I. John Bruce Glasier
“MORRIS”, Shaw once wrote, “when he had to define himself politically, called himself a Communist… It was the only word he was comfortable with… He was on the side of Karl Marx contra mundum”1 Since there is a general impression among biographers of Morris and political journalists that Morris “repudiated” Marxism, it is necessary to examine the source of this confusion.
Those writers who have sought to divorce the name of Morris from that of Marx have based their interpretation almost entirely upon two sources. These are, first, one or two good-humoured references in Morris’s own writings to his failings in the comprehension of economic theory; and, second, the reminiscences of two or three acquaintances of Morris who were themselves hostile to Marxism, the only one of whom who is in the least specific in his accounts is John Bruce Glasier.
In the first category, the main source is to be found in Morris’s article (Justice, June 1894), “How I Became a Socialist”:
“I put some conscience into trying to learn the economic side of Socialism, and even tackled Marx, though I must confess that, whereas I thoroughly enjoyed the historical part of Capital, I suffered agonies of confusion of the brain over reading the pure economics of that great work.”
Morris’s first biographer, Dr. J.W. Mackail, was the first to employ this quotation outside of its context. Mackail, according to Shaw, regarded Morris’s Socialism “as a deplorable aberration, and even in my presence was unable to quite conceal his opinion of me as Morris’s most undesirable associate. From his point of view Morris took to Socialism as Poe took to drink.”1 Mackail, indeed, goes so far as to describe Socialism as “a disturbing influence” upon Morris—
“the patient revenge of the modern or scientific spirit, so long fought against, first by his aristocratic, and then by his artistic instincts, when it took hold of him against his will and made him a dogmatic Socialist.”2
When referring to Morris’s reading of Marx, Mackail omitted (without the customary dots to indicate a hiatus) every word italicized in the above quotation.3 The passage, when doctored in this way, appears as a confession that Morris was completely unable to comprehend Marx’s writings, rather than (as Morris intended it) as a mild rebuff to the more dogmatic of Hyndman’s party, and as an encouraging note to those who, like himself, had found parts of Capital hard going. The ordinary reader may be excused for being misled by Mackail: but there is less excuse for successive commentators who have borrowed the quotation from Mackail without verifying it. So much for the first “source”.
In the second category, by far the most important source is Glasier’s book, William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement. This book contains many vivid pictures of the early propaganda, and there can be no doubt that Glasier had a profound admiration for Morris. There is also little doubt that, even if the two men were not on quite such intimate terms as Glasier suggests, Morris looked upon Glasier as one of the best of the Scottish Leaguers, and worked closely with him during the “parliamentary” struggle within the League. Nevertheless, it is necessary to look into Glasier’s claims to be Morris’s Boswell somewhat closely.
James Leatham, of Aberdeen, who knew Glasier in the days of the League, has left a vivid picture of him. “When I first knew him he was a ‘barricades man’ “:
“His ideas were ardently revolutionary, and when in one of his frequent rhapsodies he threw back his high head, with its shock of fair hair, and his blue eyes lighted up with their splendid visions, you felt that he was the constructive communist incarnate.”1
Glasier, in the ‘Eighties, shared many of the characteristics, both weak and strong, of some other Socialist Leaguers. The Glasgow Branch (Morris noted in his diary in 1887) included “some very nice fellows… a good deal made up of clerks, designers and the like and rather under the thumbs of their employers.” Glasier himself was only sporadically employed in these years, as an architectural designer and draughtsman. Enthusiastic in the propaganda, an aspiring poet, interested in questions of art and morality, he carried idealism to the point of romanticism, and made a virtue of his own weakness in serious political theory. His insistence that Morris should fit into the same romantic myth grated sometimes on Morris’s nerves. “As to your chaff about a poet, &c”, he wrote on one occasion to Glasier, when he was sweating over accounts in the Faringdon Road office, trying to get the Glasgow Branch to pay their long-standing debt for Commonweals, “Chaff away! only please remember that the said poet is dunned and has to pass it on… as other people have.”2 If there was a tendency among some members of the S.D.F. to harden into dogmatism, there was a counter-tendency with Glasier and several other Leaguers and members of the early I.L.P. to adopt a pose of unpractical “idealism”, a self-consciously elevated and priggish “moral tone”. The real fervour which had filled Glasier’s youth began to degenerate, as it was bound to do, when he conceived his “idealism”, not as complementary to a serious study of political theory, but as opposed to it.
We now have, in Laurence Thompson’s The Enthusiasts, a sympathetic biography of Glasier and of his wife, Katharine St. John Conway. This does something to redress the sour portrait which I offered of Glasier in the first edition of this Appendix. Undoubtedly the Glasiers were, and remained, “enthusiasts” in the councils of the I.L.P.; and their confused political record retains moments of honour, notably in their opposition to the First World War. But Laurence Thompson’s account does not seek to hide Glasier’s political amateurishness and his increasingly nebulous ethical religiosity.1 In 1893 he published a paper on The Religion of Socialism as “the highest faith and purpose of life”, and set himself forward as a lay preacher of that Ethical Socialism which, in Stanley Pierson’s view, constituted a dilution (and adulteration) of William Morris’s writings. “Having subordinated strategy and doctrine to quality of faith, Glasier felt free to identify himself with almost any expression of Socialism he judged to be sincere.”2 Soon after the I.L.P. was founded, Glasier became active as one of its itinerant propagandists:
“Free and unconventional in dress and manner, a disreputable hat crowning his shaggy locks, a picturesque flowing cloak for wet weather, and a Gaberlunzie’s wallet slung over his shoulder, he bravely trudged from village to town, carrying song and sunshine wherever he went”,
according to one romanticized account.3 The dress, the shaggy locks, the cloak, the wallet—all were imitative of Morris, and (with Morris’s death) Glasier became the prophet of a “moral” Socialism, more “idealistic” than the Socialism of class struggle. In his Chairman’s address to the 1901 I.L.P. Conference he declared that “Socialism sought the ending of the selfish individual and class struggle that was going on for wealth, and the gratification of brutal instincts.” At the Amsterdam Conference of the International, in 1904, he shocked not only most of the foreign delegates but also most of the British delegation by the vigour of his attack on the “reactionary and Whiggish” dogma of the class war. In the same years he was noting in his diary that Marx “had quite diverted Socialist teaching from its true line—i.e. the Tightness of Socialism and the theory of Commonweal” (1903), and so-called scientific Socialism was “totally unscientific and of little real value” (1905). In the view of his biographer, “Glasier’s most distinctive contribution to Socialist propaganda lay in his passionate anti-Marxism”, and the continuing vehemence of his dislike for Hyndman and the S.D.F. coloured all his reminiscences of Morris and of the days of the League.1
A sad but significant episode took place two years after Morris’s death which illustrates the distance which had already opened up between the master and the self-proclaimed disciple. Morris by no means gave up his efforts to promote a united socialist party with the failure of the S.D.F.-Fabian-Hammersmith joint committee of 1893 (pp. 605–10). In January 1894 he wrote in the Labour Prophet:
“The tendency of the English to neglect organization till it is forced upon them by immediate necessity, their ineradicable personal conceit, which holds them aloof from one another, is obvious in the movement. The materials for a great Socialist party are all around us, but no such party exists. We have only the scattered limbs of it…”
Throughout 1894 and 1895 Morris supported Clarion’s campaign for the unification of S.D.F. and I.L.P., proposing the means of affiliation or federation.2 From 1895 opinion in favour of unification built up in the membership of both bodies, expressed (in 1897) in affirmative ballots: such a merger might have had a profound effect upon the character of the subsequent Labour Party. But at its annual conference in 1898 the I.L.P. rejected unity, and a significant influence in bringing the delegates to this decision was a long “paper” read by a member of the Executive, John Bruce Glasier:
“Socialism is a very great and a very marvellously pervading and encompassing power. It is the most human spirit that has grown up in the world, and it is the divinest of all things we have ever had vision of with our eyes. We who call ourselves Socialists cannot ourselves comprehend its might or magnitude. We are as reeds shaken in the wind of its coming. We can only receive knowledge of it so far as the space and peculiarities of our minds will allow, and of the knowledge which we receive we can only give out according to the little measure of our powers. Is it not, therefore, somewhat perilous that we should do anything that might tend to narrow or lessen the inlet of Socialist ideas upon ourselves, or confine and constrain the message of Socialism, which is to be given forth to the whole nation, into one single channel…? Is it not, think you, better for a land that there be many pleasant rivers and brooks—yea, and mountain torrents—of Socialism than that there be one straight, flat, unfertilizing central canal?”1
Such rhetoric swung the delegates against unity, despite an 85% majority of the I.L.P. membership voting in its favour. One may see in this passage, only too clearly, the wind that was blowing up the “Morris tradition” into a sentimental afflatus. Glasier catches one or two of Morris’s tricks of rhetoric well enough, although with the additive of a local preacher’s humbug (“Is it not, think you, better for a land that there be many pleasant rivers and brooks—yea, and mountain torrents…?”). But the extra-mundane Spirit of Socialism of which he served as Prophet was only too close to the spirit which inspired his close friend, James Ramsay MacDonald. To old comrades a change in his whole outlook and character was apparent. James Leatham wrote:
“The old gaiety seemed to have left him when in 1908 we met after a long interval. From being a revolutionary, impatient of pedestrian politics, he had swung round so far that he preferred the title ‘Labour’ to the more explicit word ‘Socialist’.”1
His book of reminiscences was written on his own deathbed, in 1919 and 1920, and it is clear that there were powerful subjective forces at work making for the distortion of his recollections.2 Glasier recalled the spirit of his pioneering days with genuine excitement and nostalgia: but at the same time he ‘read back’ into those days the reformist views he held at the end of his life. The passages which refer to Morris’s attitude to Marxism, to religion, and his relations with Glasier himself, cannot be accepted as trustworthy evidence.
There is no independent evidence that Morris expressed the views of Marxism which Glasier attributes to him, although the impression which Glasier’s book is calculated to leave is that the inadequacy of Marxism was a frequent topic of discussion between the two men. In all Morris’s letters to Glasier (published and unpublished) there is no reference to Marx’s name. Glasier gives only two specific examples of Morris’s supposed statements. The first is the famous “labour theory of value” incident (see pp. 356–7 above). The second is even more doubtful, and lays Glasier open to the charge of deliberate falsification. He was aware that Morris had given (in 1890) an interview to CasselVs Saturday Journal which undermined his whole case. Morris had been asked how he had come to Socialism, and had given the following reply:
“Oh, I had for a long time given a good deal of attention to social problems, and I got hold of a copy of Carl Marx’s work in French; unfortunately I don’t read German. It was Carl Marx, you know, who originated the present Socialist movement; at least, it is pretty certain that that movement would not have gathered the force it has done if there had been no Carl Marx to start it on scientific lines…
“The general purpose of his great work is to show that Socialism is the natural outcome of the past. From the entire history of the past, he shows that it is a mere matter of evolution, and that, whether you like it or whether you don’t, you will have to have it; that just as chattel slavery gave way to mediaeval feudalism and feudalism to free competition, so the age of competition must inevitably give place to organism. It is the natural order of development.”1
Glasier, attempting to explain this interview away, relates that he quizzed Morris about it on his next visit to London:
“I don’t think the CasselVs Magazine chap quite put it as I gave it to him”, Morris replied [according to Glasier]; “but it is quite true that I put some emphasis on Marx—more than I ought to have done, perhaps. The fact is that I have often tried to read the old German Israelite, but have never been able to make head or tail of his algebraics. He is stiffer reading than some of Browning’s poetry. But you see most people think I am a Socialist because I am a crazy sort of artist and poet Chap, and I mentioned Marx because I wanted to be upsides with them and make them believe that I am really a tremendous Political Economist—which, thank God, I am not! I don’t think I ever read a book on Political Economy in my life—barring, if you choose to call it such, Ruskin’s “Unto This Last”—and I’ll take precious good care I never will!”2
Glasier, in presenting this story, did not quote the interview to which (he alleges) Morris’s remarks refer: indeed, he cannot have had the published interview before him, since he stated both its date and the title of the paper incorrectly.3 We have here two pieces of evidence. The first, a published interview during Morris’s lifetime. The second, a “verbatim” account of an unwitnessed conversation, recorded thirty years afterwards by a sick man with an obvious bias. By all normal laws of evidence, the first must be accepted as the most accurate source. But despite this, successive writers have credited Glasier’s account without question. Under examination, the story falls to pieces. CasselVs may have misquoted Morris in detail, but is exceedingly unlikely to have invented a whole paragraph containing a brief exposition of historical materialism. If it had done so (and if, as Glasier suggests, Morris wished to be dissociated from Marxism) Morris could have sent a correction to the paper. But Glasier’s account has other signs of being specious. At the time of the interview, the two men were in correspondence on the issues which provoked the Hammersmith Branch to leave the League: but this topic is not mentioned. Moreover, the whole story is overdone. Morris, as we know from a number of sources, certainly had read Capital in 1883: he had re-read much of it in 1887, together with the Communist Manifesto and Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific when preparing his articles, “Socialism From the Root Up” (see p. 423). By 1890, he had read many other works of political economy. Why should he lie to Glasier in this way? Why should he call Marx a “German Israelite”? Why—but the questions are unnecessary. It is easier to answer why Glasier would have liked Morris to have said these things.
Further, there is a kind of bluff whimsy in Glasier’s renderings of Morris’s words which has also become part of the “Morris myth”. Morris certainly was blunt in his speech and manners: but he was also a profoundly serious and responsible man, capable of very great patience and self-restraint. This latter Morris rarely appears in Glasier’s book: only too often his vivid pictures of Morris’s comradeship in the movement are hazed over by the picture of the great romantic poet acting the clown. His picture of Morris is so close to the truth, and heightens so many lovable characteristics, that one reads it with pleasure; only afterwards does one realize one has been presented, not with Morris himself, but with a sort of jolly comic “Head or tail”, “crazy sort of artist”, “poet chap”, “upsides”—all these phrases are in character, but not all in the same breath and strung together with a looseness of thought which suggests a man with a mouthful of cotton-wool. This picture, in its turn, has served a hundred later commentators, and made it easy for them to adopt Morris with condescension and to call him a great “visionary”, while paying no attention whatsoever to his real actions and his political writings.
If the second of Glasier’s stories is a fraud built round a doubtful mustard seed, what of the first, concerning the labour theory of value (see p. 356)? Despite the fact that the whole thing is over-written in the same way—“everyone will live and work jollify together”—the story, in view of the circumstances of the meeting, has a more authentic flavour. Morris might very well have said that it was not necessary to know either Marx’s work or to understand the theory of value to be a Socialist. Since Hyndman was at the time attempting to blacken Scheu by suggesting that he deviated from Marxism and was an “anarchist”, Morris may well have burst out in fury against this dogmatism. But that he used the form of words attributed to him—and related, out of its context, on every possible occasion, ever since Glasier’s book was published—is very dubious. “I do not know what Marx’s theory of value is”, and I’m damned if I want to know”—if Morris did actually say this, then, on the evidence of his own writings at the time, he was lying on both counts. He might have lied, of course, in order to make his point against dogmatism more effectively, or merely in the heat of the discussion. But at least it is worth placing on record that a similar story was going the rounds in the early movement, and was attributed not to Morris but to another member of the Glasgow S.D.F., Robert Hutchinson, a shoemaker, who—according to Leatham—used to declare: “Do I need to read Marx or anyone else in order to learn that I am robbed and how the robbery is done?”1 Hutchinson may have got the phrase from Morris. Leatham may have been mistaken in his memory. Glasier may have got the idea from Hutchinson. In itself the incident is of little importance, and the facts can never be established. So much for the second source upon which both the learned commentators and the hasty journalists have leant.
II. William Morris and Marxism
It is typical of critics of Marxism that they should rest their case upon subjective secondary sources, and should pass over the obvious primary source—Morris’s own political writings. The evidence here that Morris associated himself with the Marxist tradition is of three kinds—negative, specific, and corroborative.
Negative. With the exception of the case discussed below—the Carruthers “heresy”—Morris neither states nor implies at any time that he was opposed on any major theoretical principle to either Marx or Scientific Socialism.
Specific. The evidence that Morris had a profound admiration for the work of Marx and Engels, and explicitly identified himself with Scientific Socialism, or Communism, is to be found in every phase of his Socialist activities. It includes:
(a) Notes made by Morris upon Capital.1
(b) References in the Summary of the Principles of Socialism, written in 1884, with Hyndman.
(c) Interviews in the Press both after the “Split” and shortly before leaving the League, at both of which critical periods Morris was at pains to identify his views with Marx and with Scientific Socialism (see p. 333 and the CasselPs interview).
(d) Many passing references, all complimentary, in lectures and articles to Capital (“that great book”), Marx (“great man”), “the great Socialist economist, F. Engels”, and to German, or Scientific Socialism. Morris was sparing of such epithets (unless in such a context as “great scoundrel”), and the adjective was not thrown in for rhetoric’s sake.
(e) The central position given to both Marx and Engels in the Commonweal articles, “Socialism from the Root Up”, which Morris wrote with Belfort Bax in 1886 and 1887. The historical exposition of the class struggle in these articles closely follows Marx. The Utopian Socialists are discussed, with frequent quotations from the French edition of Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.1 In 1887, no less than seven articles were devoted to the economic theory of Volume One of Capital, which is described as “the full development of the complete Socialist theory”.2
This evidence must appear conclusive, but Bruce Glasier (once again) attempted to discount it. The articles he described as “most unsatisfactory”, and (he implied) Bax, not Morris, was their real author:
“No one who knew him personally, or was familiar with the general body of his writings, could fail to perceive that these Marxist ideas did not really belong to his own sphere of Socialist thought, but were adopted by him because of their almost universal acceptance by his fellow Socialists, and because he did not feel disposed to bother about doctrines which, whether true or false, hardly interested him.”3
A wave of the wand—and Morris’s lectures, articles, and Commonweal notes, all are spirited away! It must seem astonishing that successive commentators should have preferred this passage of Glasier to the weight of evidence in Morris’s writings themselves. But, since this is so, it is necessary to examine Glasier’s suggestion.
There are several entries in Morris’s Socialist Diary which relate to the composition of the articles. These do not support the suggestion that Bax wrote the articles and Morris only “said ditto” to them. In the first entry: “Tuesday to Bax at Croydon where we did our first article on Marx: or rather he did it: I don’t think I should ever make an economist even of the most elementary kind: but I am glad of the opportunity this gives me of hammering some Marx into myself”.1 Bax was clearly taking priority in drafting the articles on Marx’s economic theory, as one would expect: but this is not the same as Morris saying “ditto”. The next entry reads: “Yesterday all day long with Bax trying to get our second article on Marx together; a very difficult job: I hope it may be worth the trouble.”2 The article which caused Morris such difficulty concerned the theory of Money. In the result, Morris and Bax succeeded in presenting Marx’s essential theory clearly, and with telling historical illustrations, some drawn from Capital, some from their own knowledge. Moreover, anyone familiar with the style of both men can detect at a glance that—in this article as in the others—it is Morris’s direct manner and tricks of thought which predominate rather than Bax’s intelligent but pompous prose.3 The humourless Bax was hardly likely to have borrowed a phrase from Mr. Boffin to illustrate the Labour Theory of Value: while in the very choice of quotations from Capital (“says Marx with a grin”) one can trace Morris’s warm response to the play of passion and humour with which parts of Capital are written.
The evidence, indeed, is so overwhelming that Glasier’s suggestion recoils upon his own head, revealing nothing about Morris’s interest in “doctrines”, but throwing further doubt upon Glasier’s own integrity. Confirmation that Morris did find the articles “worth the trouble” is to be found in the fact that he and Bax later revised them thoroughly for publication in Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (1893) (see p. 615), referring to Capital, at the end of the long chapter on Marx as an “epoch-making work.”1 Finally—as if in anticipation of Glasier’s suggestion—they made a point of stating in the Preface that the book “has been in the true sense of the word a collaboration, each sentence having been carefully considered by both the authors in common, although now one, now the other, has had more to do with initial suggestions in different portions of the work.”2
Corroborative. Evidence that the body of Morris’s political writings draws upon and is consonant with the Marxist tradition has been frequently presented in this book. It has now been re-examined with immense thoroughness by M. Paul Meier in La Pensee Utopique de William Morris (Paris, 1972). M. Meier’s examination is conclusive—even if (as I argue in my Postscript) at times excessively literal and theoretically restrictive.
Once these primary facts have been established, certain secondary factors which, to some degree, complicated Morris’s attitude to political theory, must be borne in mind. Morris came to Socialism in his fiftieth year, with almost no previous acquaintance with serious economic theory, and he always found difficulty in mastering what he often termed the “economic side”, as opposed to the historical side, of Marxism. It is necessary to glance for a moment at those among his colleagues who might have helped to guide him through these problems, in order to understand his difficulty. Scheu, Hyndman, and Bax, each of whom was closely associated with Morris in 1883 and 1884, were all partial advocates who influenced his understanding. Scheu undoubtedly encouraged Morris’s “Leftist” leanings, and helped to implant the “anti-parliamentary” bias in his mind. Hyndman was a determined exponent of the “Iron Law of Wages” theory which encouraged opposition to all “palliatives”. Moreover, after the “Split” Hyndman’s claim to be the only true disciple of Marx, and his doctrinaire use of Marx’s name, prompted Morris to be especially careful to avoid this kind of dogmatism. As for Bax, there were occasions when the Marxist dialectic was reduced, in his hands, to a Hegelian mystique. He was the author of the first pamphlet to be published by the Socialist League which was addressed directly to trades unionists, and he wrote in its final paragraph:
“Current antagonisms are thus reduced by their own exhaustion to the shadows of their former selves, only to receive a new significance, in which their opposition vanishes. They are destroyed in their preservation, and preserved in their destruction. They are superseded…”1
No wonder that Engels exclaimed later in a moment of irritation that Bax was “a hunter of philosophical paradoxes!”2
Two other colleagues who might, in the 1880s, have helped in guiding Morris through his difficulties with economic theory were Edward Aveling and John Carruthers. But neither was capable of giving this guidance. Aveling commenced in 1885 a series of “Lessons in Socialism” in the Commonweal which he claimed were “the first attempt to put the ideas of Marx… simply and clearly before the English people, in their own language.”3 The first Lesson was good, but, by the fourth Lesson, Aveling himself noted that “some bewailing has reached my ears on the subject of the formulae used.”4 There is little wonder. As the Lessons proceeded, Aveling tended to discard all concrete illustrations and historical exposition, and to abstract from Capital only the “pure economics”, expressed in algebraic formulae, and, only too often, in a mechanical and schematic form. “Aveling on Marx is a matter for general astonishment”, Mahon wrote from Leeds. “Workingmen are utterly perplexed as to the meaning of it all. Only one member… reads them.”1 But despite Morris’s rooted objection to Socialist propaganda which was “all figures”,2 he appears to have been a staunch supporter of Aveling in this series. When advising a correspondent on Socialist theory, in February 1885, he strongly recommended Aveling’s lectures “which are very good: they are on Marx really… They would make reading Marx comparatively easy to you.”3 When the lectures came under criticism at the Annual Conference in the summer, Morris came to Aveling’s defence.4
After 1885 Morris was also influenced to some degree by John Carruthers, a member of the Hammersmith Branch, who took little active part in the propaganda of the League. Two years younger than Morris, Carruthers was a constructional engineer who had built railways, bridges, canals, and port installations in Canada, the United States, Northern Europe, Mauritius, Egypt, India, and South America, and had served as consultant engineer to the New Zealand and Western Australian Governments.5 In 1883—before reading Marx—he had published a remarkable book, Communal and Commercial Economy, which deserves to be remembered in the tradition of English Socialist thought. Largely concerned with an acute, passionate, but at times disorganized, critique of the economic theory of Ricardo and Mill, Carruthers concluded with a warm advocacy of Communism, which he envisaged (as did Morris in News from Nowhere) as a loose association of small communes. He revealed clearly that “the whole class of labourers… have common interests antagonistic to those of the capitalists”,1 but through a failure in historical understanding he tended to present the exploitation of the working class in a mechanical and rigid manner—not as an active relationship of struggle with the capitalist class. To the capitalist (he wrote)—
“it is a matter of indifference what natural agents are instrumental in the production of his wealth, and the labour of men does not, in his estimation, differ generically from that of birds or horses, and is more important only because the men are the phenomena over which he has most control.”2
“The workman, in commercial economy, is simply an implement that costs nothing”.3 Something in the emotional tone, rather than in the economic reasoning of this argument appealed to Morris, for he noted in his Socialist Diary:
“Tuesday I spent with Bax doing the next Marx article, which went easier: as a contrast I had a long spell with Carruthers… and he read me the 2nd (and important) chapter of his Political Economy, which iz by the standard of Marx quite heretical. It seemed to me clear & reasonable; and at any rate has this advantage, that it sets forth the antagonism of classes in the nakedest manner: the workman is nothing but part of the capitalist machinery; and if he is rebellious is to be treated like a rebellious spade would be, or say a troublesome piece of land.”4
It is clear that the “heresy” which was attracting Morris was parallel to his political “Leftism” at this time, and was more a confusion of terms than a serious disagreement with the Marxist position.
What is, however, somewhat less clear is what this Marxist position was, in any public sense, in the 1880s. Marxist, as well as anti-Marxist and agnostic, historians have made anachronistic judgements which contemporary scholarship is only now beginning to detect. As the late Henry Collins has pointed out, Marx’s repudiation of the “Iron Law of Wages” was scarcely a public matter, was not published in any extended form until 1898, and, while it was no doubt a point of discussion in Engels’s circle, Bax (Engels’s closest English disciple) was still re-stating the “Iron Law” in 1901.1 From such Marxist texts as were available, as Wage-Labour and Capital (1885), readers could well derive support for downgrading trade-union struggles in favour of legislative struggles to limit the working-day.2 And the confusion becomes even greater when we consider the complex positions through which one other colleague who was close to Morris in 1884-7 was moving—George Bernard Shaw.
Shaw, when Morris first came to know him, was one of the few English intellectuals who had studied Capital with care. He was thought to be an expounder and interpreter of Marx, and perhaps thought himself to be so, although early in 1884 he inserted in Justice a criticism of the theory of surplus value, expressed characteristically in the form of jest (signed, “G.B.S. Larking”).3 Through 1885 and into 1886 Shaw was a member of the Hampstead Marx Circle, which met fortnightly to study Capital, and which wrestled with critiques of Marx from the Jevonian position of marginal utility.4 In the same period Shaw was working very closely with the Socialist League and lecturing frequently for its branches. Throughout 1886 League members, including Morris, took part in a series of joint conferences with Fabians and others on Socialist strategy: these broke down, not on any issue of “Marxism” but on the vexed question of political action.1 As late as February 1887, when the League challenged Bradlaugh to public debate, Shaw was invited (and agreed, subject to conditions) to act as the League’s champion.2 In May 1886 Morris clearly supposed Shaw still to be, in general, on the side of the Marxist theory of surplus value against the Jevonian theory of marginal utility, and he wrote to him soliciting an “economical” article for Commonweal, “tackling Jevons”.3 But it is fairly clear that by that time it was Jevons who had tackled Shaw, although Shaw’s full critique of Marx’s economic theory did not appear until he reviewed Capital in the National Reformer in October 1887.4 Even so, we should be cautious of a doctrinaire hindsight in which the theory of surplus value is seen as some litmus-paper testing adhesion to “Marxism”. Shaw remained a deeply-divided man: in one part of himself he was (and was to remain) strongly influenced by Morris.5 Perhaps this split found expression in a divided attitude to Marx. On the one hand, “Marx was wrong about value”, as Newton was wrong about light and Goethe was wrong about colours; on the other hand, Marx’s economic fallacies did no essential damage to the “super-structure” of his theories, to his historical and contemporary analysis of the class struggle. “Read Jevons and the rest for your economics”, he advised, and “read Marx for the history of their working in the past, and the conditions of their application in the present. And never mind the metaphysics.”1
The bearing upon Morris of Shaw’s idiosyncratic intellectual pilgrimage from something akin to Marxism (“I have done more up and down fighting for Marx than any other Socialist in the country”2) to something akin to Fabianism remains unclear. Eventually, the rejection of the Marxist theory of value and its replacement by the Fabian theory of rents (rent of land, of capital, and of ability) smoothed the way for the rejection of a theory of class struggle and for the adoption of the strategies of gradualism in the Fabian Essays of 1889. But this need not have seemed inevitable at any time before 1888 and, with Hyndman presenting himself as an orthodox Marxist, one is chiefly struck by the confusion and intricacy of the issues.
One is also struck by the steadfastness of Morris to the Marxist side of these arguments, even when he felt himself to be a novice in economics and even when he was at odds both with Hyndman and with the “Marxists” of the Bloomsbury Branch. He always emphasised that the study of Capital was difficult:
“The more learned socialist literature, like Marx’s celebrated book, requires such hard, and close study that those who have not approached the subject by a more easy road are not likely to begin on that side, or if they did, would find that something like a guide was necessary to them before they could follow the arguments steadily.”3
But for those who could undertake it, the best entry into Socialist theory was through Capital. In February 1885 he replied to a correspondent enquiring as to Socialist reading: “If you read German or French, you should tackle Karl Marx Das Capital at once.” In the second place he recommended Gronlund’s Co-operative Commonwealth (“of some use”), then Carruthers’s Commercial and Communal Economy (“well argued and worth reading”), then three pamphlets with “useful information” by Lassalle, Joynes and Sorge, then Hyndman’s Historical Basis of Socialism which “states in some of its chapters the Marxian theory”, although Gronlund “carries it further” and Hyndman’s book “is ill put together, & not always accurate”:
“On the whole tough as the job is you ought to read Marx if you can: up to date he is the only completely scientific Economist on our side.”1
A final confirmation of this steadfast respect—and a confirmation rather more conclusive than Glasier’s thirty-year-old memories—may be found in an episode involving Annie Besant. The courageous champion of Secularism and contraception had been converted, rather suddenly, to Socialism late in 1885. She argued her new convictions in a series of articles in Our Corner, February to May 1886. The second article commenced (March 1886): “In Karl Marx’s somewhat prolix and often pedantic work, ‘Das Capital’, may be found a carefully elaborated exposition of ‘surplus value’ …” The reader was directed to a footnote:
“The well-read student of economics will find little that is new in Marx, but he will find some lucid expositions of well-known truths. Marx is, on many points, a very useful intellectual middleman, and a condensation of his book—edited by a capable scientific Socialist, who would expunge the prolixities and the pseudo-scientific formulas-would be of real service to those whose time for study is limited.”2
The ink was scarcely dry upon the articles when Annie Besant prepared to put them together in a pamphlet, Modern Socialism, and in course of doing so she sent them to Morris for an opinion. Morris’s reply does not seem to have been preserved, but we may deduce its tenor from Besant’s acknowledgement: “I have cancelled the footnote about Marx, and the ‘prolix and pedantic’, for the reprint of the articles on Socialism. I am glad you think they will be useful.”1 What makes this small episode the more piquant is that there is strong reason to suppose that (unknown to Morris) the “intellectual middleman” who was the real author of that banal philistinism in the footnote was none other than George Bernard Shaw, who was at this time conducting a secret amour with Annie Besant, who had sent to him all articles for advice in advance of their first publication.2
In conclusion, it can be said that it is a cause for surprise, not that Morris found difficulty in advanced economic theory, nor that he fell into certain errors in political tactics, but that—despite all the confusion of issues in his period, and the discord of voices surrounding him (not least in importance being the voice of Shaw)—he should have stood from 1883 until the end of his life “on the side of Karl Marx contra mundum”.
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1 May Morris, II, p. ix.
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1 Observer, November 6th, 1949.
2 Mackail, I, p. 80.
3 Ibid., II, p. 80.
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1 James Leatham, Glasgow in the Limelight, p. 35.
2 Morris to Glasier, August 16th, 1886, Glasier MSS. See also Laurence Thompson, The Enthusiasts, (1971), p. 48.
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1 For an excellent assessment of Glasier’s politics, see Fred Reid’s review of The Enthusiasts in Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History. no. 24, Spring 1972, pp. 69–73.
2 Stanley Pierson, Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism (Ithaca, 1973), p. 144 and chapter six passim.
3 J. Bruce Glasier: a Memorial (1920), p. 9.
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1 Laurence Thompson, op. cit., pp. 90–1, 190, 41.
2 See Laurence Thompson, Robert Blatchford: Portrait of an Englishman (1951), p. 97; Report of the Fourth Annual Conference of the I.L.P. (1896), p. 16; first edition, pp. 700–1.
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1 Report of the Sixth Annual Conference of the I.L.P. (1898), pp. 25–8; S. Pierson, op. cit., pp. 258–9.
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1 The Gatewayt Mid-January, 1941.
2 For the circumstances in which the book was written, see Laurence Thompson, The Enthusiasts, pp. 244–5.
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1 Cass ell’s Saturday Journal, October 18th, 1890.
2 Glasier, p. 142.
3 Ibid. Glasier gives CasselVs Saturday Magazine “a year or two” after December, 1884.
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1 James Leatham, Glasgow in the Limelight, p. 35. Hutchinson was brother-in-law to the inquisitorial W.J. Nairne who supposedly occasioned Morris’s explosion: see above p. 356 and L. Thompson, The Enthusiasts, p. 40.
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1 Among Walthamstow MSS. Mr. R. Page Arnot refers in William Morris, A Vindication, p. 7, to a MS. among the papers of J.L. Mahon “in the handwriting of Morris, being a short precis of one of the ‘economic portions’ of Capital”.
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1 Commonweal, October 30th, 1886, February 5th, 1887. Morris and Bax translated from the French edition of Engels’s book, not yet published in English.
2 Ibid., February 26th, March 12th, March 26th, April 30th, June 18th, July 23rd and August 6th, 1887.
3 Glasier, p. 143. I have restored a clause here (as to “almost universal acceptance”) which was cut in the first edition, since a Professor Le Bourgeois (sic) has been buzzing around this Appendix like an angry wasp, and accusing me of “suppression”. The restored clause of course makes Glasier look even sillier: see J.Y. Le Bourgeois, “William Morris and the Marxist Myth”, Durham University Journal, December 1976: and my forthcoming reply, “A Wasp in September.”
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1 Brit Mus. Add. MSS. 45335, entry for February 15th, 1887. I have included this entry once again to satisfy the buzzing of Le Bourgeois.
2 Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45335, entry for February 23rd.
3 See, for example, a characteristic passage from the article on Money: “In the first stage, illustrated by the proceedings of the Craftsmen of the time of Homer, which were pretty much those of the Mediaeval Craftsman also, the village potter sold his pots and with the money he got from them, which, possible trickery apart, represented just the value or embodied labour of the pots, he bought meal, oil, wine, flesh, etc., for his own livelihood and consumed them.”
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1 Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (1893), p. 267.
2 Ibid., p. vi.
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1 Address to Trades Unions, The Socialist Platform, No. 1 (1885).
2 Engels to Sorge, April 29th, 1886, Labour Monthly, November, 1933.
3 Commonweal, April, 1885.
4 Ibid., July, 1885.
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1 J.L. Mahon to Soc. League Council, January 23rd, 1886, S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc. Hist. On the other hand, Lyons, a London clothing worker, declared at the First Annual Conference that “the workers, he knew by personal experience, to a large extent bought the paper just on account of the scientific articles on Socialism”: Commonweal, August, 1885.
2 Walthamstow MSS. Recollections of H.A. Barker referring not to Aveling, but to the articles of John Sketchley, which, for the general reader, were overloaded with statistics. Since Sketchley was a regular contributor to Commonweal until 1890, Morris did not allow his own prejudice against “figures” to influence his editorial policy.
4 Commonweal, August Supplement, 1885.
5 See Economic Studies (Selections from the writings of John Carruthers) (1915), for biographical foreword.
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1 Carruthers, Communal and Commercial Economy (1883), p. 5.
2 IbicL, p. 10.
3 Ibid., p. 39.
4 Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45335.
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1 Henry Collins, “The Marxism of the Social Democratic Federation”, in Essays in Labour History, 1886-1923, eds. Asa Briggs and John Saville (1971), pp. 52–3. Bax and Quelch re-affirmed the “Iron Law” which “stands as firmly today as when stated by Lassalle” in A New Catechism of Socialism (1901).
2 Henry Collins, op. cit., pp. 59–61.
3 Justice, March 15th, 1884; and G.B. Shaw to M.E. McNulty, April 15th, 1884, Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1874-97, ed. Dan H. Laurence (New York, 1965), pp. 81–7.
4 For the early evolution of Shaw and the Fabians, see especially A.M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884-1918 (Cambridge, 1962); S.Tierson, op. cit., pp. 119–29; Willard Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism: Men and Ideas in the Formation of Fabian and Socialist Doctrines (New Haven, 1975); D.M. Ricci, “Fabian Socialism: A Theory of Rent as Exploitation”, Journal of British Studies, IX (1969), pp. 105–21.
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1 Brief reports of Fabian Society activities in 1886 appeared in Our Corner and the Practical Socialist: see also S. Pierson, op. cit, p. 126.
2 Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, pp. 164–6.
3 James W. Hülse, Revolutionists in London (Oxford, 1970), p. 123.
4 Shaw’s first explicit critique of the theory of value was in correspondence in the Pall Mall Gazette, May 7th and 12th 1887: there followed articles reviewing Capital in the National Reformer, October 7th, 14th, 21st, 1887.
5 I find James Hulse’s treatment of the Shaw-Morris relationship in Revolutionists in London, pp. 122–30 very much more satisfactory than his treatment of Morris’s thought, for which see Postscript below. See also E.E. Stokes, “Morris and Bernard Shaw”, Journal of William Morris Society, I, Winter 1961.
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1 Shaw to Aveling (draft), May 17th, 1887, Collected Letters, pp. 168–9; National Reformer, October 21st, 1887.
2 Collected Letters, p. 121.
3 William Morris, Preface to Frank Fairman, Tlie Principles of Socialism Made Plain (1887): the Preface is dated December 5th, 1887.
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1 Morris to an Unknown Correspondent, February 28th [1885]. I am indebted to Mr. Stuart B. Schimmel of New York, the owner of this letter, for permission to quote extracts: the full letter will appear in Professor Norman Kelvin’s Collected Letters, In this same letter Morris recommends his correspondent to attend Aveling’s lectures.
2 Our Corner, Vol. 7, March 1886, p. 133.
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1 Annie Besant to William Morris, March 9th, 1886, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45346. The articles were published with almost no revision as Modern Socialism (1886: reprinted 1890), with the footnote and “prolix and pedantic” deleted. The resultant treatment of Marx is level and respectful.
2 Arthur H. Nethercot, The First Five Lives of Annie Besant (Chicago, 1960), p. 226 and passim. The suggestion that, while the footnote may have come from Besant’s pen, the true author was Shaw rests not only upon the circumstances of Shaw and Besant’s relations at the time, Shaw’s consultation in the writing, and the fact that Besant was not a particularly “well-read student of economics”. We must add to this: 1) The proposal that a “capable scientific Socialist” should edit and condense Capital recalls a similar “condensation” which Shaw had recently performed on Gronlund’s Co-operative Commonwealth (see Shaw: Collected Letters, pp. 101, 112); 2) There is reason to suppose that Shaw, rather than Annie Besant, was the real author of a letter over her name criticising Marx’s theory of value in the Pall Mall Gazette, May 24th, 1887 (after a letter from Shaw had been refused); 3) Besant’s articles and pamphlet continued to distinguish between Marx’s economic exposition and his irrelevant “metaphysics”, a distinction which Shaw was also making at this time; compare Besant, Modern Socialism (1886), p. 17 and Shaw, cited in Pierson, op. cit., p. 121.