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'SOCIALIST?
(This is a modified version of a paper I first gave at the Socialist
History Society).
I have made the title of this paper into a question rather than a
statement,since what I want to investigate is the extent of the
Green movement's debt to Morris. Some research on this topic
has also been done by Florence Boos, who has also edited
Morris's Socialist Diary.
I want to suggest that many of the ideas and practices which we
advocate today in the Green movement owe their origins to
Morris - perhaps indirectly[Footnote 1]
.He seems to have been one of the first Victorians to address
himself consciously to the question of our relationship with
Nature, the natural world - i.e. rather than just write about it, or
paint it, he suggested concrete steps that might be taken to
preserve and enhance the beauty of the natural world and of the
countryside. Some of his major interests are those which are still
very much central concerns of the Green movement today - for
instance his concern with THE NATURE OF WORK. His
discussion of the Nature of Work develops from ideas first
discussed by Carlyle and Ruskin.
WR101 We define work in the full sense, not the traditional limited definition as
employment in the formal economy. Green thinking recognises the latter as one part
of the whole - a large part, but not the only one. Work exists in a variety of forms,
each related to and often affecting others, like species in an ecosystem. Work covers
all the activities people undertake to support themselves, their families and
communities.
I did say that his expression of his vision changed - but the
vision itself did not change all that much. He saw Socialism as
the means to achieve his vision of an integrated, whole society,
in which the landscape was not damaged, and in which the stark
division between town and country was abolished - expressed
most elaborately in NEWS FROM NOWHERE, of course. The
idea of the abolition of the division between town and country
(i.e. the abolition of large manufacturing districts such as, in the
19th. century, Leeds, Manchester, etc) was a common feature of
Utopian writing. [Footnote 6] - and Marx had stated that one of
the tasks of Socialism would be to end this division. Again, this
is something that most environmentalists regard as a priority,
even if they may not have heard of Morris and don't approach
the question from a Marxist perspective. Note, for instance,
these extracts from the Green Party's MANIFESTO FOR A
SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY:CY201 We believe that is is a
fundamental human right and obligation for people to live in a
style that ensures the can hand on to their descendants an
environment that is at least as rich in wildlife and attractive
landscapes as when they inherited it.
CY202 Rural and urban communities meet the many different
needs of people in a healthy society. They are not separate from
each other and one should not dominate the other. In a green
society, towns will not grow beyond the ability of the
countryside around them to provide fresh and healthy water and
food, recreation, timber and wildlife habitats. There will be a
constant flow of environmental, social and cultural information
between them. Towns will return compostable materials to the
countryside. These urban communities will integrate into all
their decisions the impact on a vital, thriving rural community.
Morris repeated over and over again his hatred of the ugliness
caused by rapid industrialisation; poisoning of the atmosphere
by sulphurous emissions from factories, pollution of rivers,
cutting down of trees - in short, the wholesale destruction of
what we should now call the environment. The following
examples are taken from Art Under Plutocracy, delivered at
University College, Oxford, November 14, 1883. The meeting
was chaired by Ruskin: Morris's lecture caused a furore,
especially at the point at which Morris declared his adherence to
the Socialist cause and asked his audience to support it, at least
financially if in no other way.
a.To keep the air pure and the rivers clean, to take some
pains to keep the meadows and tillage as pleasant as
reasonable use will allow them to be; to allow peaceable
citizens freedom to wander where they will, so they do no
harm to garden or cornfield; nay, even to leave here and
there some piece of waste or mountain sacredly free from
fence or tillage as a memory of man’s struggles with
nature in his early days; is it too much to ask of civilisation
to be so far thoughtful of man's pleasure and rest, and to
help so far as this her children to whom she has most often
set such heavy tasks of grinding labour? Surely not an
unreasonable asking. But not a whit of it shall we get under
the present system of society. That loss of the instinct for
beauty which has involved us in the loss of popular art is
also busy in depriving us of the only compensation possible
for that loss, by surely and not slowly destroying the beauty
of the very face of the earth….not only have whole counties
of England, and the heavens that hang over them,
disappeared beneath a crust of unutterable grime, but the
disease which, to a visitor coming from the times of art,
reason and order, would seem to be a love of dirt and
ugliness for its own sake, spreads all over the country….
b.And why have our natural hopes been so disappointed?
Surely because in these latter days, in which as a matter of
fact machinery has been invented, it was by no means
invented with the aim of saving the pain of labour. The
phrase labour-saving machinery is elliptical, and means
machinery which saves the cost of labour, not the labour
itself, which will be expended when saved on tending other
machines.
c.I tell you that the very essence of competitive commerce is
waste.
FOOTNOTES
[1] It is also vital to acknowledge Morris's own debt to Ruskin -
he himself never tired of reiterating that he owed a great deal to
Ruskin in the field of aesthetics,though he soon parted company
with him on the subject of 'Political Economy'.But what they
shared was a love of the countryside - what we should now call
the environment - and a dislike of the ugliness and pollution
brought about by the industrialisation of the early to mid-
nineteenth century. This is why this paper starts with a quote
from Ruskin, rather than from Morris himself - the difference
being (as you are no doubt already aware!) that Ruskin was
reluctant to contemplate any solution to this problem that could
have been described,however loosely, as Socialist.
[2] Although it is always possible that none of the social
criticism of the 19th. century would have been possible without
Carlyle.
[3]I will briefly observe here that the date 1876 is not without
significance; it is the year that Wagner's RING was first
performed at Bayreuth. I have argued elsewherethat SIGURD
THE VOLSUNG is an anti-RING. (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis,
University of Leeds, 1993).