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From International Socialism, No.10, Autumn 1962, pp.32-33.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Art Labour and Socialism
William Morris
SPGB. 1s.
This is a reprint, with a lengthy (anonymous) preface, of the greater part of a lecture given by William Morris in 1884. It is an interesting little historical curiosity, demonstrating the superficiality and inadequacy of Morris’s Utopian approach. He condemns the dreariness and frustration of the life of the workers under capitalism, the ugliness produced by industrialisation, the subordination of men to machinery etc. But he fails to recognise the positive and progressive role which capitalism has played in developing the productive forces of society and so creating the material basis for socialism. He equally fails to appreciate its cultural achievements. The Renaissance is described as ‘the fruit of the five centuries of free and popular art which preceded it, and not of the rise of commercialism which was contemporaneous with it’ (!). All the intellectual and creative activity of the three or four hundred years preceding the date of his lecture are passed over in complete silence. An equally glaring example of his undialectical approach is in the reference to the trade unions as having ‘already become conservative and obstructive bodies’. He puts his faith in a vague union or brotherhood, springing spontaneously out of the miseries of the workers plus the enlightenment spread by the Socialist League.
Nor does Morris come to grips with the question which is inevitably posed by his theme – namely, what will be the relation between men and their work under socialism? Are boredom and lack of creativity in work, which are the workers’ experience under capitalism, the inevitable concomitants of mass production industries? How can anyone find joy and fulfilment in unskilled repetitive work even if production is for use not profit and even if the factory is under the workers’ control? To answer that there will be more leisure and that the dreary chores will be shared out equally among everyone is to dodge the question. But to answer, as Morris would presumably have done, that we must go back to the small scale workshops of the Middle Ages is merely ludicrous.
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