CONVERSATIONS WITH ELLEN
or falling in love with a woman of the future Morris meets and falls in love with a young lady called Ellen But he cannot express his love to her because she is much younger than him and, in any case, she is a woman of the future and Morris has a premonition that at any time he is going to be snatched back into the grime of industrial England.
As you read News from Nowhere, you will realise that there are two fantasies interwoven. The one is a fantasy about our communist future, about the liberation of the craftsmanship in all of us. The other is a fantasy of sex and love. In Morris's mind, the liberation of love and the liberation of craftsmanship inter-twine - But just as his craftsmanship draws on medieval ideas, so does his romanticism. Morris's love is a chivalric or knightly love - A fantasy that is not consummated in sex and is enjoyed all the more for that. In the medieval romances, the young knight could fall passionately in love with the wife of another knight absent on the crusades. He wrote poems and sang songs to her from the bottom of the castle wall. She threw down her headscarf and he wore it as his colours into battle, But the poignancy and the sensuality of the love come precisely from the fact that the two never touch. Morris's love for Ellen does involve touching, but it generally follows the medieval pattern. Richard has a woman friend called Clare. Whilst Morris and Hammond are talking about history in the British Museum, Richard and Clare go into a private room to make love. Morris and Ellen, on the other hand, just languish in one another's company and think of things that cannot be. It may be because Morris's love is attenuated and frustrated that the images of violence and romantic passion are linked when Morris discusses the need for political revolution. Craftsmanship and sexuality are also repeatedly linked. This is how Morris describes the spirit of communist times. It is: " delight in the life of the world; intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells, such as a lover has in the fair flesh of the woman he loves; "
In the final pages of the book, Ellen and Morris attend the harvest feast where everyone who has come for the hay harvest is eating together in the local church. But as they sit opposite one another, Ellen can no longer see him. Morris has faded away to the nineteenth century
Marx and Morris
William Morris (1834-1896) was an English poet, artist and storyteller. He
founded the Socialist League in 1883 and wrote a fantasy about a future
communist society, which he called News from Nowhere.
Marx and Morris
People argue about whether Morris was a marxist. In this quote Ian Birchall
explains why he calls Morris an "orthodox marxist".
I would not have called Morris an orthodox marxist, but I will try to
explain
what I think he did have in common with Marx. Both of them thought men and
women are stopped from being truly human by the stunting effect of a
corrupt social system. The present system they called capitalism. Like
previous systems it distorts our true being, but our full humanity will
flourish in the communist future. Our separation from what we really are is
called "alienation" by Marx. The system makes us strangers (aliens) to
ourselves.
Some marxists, notably the followers of Louis Althusser, say that Marx only
thought like this in the first part of his life. Others, the Hegalian
marxists or "humanists", say this kind of thinking runs through all his
work.
To be human, according to Marx and Morris, is to be a creative worker. This
is the humanity that we have been alienated from. The alienation took place
very early in human history and was associated with the emergence of
economic and social classes. When early societies produced more than they
needed to exist on, the surplus was set apart for special communal purposes
such as investment, defence or religion. The groups that took charge of
this surplus became the ruling class and, since then:
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles."(5)
Under capitalism there are many classes, but they are polarizing into two:
the proletariat (or working class) and the bourgeoisie (or capitalists).
The proletariat are the class who own nothing but their labour power, the
capitalist are the class who own the means of production.
The proletariat are the first class in history whose class struggles can
free everyone from alienation. They have no one beneath them to exploit so
the only path they can take to freedom is to set up a classless society in
which no one is exploited. This, Marx thought, would happen after a
revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and after an in-between period called
the "dictatorship of the proletariat".
Morris and Ruskin
William Morris was a follower of John Ruskin (1819-1900), an art critic who
thought Victorian economic society was taking the humanity out of art and
the art out of humanity. Morris tried to create an art that was part of
life. He designed fabrics. houses, furniture, books, wallpaper and
whatever else he felt people needed to lead beautiful lives. He became a
socialist because when he read Marx he came to the conclusion that in the
communist future art and living will be re-united.
Morris and Ruskin were "gothics". In the great controversy that tore
Victorian architects apart they favoured the medieval style rather than the
Greek and Roman classical forms. All this became part of Morris's
marxism. Marx argued that art and economics were linked. He saw history
as a series of "modes of production". Capitalism developed out of feudalism
just as communism would develop out of capitalism via socialism. Under
feudalism the nobles took an economic surplus from the serfs who were
forced to work their land. (Serfs could not sell their labour to anyone as
workers can under capitalism). This surplus paid, amongst other things, for
medieval civilization. It built the crenellated castles and the great
gothic cathedrals. Under capitalism the surplus is extracted by capitalists
almost without being noticed. The removal of the surplus as profit is
disguised by the market. And the surplus is more private than under
feudalism, so the capitalist does not have the same responsibility for the
welfare of the community. The workers lose the common rights and privileges
they had under feudalism and cash becomes the only link between worker and
employer. In this move from feudalism to capitalism, the workers both gain
and lose. They gain a form of freedom, for example, but, according to
Morris, they lose wholeness.
Adam Smith, you will recall, argued that the well-being of the workers is
immeasurably greater in countries like Britain than in economically
under-developed countries because of the "division of labour". Workers
produce more; the example he gave was pin making, and the market leads to a
world wide division of labour that increases everyone's labour. Morris
argued back that the division of labour meant craftsmanship was replaced by
mass-production and this meant losses as well as gains for the workers. The
losses were two. First, the goods produced were shoddy and second, their
production reduced the humanity of the workers.
But, Morris said, craftsmanship and wholeness will be recovered under
communism. People will regain their true being. Work will become a pleasure
and people will be as enthusiastic about it as they are about sex. Morris's
communism is a work-loving society. It is a society where the joy of making
beautiful things has become a necessary part of everyone's life.
But why is this communism? It's communism because such a society is only
possible when private property and the market are abolished and goods are
produced to meet human needs directly. In Morris's communist future no one
buys, sells or barters. "The wares which we make are made because they are
needed: men make for their neighbours' use as if they were making for
themselves, not for a vague market"(6).
News from Nowhere (7)
According to Marx the class struggles of the workers under capitalism will
lead to a revolution which will be followed first by socialism and then by
communism. In socialist society there is a state that controls the remnants
of the old exploiting classes. but as classes fade so does the state. In
socialism people are paid according to their labour, but in the classless,
communist society they work according to their abilities and take whatever
they need.
Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) is a short story of a dream of what
communism would be like. Morris dreamed his dream after a particularly
argumentative evening at the Socialist League where they had been
discussing what socialism (or communism) is. The dream took him into the
twenty first century, only to find that the people there have gone back to
the middle ages.
They have built a stone bridge with houses on it across the Thames and the
river water is pure and clean. People wear colourful medieval clothes, use
parish churches for their community meetings, live in houses they build
themselves, play fourteenth century instruments and hand-write their own
books. Industrial towns have vanished altogether and, in London, a forest
stretches from Hackney marshes to Kensington. An old man, called Hammond,
tells Morris that medieval England was a "country" of clearings amongst the
woods and wastes". In the industrial revolution it became a "country of
huge and foul workshops", but now it is:
Morris tells us that the spirit of communism is a delight in the life of
the world, showing itself in an "intense and overweening love of the very
skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells". Some people argue that
Morris's vision of the future diverges markedly from Marx's at this point.
Marx, they say, saw the future as one in which the industrial and
scientific revolutions are taken even further than they were in the early
19th century.
According to Morris there are no large coalfields in the communist future.
People use some new, unexplained power called "force" which does not smoke
and can be provided to people where they live. Domestic industry
flourishes, but some work is more pleasantly and conveniently done in
company, so there are "banded workshops" where craftsmen and women can work
together. The one Morris sees is for glass-blowing and pottery -crafts that
need kilns and furnaces. But people work here for the pleasure of working
together rather than the need for equipment. Hammond tells Morris that
irksome work is now done by machines, but
Pain and pleasure
According to the mainstream of political and economic thought in the 19th
century, wages are compensation for the pain of labour. "The real price of
everything", Adam Smith had said, "...is the toil and trouble of acquiring
it...Labour was the first price...that was paid for all things"(10). Sex,
on the other hand, was its own reward and as a consequence, Thomas Malthus
argued, population rapidly outran production. A communal utopia would be
like a generous poor law. It would encourage promiscuity, but give no
incentive to work.
In News from Nowhere, Morris discusses these problems with Hammond, who
says that they would no more think of charging for work than of charging
for having children. "The reward of labour is life". The reward for
especially good work is "the reward of creation". Passionate creativity is
like passionate love, it supplies its own stimulus. But, argues Morris,
"the man of the nineteenth century could say there is a natural desire not
to work". Wholly untrue, and to us quite meaningless, says Hammond.
"Because it implies that all work is suffering, and we are so far from
thinking that, that... there is a kind of fear growing up amongst us that
we shall one day be short of work. It is a pleasure which we are afraid of
losing, not a pain."(11)
So deep is the future's need for useful work that markets, even a limited
international trade, operate without money or barter, providing easy and
relaxing work-pleasure for children and the less creative adults.
Family matters
I could not help noticing, says Morris, that the women served the men
breakfast. Isn't that a little reactionary? Hammond, however, explains that
he is an expert on the so-called "emancipation of women movement" and knew
it to be based on two fallacies. One, that house-work is demeaning, Two,
that women should want to escape from motherhood. In the communist future
motherhood is highly honoured and the "ordinary healthy woman", being more
aware of her biology than Victorian feminists and free of the anxieties of
poverty, "has far more instinct for maternity". As for housework, it is a
craft that women do with greater skill than men and, in the communist
future, "The women do what they can do best, and what they like best" (12).
No one stops women doing other work. In fact Morris meets two eccentric
ladies who are expert stonemasons.
Eugenics (the study of how to breed a sound healthy race) was a major issue
in social science at the end of the nineteenth century. In the communist
future, Morris finds, everyone is good looking and people age very slowly.
Hammond has his own ideas about why this is. Under communism formal
marriage and divorce no longer exist. Men and women couple and uncouple
according to their love for one another and Hammond argues that this is
what leads to healthy offspring. "Pleasure" he says "begets pleasure" (13).
Children under five are discreetly absent from the pages of News from
Nowhere. Older children are often encouraged to fend for themselves in the
forest. When Morris finds the woods from Hackney to Kensington are full of
children playing he thinks it must be the school holidays. But under
communism there are no schools. People learn what they want to, not what
they are made to (14).
Government
The society in News from Nowhere is an unstructured one that holds together
because it has not got many real problems. Problems are largely a
consequence of class society and, in particular, capitalism. Liberated from
the distortions of the system, the people shape themselves, and they enjoy
doing it. Society no longer stands as a power over them because, in as far
as it exists, it is a result of their free association.
Tell me about your politics, Morris asks Hammond, only to be told that "we
have none". It is clearly not easy to knock up a political party on the
question as to whether haymaking in such and such a countryside shall begin
this week or next" (15).
Notes and references
6. Penguin Morris page 267
7. News from Nowhere is available unabridged from Lawrence and Wishart
together with two other stories. The Penguin Morris (misleadingly called
News from Nowhere) contains a shortened version along with an outline of
his life, selections from his poems, and selections of the wallpapers and
fabric he designed.
8. Penguin Morris page 245
9. Penguin Morris page 267
10. Adam Smith 1776 The Wealth of Nations, book one, chapter 5
11. News from Nowhere chapter 15
12. Penguin Morris page 234
13. News from Nowhere chapter 9
14. News from Nowhere chapters 5 and 10
15. News from Nowhere chapters 13 and 14
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