Workers' Liberty

Perhaps Morris’ most significant breakthrough was to identify working class action and the socialist movement more generally as the essential social agents in protecting the environment. Rather than appeal generally for upstanding people in general to protect nature, his message was explicitly aimed at and designed to mobilise a specific class – the working class.

The first breakthrough in this respect came very early in his conversion to socialism. In a letter to an unknown correspondent, (4 September 1882), he looked forward to a time “when the workmen of some manufacturing district will strike to compel their masters to consume their own smoke”. (Meier 1978 p.425)

He made the point more explicitly in public when he delivered his lecture Art: a Serious Thing at the annual distribution of prizes of the Leek School of Art on 12 December 1882. He said: “I have taken note of many strikes, and I must needs say without circumlocution that with many of these I have heartily sympathised: but when the day comes that there is a serious strike of workmen against the poisoning of the air with smoke or the waters with filth, I shall think that art is getting on indeed”. (Lemire 1969 p.51)

Later, writing in Commonweal on 26 February 1887 he appealed “to all Socialists to do their best to preserve the beauty and interest of the country. It is true that it is a part of that wealth in which the workers under our present system are not allowed to share. But when we have abolished the artificial famine caused by capital, we shall not be so pinched and poor that we cannot afford ourselves the pleasure of a beautiful landscape because it doesn’t produce ironstone, or of a beautiful building because it won’t do for a cotton mill, and that pleasure will not then be confined to a few well-to-do people, but will be there to be enjoyed by all”. (Salmon 1996 p.200)

Morris did not go on to discuss the potential contradictions in workers fighting to defend the environment – for example the impact on jobs and wages. However he was one of the first to put the working class at the centre of ecological action and with that step he went beyond the bounds of most of latter-day green activists.

For Morris, the wider point of working class action was to take power and to create of a socialist society. In Unattractive Labour (May 1885) he affirmed “the hope of revolution, of the transformation of civilisation, now become on the face of it a mere corruption and curse to the world, into Socialism, which will set free the hands and minds of men for the production and safeguarding of the beauty of life”. (Salmon 1994 p.90)

One of the strengths of Morris’ Marxism was in the way he laid out the basic conditions a socialist society would meet. In an early lecture, Art and Socialism (23 January 1884) he summed up what he called “the due necessaries for a good citizen” and that these would not be bought at the cost of damage to the environment. The conditions were:
“First, honourable and fitting work: which would involve giving him a chance of gaining capacity for his work by due education; also, as the work must be worth doing and pleasant to do, it will be found necessary to this end that his position be so assured to him that he cannot be compelled to do useless work, or work in which he cannot take pleasure.
“The second necessity is decency of surroundings: including (a) good lodging; (b) ample space; (c) general order and beauty. That is (a) our houses must be well built, clean and healthy; (b) there must be abundant garden space in our towns, and our towns must not eat up the fields and natural features of the country; nay I demand even that there be left waste places and wilds in it, or romance and poetry—that is Art—will die out amongst us. (c) Order and beauty means, that not only our houses must be stoutly and properly built, but also that they be ornamented duly: that the fields be not only left for cultivation, but also that they be not spoilt by it any more than a garden is spoilt: no one for instance to be allowed to cut down, for mere profit, trees whose loss would spoil a landscape: neither on any pretext should people be allowed to darken the daylight with smoke, to befoul rivers, or to degrade any spot of earth with squalid litter and brutal wasteful disorder.
“The third necessity is leisure. You will understand that in using that word limply first that all men must work for some portion of the day, and secondly that they have a positive right to claim a respite from that work: the leisure they have a right to claim, must be ample enough to allow them full rest of mind and body; a man must have time for serious individual thought, for imagination—for dreaming even—or the race of men will inevitably worsen. Even of the honourable and fitting work of which I have been speaking, which is a whole heaven asunder from the forced work of the Capitalist system, a man must not be asked to give more than his fair share; or men will become unequally developed, and there will still be a rotten place in Society.” (Morton 1973 p.127-128)

What would ensure that these conditions were met? Again, Morris was perfectly clear – the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production was crucial. In the lecture Monopoly: or, How Labour is Robbed, (20 February 1887), he argued that “those raw materials and tools would be the property of the whole community, and would be used by every one in it, on the terms that they should repair the waste in them and not engross undue shares of them”. He made the same point in one of his last lectures, entitled Communism, and given to the Hammersmith Socialist Society in 1893: “The resources of nature therefore, and the wealth used for the production of further wealth, the plant and stock in short, should be communised”. (Morton 1973 p.235)

Within this perspective, science and technology are put to ecological rectification. In Useful Work versus Useless Toil, (21 January 1884), he argued that under socialism: “Science duly applied would enable them to get rid of refuse, to minimise, if not wholly to destroy, all the inconveniences which at present attend the use of elaborate machinery, such as smoke, stench, and noise; nor would they endure that the buildings in which they worked or lived should be ugly blots on the fair face of the earth.” (Morton 1973 p.104)

In short, under socialism “civilised man will no longer seem (as he does now) to be the enemy of nature, to shame her and befoul her, and turn her rest and order and beauty into feverish ragged squalor; the house shall be like a natural growth of the meadow, and the city a necessary fulfilment of the valley… of days made up of unwearisome work, and of leisure restful but not vacant”. (Art: a Serious Thing in Lemire 1969 p.49)

In another early article, The Dull Level of Life, published in Justice, (26 April 1884), he was even more explicit about the aims of socialism: “To use the forces of nature by means of universal co-operation for the purpose of gaining generous and equal livelihood for all, leaving them free to enjoy their lives, and to emulate each other in, producing pleasure for themselves and others…” (Salmon 1994 pp.30-31)

Morris also laid bear how the relationship between nature and humanity would be reconciled under communism in his fiction. In News from Nowhere (1890) he dreamt that “England… 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”.

He went on:
“Said I: ‘One thing, it seems to me, does not go with your word of ‘garden’ for the country. You have spoken of wastes and forests, and I myself have seen the beginning of your Middlesex and Essex forest. Why do you keep such things in a garden? and isn't it very wasteful to do so?’
‘My friend,’ he said, ‘we like these pieces of wild nature, and can afford them, so we have them; let alone that as to forests, we need a great deal of timber, and suppose that our sons and our sons' sons will do the like. As to the land being a garden, I have heard that they used to have shrubberies and rockeries in gardens once; and though I might not like the artificial ones, I assure you that some of the natural rockeries of our garden are worth seeing’.” (Morton 1968 p.254, p.256)

In short under communism, “the spirit of the new days, of our days, was to be delight in the life of the world; intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells”. (Morton 1968 p.317)

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