The English Utopia. A L Morton 1952
Here too industry has taken on a different character. The ten-year cycle seems to have been broken down now that, since 1870, American and German competition have been putting an end to English monopoly in the world market. In the main branches of industry a depressed state of business has prevailed since 1868, while production has been slowly increasing, and now we seem both here and in America to be standing on the verge of a new crisis which in England has not been preceded by a period of prosperity. That is the secret of the sudden – though it has been slowly preparing for three years – but the present sudden emergence of a socialist movement here. – Engels to Bebel, 1884 [1]
Bellamy’s Looking Backward, published in 1888 by a then little-known American novelist, had very much the same sort of immediate success as Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie, and for very much the same sort of reason. It was written in and arose from a time of swift change and almost intolerable tension, and it seemed to many to point to a practical solution of real problems. By the mid-1880s capitalism had made immense advances in all the leading countries, and its battle with the working class that it had created was now fairly joined. For England this world advance meant the loss of a long-standing world monopoly, the so-called ‘Great Depression’, and a new stage in working-class political and trade-union activity. In Germany and France mass Socialist parties were beginning to grow on the ruins of the dead First International. In all these countries the concentration of capital was making visible the first signs of monopoly, but it was in the USA that the most rapid progress and the clearest signs of this monopoly could be seen. Between 1859 and 1889 industrial production had increased fivefold, to reach a total of over nine billion dollars: the great empire of Standard Oil was only the most startling of its kind. Writing about 1887, Bellamy described this process as well as the fears and opposition it excited:
Meanwhile, without being in the smallest degree checked by the clamour against it, the absorption of business by ever larger monopolies continued. In the United States... there was not, after the beginning of the last quarter of the century, any opportunity whatever for individual enterprise in any important field of industry, unless backed by great capital... Small businesses, as far as they still remained, were reduced to the condition of rats and mice, living in holes and corners, and counting on evading notice for the enjoyment of existence. The railroads had gone on combining till a few great syndicates controlled every rail in the land. In manufactures, every important staple was controlled by a syndicate. These syndicates, pools, trusts, or whatever the name, fixed prices and crushed all competition, except when combinations as vast as themselves arose. Then a struggle, resulting in a still greater consolidation, ensued.
No less alarming for the small capitalists, professional people and independent producers was the advance and militancy of the working class. The Knights of Labour reached their greatest membership, about 700,000, in 1886, in which year, also, the American Federation of Labour was founded: for some years there seemed every prospect of the formation of a strong American Labour Party. In the meantime there was an unprecedented outburst of strikes. To quote Bellamy once more:
Strikes had become so common at that period that people had ceased to enquire into their particular grounds. In one department of industry or another, they had been nearly incessant ever since the great business crisis of 1873. In fact it had come to be the exceptional thing to see any class of labourers pursue their avocation steadily for more than a few months at a time.
Many of these strikes had a character more or less political:
The working classes had quite suddenly, and very generally, become infected with a profound discontent with their condition, and an idea that it could be greatly bettered if they only knew how to go about it.
Socialism was firmly on the agenda, in America as well as in the Old World, and, as Engels commented in 1886:
The last Bourgeois Paradise on earth is fast changing into a Purgatorio, and can only be prevented from becoming, like Europe, an Inferno by the go-ahead pace at which the development of the newly-fledged proletariat of America will take place. [2]
Such was the background of Looking Backward, a background of monopoly, graft and speculation, of desperate strikes savagely repressed, the world of Rockefeller and Carnegie and of the Haymarket Martyrs, railroaded in 1884 after the explosion in Chicago of a bomb planted by the police. In Bellamy’s New England, industry was expanding while great tracts of land were passing out of cultivation.
To Bellamy, a kindly, academic man, not actively associated with the movement of the working class, all this violence, greed and selfish conflict was extremely distasteful. It was untidy and unreasonable, and it was the tidiness and reason of socialism that most appealed to him. Its triumph, therefore, would be the triumph of abstract reason, not of a revolutionary class:
Looking Backward, although in form a fanciful romance, is intended, in all seriousness, as a forecast, in accordance with the principles of evolution, of the next stage in the industrial and social development of humanity.
Early in the book, Bellamy explains what he means by the principles of evolution. His hero, Julian West, after a Rip Van Winkle sleep, wakes to find himself in the transformed, socialist, Boston of the year 2000. His host and mentor, Dr Leete, who is ever ready to explain everything at inordinate length, tells him how the change came:
‘Early in the last century the evolution was completed by the final consolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The industry and commerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted by a set of irresponsible corporations and syndicates of private persons at their own caprice and for their own profit, were intrusted to a single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the common interest for the common profit. The nation, that is to say, organised as one great business corporation in which all other corporations were absorbed; it became the one capitalist in place of all other capitalists, the sole employer, the final monopoly in which all previous and lesser monopolies were swallowed up, a monopoly in the profits and economies of which all citizens shared...’
‘Such a stupendous change as you describe’, said I, ‘did not, of course, take place without great bloodshed and terrible convulsions?’
‘On the contrary’, replied Dr Leete, ‘there was absolutely no violence. The change had been long foreseen. Public opinion had become fully ripe for it, and the whole mass of the people was behind it. There was no more possibility of opposing it by force than by argument.’
It is, in fact, an early and correspondingly naive exposition of the now familiar doctrine of super-imperialism, the idea that monopoly capitalism, by eliminating competition, will mechanically and painlessly transform itself into its opposite. And, inevitably, the quality of the socialism in Bellamy’s Utopia is coloured by its mechanical derivation. The flat equality, the almost military regimentation of labour, the bureaucratic organisation, the rigidity of life, the value placed upon mechanical inventions for their own sake, are part of his vision just because he has failed to grasp the difference in kind between capitalism and communism. In the year 2000, according to Bellamy, everyone is to live pretty much as the comfortable middle classes of Boston lived in 1886 – and like it.
It was this, probably, as much as its merits, which gave Looking Backward its extraordinary popularity. At a time when the professional classes and the small producers, who were still very numerous, felt caught between the trusts and the militant workers, they were offered a prospect of Advance Without Tears, a socialism which did not force them to take sides in the battle. Bellamy was careful to disclaim any connection with the working-class movement, ‘the followers of the red flag’ as he calls them:
‘They had nothing to do with it [the change] except to hinder it, of course’, replied Dr Leete. ‘They did that very effectually while they lasted, for their talk so disgusted people as to deprive the best considered projects for social reform of a hearing.’
The Populists and Grangeites, trying to organise the farmers and small men against the trusts, were then at their most influential: a few years later, under Bryan, they came near to capturing the Democratic Party. The People versus the Trusts, Man versus Money, were the popular slogans. It was to this public that Bellamy came as a revelation, giving a scientific and evolutionary colour to what was really a hopeless attempt to arrest the advance of monopoly by returning to a more primitive order of things. And at the same time, his book had certain merits: in spite of what now seems an intolerably pretentious and solemn style, it is not without telling phrases and whole paragraphs of acute and damaging criticism of both the institutions and effects of capitalism. And it does at least set up standards more civilised than those of capitalism, calling attention to the possibility of ending competition and of its replacement by human cooperation in a classless society, however frigidly that society might be conceived.
For all these reasons, and perhaps because at this moment any book that seemed to offer a hope would have been welcomed, Looking Backward was successful beyond anything that Bellamy could have expected. In America hundreds of thousands of copies were sold in a few years. By 1891 Dutch, Italian, French, German and Portuguese translations had appeared. The English edition, first published in 1889, attracted almost as much attention as the American had done. Bellamy came to be regarded in the USA almost as the inventor of socialism and to be accepted as the leader of a political party whose objective was to turn the fiction of Looking Backward into reality. Even in England, where socialism had had a longer history and where Marxism was better known, there was a strong tendency for Bellamy’s picture of life under socialism to be accepted as authoritative.
It was for this reason that William Morris made it the subject of a long and highly critical review in the Socialist League journal, The Commonweal, on 22 January 1889. I propose to quote from this review at length, because it seems to me to state perfectly the case against Bellamy, because it illustrated very clearly Morris’ own view not only of Bellamy but of the nature of socialist society, and because it is hardly known, and, indeed hardly accessible, to readers of the present day. After a few general remarks Morris explains that since:
Socialists and non-Socialists have been so much impressed with the book, it seems to me necessary that The Commonweal should notice it. For it is a ‘Utopia’. It purports to be written in the year 2000, and to describe the state of society after a gradual and peaceful revolution has realised the Socialism which to us is in fact in but the beginning of its militant period. It requires notice all the more because there is a danger in such a book as this: a twofold danger; for there will be some temperaments to whom the answer given to the question ‘How shall we live then?’ will be pleasing and satisfactory, others to whom it will be displeasing and unsatisfactory. The danger to the first is that they will accept it with all its necessary errors and fallacies (which such a book must abound in) as conclusive statements of facts and rules of action, which will warp their efforts into futile directions. The danger to the second, if they are but enquirers of young Socialists, is that they also accepting its speculations as facts will be inclined to say, ‘If that is Socialism, we won’t help its advent, as it holds out no hope to us.’ ...
Bellamy’s temperament may be called the unmixed modern one, unhistoric and unartistic; it makes its owner (if a socialist) perfectly satisfied with modern civilisation, if only the injustice, misery and waste of class society could be got rid of; which half change seems possible to him. The only ideal of life which such a man can see is that of the industrious professional middle-class man of today, purified from their crime of complicity with the monopolist class, and become independent instead of being, as they are now, parasitical...
It follows naturally from the author’s satisfaction with the best part of modern life that he conceives of the change to Socialism as taking place without any breakdown of that life, or indeed disturbance of it, by means of the final development of the great private monopolies which are such a noteworthy feature of the present day. He supposes that these must necessarily be transformed into one great monopoly which will include the whole people and be worked for the benefit of the people...
The great change having thus peaceably and fatalistically taken place, the author has put forward his scheme of the organisation of life; which is organised with a vengeance. His scheme may be described as State Communism, worked by the vast extreme of national centralisation. The underlying vice in it is that the author cannot conceive, as aforesaid, anything else than the machinery of society, and that, doubtless naturally, he reads into the future of society, which he tells us is unwastefully conducted, that terror of starvation which is the necessary accompaniment of a society in which two-thirds or more of its labour-power is wasted: he tells us that every man is free to choose his own occupation and that work is no burden to anyone, the impression which he produces is that of a huge standing army, tightly drilled, compelled by some mysterious fate to unceasing anxiety for the production of wares to satisfy every caprice, however wasteful and absurd, that may cast up among them.
As an illustration it may be mentioned that everybody is to begin the serious work of production at the age of 21, work three years as a labourer, and then choose his skilled occupation and work till he is 45, when he is to knock off his work and amuse himself (improve his mind, if he has one left him). Heaven! Think of a man of 45 changing all his habits suddenly and by compulsion! ...
In short, a machine life is the best which Bellamy can imagine for us on all sides; it is not to be wondered at then that his only idea of making labour tolerable is to decrease the amount of it by means of fresh and ever fresh developments of machinery...
I believe that the ideal of the future does not point to the lessening of man’s energy by the reduction of labour to a minimum, but rather to a reduction of pain in labour to a minimum, so small that it will cease to be pain... In this part of his scheme, Mr Bellamy therefore worries himself unnecessarily in seeking (with obvious failure) some incentive to labour to replace the fear of starvation, which is at present our only one, whereas it cannot be too often repeated that the true incentive to happy and useful labour must be pleasure in the work itself...
It is necessary to point out that there are some Socialists who do not think that the problem of the organisation of life and necessary labour can be dealt with by a huge centralisation, worked by a kind of magic for which no one feels himself responsible; that on the contrary 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, [3] that the individual man 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. That variety of life is as much an aim of true Communism as equality of condition, and that nothing but a union of these two will bring about real freedom... And finally, that art, using that word in its widest and due signification, is not a mere adjunct of life which free and happy men can do without, but the necessary and indispensable instrument of human happiness. [4]
Morris, with his strongly creative mind, could not rest content with a mere criticism of Bellamy’s utopia. To him Looking Backward was a challenge which he could only answer by giving his own picture of life under communism, fully aware as he was of the errors and fallacies which such a book must abound in and quite prepared to face responsibility for his own. It seems clear that Looking Backward provided the stimulus for News From Nowhere, which began to appear as a serial in The Commonweal on 11 January 1890.
If, as I have suggested, Looking Backward was the immediate provocation that led Morris to write News From Nowhere, it seems no less clear that he was only putting into form and words something that had long been maturing in his thoughts. There is, in the closing pages of A Dream of John Ball, published also in The Commonweal in 1886, a plain hint that some such complementary tale was being planned, when John Ball says in parting:
I go to life and death and leave thee; and scarce do I know whether to wish thee some dream of the days beyond thine to tell thee what shall be, as thou has told me, for I know not if that shall help or hinder thee. [6]
Having projected us into the past and thence carried us forward in time, it was only logical for Morris to move into the future and then look back, all the more since the socialist future seemed to him in many ways akin to the feudal past of the Middle Ages.
We know, too, that the kind of life he describes in News From Nowhere had long been implicit in his whole work, in his architectural theory and practice and in his craftsmanship no less than in his poems and tales. Perhaps this appears most clearly in a letter written as early as 1874:
Surely if people lived five hundred years instead of threescore and ten they would find some better way of living than in such a sordid loathsome place, but now it seems nobody’s business to try to better things – isn’t mine you see, in spite of all my grumbling – but look, suppose people lived in little communities among gardens and green fields, so that you could be in the country in five minutes’ walk, and had few wants, almost no furniture for instance, and no servants, and studied the (difficult) arts of enjoying life, and finding out what they really wanted: then I think one might hope civilisation had really begun.
In this letter, written long before Morris was conscious of being a socialist, the germ of News From Nowhere is already apparent, not least in the casual phrase about ‘no servants’. It is not easy for us to realise today how revolutionary such an idea was, coming from a well-to-do man in 1874, when domestic servants were taken as a matter of course by every section above the lowest strata of the middle class. But Morris was already feeling towards the idea that inequality of condition was something unworthy of humanity, degrading equally exploiter and exploited, an idea which he was afterwards constantly enlarging, as, for example, in Art and Socialism. And even in 1874 I think he would have said that it was no less degrading to be the servant to a machine than to an individual. The great difference between Morris then and in 1890 was that by this latter date he had made it his business to try to better things and had discovered in socialism the way to go about it.
In considering the origin of News From Nowhere it is important to remember that in many of its details it was in line with a strong current of thought in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. From 1871 to 1884 Ruskin was writing his Fors Clavigera, ‘letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain’, setting out the objectives of his Guild of St George, a scheme for a network of utopian communities in which life was to be very like that described in News From Nowhere, though Ruskin, with his aristocratic socialism, never envisaged the fellowship and the democratic equality of life which was for Morris the crown of the work. Morris understood too, and perhaps the failure of the Guild helped to teach him, that any attempt at the piecemeal transformation of society by such methods was futile. Nevertheless, while he passed far beyond Ruskin, he learnt much from him and always regarded him with the utmost respect.
We know also that in 1885 he was reading, with peculiar interest, Richard Jefferies’ After London:
I read a queer book called After London coming down: I rather liked it: absurd hopes curled round my heart as I read it. I rather wish I were thirty years younger: I want to see the game played out.
Here we touch one of Morris’ most characteristic thoughts: he was convinced capitalism was nearing its end: either there would be revolution and the birth of a socialist society, or some vast catastrophe, a reversion to barbarism and a beginning all over again. Such was his hatred of capitalism and its ‘modern civilisation’ that he preferred even this solution to its continued existence. There were times when he seemed even to welcome the idea of catastrophe. In a letter of this same year he wrote:
How often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world... I used to despair once because I thought what the idiots of our day call progress would go on perfecting itself: happily I know now that all that will have a sudden check – sudden in appearance I mean – ‘as it was in the days of Noë’.
More often, however, he looked forward to the positive solution of socialism, and realised that such a beginning again would solve nothing. As he wrote in News From Nowhere:
Nor could it [commercialism] have been destroyed otherwise; except, perhaps, by the whole of society gradually falling into lower depths, till it at last reached a condition as rude as barbarism, but lacking both the hope and the pleasure of barbarism. Surely the sharper, shorter remedy was the happiest. This is indeed very close to what the Communist Manifesto says about revolution as the alternative to ‘the common ruin of the contending forces’. [7]
It was precisely the picture of such a society, with the rudeness of barbarism but none of its hopes, the poverty of the Middle Ages but none of its vitality, which Morris found in After London. Here Jefferies describes with extraordinary vividness the face and the life of an England suddenly denuded of most of its people by some never-explained catastrophe. The woodlands creep back, river valleys become lakes or swamps, remnants of population survive here and there in tiny principalities and city states, all but the crudest and most necessary arts and crafts have vanished, corruption, serfdom and endless petty warfare are universal. Just at the close (the book was never finished) there is a hint of a new kind of state arising among the barbarian shepherd tribes on the perimeter.
Here, certainly, was destruction ‘as it was in the days of Noë’, and much, in spite of the degeneration described, that Morris would certainly have found more to his taste than the civilisation of the nineteenth century. Still, the prospect it held out was only a second best and at most times he believed that such a desperate remedy could be avoided. After London is, as it were, a News From Nowhere in reverse – capitalism indeed destroyed but no socialism to take its place. There is no doubt, I think, that it was among the influences that went to the final shaping of Morris’ Utopia.
It would be interesting to know, though there seems no direct evidence, if Morris also read another utopian romance of the period, A Crystal Age by WH Hudson, first published in 1887. It is at the least possible that he did so, since Hudson was friendly, among others, with Wilfred Scawen Blunt and RB Cunninghame Graham, through either of whom Morris might have heard of him. However that may be, A Crystal Age has certainly features which remind us of News From Nowhere, with the socialism, of course, always excluded. The most striking thing, perhaps, about A Crystal Age is its complete lack of relation to anything in the existing world, except by antipathy. It is a new creation, so remote from us in time and feeling that the very memory of any kind of society now existing has been entirely lost.
What Hudson does notably share with Morris is the conception of an epoch of rest, a period in which the world stands still. This time of rest, which for Morris is no more than a temporary and relative pause between periods of more marked change, and is even so hardly consistent with his generally dialectical outlook, is for Hudson unbroken, as far as can be seen, in either direction. He describes a world of small, scattered, self-sufficient and entirely permanent families, each with its own ‘house’. The individuals come and go, but their numbers remain unchanged and the ‘house’, the material basis and framework within which it exists, is eternal, so that almost one might say that the family exists to serve the ‘house’ and not the ‘house’ to preserve the family. Since the family is self-sufficient there is no question of exchange or exploitation; in this sense it might be said that a vaguely socialist element is present, and the scene in which the hero, a visitor from our own time, offers money as payment for a suit of clothes might have been written by Morris, except that his people are better mannered and less censorious than Hudson’s. The two Utopias are similar, too, in the absence of any great cities, in the part played by art, by handicrafts and the new pleasure which their people have found in necessary work.
Yet Morris goes far beyond Hudson not only in his sense of history but in the depth of his human feeling. For him Utopia is not somewhere remote in time or space but grows out of existing society through struggle, bearing clear traces of that struggle and of its whole past. Nor have its people really much in common with the ascetic, humourless and almost sexless creatures of Hudson. No one could imagine himself living, or could wish to live, in this Utopia any more than one could live in a stained-glass window, but Morris’ has seemed to thousands not only possible but worth fighting for.
In one other respect, however, there is a resemblance worth mentioning. This is the dream structure. Hudson’s hero ‘wakes’ from a sleep prolonged through countless centuries, and we are not told directly that the substance of the book is a dream. Yet this may perhaps be inferred from a number of details not otherwise explicable, as in the concluding pages in which he describes his own death. Bellamy, and, later, Wells use the device of a prolonged sleep, but rationalise it, giving it a pseudo-scientific explanation which is all of a piece with the spuriously scientific character of their Utopias. Such a device would have been quite out of character for Morris, the scientific nature of whose imagination does not rest on a mass of superficial detail but on his mastery of the law of movement of human society. Further, he was soaked in the literature of the Middle Ages and the barbarian North, in which the magic sleep and the dream with a purpose are familiar devices: it was as natural for him to use the dream for his picture of Socialist England as it was for Langland to use it to describe the Harrowing of Hell.
And the dream was more to Morris than a literary device. His imagination was primarily a visual one, his visual memory, as we know, quite extraordinary. It seems likely that anyone so constituted would normally have vivid and realistic dreams, and Morris in the opening pages of A Dream of John Ball tells us that this was so in his case, describing in detail the kind of solid, coherent and architectural dreams which he enjoyed. There is no reason to doubt that what he described there were actual experiences, nor that it was those experiences which finally determined the form of his two great socialist romances.
JW Mackail writes of News From Nowhere, with that faint air of patronage and disparagement which he can never avoid when speaking of Morris’ socialism:
It is a curious fact that this slightly constructed and essentially insular romance has, as a Socialist pamphlet, been translated into French, German and Italian, and has probably been more read in foreign countries than any of his more important works in prose or verse.
Today it seems curious that Mackail, who with all his faults as a biographer really loved and respected Morris, could not see what has been clear to thousands of workers in many countries, that News From Nowhere was the outcome of years of thought and preparation, was cast in a form peculiarly suited to the genius of Morris, and was, in fact, the crown and climax of his whole work.
True, it is a short book, true it was written quickly and almost casually amid a press of other activities, true, and this is what the Philistines cannot stomach, it was written for a socialist periodical as ammunition for the daily battle. All this only proves what ought not to need proof but is constantly being forgotten or denied, that it was the best of Morris that was given to the working class, and that, great as he was, he was at his greatest as a revolutionary. Into News From Nowhere, as into no other book, Morris packed his hopes and his knowledge, all that he had accomplished and become in a life of struggle.
This is important because, though we can say he formally became a Socialist about 1883, his life and work form a seamless whole, stretching flawless and unbroken from his early romances to the socialist works of his maturity. Morris was always learning, deepening his understanding of the world and of his own beliefs, but he had nothing to unlearn since at each new stage his present was only the fulfilment of his past. He had learned from Ruskin to see art (in the broadest sense) not as a special activity producing a special kind of luxury goods but as an essential part of the whole life of man. ‘Art’ was anything that was made by men who were free and who found pleasure in their work. His initial quarrel with the mass of commercially produced goods was that they were made without joy by men under compulsion. Such a view could not but lead in logic to a critique of existing society, and Morris was not the man to shrink from pushing his conclusions home to the end.
So he began early to ask: ‘What do men need to be happy?’ Since his approach was clear and direct, with nothing of the mystic or idealist about it, his answers, too, were simple and materialist. The essentials he thought, were fellowship, abundance of the necessaries of life, sun, air and free space, and joy in the work. He described such a life when he wrote of the men of Burgh Dale that they lived:
... in much ease and pleasure of life, though not delicately or desiring things out of measure. They toiled with their hands and wearied themselves; and they rested from their toil and feasted and were merry; tomorrow was not a burden to them, nor yesterday a thing they would fain forget; life shamed them not, nor did death make them afraid. [8]
To all this one thing more was needed. In one of his earliest tales, Svend and His Brethren (1856) he had written of a people who were rich, strong and numerous, masters of all arts, possessed of all gifts:
Should not then their king be proud of such a people, who seemed to help so in carrying on the world to its consummate perfection, which they even hoped their grandchildren would see?
Alas! Alas! they were slaves – king and priest, noble and burger, just as much as the meanest-tasked serf, perhaps even more than he, for they were so willingly, but he unwillingly enough.
Already the young Morris is passing judgement on the pride and the misery of Victorian England. From the beginning and constantly more clearly, he saw that no man could be happy except in a free society. Above all he felt this in his own experience, for he more than any man of his time had all that should make for happiness – strength and genius, ample means, devoted friends and work in which he delighted. Whatever he undertook he did well and everything he attempted was successful. But he remained unsatisfied because he could not enjoy fully what could not be enjoyed by all. ‘I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few’, he wrote. [9]
He began, therefore, to enquire into the nature of this freedom, to study the history of those times and societies in which it seemed the most to be found and to ask why it was so lacking in the bourgeois democracy of nineteenth-century England. Above all he studied the literature and life of Northern Europe in its heroic age, and in Iceland he found the nearest approach, perhaps, to a free society that the world had yet seen. Quickly he grasped the essential fact that Icelandic freedom was the result of the relative absence of class divisions, and, once he had realised that freedom meant the abolition of classes, he was on the road to conscious socialism. Morris was a man passionately in love with the classless society, determined to seek and ensue it by all possible means: it was in Marxism that he found the road, thereby escaping the heartbreak and frustration which DH Lawrence suffered in our own time in attempting the same quest without the essential clue. Morris loved the past, and understood it better than Lawrence did, but he never made the mistake of trying to return to it. When he visited Iceland it was to gain knowledge and strength for the struggle, not to escape from the present. He knew that the classless society of the future could only emerge from what actually exists and be reached through the conflict of classes, that is to say, through revolution.
That is why, though he called himself a socialist when speaking in general terms, he liked to use the word communist to define precisely the kind of socialist he was. He used the word not in a pleasantly antiquarian way, but precisely, with a full understanding of its implications. In the 1880s these implications were mainly two – both highly disreputable. First, a communist was an upholder of the deeds of the Paris Commune, then a matter of recent history and an object of terror to the bourgeoisie as the great example in practice of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Morris never tired of defending the Commune and glorifying its memory. Secondly, a communist was one who accepted the teachings of Marx as expounded in The Communist Manifesto. So much nonsense has been written about Morris that it is still necessary to emphasise the point that he was a Marxist as he understood Marxism – always remembering that at this date much of the important work of Marx and Engels was not available to English readers, and that in practice English socialism was still in the early growing stages, making many blunders from lack of the experience, English and international, which is now at our disposal. Those who deny Morris the name of Marxist do so either because they are so ignorant of Marxism that they cannot recognise it as it appears in his writings, expressed, often, in his very individual style, or because they have formed a preconceived notion of Morris in defence of which they are prepared to distort the plain meaning of what he actually wrote and said. [10]
He was a Marxist, too, in the sense that accepting its principles he understood no less the need for practical work. From 1883, when he joined the Democratic Federation, to his death in 1896, he gave his time, energy and money without stint to the cause of socialism. It received the best of his writings during these years, but he took his full share also in the hard, routine activities of the Movement, as well as in the, for him, far more unpleasant internal controversies with which the Movement was torn. To give an account of all this, or of the history of the Movement at this time, would be out of place here even if space permitted it. It need only be said that in the decade before News From Nowhere England was shaken by the crisis accompanying the ending of its world monopoly, that it was a decade of mass unemployment and unemployed struggles, that the trade-union movement was revitalised under a largely socialist leadership and that socialism itself, in its modern form, began to make headway here, at first in the hands of small sects, but indirectly influencing wide masses of workers.
In all this ferment Morris played a central part, and it is the events of this decade which form the background of News From Nowhere. If it is richer in content than all earlier utopias this is because it was written, not in isolation, but as a part of the actual struggle by one who was both a scientific socialist and a great poet. Morris’ is the first Utopia which is not utopian. In all its predecessors it is the details which catch our attention, but here, while we may be dubious about this detail or that, the important things are the sense of historical development and the human understanding of the quality of life in a classless society.
Such, in outline, were the elements that went to the making of News From Nowhere, those personal and peculiar to Morris as well as those arising from the conditions of the time, while some indication has been given of their interaction. Now it is time to turn to the book itself, and to note first of all that it was intended to do a particular job, first, to replace what Morris felt to be the false picture of life under socialism drawn by Bellamy with what he felt to be a true picture, and, second, to hearten and inspire his comrades by a reminder of the positive goal towards which their efforts were leading.
For this purpose he did not need to imitate or try to rival the mechanical complications of Bellamy, the music perpetually on tap after the manner of the BBC (it is characteristic of Bellamy that almost the only pleasure mentioned in his Utopia is what we call today ‘listening to the wireless’), the vast network of tubes along which completely standardised goods were delivered to every house from huge central warehouses, the ever more complex machines. Such things might have a certain appeal in 1890, but we, who have seen today mechanical marvels more than Bellamy ever dreamed of, know how little such things in themselves are a guarantee of happiness. Morris, perfectly aware that socialism implies the victory of man over his environment, is not concerned with such details, which are passed over with the most casual of references. What interested him was not the complication of things, but the new productive relations of people and the transformation of human relations and human nature which they entail.
Talking to old Hammond, the historian into whose mouth he puts the tale of the coming of socialism, Morris (who tells the story throughout in the first person) mentions ‘human nature’:
‘Human nature!’ cried the old boy impetuously; ‘What human nature? The human nature of paupers, of slaves, of slave holders, or the human nature of wealthy freemen? Which? Come, tell me that!’ [11]
It is the human nature of wealthy freemen that is the centre and permanent interest of News From Nowhere, a human nature which poverty, exploitation, competition, fear and greed have had no part in shaping. Given these conditions he is able to show how and why a classless society, in which the evils of capitalism have so entirely ended as to have ceased even to be a living memory, must produce a new quality of happiness, a fellowship, a toleration, a universal courtesy and a delight in life and in the material world which we can hardly imagine. It is because Morris had the unique combination of gifts and experience which made this feat of the imagination possible for him that his book holds its place among the very few great classics of socialism. Patiently, with abundant and detailed proof, he demonstrates how one evil after another which is commonly set down to ‘human nature’, is in reality a consequence of capitalism.
Some critics have complained that the picture is too brightly drawn, that the men and women in this Utopia are too good to be true. I do not find any substance in such criticisms. Morris drew largely from within – he felt in himself and saw in his friends the potentialities of happiness and social living, which, stifled and frustrated as they were, could still be seen clearly enough. And he had what his critics lack, a deep understanding of the boundless possibilities of socialism, seeing in it not merely a new mechanism for reorganising society but also a means for the salvation of souls.
He did not imagine, nor does he claim in News From Nowhere, that socialism will make men perfect, or that suffering and folly will cease; indeed, he goes out of his way to indicate some of the kinds of unhappiness that he thinks will still be possible. But he also insisted that in this world of ‘clear and transparent human relationships’ all the problems of life would be encountered on a new and higher level and would be capable of solution. In his Utopia man has become free in every sense of the word – master of his environment and of himself:
You must know that we of these generations are strong and healthy of body, and live easily; we pass our lives in reasonable strife with nature, exercising not one side of ourselves only, but all sides, taking the keenest pleasure in the life of the world. So it is a point of honour with us not to be self-centred, not to suppose that the world must cease because one man is sorry; therefore we should think it foolish, or if you will, criminal, to exaggerate these matters of sentiment and sensibility... So we shake off these griefs in a way which perhaps the sentimentalists would think contemptible and unheroic, but which we think necessary and manly. [12]
It is because Morris insisted on the human aspect that his book reaches such heights, but for that very reason it has often been misunderstood. Refusing to allow himself to be drawn into secondary details about the machinery of production he has come to be regarded as a machine-wrecker, and a popular view of News From Nowhere is that it advocates a return to medieval methods in which everything is made by hand. Now it is true that Morris, with his extraordinary skill in and love of handicrafts, does stress this side more than many other writers would have done, and I think that in News From Nowhere there is at times an embroidering and elaboration of this theme which may even upset the balance of the whole, nor must we forget that he was writing a tale and not a treatise. At the same time it is quite untrue that he was hostile to machinery as such: what he argues is what any socialist would argue, that under capitalism machinery is used not to benefit the working population but to exploit them. This is made clear over and over again, for example in Useful Work Versus Useless Toil, written as a pamphlet for the Socialist League in 1883:
Our epoch has invented machines which would have appeared wild dreams to the men of past ages, and of those machines we have as yet made no use.
They are called ‘labour-saving’ machines – a commonly-used phrase which implies what we expect of them; but we do not get what we expect. What they really do is to reduce the skilled labourer to the ranks of the unskilled, to increase the number of the ‘reserve army of labour’ – that is, to increase the precariousness of life among the workers and to intensify the labour of those who serve the machines (as slaves to their masters). All this they do by the way, while they pile up the profits of the employers of labour, or force them to expand those profits in a bitter commercial war with each other. In a true society these miracles of ingenuity would be for the first time used for minimising the amount of time spent in unattractive labour, which by their means might be so reduced as to be but a very light burden on each individual. All the more as these machines would most certainly be very much improved when it was no longer a question as to whether their improvement would ‘pay’ the individual, but rather whether it would benefit the community. [13]
This view, which Morris held consistently, can be traced in News From Nowhere by anyone ready to read it without preconceived notions. In this Socialist England ‘all work which it would be irksome to do by hand is done by immensely improved machinery’. This does not now involve the concentration of population in vast industrial centres because ‘the great change in the use of mechanical force’ makes this no longer necessary. ‘Why’, they ask, ‘should people collect together to use power, when they can have it at the places where they live, or hard by, any two or three of them; or any one for the matter of that?’ Many utopian writers, from More onward, have seen the division between town and country as a growing evil: Marx declared that it was one of the tasks of socialism to end this division: Morris is perhaps the first to suggest here the place which something comparable to the vast schemes for electrification now proceeding in the USSR could have in all this, and there is a more genuinely scientific attitude in these scattered hints than in all the elaborations of Bellamy.
Morris saw this change in the use of mechanical force as a factor of the dialectic of history:
This is how we stand. England was once a country of clearings among the woods and wastes, with a few towns interspersed, which were fortresses for the feudal army, markets for the folk, gathering places for the craftsmen. It then became a country of huge and foul workshops and fouler gambling-dens, surrounded by an ill-kept, poverty-stricken farm, pillaged by the masters of the workshops. It is now a garden, 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. For, indeed, we should be too much ashamed of ourselves if we allowed the making of goods, even on a large scale, to carry with it the appearance, even, of desolation and misery. [14]
For the rest, he is content to admit frankly that such mechanical details were not his proper concern, as when he saw strings of ‘force barges’ plying on the Thames:
I understood pretty well that these ‘force vehicles’ had taken the place of our old steam-power carrying; but I took good care not to ask any questions about them, as I knew well enough that I should never be able to understand how they were worked, and that in attempting to do so I should betray myself, or get into some complication impossible to explain; so I merely said, ‘Yes, of course, I understand.’ [15]
This whole question of machinery and the relation of town and country is important both as showing how far Morris is commonly misrepresented and how correctly he applied the principles of Marxism. His Marxism can be traced similarly in nearly every question with which he deals, but nowhere more clearly than in the famous chapter called How the Change Came, which describes the revolution by which capitalism was overthrown and socialism established. [16]
Morris was surrounded on the one hand by Fabians, separating socialism from the class struggle by their belief in the gradual and piecemeal transformation of capitalism from within, and on the other by Anarchists who equally in practice abandoned the class struggle by treating the fight for socialism as a conspiracy in which the mass of the workers were to play at best a very secondary part. Though he made tactical errors enough, Morris always held the Marxist view that socialism could only come by the seizure of power by the working class, which is what he always meant by revolution. It is such a seizure of power which he describes in News From Nowhere, drawing on the experience of the preceding decade – the unemployed agitations, the free-speech fight with Bloody Sunday (13 November 1887) as its climax, and the great strike wave of 1888 with its accompanying revitalisation of trade unionism.
Many details of this revolution, which Morris put in the year 1952, may now seem obsolete and improbable, but as a whole it convinces as no other imaginary account of a revolution does, and I think the total success comes largely from the way in which Morris used his experiences in the actual movement, just as the occasional false notes reflect the weakness and immaturity of that movement. The success comes, too, from the careful way in which he had studied socialism as the science of the class struggle. In his account this is evident, over and over again, when he shows how the workers develop in struggle from merely trade-union consciousness, to a higher, political consciousness, in the part played by the precipitating incident of the massacre on Trafalgar Square, an incident which produced a qualitative change in the whole relation of forces, and in the way in which the workers in the course of the revolution throw up and perfect the necessary forms and organisations of struggle. Most interesting of all, perhaps, is the understanding, incomplete no doubt by comparison with the later teachings of Lenin, but remarkable at this early date, of the need for a revolutionary party:
But now that the time called for immediate action, came forward the men capable of setting it on foot; and a vast network of workmen’s associations grew up very speedily, whose avowed single object was the tiding over of the ship of state into a simple condition of Communism; and as they practically undertook also the management of the ordinary labour war, they soon became the mouthpiece and intermediary of the whole of the working classes. [17]
On the character of the state, of law, of colonial oppression, he is equally clear, but his insight is nowhere keener than in the passage which makes use of the Marxist idea that the revolution is needed to transform the working class themselves and prepare them for socialism, no less than for the overthrow of capitalism:
The sloth, the hopelessness, and, if I may say so, the cowardice of the last century, had given place to the eager, restless heroism of a declared revolutionary period. I will not say the people of that time foresaw the life we are leading now, but there was a general instinct amongst them towards the essential part of that life, and many men saw clearly beyond the desperate struggle of the day into the peace which it was to bring about...
The very conflict itself, in days when, as I told you, men of any strength of mind cast away all consideration for the ordinary business of life, developed the necessary talent amongst them. Indeed, from all I have read and heard, I doubt whether, without this seemingly dreadful civil war, the due talent for administration would have developed amongst the working men. Anyhow, it was there, and they soon got leaders far more than equal to the best men among the reactionaries. [18]
After so many Utopias which are mere fantasy, or pedestrian guesswork, or a jumble of both, one which is scientific, in the sense that it is deduced from the present and from the existing relations of the classes, cannot but be of outstanding importance. But this would not be enough in itself to give News From Nowhere the position it now holds. This is rather due to its combination of scientific method with the imagination of a great poet, so that it is not only the one Utopia in whose possibility we can believe, but the one in which we could wish to live. Morris put into it not only his political experiences but his whole knowledge of life, his love of mankind and of the natural world. Further, I think, his years in the movement enabled him to identify himself with the people not only politically but imaginatively, so that in News From Nowhere are embodied the deep, undying, hopes and desires not of an individual only but of a nation. In the dialectical development of the English Utopia it forms the final synthesis.
We have seen how Utopia begins with the Land of Cokaygne – the serf’s dream of a world of peace, leisure and abundance – and we saw, too, how the Cokaygne dream persisted as an almost secret tradition under the surface, while the main stream of utopian thought passed through other channels. The great literary utopias are the work of the learned, of philosophers and not seldom of prigs, reflecting indeed historical development but only indirectly and in a distorted form the struggles and hopes of the people. With Morris the two streams flow together again, not just because he was a man of genius, but because he had mastered, imaginatively and intellectually, the philosophy of the working class. One small example may illustrate this.
Solemn critics have blamed Morris because throughout the whole of his visit to the future the sun is shining, ‘whereas’, they say, ‘we know that in England it always rains and would do so under any social system’. Such a criticism can only be made because they miss the point that the England of News From Nowhere is the Land of Cokaygne, and in Cokaygne you may have whatever weather you please. The unknown poets who made the many variants of Cokaygne were expressing symbolically the belief that man can become the master instead of the slave of his environment, and Morris, identifying himself with them, uses naturally, and perhaps unconsciously, the same ancient symbol to express one of the most important truths of socialism.
It is this synthesis of the most ancient with the most modern wisdom, of the intellect with the imagination, of revolutionary struggle with a simple love of the earth which gives News From Nowhere its unique literary quality. It is the only Utopia which stirs the emotions as a whole: More can move us by his account of enclosures but not by his account of Utopia: Swift can make us share his anger and pity his sufferings, but we could not endure the life of his Houyhnhnms: Morris can carry us with him throughout. We feel the stir and wonder of the awakening into a transformed London, the joy and simplicity of the new life there, the stress and ferment of the revolutionary years, the glory of an England rescued and cleansed from the filth and degradation of capitalism.
At every point Morris recasts his own experiences into the utopian stuff, and never more completely than in the magical, leisurely journey up the Thames with which the book ends. It was a journey he had often made himself, and as he describes this imaginary voyage we know how at every point of his real voyages he had in thought stripped away the vulgarities and desecrations of bourgeois profit-seeking and bourgeois pleasures. Through his eyes we see Hampton, Reading, Windsor, Oxford, not as they are, or even as they were in 1890, but as he had often longed for them to be. At the end of the voyage stood his beloved house at Kelmscott, the house which he could never entirely enjoy because he could never forget that it formed part of the suffering world, but which the world could equally never entirely spoil for him, because it was first of all his exceptional capacity for happiness which had made him a socialist. The June before he wrote News From Nowhere he had rejoiced at Kelmscott in a record haysel:
Haymaking is going on like a house afire; I should think such a haytime has seldom been; heavy crops and wonderful weather to get it in. For the rest the country is one big nosegay, the scents wonderful, really that is the word; the life of us holiday-makers luxurious to the extent of making us feel wicked, at least in the old sense of bewitched.
All this appears transformed in the masterly last chapters of News From Nowhere: the record hay crop, the long, hot June days, the ancient, scented house, no longer an oasis amid the horrors of the world of commercialism, but gaining a new dignity and beauty from its use and surroundings, the delight at being able to enjoy all this without a lurking sense of guilt (though Morris had surely earned the right to enjoy if ever a man did), and, finally, the sense of bewitchment. At Kelmscott Morris was at the end of his journey in time, he entered it like a ghost from the past, aware that this imagined happiness was not for him, that he and his new-found companions, more radiantly alive at that moment than the people of the real world, were divided by a gulf across which he and they could peer and call, but which prevented further contact. Drop by drop the joy and beauty of the future life slip through his fingers, his hold relaxes, he turns away to meet a representative of the past to which he must now return:
It was a man who looked old but whom I knew from habit, now half-forgotten, was really not much more than fifty [was in fact of Morris’ own age]. His face was rugged, and grimed rather than dirty; his eyes dull and bleared, his body bent, his calves thin and spindly, his feet dragging and limping. His clothing was a mixture of dirt and rags long over-familiar to me. As I passed him he touched his hat with some goodwill and courtesy, and much servility. [19]
It is a moment of extraordinary poignancy, but it is not the end. The new world fades, its time is not yet, but Morris understood, and has the power to convince us, that what he has imagined is in essentials real, that it is there for us to find and that the time is coming in which we shall find it. Over three hundred years earlier More had ended his account of a communist society sadly, with the realisation that ‘many things be in the Utopian weale publique, whiche in our cities I may rather wishe for than hope after’. More wrote without hope because he wrote alone: Morris wrote out of the fullness of his life, out of the experiences of the struggle for socialism and his fellowship with others in that struggle, and his conclusion was therefore very different:
Yes, surely! and if others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream. [20]
The Utopias of Bellamy and of Morris are the outstanding but by no means the only ones to concern themselves with socialism during the last years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth. Indeed, it became increasingly obvious that socialism was the only topic with which utopian writers could concern themselves if they were to discuss real problems at all, since socialism had now clearly established itself both as the antithesis and the logical historical successor of capitalism. Where is capitalist society going? Is the establishment of socialism practically possible? If so, is it desirable? If not, can it be prevented? And, finally, what would life under socialism be like? Such were the questions under debate.
We have seen how Bellamy and Morris answered them in their different ways, and, as the debate progressed, a great fear entered the hearts of the bourgeoisie. This fear had, in a sense, always existed, but as the Paris Commune was followed by the growth of a world trade-union movement, by the advance of mass Socialist parties in many countries, by the Russian Revolution of 1905, by increasingly severe crises accompanied by large-scale unemployment, the fear steadily grew. And at the same time the middle classes were alarmed at the growth of monopoly, both as a menace in itself and as leading to counter-organisation on the part of the workers. As these workers more and more turned to socialism as the way out of their troubles, the capitalists became a prey to secret doubts as to the eternity of their order, began to feel that the world could perhaps exist without them and that before long it would certainly try.
The very popularity of Looking Backward and News From Nowhere was a menace and a challenge: these books were having a serious effect and must be answered. And answered they were, after a fashion, though the answers were ineffective and have passed today to the rubbish heaps of literature. Who, for example, has read, or even heard of, Mr East’s Experiences, or of My Afterdream? Finally, since the advance of socialism was international, and Bellamy’s and Morris’ utopias had been translated into a number of foreign languages and widely read, the debate assumes a more international character and in this section we shall have to consider not only English books but books from the USA, Germany and Austria as well.
Mr East’s Experiences in Mr Bellamy’s World, by Conrad Wilbrandt, was a German book which appeared in translation in New York in 1891. It is a heavy and aridly argumentative Teutonic work, full of the jargon of academic political economy. Its chief positive conclusions seem to be that revolution is the result of tariffs and that if war destroys its important foreign markets the socialist state must collapse since it has no capital(!).
The fact that such a reply should have appeared in a foreign country so soon after the publication of Looking Backward is impressive evidence of its effectiveness: no less impressive is the fact that as late as 1900 it was still found to require an answer, and it was in that year that My Afterdream: A Sequel to the Late Mr Bellamy’s Looking Backward was published in London. In it Bellamy’s hero, Julian West, is made to declare that he has matters to add to what he told Mr Bellamy, and it is an altogether livelier affair than either Wilbrandt’s or Bellamy’s own book. The main arguments are not convincing but there are some telling strokes at the expense of Bellamy’s solemn elaboration of mechanical detail, as in the picture of the dangers and difficulties of moving along streets filled with the countless pneumatic tubes of all sizes necessary to carry goods from the national warehouses to every house.
Typical is the reductio ad absurdum of his argument on the automatic self-regulation of the hours of labour in the various trades. West explains that the difficulty of procuring undertakers was so great that their working day had had to be reduced to five minutes, so that to carry out a funeral needed 4362 assistants working in relays. In an attempt to counter this, a Cock Robin School had been set up, where the boys practised mock funerals with the gigantic model of a robin:
The pupils are selected from those lads who show unusual signs of tender-heartedness; and the idea is that by accustoming them from early years to practise the rites of sepulture, in future there will be a larger number of volunteers for the profession, with the necessary result of an increase in the hours of labour, and this will, of course, effect a great saving for the community.
The profession of artist, on the contrary, was so much desired that here a full eight-hour day was insisted on, and the artist constantly tormented by inspectors.
Julian West’s final discomfiture came when he was given the task of cleaning sewers, and when he discovered that Edith Leete (who had appeared to be a ‘lady’) worked in a laundry. His not very startling conclusion is that ‘it was not, I determined, reconstruction on new lines that the world needed: it was the creation of a higher ideal among the toiling masses’. He does not say if he regards high ideals as unnecessary for the upper classes or whether he thinks they are already sufficiently provided.
Neither of these books has the slightest value as a serious criticism of socialism, but both are to a certain extent valid as against the bureaucratic distortions and the rigidly mechanical equalitarianism of Bellamy’s Utopia, that is to say, of the most markedly non-Marxist aspects of his work. In this sense they illustrate the truth of Morris’ warning about the dangerous tendencies in Looking Backward.
Apart from these direct replies to Bellamy, the period saw at least four anti-socialist Utopias. The earliest of these is Across the Zodiac by Percy Greg, published in London in 1880. Greg, a Lancashire journalist, is described by the Dictionary of National Biography as ‘in youth a secularist, in middle life a spiritualist, in later years a champion of feudalism and absolutism, and in particular an embittered adversary of the American Union’.
He has evidently, what was rare in England at that date, at least a superficial knowledge of Marxism, and his attack follows a historical method which is interesting as foreshadowing more recent attempts to link communism and fascism. The hero of his story reaches Mars in a space boat to find there a world which is evidently what Greg fears our own may become in some centuries’ time.
The creation of a Martial world state, with universal suffrage had opened a long period of class war, culminating in a proletarian revolution and universal communism. The results (naturally) were disastrous:
The first and most visible effect of Communism was the utter disappearance of all perishable luxuries, of all food, clothing, furniture, better than that enjoyed by the poorest.
Dissatisfied groups gradually seceded to less fertile parts of the planet to set up a rival state, a long, intermittent war followed, ending with the destruction of communism and the establishment of a world totalitarian state. This state was more efficient than its communist rival, but, from Greg’s point of view, scarcely more admirable.
It was based on private property, but its members had virtually no private life. The family had ceased to exist, marriage was by purchase and women were strictly confined to their homes and without rights of any kind. The new society was ‘materialistic’, atheism being a dogma and any doubts expressed about the infallibility of science likely to land the doubter in an asylum; it was authoritarian, with an absolute ruler, the campetê, arbitrarily selected, and all lower officials chosen on a kind of ‘leader principle’, and it was brutally repressive, one feature being the systematic torture of prisoners.
At the time of being visited, however, the Martial state was being undermined from within by a secret society, religious rather than political, rejecting the official atheism and refusing to hand over its children to the state. No solution of the conflict was in sight, but Greg hints that the totalitarian state will ultimately be defeated. Across the Zodiac, old-fashioned in its details and in its pompous, inflated style has yet an oddly familiar ring: all the current clichés about communism, totalitarianism and the ‘free world’ can be seen taking shape: totalitarianism is the logical response to communism and both are criticised from a feudal – romantic standpoint in which much play is made with ‘chivalry’ and ‘Christian values’.
Similar in some respects is a book published in America in 1890, which, fantastic as it is, had a considerable immediate success. This is Caesar’s Column, by Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly was born in Philadelphia in 1831, moved west, and settled early in Minnesota where he was Lieutenant Governor during the Civil War and later a Grangeite and a leading figure in the Populist Party. He was one of the characteristic middle-class radicals of the frontier – muddled, eccentric (a believer in both the Baconian theory and the historical existence of Atlantis), but shrewd, and a courageous and outspoken opponent of graft and monopoly.
Of the corruption of American politics he had ample experience, being a member, around 1889, of that Minnesota State Senate of which his biographer wrote:
One Senator charged, and offered to prove, that 25,000 dollars had been paid to another Senator for his vote; and that dignified body did not even think it worthwhile to investigate the charge. In the House, thirty members were said to have banded themselves together, and one man sold their votes, on all important questions, as Mr Donnelly said, ‘like a bunch of asparagus’. An universal outcry went up from the people that it was the worst legislature that had ever been known in the world.
It was to these experiences, and others like them, that Caesar’s Column owes its existence. In it Gabriel Welstein, an extremely innocent young man of Swiss origin, comes to New York from East Africa in the year 1988. He finds that monopoly capitalism has developed into a system of unparalleled corruption. A series of dramatic chapters describe the vices and selfishness of the rich, the brutalisation and growing revolt of the masses, and the final wild outbreak, part of a world-wide insurrection, in which the workers destroy capitalism and its civilisation under the leadership of a secret, and highly sinister, ‘Brotherhood of Destruction’. This revolt has neither plan nor purpose, but leads only to an orgy of massacre and riot, culminating in the episode from which the book takes its title.
So many corpses litter the streets of New York that the leader of the revolt, Caesar Lomellini, decides to dispose of them in a vast column, built by laying the bodies out in successive layers and covering each layer with concrete. For Caesar’s Column Welstein composes an inscription that is the epitaph of a civilisation:
This great monument is erected by Caesar Lomellini; Commanding General of the Brotherhood of Destruction, in commemoration of the death and burial of modern civilisation.
It is composed of the bodies of a quarter of a million of human beings, who were once the rulers, or the instruments of the rulers, of this mighty, but, alas! this ruined city.
They were dominated by leaders who were altogether evil.
They corrupted the courts, the juries, the newspapers, the legislatures, the congresses, the ballot-boxes and the hearts and souls of the people.
They formed gigantic combinations to plunder the poor; to make the miserable more miserable; to take from those who had least and give it to those who had most.
They used the machinery of free government to effect oppression; they made liberty a mockery, and its traditions a jest; they drove justice from the land and installed cruelty, ignorance, despair and vice in its place.
Their hearts were harder than the nether mill-stone; they degraded humanity and outraged God.
At length indignation stirred in the vasty courts of heaven; and overburdened human nature rose in universal revolt on earth.
By the very instruments which their own wickedness had created they perished, and here they lie, sepulchred in stone...
Should civilisation ever revive on earth, let the human race come hither and look upon this towering shaft, and learn to restrain selfishness and live righteously. From this ghastly pile let it derive the great lesson, that no earthly government can endure which is not built on mercy, justice, truth and love.
Horrified by all that he had seen, by the dead civilisation no less than by the judgement that had overwhelmed it, Welstein flies back to his remote African home, one of few places unvisited by the catastrophe, there to set about the construction of a republic on lines by which, he hopes, the danger of class struggle may be avoided. It is the old dream of the middle-class radical, free enterprise without exploitation, very much, indeed, what Donnelly and his fellow Populists wanted in America. There is no mistaking the earnestness of his intentions; but between hatred of monopoly capitalism and fear and misunderstanding of the working class, his helplessness is equally obvious.
Another Utopia which also promised free enterprise without exploitation in an East African setting was Freeland: A Social Anticipation, published in 1890 by the Austrian economist Theodor Hertzka. This may seem a less remarkable coincidence when we remember that the recent explorations of East Africa had revealed large tracts with a climate suitable for European settlement, and that the area was just on the point of being opened up. Both books, in fact, were written in the very years in which the British East Africa Co was preparing the way for the formal annexation of the whole region. Hertzka’s Utopia is unique at least in showing us, instead of a society as a going concern, the foundation of such a society, and he shared with Cabet the experience of witnessing attempts to transform his fiction into reality. The results, however, were even less substantial than in the case of the Icarians. [21]
The story of the establishment of Freeland is told with the most painstaking detail, down to the furnishing of each member of the advance party ‘with six complete sets of underclothing of light elastic woollen material – the so-called Jäger clothing’. After such a start it can be imagined how brilliantly all obstacles to the setting up of the Utopian state are overcome.
The basis of this state is the common ownership of the land combined with free enterprise in production. Any individual or group is provided with capital, free of interest, for approved enterprises, the capital to be repaid by instalments. Most production is in fact carried on by cooperative associations, the products being shared according to the work done. Women, children and those unable to work are provided for. Freeland is the utopia of enlightened self-interest:
The organisation was in truth mainly a mode of removing all those hindrances that stand in the way of wise self-interest. So much the more was it necessary to give right direction to the sovereign will, and offer to self-interest every assistance towards obtaining a correct and speedy grasp of its real advantage.
In such a society it is gratifying rather than surprising to learn that neither communism nor nihilism, those two bogeys of the day, could find any foothold.
Most of what has been said about the replies to Looking Backward applies equally to Eugene Richter’s Pictures of the Socialistic Future (1893). Richter draws a picture of socialism manifestly absurd and contradicted by everything that has happened since 1917. His Socialist government confiscates personal property and small savings, and abolishes money. Children are taken from their parents, old people forced into homes. Everything, down to the smallest one-man enterprise, is nationalised overnight. After all this it is not difficult to proceed to the assumption, which can now be demonstrated in practice to be incorrect, that socialism will lead to such a fall in production that the workers will receive less than they received under capitalism. Once more we have the familiar picture of the police state, with bureaucratic follies and extortions multiplied till the overdriven workers revolt. And once more it may be observed that such justification as it may have is given to Richter’s picture by the lapses into opportunism, the undialectical thinking, which were already appearing in Social Democracy in a number of countries.
A more interesting work on similar lines is Ernest Bramah’s What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War (1907), reprinted in 1909 under its more familiar title, The Secret of the League. At the General Election of 1906 a block of some forty Labour and Trade Union Members had been returned to Parliament, to the alarm of those to whom that body had always been regarded as the exclusive preserve of the upper and middle classes. Bramah’s book is an expression of that alarm, and when it opens, about 1918, Britain is in the middle of another election in the course of which a ‘moderate’ Labour government is replaced by a Socialist one. To Bramah the process was beautifully simple:
The Labour party had come into power by pointing out to voters of the working class that its members were their brothers, and promising them a good deal of property belonging to other people and a good many privileges which they vehemently denounced in every other class. When in power they had thrown open the doors of election to one and all. The Socialist party had come into power by pointing out to voters of the working class that its members were even more their brothers, and promising them a still larger share of other people’s property (some, indeed, belonging to the more prosperous of the Labour members then in office) and still greater privileges.
The new Socialist government, in spite of its name, made no attempt at any fundamental change, but contented itself with imposing ever increasing taxation to finance a ‘Welfare State’ on the basis of a continued capitalist productive system. The result was a maximum irritation of the upper, and especially of the middle classes, with the minimum of benefit to the workers:
It was almost the Millennium. The only drawback was that, with all this affluence around, the working man found himself very much in the condition of a financial Ancient Mariner. There was a great deal of money being spent on him, and for him, but he never had any in his pocket. And the working man’s wife was even worse off.
Bramah, obviously, had no conception that socialism could mean anything else than mindless plundering, and his book is both stupid and ignorant, filled with an undisguised hatred of and contempt for the working class. What is interesting is its reflection of the rise of the Labour Party; and its unintended demonstration of the futility of trying to build a welfare state while leaving the capitalist class in undisturbed possession of the power drawn from ownership of the means of production.
His story proceeds to describe the increasing difficulties of the government and its defeat by the ‘Unity League’, a semi-secret organisation of all the population outside the manual workers. The method of the League was to proclaim suddenly, on behalf of all its members, a boycott on the use of coal: at the same time it had secured, by a conspiracy with the foreign governments concerned, the placing of an embargo on the import of British coal by its normal chief buyers – all of course with the most patriotic motives and sentiments. In the end, after a coup d'état, the League seized power and proceeded to establish a Parliamentary dictatorship by the simple means of disfranchising virtually the whole of the working class, a step which Bramah approves with the Ireton-like argument that in running a business the shareholders vote according to the amount of their capital.
The same year, 1907, saw also the publication of a final contribution to the great debate, this time on the socialist side. Jack London’s The Iron Heel has long been accepted as a classic in the working-class movement, and I do not propose to discuss it here in any detail. It is valuable because London, despite many theoretical weaknesses, writes with power and imagination about the immediate future from the standpoint of Marxism. It was this which gave him his insight into the nature of the enemy, his understanding of the ferocity and unscrupulousness of the ruling class and the lengths to which they will go rather than give up their power. This insight helped him to foresee the rise of fascism, and, in particular, as we can now realise better than ever before, the new kind of fascism that is threatening to arise out of American imperialism. Above all, he saw that fascism is not a mysterious disease, but something arising naturally in certain conditions from declining capitalism.
In one sense The Iron Heel was already becoming ‘old-fashioned’ even when it appeared, for it still takes for granted that socialism is a revolutionary creed, at a time when all over Europe and America reactionary leaders were trying to disguise this awkward fact. By 1907 the new epoch of imperialism was already well advanced, and with it went the growth of opportunism in the workers’ movement. So, also, the nature of utopian speculation changed correspondingly, and, if the discussion continued to revolve around socialism, it was socialism with a difference, the socialism of the Fabians and their vulgarisers. Already, in terms of utopian development, we have slipped over into the period in which HG Wells is the dominating figure, and it is to Wells and what he stood for, and to the opposition which his ideas aroused, that we must now turn.
1. Friedrich Engels to August Bebel, 18 January 1884; available at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/letters/84_01_18.htm > – MIA.
2. Friedrich Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky, 3 June 1886; available at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/letters/86_06_03.htm > – MIA.
3. Compare the views of Winstanley, Godwin, Spence.
4. William Morris, ‘Bellamy’s Looking Backward’, The Commonweal, 22 January 1889, available at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1889/backward.htm > – MIA.
5. William Morris, News From Nowhere, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/nowhere/index.htm >.
6. William Morris, A Dream of John Ball, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1886/johnball/johnball.htm >.
7. William Morris, News From Nowhere, Chapter XVIII, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/nowhere/chapters/chapter18.htm >.
8. William Morris, The Roots of the Mountains, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1889/roots/roots.htm >.
9. William Morris, Hopes and Fears For Art, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1882/hopes/chapters/index.htm >.
10. It may be worthwhile to give one example of such distortion. Lloyd Eric Grey, in William Morris: Prophet of England’s New Order, declares that Morris wrote ‘to members of the Marxian Social Democratic Federation that anyone who believes that “knife and fork” economics takes precedence over “art and cultivation... does not understand what art means"’. What Morris wrote (How I Became a Socialist, p 659, in Cole’s Nonesuch volume) was precisely the opposite: ‘Surely anyone who professes to think that the question of art and cultivation must go before that of the knife and fork (and there are some who do propose that) does not understand what art means, or how that its roots must have a soil of a thriving and unanxious life.’ [Available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1894/hibs/hibs.htm >.]
11. William Morris, News From Nowhere, Chapter XIV, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/nowhere/chapters/chapter14.htm >.
12. William Morris, News From Nowhere, Chapter IX, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/nowhere/chapters/chapter9.htm >.
13. William Morris, Useful Work Versus Useless Toil, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1884/useful.htm >.
14. William Morris, News From Nowhere, Chapter X, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/nowhere/chapters/chapter10.htm >.
15. William Morris, News From Nowhere, Chapter XXIV, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/nowhere/chapters/chapter24.htm >.
16. William Morris, News From Nowhere, Chapter XVII, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/nowhere/chapters/chapter17.htm >.
17. William Morris, News From Nowhere, Chapter XVII, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/nowhere/chapters/chapter17.htm >.
18. William Morris, News From Nowhere, Chapter XVII, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/nowhere/chapters/chapter17.htm >.
19. William Morris, News From Nowhere, Chapter XXXII, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/nowhere/chapters/chapter32.htm >.
20. William Morris, News From Nowhere, Chapter XXXII, available on the MIA at < https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/nowhere/chapters/chapter32.htm >.
21. See Part V, Chapter V.