Soon after the split with SDF, the Socialist League debated its attitude towards standing candidates for parliament and for other bodies, such as local councils. On one side were Eleanor Marx, Aveling and Bax who like Engels favoured using elections as a means of making socialist propaganda; on the other stood Morris and some comrades influenced by anarchism, who opposed such an intervention.
In his contribution in Commonweal (July 1885), Morris argued: “I think that Socialists ought not to hesitate to choose between Parliamentarism and revolutionary agitation, and that it is a mistake to try and sit on the two stools at once; and, for my part, I hope that they will declare against Parliamentarism as I feel assured that otherwise they will have to retrace their steps at the cost of much waste of time and discouragement… On the other hand the object of Parliamentary institutions is the preservation of society in its present form — to get rid of defects in the machine in order to keep the machine going… if we mix ourselves up with Parliament we shall confuse and dull this fact in people’s minds instead of making it clear and intensifying it.” (Salmon 1994 p.98, p.100)
He maintained this hostility throughout his involvement with Commonweal, asking readers in 1890: “What is the aim of Parliament? The upholding of privilege; the society of rich and poor; the society of inequality, and the consequent misery of the workers and the degradation of all classes.” (Salmon 1994 p.481)
He described the House of Commons as a “Den of Thieves” and famously in his utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890) made the historic parliament building a store for manure under Communism.
Of course workers had only recently obtained the vote and there were no Marxist MPs in parliament (as in Germany), although a few Radicals did seek workers’ support. Morris was therefore highly critical of the Liberal Party, which he described as “a nondescript and flaccid creation of bourgeois supremacy, a party without principles or definition, but a thoroughly adequate expression of English middle-class hypocrisy, cowardice, and short-sightedness, engrossed the whole of the political progressive movement in England, and dragged the working-classes along with it, blind as they were to their own interests and the solidarity of labour.” (Socialism from the Root Up in Salmon 1994 p.551)
At best, Morris believed that revolutionaries “Socialists may be obliged to use the form of parliament in order to cripple the resistance of the reactionists by making it formally illegal and so destroying the power of the armed men on whom the power of the parliament and the law-courts really rests. But this can only come in the last act; when the Socialists are strong enough to capture the parliament in order to put an end to it, and the privilege whose protection is its object, the revolution will have come, or all but come.” (Anti-Parliamentary, Commonweal, 7 June 1890 in Salmon 1994 pp.481-82)
Later in life Morris’ hostility toward standing for parliament softened, in part because of the experience of getting John Burns and Keir Hardie elected in 1892. In a lecture The Present Outlook in Politics in 1887 he looked forward to the “gradual building up of a great labour party” and as late as May 1895 he spoke in favour of George Lansbury, who stood for parliament as an SDF candidate. (Lemire 1969 p.213, 322)
On his earlier attitude toward standing candidates and parliament, I think Morris was simply wrong. His justifiable hostility to the bourgeois state and its parties was mechanically transformed into inflexible tactics to close off avenues for socialist propaganda, and thus conceded important arenas of national and local politics to the bourgeoisie.
----------
Back to 1) William Morris – a Marxist for our time