Workers' Liberty

One of the great myths about Morris is that he was hostile to technology. At best this myth is based on a very partial reading of his writings, and the extraction of his comments about the limits of machinery in socialist society. Typical of this genre was his comment on Edward Bellamy’s utopia Looking Backward, which he reviewed in Commonweal, (22 June 1889).

Morris wrote sarcastically: “In short, a machine-life is the best which Mr Bellamy can imagine for us on all sides… this ideal of the great reduction of the hours of labour by the mere use of machinery is a futility. The human race has always put forth about as much energy as it could under given conditions of climate… and the development of men’s resources, which has given him greater powers over Nature, has driven him also into fresh desires and fresh demands on nature, and this has made his expenditure of energy much what it was before. I believe this will always be so, and the multiplication of machinery will just multiply machines.” (Salmon 1994 pp.423-424)

Aside from his observation of energy and climate, Morris’ point about the malleability of human needs and on the capacity of machine use to meet them is realistic, rather than dismissive.

More importantly, he anticipated the objection about getting rid of machines and answered it in a number of different places. In an early article, Work In A Factory As It Might Be, published in Justice, (31 May 1884) he positively commended the use of machinery under socialism, where “the most ingenious and best approved kinds will be used when necessary, but will be used simply to save human labour”. It was the use of machines under capitalism that Morris abhorred, not technology per se. As he put it: “Machines once used for mere profit grinding but now used only for saving human labour, it follows that much less labour will be necessary for each workman; all the more as we are going to get rid of all non-workers, and busy-idle people; so that the working time of each member of our factory will be very short, say, to be much within the mark, four hours a day.” (Salmon 1994 p.40)

He was even more explicit in the lecture How We Live and How We Might Live, delivered later that year: “Before I leave this matter of the surroundings of life, I wish to meet a possible objection. I have spoken of machinery being used freely for releasing people from the more mechanical and repulsive part of necessary labour; and I know that to some cultivated people, people of the artistic turn of mind, machinery is particularly distasteful, and they will be apt to say you will never get your surroundings pleasant so long as you are surrounded by machinery. I don't quite admit that; it is the allowing machines to be our masters and not our servants that so injures the beauty of life nowadays. In other words, it is the token of the terrible crime we have fallen into of using our control of the powers of Nature for the purpose of enslaving people, we care less meantime of how much happiness we rob their lives of.” (Morton 1973 p.155-56)

What Morris did highlight were the hazards associated with industrial production. In Commonweal, (23 October 1886) he commented upon a case of white-lead poisoning that had been reported in the press that week. He wrote: “Stripped of verbiage it amounts to this, that a man was killed by being compelled to work in a place where white lead was flying about, and that no precautions were taken to prevent his dying speedily… It is quite impossible that the man’s employers did not know the risk he ran of this speedier death, and the certainty of his being poisoned sooner or later.” (Salmon 1996 p.146)

In another article three years later (22 June 1889), he wrote about a tram-car incident in which a boy was killed, which emphasised what we now call corporate accountability rather than individual culpability of drivers. He wrote: “We have nothing to say about the men who have been arrested: even if they should be proved to be guilty of carelessness, yet after all it is not they who would be the real criminals, but rather ourselves, who allow monopolist companies to work our railways for profit, with the necessary consequence of low wages and long hours and shorthandedness among the underlings out of whose pay and leisure the monopolists have to scrape up a dividend. What can come of such a system but misery and disaster on all hands? (Salmon 1996 p.587)

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