This is an extract from a longer piece by Jane Susanna Ennis
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.
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.
We will first
of all consider the final paragraph of A
Dream of John Ball:
But as I turned away shivering and downhearted, on a sudden came the frightful noise of the "hooters," one after the other, that call the workmen to the factories, this one the after- breakfast one, more by token. So I grinned surlily, and dressed and got ready for my day's "work" as I call it, but which many a man besides John Ruskin (though not many in his position) would call "play."
This is a
point that Morris develops at greater length in News From Nowhere. Because Morris enjoyed his work and was
self-employed - indeed, was an employer - many people would have thought of his
work as play, because it was enjoyable. It seems as though the section on
Workers' Rights in the England and Wales Green Party's Manifesto for a Sustainable Society reflects this:
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 referred to
Carlyle because he perhaps stimulated Morris's examination of the Nature of
Work. Carlyle himself never really tries to define what work IS, and he
certainly has no truck with the idea of Pleasure in Work - in fact he more or
less dismisses the idea of happiness as an irrelevance; he almost seems to
advocate 'useless toil' as being at least preferable to 'idleness' - however
you define idleness. Certainly Carlyle, writing in 1843, was in a position to
observe the Industrial Revolution at first hand, and to see the degradation of
the worker from an 'artisan' to a 'hand', the appendage to a machine. But the
remedies he proposed were vastly different from those proposed by Morris - not
only is Carlyle vague about the definition of work, but he sees restoration of
feudal authority as the only true remedy for the evils of laissez-faire
capitalism. In fact both Carlyle and Ruskin seem to hold the view that if
everyone remained content in their stations, and the workers worked and their
'natural superiors' recognised and lived by the principle of noblesse oblige
everything would be fine and there would be no need for revolution.
Perhaps
Morris's concept of The Nature of Work should be seen as a reaction against the
Protestant ethic expressed in Ruskin's writings, and the dour Calvinism of
Carlyle. I think the problem with
Carlyle and Ruskin was that they never quite came to terms with the fact that
work basically consists of the production of commodities, or more properly the
production and exchange of commodities; Morris had grasped this even before he
read Marx, and he discusses:
(a) what
commodities should be produced.
(b) how they
should be produced.
(c) by whom
they should be produced.
(d) for whom
they should be produced.
(e) how they
should be distributed.
A related
theme is the question of how Morris's expression of his love of nature, of
landscape, of the English countryside, (a) is expressed in his poetry and later
prose works; how it changed and developed as he travelled the road to Socialism.
Thus we could
say that Morris's vision of the Middle Ages as a time of artistic excellence
(he regarded the Renaissance as the beginning of degeneracy and decay in the
arts) functioned as a blueprint for what the world might be like after the
Socialist revolution. He did not idealise the medieval period in the way Ruskin
did, or the way the Pre-Raphaelites did in their paintings, but he was aware
that the art/craft of the medieval period was an expression of some creative
spark that (he felt) the Victorian period had lost. Thus in some ways Morris
could hardly be said to have idealised the medieval period at all. He admired
the art of the period, which is not quite the same thing.
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. 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 England and Wales Green Party's Manifesto for
a Sustainable Society:
CY201 We
believe that is a fundamental human right and obligation for people to live in
a style that ensures they 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.
The vision of
society in News From Nowhere is one
that is close to the vision of a possible future society expressed in many
green/environmental manifestos and blueprints. For instance, the Thames is so
clean - due to a lack of industrial pollution - that there are again salmon in
the river near Hammersmith. The society has no money, it is a barter economy,
people produce (a) what they need (b) what they LIKE. Piccadilly is a market,
but one 'ignorant of the arts of buying and selling' - beautiful hand-made
craft goods are exchanged and donated. The whole of London has reverted to being
villages and parks. All the houses have gardens and (of course, this being
Morris's dream!) all the buildings are well-built and attractively ornamented,
but NOT VULGAR.
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.
It is as well
to recall here that the terminology we now use was not used by Morris and his
contemporaries, although I am suggesting that he gave the impetus to many of
our own environmental concerns. At certain points Morris still used vocabulary
such as "conquering Nature", "our struggle with Nature" and
so on, which indicates that, though he did his best, he could not entirely free
himself from the mind-set that saw Nature as a hostile force to be conquered
and subdued, or the Conquest of Nature as something desirable … although his
awareness of humanity as a part of Nature is usually to the fore. It is
possible that he used this terminology as an initial point of contact with his
audiences.
For most of
the 19th century, "environment" was a neutral term meaning "the
surroundings", "where we live" - it didn’t have the emotive
weight it carries today. Similar, the word "ecology" (first recorded
in English in 1893 according to “Ecology for Beginners”, but used by Thoreau in
1856, according to the OED) was not used with any positive or negative
connotations - the general public were less aware of what an ecosystem was and
how it could be damaged.
Morris, like
Engels, (and even Ruskin and Carlyle, as we have seen), was perfectly well
aware of the dehumanisation of work and of the degrading, cramped and unsanitary
conditions in which the working class lived. And he did set out to campaign
against all this. He did visit industrial towns and saw how ugly and dirty they
were, and was indignant at the conditions in which the workers lived. My point
throughout has been that Morris's ideas on the environment have had a great
influence on the environmental movement, and Morris never denied that he was a
member of the bourgeoisie - what is true is that has taken a century or more
for some of these ideas to be taken up by large numbers of people.
Unfortunately, it has to be conceded that the Green movement is still perceived
in some quarters as something of a middle-class hobby, at least in the UK and
the USA.
So perhaps I
could sum up by saying that Morris has influenced the Green movement in ways
which he could not have anticipated, but would surely have been happy to know
about. I think, though, that it was his perspective as a Socialist activist
that enabled him to develop ideas and theories that could have practical
application; as a young man, his poetry celebrated the beauty of nature, but it
is in his prose writings and lectures that we see a development towards an
active 'Green Socialist' perspective.
Jane Susanna Ennis is a member of Camden Green Party and a Green Left supporter.
You can download the the full piece here:
https://www.academia.edu/652719/William_Morris_the_first_Green_Socialist
You can download the the full piece here:
https://www.academia.edu/652719/William_Morris_the_first_Green_Socialist
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