Travelling Hopefully Towards a New Society?ⁱ

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Preface 2014

On thursday 16th October an exhibition about William Morris, Anarchy and Beauty, will open at the National Portrait Gallery in London.  This reminded me of the following piece which I wrote, based on a paper given at the Morris centenary conference in 1996, which never got published. It needed this brief prface because it is dated – 1996 was just the beginning of the Net as we know it in 2014, we had not yet had the Blur era and roads protests were going to change the World…

As a piece about past visions of the future, which is a past vision of the future, it makes me smile, and at the same time, as I argued, some principles are timeless…

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Introduction

Most studies of William Morris life and work tend, as in the title of Edward Bellamy’s book, to be Looking Backward. I want to consider what Morris’ ideas mean now and for the future. We live in a time which has seen the fall of the Soviet parody of “Communism”; the very state dictatorship which Morris objected to in Bellamy. But at the same time, Fordist capitalism is also crumbling, like one half of an arch left teetering by the loss of its opposite. Thus we live, as the Chinese say, in interesting times, but this paper is avowedly not millennial in its outlook. The forthcoming millennium is as vacuous as other false millennia imagined by utopian thinkers from More to Marx – a terminal moment which will certainly pass without solving all the World’s ills. My aim is more to look inside human practices to see the potential of Morris’ new society in all times, disregarding the outdated notion of progress in the sense which dominated western thought from the Enlightenment until the First World War, and which still haunts discussions of technological and scientific development.

To begin with I have to state that I am an anarchist, and that I regard the society described in News from Nowhere as an anarchist one. I appreciate that this is a controversial view and that Morris has been claimed by all parties on the “Left” including most recently the Socialist Workers! I am aware that Morris did not call himself an anarchist, but equally, as he wryly observed, every individual in left politics represents their very own wing of the “Party” and we all have different names for what we are. Thus, to be clear, I mean by anarchism i)the rejection of the state as an authoritarian institution; ii)a belief in devolved forms of social organisation; iii)a belief that responsibility for one’s own actions is more important than claiming power over others. I do not mean i)wearing black clothes and throwing bombs or ii)that everyone shall do as they like. Within these criteria I would say that Morris’ “Nowhere” is as near to an anarchist future as one can imagine.

In this paper I want to consider how near we are to Morris’ ideal society. In particular, I will discuss his ideas on social organisation and suggest that there are intimations of this kind of informal system in the contemporary world. However, this is not to say that I think that anarchy or “Nowhere” are easy states to arrive at – no doubt this is why More chose the word Utopia, derived from the Greek for nowhere. In my view Utopias are goals to be aimed at without hope of achievement; ideal states that we may constantly strive for but which must remain ideals. In the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, “it is better to travel hopefully than it is to arrive”. This is a paper about travelling hopefully.

News from Nowhere

Having just re-read News From Nowhere ⁱⁱ I’m struck by the fact that many of the conditions of life that Morris hoped for are a reality. Indeed it is a characteristic of many utopian and dystopian writings of the last 100 years that as often as not the material conditions described have come about without the accompanying social revolution. At least in the countries of the North. Morris stress on health and longevity, which he shares with Bellamy, conforms well with quality and expectancy of life in Britain. Similarly, I would suggest, the liberation of women has actually gone further than that described by Morris, although it probably has further to go yet. Again, Morris ideas about the end of the nation state are at least a possibility in Europe, despite disputes about beef. Other things haven’t changed; there are still violent demonstrations in Trafalgar Square, and the Daily Telegraph, which Morris mentions, is still as right wing as ever. I suggest that the fact of our material affluence in some sense contradicts the belief that society itself can be improved simply through prosperity. Indeed the current state of Russia suggests that people will reject the safety of state material provision if this has undesirable social consequences.

In any case, material facts are less important than Morris’ ideas of social organisation, and it would be rash to suggest that these are clearly implemented anywhere at the end of the 20th century. Or indeed that they have ever been tried except in the most fleeting instances (e.g. Republican Spain or the Makhnovist Ukraine). Rather, I want to explore the possibility that in aspects of our own society, the social practices described by Morris have been and are emerging.

The new society is carefully described in News from Nowhere. In the “Guest’s” formal discussions with Old Hammond and other characters William Morris explicitly debates the organisation of life and labour. But I feel that it is in the more incidental description that we see this society in action. The problem is to make this incidental account more explicit.

In my view the Guest report is of informal social networks; forms of non-hierarchical organisation of activity through collaborative goals. They are what the anthropologist Jean Laveⁱⁱⁱ has called “communities of practice”. Such communities of practice are not new. Lave has described them among tailors in the West African state of Liberia. They are observable in many areas of Western and non-Western societies to this day. What characterises such communities is not politics so much as a degree of self-sufficiency and mutuality. As with the medieval guilds that Morris admired, any group of people that shares knowledge and resources, and which provides a context for individuals to acquire a practice or skilled activity, constitutes a form of social organisation which I also recognise in Morris. In effect the era of News from Nowhere represents the ultimate expression of the community of practice; an extension of the principle to society at large.

In order to understand if such a situation is at all possible, I want to ask where and why elements of such social organisation exist in the contemporary world and I will begin, you may think strangely, with the history of warfare. In his book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines^iv, Manuel de Landa deduces the implications of warfare for wider society and its future. As anyone who has seen the “trooping of the colour” or a film of the battle of Waterloo knows, 19th century armies were tightly regimented. Soldiers were drilled to move and fight as a machine; as clockwork blocks of bodies all reproducing the same actions. By the end of the 19th century it was clear that such an organisation was no longer viable. Particularly in the First World War, this kind of centralised system led to massive slaughter, and in the inter-war period, advances in technology made the old ways even more impracticable. Warfare is always chaotic, and here de Landa specifically refers us to chaos theory. 19th century “clockwork” armies relied on rigid command structure and rigid discipline to cope with this chaos, but, de Landa argues, hierarchy in the end augments chaos rather than unravelling it;

“[c]entralised command systems attempt to deal with this problem by monopolising the decision making process in order to maximise certainty at the top….But in fact a centralised control scheme has the opposite effect…By lowering the thresholds of decision-making through the authorisation of more local initiatives, different parts of the machine can deal with a small amount of uncertainty instead of letting the upper echelons deal with the problem as a whole” ^v

The latter part of the 20th century saw the advent of Blitzkrieg. “Distributed networks” of small units of troops or armour given autonomous goals in order that they could adapt to the specifics of the situation. The general staff gave away some control in exchange for flexibility. In more recent times, and perhaps in the future, this autonomy may well extend to machines. Perhaps it already does, but I don’t really have time to go into this frightening prospect. However, one point that should be made here, and to which I shall return, is that the military model of flexible autonomy was exactly what led to the creation of the ARPANET, the original core of what we now call the internet or, more pretentiously, cyberspace. Studies conducted for the RAND corporation concluded that;

“the strongest communication system would be a distributed network of computers having several properties; it would have sufficient redundancy so that the loss of subsets of links or nodes would not isolate any of the still functioning nodes; there would be no central control….” ^vi

How does this relate to Morris? Here is part of the description of revolution in News from Nowhere (309) –

“they depended not on a carefully arranged centre with all kinds of checks and counter checks about it, but on a huge mass of people in thorough sympathy with the movement, bound together by a great number of links of small centres with very simple instructions”

and in effect this seems to be the basis of the new society of News from Nowhere.

Morris and New Times

My second theme comes from what Marxism Today called the New Times,^vii and in particular the recent growth of interest in the “civil society”. By “New Times”, the contributors to Marxism Today mean a change that goes beyond left and right, and at the same time beyond the old certainties of capitalism and the traditional left. At one level, for example, the discourses of feminism or anti-racism are not distinctly of the old left-right dichotomy. The same is true of green or environmentalist discourse^viii. This changing of the subject is situated within broader changes within the “West”; the transition to so-called “Post Fordist” or “Post Industrial” economics. From the point of view of libertarian thought, and Morris ideas in particular, the “New Times” have a particular resonance. This is expressed clearly by David Marquand^ix

“What is needed is a….marriage between the communitarian, decentralist, participatory radicalism to which the Democrats, and perhaps the greens, are heirs, and the communitarian, decentralist participatory strands in the socialist inheritance: a marriage, if you like, between Thomas Paine and William Morris”

This relates directly to my previous point. The irony of Thatcherite and Reaganite “freedom” was its attempt to concentrate power at the centre. This has certainly been true of British government over the desperate 18 years since 1979^x. In order to “liberalise” the economy, the Tories had to institute more and more measures putting power in the hands of central government or of unelected “Quangos”. At the same time the culture of financial stringency in public services discouraged commitment and initiative beyond what is required by contract. Yet this actually militates against the supposedly more flexible society that the New Right claims to want. For clearly what is needed is to devolve responsibility to those who are active in society, in the public or private sectors. To give initiative to people to create and innovate. Indeed, it is perhaps ironic that Morris’ future vision is effectively of a “nation” of entrepreneurs, but one which, I suspect, would not appeal to Margaret Thatcher or John Major.

The “New Times” are also bound to the concept of a “civil society”; a society that allows for positions and actions that exist in the interstice between the rights of citizens as consumers of law and the authority of the state; a voluntary, participative sector of society which underpins the creative role of citizens at large. The society of News from Nowhere takes the concept of the civil to its ultimate conclusion by replacing all centralised authority with devolved responsibilities. But clearly, these kinds of “institutions” already exist. Indeed our society relies to a great extent on a voluntary sector which exists in between what is required and what is a “right”. The more the New Right has sought to wrest power from the civil society through centralisation, the more it has needed civil activity to compensate for the social ills it has created. The authoritarian left has produced the same results – as we can now see, the former Soviet Union is in desperate need of civil action and institutions. For clearly centralism of the left or right reduces the citizen to a mere robot, in its original Czech sense of a “worker”! Indeed, it is clear that this is what Morris objected to in Bellamy’s account of the year 2000

“the impression he produces is that of a standing army, tightly drilled, compelled by some mysterious fate to unceasing anxiety for the production of wares to satisfy every caprice” ^xi

Indeed Bellamy’s “socialist” state is in effect the extension of the logic of the 19th century clockwork army to the whole of society. To some extent this is Stalinism, but it has closer links to national “socialism”. Bellamy’s “National Party” was “the most patriotic of all parties, it sought to justify patriots and raise it [sic] from an instinct to a rational devotion”^xii

Currently I would suggest that the environmental movement, particularly through anti-roads campaigns, epitomises both Morris’ vision and the importance of the civil society. It is no coincidence that in its 1996 exhibition, the V&A chose an image of Twyford Down to represent the environmentalist aspect of Morris’ legacy. As a counterbalance to the juggernaut of the state, environmental campaigns embody what Thoreau^xiii called the “duty of civil disobedience”. Environmentalists take on the mechanical assumptions of state power – that road building is necessarily beneficial – and attempt to challenge such assumptions at all levels. Having taken a minor part in these campaigns I know that they gain strength from a decentralised structure, and from the fact that individuals take responsibility for events. Indeed, in recent years the attempts of the state to control resistance, through such instruments as the Criminal Justice Act, have forced campaigners to adopt ever more decentralised organisations where there is no centre to be attacked with injunctions, sequestrations, fines and prison sentences. Precisely the same logic through which the ARPANET was designed to resist nuclear attack!!

The Downside of Decentralisation

Like most utopian thinking, the overriding atmosphere of News From Nowhere is of light without much shade. This is not necessarily a problem – as I suggest above, we should always have goals towards which to travel hopefully. But it may be as well to be aware of the pitfalls along the way. The environmental movement, for example, exhibits some of those weaknesses of autonomy which Morris does not discuss. For, if hierarchy generates chaos, then so does devolution; environmentalists often waste their efforts and have a less than optimal impact precisely because their actions are redundant. And whilst redundancy may be a good defence, it is also potentially wasteful of scarce human resources. Such situations are compounded by lack of information; the rumour mill seems to be the biggest enemy of a roads campaign; not knowing what is happening elsewhere, or failing to make clear decisions can diffuse and limit the effectiveness of protest actions. Particularly when confronted with a well organised opposition. This problem is entirely overlooked in Morris’ account. Thus, for example, people decide to go haymaking almost as if they were driven by a collective unconscious, but there is no mention of how the logistics of this, or the necessary information are to be channelled. What if everyone turned up at Kelmscott Manor for haymaking – who would do the necessary work elsewhere and how would the multitude be fed? In my view a decentralised society must not be a totally disorganised one; there must be mechanisms through which information is channelled and by which collective decisions are arrived at.

This brings us back to the internet.

The Superhypeway

Much to much has been said recently about the potential of the so-called information superhighway, or rather superhypeway, and of electronic communication and virtuallity in general. Those of us who use these media regularly know that their problem is one of too much information, much of it useless, and a chaos born of local autonomy. The internet is an entirely non-hierarchical net of nodes originally conceived as being resistant to nuclear attack. There is no centre and this makes it invulnerable, but uncontrollable. This is not to say that these media don’t have their uses, but rather that they vividly show us the problems of decentralised systems. Many now seem to fear the intervention of capitalism and commerce on the net, and with the existence of private domains and of commercial and official “intranets”, there is a certain amount of truth in this. However, I think the bigger danger lies in patronage and nepotism. Since the Net is not a broadcast medium it depends on word of mouth and/or electronic links to spread ideas, and in this respect is has a limited appeal for commerce. The extent to which what you have to say is heard depends upon who else takes you seriously. I’m sure I don’t need to tell academics among those reading this how such mechanisms work- as Pierre Bourdieu^xiv describes in Homo Academicus, the academic world is driven and reproduced through patronage and has increasingly become so as funding has become tighter.

Could the society of News From Nowhere rise above this? Morris stresses the key importance of the elimination of competition, arguing that affluence gives an end to want and hence to struggle. I think we now know that this is not true. How, for example, do the people of Morris new society decide who gets to do what? Are there no decisions driven by friendship and mutual or familial interest that override fairness? A society without arbitration is one in which nepotism is bound to rule to some extent in spite of good intentions. This is not an argument which appeals to so-called “human nature”, an appeal that Morris vehemently and rightly denounces. Rather, I think we must recognise that competition can have goals other than mere material affluence. Indeed, the academic world, mentioned above, is a case in point- as far as I can see material rewards play a minor part in academic life and yet academia is ruthlessly competitive. As Foucault^xv has argued, pursuit of social power is and has always been of primary importance and any devolved organisation must be able to check this desire.

Fortunately, the era of electronic communication also has its positive aspects. Here is Marshall McLuhan^xvi, the prophet of the electronic age, in a statement worthy of Morris’ new society;

“The primitive hunter or fisherman did not work, any more than does the poet, painter or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work. Work begins with the division of labour and the specialisation of functions and tasks in sedentary agricultural communities. In the computer age we are once more totally involved in our roles. In the electric age the “job of work” yields to dedication and commitment, as in the tribe.”

It is perhaps possible, as McLuhan and many others have claimed, that the new media will reinvest work with the values that Morris believed in. That in some sense the trivial rewards of petty power will be subsumed by the more satisfying results of “work” that actually has some meaning. Certainly, what holds the environmental movement together and maintains its direction is “dedication and commitment” and in this sense the importance of “useful” activity stressed by Morris may circumvent some organisational problems.

Progress

All this brings me to my final point; that of the idea of progress.

Predictions of the future are written for their own times. Morris optimism, a reaction to Bellamy’s sterile vision of regimentation and mechanisation, reflects the general optimism of the late 19th century, as much as Orwell’s 1984 describes the pessimism of 1948. But more than this it embodies the myth of progress that capitalism, Marxism and Socialism shared at that time. Again I think we have learned that progress and the idea of a linear history is mistaken – the Millennium, be it a Marxist revolution or an exhibition in Greenwich, does not put an end to the World’s problems. In a sense Mao and his followers grasped this point when they realised that a revolution must be continuous – one must always continue to travel hopefully towards the promised land!

It is interesting and ironic that McLuhan refers back to hunters and gatherers for his metaphor of the future, much as Marx and Engels talked of primitive communism. There is much talk these days about progress towards globalisation, retribalisation and McLuhan’s “Global Village”. Rather, in my view, the new media actually bring out what is and has always been present in humanity – it is not a matter of progress. William Morris is often criticised for his medievalism, for harking back to an idealised past, but in fact he recognised in Medieval society a character and temper that exists at all times and in all societies, given the opportunity. In this sense we should not talk of progress with all its baggage of Victorian ideology; the journey is one that people have made and hopefully will always be making. Perhaps new technologies will, as McLuhan suggests, help us to express or extend the co-operative aspects of humanity. Non-hierarchical, collaborative action; a sense of involvement in our work and a sense of responsibility for our world; are not things that we progress towards, but things that we are constantly finding within and around us. They are things that we can do now.

Footnotes