In News from Nowhere published in 1890 William Morris imagined a future where all land and all facilities would be held in common and used for the benefit of all people. National government would be abolished (and Morris imagines that in his future utopia the Houses of Parliament would be given a more productive function: a storage place for manure).Government would be undertaken at local level within a commune, ward or parish, and power would be exercised not through elected representatives, but directly by the people.
Decisions would be made by majority vote, but votes would only be taken after the matter was first adjourned for discussion and debate.If the vote when it took place was a close one, there would be a further adjournment allowing for more discussion, for decisions would only be made if there was a strong majority in favour.[1]
This would be a garden utopia, where people would take meals together, and everyone would be engaged in useful and creative work, ‘where nothing is wasted and nothing is spoilt, with the necessary dwellings, sheds, and workshops scattered up and down the country, all trim and neat and pretty,’ in sharp contrast to the blighted villages and cities of the heavily industrialised England of his time.
Morris was no mere fantasist – he recognised that the transition to such a society would be long and difficult, and that a period of class struggle and counter revolution would be inevitable.
Conscious association and variety of life
Morris hated the idea of the uniformity which he believed would be produced by Fabian state socialism, and warned of ‘the danger of the community falling into bureaucracy, the multiplicity of boards and offices, and all the paraphernalia of official authority, which is, after all a burden, even when it is exercised by the delegation of the whole people and in accordance with their wishes.’[2]
He believed that small self-determining communes would allow people to deal with problems ‘in conscious association with each other’ and that the variety this would produce was very much to be welcomed:
It will be necessary for the unit of administration to be small enough for every citizen to feel himself responsible for its details, and be interested in them; that individual men cannot shuffle off the business of life on to the shoulders of an abstraction called the State, but must deal with it in conscious association with each other.… Variety of life is as much an aim of true Communism as equality of condition, and … nothing but a union of these two will bring about real freedom.[3]
The size of community was a critical factor.Too large and they would become impersonal, but too small and they would also fail, as the socialist Edward Carpenter explained:
To have a score or fifty, even a hundred people penned together in a little community, they are bound either to chafe and gall each other into a state of exasperation and explosion, or else if they are so likeminded as to have no serious differences it can only be by reason of their exceeding narrowness and sectarian character.[4]
Morris is often dismissed as someone who yearned to recreate a romanticised, idealised past which never existed.But that is to do him an injustice, to trivialise the nature of his vision.The stylised manner of his writing is not to everyone’s taste, but as E P Thompson points out, William Morris acted with great courage; he was ‘the first creative artist of major stature in the world, to take his stand, consciously and without shadow of compromise, with the revolutionary working class.’[5]
Many of Morris’ ideas would have resonated at the time with liberal social reformers, industrial philanthropists, Marxist socialists, communitarian anarchists, and the pioneers of garden cities.Morris had the intellectual power to imagine a synthesis of all of this and so created a sweeping but also specific vision of what community could become.It is hard to think of anyone at that time, or indeed subsequently, who has done so with greater vividness or generosity of spirit.
[1] William Morris, News from Nowhere, 1890.
[2] William Morris, True and False Society, quoted E P Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, 1955, revised ed 1977 p. 688.
[3] William Morris, ‘Looking Backward’, Commonweal, June 22nd 1889.
[4]Commonweal (4 May 1889).
[5] E P Thompson, p 727.
