of his time – except, perhaps, his fellow socialist Oscar Wilde – of the piety of Victorian charity and philanthropy, and what he considered its damaging effect on the Socialist movement.

The opposition to charity comes also from a refusal to accept piecemeal solutions of any kind. Much of what must have attracted Morris to Marxism is its setting such importance on seeing society as a totality. In ‘Art under Plutocracy’ (1883), he takes the same approach to art. Much as the profit motive extends itself into every aspect of life in capitalism, for Morris, in socialism, art would extend itself to the same degree. He says to his audience:

I must ask you to extend the word art beyond those matters which are consciously works of art, to take in not only painting and sculpture, and architecture, but the shapes and colours of all household goods, nay, even the arrangement of the fields for tillage and pasture, the management of towns and of our highways of all kinds; in a word, to extend it to the aspect of the externals of our life. For I must ask you to believe that every one of the things that goes to make up the surroundings among which we live must be either beautiful or ugly, either elevating or degrading to us, either a torment and burden to the maker of it to make, or a pleasure and a solace to him.

Art, then, is not some sort of practice indulged in by special groups of people called ‘artists’. It is a way of seeing the world and intervening in it. This is the seed from which many of the avant-gardes of the twentieth century sprang. When the Soviet Constructivists tried to build their own idea of communism in the 1920s in the former Russian Empire, these were their slogans. ‘Art into life’, or, as Mayakovsky put it, ‘The streets our brushes, the squares our pallets.’⁵

This sense of totality is also a faith that every human being can be what Morris himself was. As he once quipped, ‘if a chap can’t compose an epic poem while he’s weaving tapestry, he had better shut up, he’ll never do any good at all’ – and although he was under little illusion about the enduring nature of those poems, he believed that everyone was capable of these achievements, when freed from the need of wage labour under capitalism. In ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’ (1884), he asserts:

you must not say that every English child is educated now; that sort of education will not answer my claim, though I cheerfully admit it is something: something, and yet after all only class education. What I claim is liberal education; opportunity, that is, to have my share of whatever knowledge there is in the world according to my capacity or bent of mind, historical or scientific; and also to have my share of skill of hand which is about in the world, either in the industrial handicrafts or in the fine arts; picture-painting, sculpture, music, acting, or the like.

This is a demand we have heard very recently from Jeremy Corbyn: the belief that we all have a book, a painting, a piece of music, within us. This insistence that art should be made by everybody is simply an assumption that what Morris, as a middle-class Victorian aesthete and designer, had come to accept as normal could and should be for everyone. The alternative to that was too depressing to think about:

the material surroundings of my life should be pleasant, generous, and beautiful; that I know is a large claim, but this I will say about it, that if it cannot be satisfied, if every civilised community cannot provide such surroundings for all its members, I do not want the world to go on; it is a mere misery that man has ever existed. I do not think it possible under the present circumstances to speak too strongly on this point. I feel sure that the time will come when people will find it difficult to believe that a rich community such as ours, having such command over external Nature, could have submitted to live such a mean, shabby, dirty life as we do.

Morris’s is a wonderfully sane, palpable and concrete vision of a communist life, one that a stricter Marxist might find trite or ‘reified’. In ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’, he outlines a particular idea of communal life, and of what could and could not be communised:

I console myself with visions of the noble communal hall of the future, unsparing of materials, generous in worthy ornament, alive with the noblest thoughts of our time, and the past, embodied in the best art which a free and manly people could produce; such an abode of man as no private enterprise could come anywhere near for beauty and fitness, because only collective thought and collective life could cherish the aspirations which would give birth to its beauty, or have the skill and leisure to carry them out. I for my part should think it much the reverse of a hardship if I had to read my books and meet my friends in such a place; nor do I think I am better off to live in a vulgar stuccoed house crowded with upholstery that I despise, in all respects degrading to the mind and enervating to the body to live in, simply because I call it my own, or my house.

Nowhere in the Past, Nowhere in the Future

For a modernist of any kind, Morris can make tough reading. The idea of ‘natural beauty’ excludes the warped, the artificial, and the perverse – for that reason, the version of his ideas developed by Wilde in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ is a lot more attractive to those of us who firmly believe socialism should have space for perverts. Yet at other times Morris appears very much as a modernist thinker, to a degree which is sometimes quite startling, and which fully justifies Pevsner’s controversial attempt to make him into a progenitor of the Bauhaus. This can be seen especially in his proposed solutions to ‘The Housing of the Poor’, offered in 1884:

It might be advisable, granting the existence of huge towns for the present, that the houses for workers should be built in tall blocks, in what might be called vertical streets, but that need not prevent ample room in each lodging, so as to include such comforts of space, air, and privacy as every moderately-living middle-class family considers itself entitled to; also it must not prevent the lodgings having their due share of pure air and sunlight, necessaries of life which the builders of the above-mentioned bastilles do not seem to have thought of at all. This gathering of many small houses into a big tall one would give opportunity for what is also necessary to decent life, that is garden space round each block. This space once obtained, it would be a small matter to make the gardens far more beautiful, as they would be certainly far more cheerful, than the square gardens of the aristocratic quarters of the town now are; it would be natural to have cloisters or covered walking or playing places in them, besides such cheap ornaments as fountains and conduits. Inside the houses, besides such obvious conveniences as common laundries and kitchens, a very little arrangement would give the dwellers in them ample and airy public rooms in addition to their private ones; the top storey of each block might well be utilised for such purposes, the great hall for dining in, and for social gathering, being the chief feature of it.

And here we are, rather unexpectedly, at Le Corbusier’s ‘Radiant City’, several decades before the fact, from someone whose best-known utopia involved transforming London into a series of traditional villages. Practically everything here features in the best of the municipal socialist housing schemes of the twentieth century – the roof gardens of Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseille, the communal facilities of Moisei Ginzburg’s Narkomfin building in Moscow, the ‘vertical streets’ of Sheffield’s Park Hill flats, the communal gardens of Vienna’s Karl Marx Hof and the communal spaces of Alterlaa, in the same city. But it should be noted that this begins with an ‘if’ we still carry on living in a metropolis of some sort; as News from Nowhere makes clear, he came to reject the notion that we should do so at all, and this vision of communist high-rises is, in the later parlance, what would be called a ‘transitional demand’. It is based also on an assumption of democratic control and the collective production of space that would seldom be realised in even the most elaborate and successful of realised socialist spaces. He always imagines possible objections to what he suggests: ‘of course’, he continues, ‘it is understood that such public rooms would not interfere with the ordinary private life of each family or individual; they would be there for use, if any one wished to use them, as they quite certainly would, for the avoidance of waste and the fostering of reasonable pleasure’ – the Peabody Trust world of ‘improved’ and ‘model’ dwellings, and the utopian plans for tightly regulated communities, are both rejected here in a vision of socialist architecture from below. The way that these would avoid being, like those were, ‘bare or prison-like’ is the ‘cooperation among the men of diverse crafts who would inhabit these houses’, which ‘would make them not merely comfortable and pretty, but beautiful even’.

Nonetheless, this apparition of William Morris, progenitor of twentieth-century architectural futurism, is exceptional. His retro-utopia in News from Nowhere was, on one level, a reflection of what he himself found beautiful – nature, age, handicraft, intimacy – but it was also a firm rejection of the techno-utopia in the American socialist Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a machine-made, hygienic and bureaucratic future which Morris found repellent, both aesthetically and for its avoidance of the question of class and labour. This is taken to an extreme in News from Nowhere, where we find the iron and steel bridges of the nineteenth century – many of which, from the Clifton Suspension Bridge to the Forth Rail Bridge, are now considered as being among the most beautiful works of architecture in Britain – being replaced with bridges in stone. Like Ruskin, Morris did not believe that anything created through alienated labour, as these bridges absolutely were, could possibly be beautiful. This has led to the mistaken belief that Morris was opposed to machine-production altogether. On the contrary, he recognised that some work (he specifically mentions mining) is so painful and unpleasant that it ought to be mechanised as much as possible to remove that suffering. In ‘How We Live and How We Might Live’, he outlines this position, as a response to what he expects is a scandalised audience of aesthetes:

I know that to some cultivated people, people of the artistic turn of mind, machinery is particularly distasteful, and they will be apt to say you will never get your surroundings pleasant so long as you are surrounded by machinery. I don’t quite admit that; it is the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays. In other words, it is the token of the terrible crime we have fallen into of using our control of the powers of Nature for the purpose of enslaving people, we careless meantime of how much happiness we rob their lives of.

But it will not do to pretend that Morris’s vision of communism is not modelled on a particular interpretation of the past, particularly of the Middle Ages. In ‘Art under Plutocracy’, he makes clear that, for him, a society without the division of labour can be seen in embryo in Gothic art and architecture. Here, in a time where ‘art was abundant and healthy, all men were more or less artists; that is to say, the instinct for beauty which is inborn in every complete man had such force that the whole body of craftsmen habitually and without conscious effort made beautiful things, and the audience for the authors of intellectual art was nothing short of the whole people’. As he insists, via Ruskin, ‘art’ can be literally defined as ‘the expression of man’s joy in his labour’. Art without labour is hard for Morris to imagine; but then, to point out how, say, we might find an apparently craft-free artwork beautiful – some Dan Flavin installation of neon lights, let’s say – a time-travelling Morris would ask, ‘but who made it? How much were they paid? Did they enjoy their work?’ If the answer to the last was ‘no’, then the work was an artefact of suffering, and hence, like the classical architecture of slave states, it could not be truly beautiful.

Histories of Disappointment

In considering Morris from the perspective of 120 years of partial attempts at creating socialism through parliamentary gradualism or revolutionary and state violence, the full sophistication of his interpretation of Marx is particularly clear. News from Nowhere was intended as gentle satire and encouragement rather than prophecy, but the prescience of his writing on the antinomies of revolution and reform can be very striking. The formation of an affluent or property-owning (section of the) working class, the creation of a top-down state socialism, and the eventual frustration of attempts to legislate capitalism out of existence – all of these he thoroughly anticipated in the 1880s and 1890s. Whereas reading other thinkers from the time can be a melancholic experience, given how little they expected these developments, reading Morris, it is bracing to see someone that early expect much of what would happen, and be unshaken in his socialism despite that.

This is where his insistence on seeing society as a whole, like the environment (natural and human-made) and art as a whole, had a strengthening effect on his politics. In ‘Art under Plutocracy’, for instance, he is adamant about the fact that the emergence of what was then called the ‘deserving poor’, or would later be called a ‘labour aristocracy’, does not affect his argument. Beneath them still would remain an ‘undeserving’ poor, an unskilled lumpenproletariat whose conditions are waved away as irrelevant. ‘Do not’, Morris begs,

take refuge behind averages; for at least they are swelled by the high wages paid to special classes of workmen in special places … the enormous average of one hundred pounds a year to so many millions of toiling people, while many thousands who do not toil think themselves poor with ten times the income, does not comfort me for the fact of a thousand strong men waiting at the dock gates down at Poplar … [I]f averages will content us while such things as this go on, why stop at the working classes? Why not take in