Read Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism Online
Authors: Peter Marshall
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There is a strong libertarian temper to Morris’s writings and he was well aware of the anarchist case against government and political authority. G. K. Chesterton wrote him off as ‘a sort of Dickensian anarchist’. There is no doubt that he hated the centralized State. He had, as he noted in 1887, ‘an English-man’s wholesome horror of government interference & centralization which some of our friends who are built on the German pattern are not quite enough afraid of’.
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It is not therefore surprising that many of his political essays have inspired anarchists. In ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’, he made a classic indictment of the capitalist division of labour which separated mental and manual work and reduced the worker to a mere machine operative. In clear and eloquent prose, he rejects capitalism, the ‘society of contract’, for its
classes, its crude utilitarianism, its mass production, its machine domination and its compulsory labour. In its place, he advocates agreeable and voluntary work, with appropriate technology minimizing the time spent in unattractive labour.
In another essay, ‘The Society of the Future’, Morris sketched his libertarian ideal more boldly. His ultimate aim is ‘the freedom and cultivation of the individual will’.
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In place of existing political society, he calls like Kropotkin for a federation of self-governing communes. Life then would become unconstrained, simple and natural. It would be
a society which does not know the meaning of the words rich and poor, or the rights of property, or law or legality, or nationality: a society which has no consciousness of being governed; in which equality of condition is a matter of course, and in which no man is rewarded for having served the community by having the power given to injure it.
It is conscious of a wish to keep life simple, to forgo some of the power over nature won by past ages in order to be more human and less mechanical, and willing to sacrifice something to this end.
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In his utopian novel
News from Nowhere
, written in 1889 for successive issues of
Commonweal
, Morris offered one of the most persuasive glimpses of what a free society might be like. The revolution in England, we are told, has passed through two stages, not without bitter civil war, but a free and classless society has eventually emerged. Although for a time ‘State socialism’ doled out bread to the proletariat such a ‘slough’ was brought to an end.
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In addition, the Committee of Public Safety set up to oppose the existing government at the beginning of the struggle was eventually dissolved.
There is nothing of the over-organized life and none of the centralized institutions obligatory in authoritarian utopias. For Morris, it is common sense, as clear as daylight, that government is unnecessary: ‘a man no more needs an elaborate system of government, with its army, navy, and police, to force him to give way to the will of the majority of his
equals
, than he wants a similar machinery to make him understand that his head and a stone wall cannot occupy the same space at the same moment.’
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The site of the Houses of Parliament has become a dung market, for there is no longer any need to house parliament (‘a kind of watch-committee sitting to see that the interests of the Upper Classes took no hurt’) since ‘the whole people is our parliament’. Government, that ‘machinery of tyranny’ which protects the rich from the poor, has become obsolete in an equal society.
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In Morris’s ‘utopian romance’, there is no government, private property, law, crime, marriage, money or exchange. Society consists of a federation of communes (based on the old wards and parishes). Affairs are managed
by general custom reached by general assent. If differences of opinion arise, the Mote or assembly of neighbours meets and discusses the matter until there is general agreement which is measured by a show of hands; the majority will never impose its will on the minority, however small. If agreement cannot be reached, which is rare, the majority must accept the
status quo.
It is a world in which Morris’s ideal commonwealth has become a reality, in which human beings live in equality of condition, fully aware that harm to one would mean harm to all. They enjoy an abundance of life, and there is space and elbow-room for all. Factories have been replaced by workshops and people find joy in their work. Nothing is made except for genuine use and all work which is irksome to do by hand is done by improved machines. The only reward of labour is the reward of life and creation. Their happiness is thus achieved ‘by the absence of artificial coercion, and the freedom for every man to do what he can do best, joined to the knowledge of what productions of labour we really wanted’.
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They live simple yet beautiful lives in harmony with nature. The salmon leap in the river Thames which is only spanned by stone bridges. The picture Morris depicts is very reminiscent of Godwin’s free society except that in place of lawcourts there is ‘no code of public opinion which takes the place of such courts, and which might be as tyrannical and unreasonable as they were … no unvarying conventional set of rules by which people are judged; no bed of Procrustes to stretch or cramp their minds and lives’.
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While all this is entirely anarchistic, Morris has been called a Marxist dreamer.
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He knew Engels and read Marx and certainly accepted the need for class struggle. He saw communism as completing socialism in which the resources of nature would be owned by ‘the whole community for the benefit of the whole’.
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However, his communist sympathies did not come from reading
Capital
– although he thoroughly enjoyed the historical part, its economic theories made him suffer ‘agonies of confusion of the brain’.
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They came from the study of history and it was the love and practice of art that made him hate capitalist civilization. He turned to Marx and aligned himself for a time with the authoritarian socialists Belfort Bax, H. M. Hyndman and Andreas Scheu because he wanted a ‘practical’ form of socialism which contrasted with his previous utopian dreams. He was, if anything, an original socialist thinker whose criticism of capitalism was merely reinforced by, if not ‘complementary’ to, Marxism.
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Morris liked Kropotkin, and his decentralized society is very similar to the one envisaged in Kropotkin’s
Fields, Factories and Workshops.
He was also inspired by Carpenter’s attempt to live a simple, communal and self-sufficient life in the country. Morris was always amiable in print towards those he called ‘my Anarchist friends’. But just as he learned from Mill —
against
his
intention — that socialism was necessary, so he joked that he learned from the anarchists, quite against their intention, that anarchism was impossible.
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His disagreement with the anarchists came to a head in the Socialist League when the anarchist group (led by Joseph Lane, Frank Kitz and Charles Mowbray) secured a majority after the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1888 and began to advocate acts of violence. Repelled by the terrorist outrages throughout Europe in the early 1890s, Morris asked his anarchist friend James Tochatti, who edited
Liberty
, to repudiate the recent anarchist murders, adding: ‘For I cannot for the life of me see how such principles [of anarchy], which propose the abolition of compulsion, can admit of promiscuous slaughter as a means of converting people.’
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Morris’s principal theoretical objection to anarchism was over the question of authority. In a letter to the Socialist League’s journal
Commonweal
of 5 May 1889, he reiterated his belief in communism, but argued that even in a communist society some form of authority would be necessary. If freedom from authority, Morris maintained, means the possibility of an individual doing what he pleases always and under all circumstances, this is ‘an absolute negation of society’. If this right to do as you please is qualified by adding ‘as long as you don’t interfere with other people’s rights to do the same’, the exercise of some kind of authority becomes necessary. He concluded: ‘If individuals are not to coerce others, there must somewhere be an authority which is prepared to coerce them not to coerce; and that authority must clearly be collective.’ Furthermore, in an equal society some desires could not be satisfied without clashing with ‘collective society’ and in some instances ‘collective authority will weigh down individual opposition’.
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He did not want people to do exactly as they please; he wanted them to consider and act for the good of the commonweal.
It is of course Mill’s and Spencer’s argument that some restriction of freedom in the form of political authority are necessary to protect freedom. But, unlike Mill and Spencer, Morris had faith in the ability of people to arrange their affairs through mutual agreement. In reality, the differences between Morris and the anarchists are very slight. When he attacks anarchism, he is clearly thinking of a Stirnerite or Nietzschean type of anarchist individualism. In an interview with
Justice
on 27 January, 1894, after a French member of the Autonomie Club blew himself up while allegedly on his way to destroy the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, Morris made it clear that he had come to oppose the anarchists not only because of their inexpedient insurrectionary methods, but because anarchism ‘negatives society, and puts man outside it’.
But many anarchist communists, including Kropotkin, would also repudiate such a view. While sharing Morris’ concern with the problem of
the anti-social individualist, they believe that persuasion rather than coercion is the best means of dealing with such people in the long run. In addition, many anarchists would not disagree with Morris’s view that there should be a ‘common rule of conduct’ or ‘common bond’ in any group, that is ‘the conscience of the association voluntarily accepted in the first instance’, although they would not call it ‘authority’ as Morris did.
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Morris insisted that by authority he was not pleading for something arbitrary or unreasonable but ‘for a
public conscience
as a rule of action: and by all means let us have the least possible exercise of authority’.
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While Morris accepted reluctantly the need for a transitional socialist period of ‘collective authority’ before moving towards communism he wrote to Georgie Burne-Jones in 1888 that in itself it was a ‘pretty dull goal’. Moreover, his daughter May Morris emphasized that ‘he would no more accept the tyranny of a Collectivism that would crush individuality than he would accept the tyranny of Capitalism.’ He was fully aware in a post-revolutionary society of ‘the danger of the community falling into bureaucracy, the multiplication of boards and offices, and all the paraphernalia of official authority’.
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Morris may have appreciated Marx’s view of history, and wanted to give a practical expression to his utopian dreams, but in the final analysis Morris belongs more to the extended anarchist family rather than to authoritarian socialism.
Wilde admired Morris as a poet and as a book designer, and they shared a common friend in the Russian revolutionary Stepniak. Their concern with freedom was mainly inspired by their concern for art and their desire to create a beautiful life. They both came to realize that art for art’s sake is an insufficient standard; it is not enough merely to call for the beautification of life, for there must be a political and social context to aestheticism. Wilde concluded that only in a free society without government would an artist be able to express himself fully.
From his early childhood, he had a strong utopian sensibility which led him to conjure up imaginary islands. He remained convinced that
a map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of utopias.
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Wilde’s love of liberty was encouraged by his mother who saw herself as ‘a priestess at the altar of freedom’.
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Unlike her, however, he saw nothing noble in suffering and sought to create a beautiful life without ugliness and
pain and compulsion. As a student at Oxford, he came to the conclusion not only that
‘La beauté est parfaite’
but that ‘Progress in thought is the assertion of individualism against authority.’
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After leaving Oxford, Wilde wrote in his twenties a play called
Vera; or, The Nihilist
(1880). He was already calling himself a socialist, but it is clear from the play that he considered socialism to be not a levelling down but the flowering of personality. Prince Paul declares: ‘in good democracy, every man should be an aristocrat.’
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The nihilists detest torture and martial law and demand the abolition of marriage and the right to labour. To make them as authentic as possible, Wilde even borrowed an oath from Nechaev’s
Catechism of a Revolutionary
which Bakunin may have helped edit.
He later described agitators as
a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary.
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