Art, Labour & Socialism by William Morris
With a Modern Assessment
Foreword
An address that William Morris delivered at University College, Oxford, was reprinted by him in the magazine Today, in February 1884, under the title “Art Under Plutocracy”.
In 1907 the larger part of it was published by the Socialist Party of Great Britain in pamphlet form as Art, Labour and Socialism.
It has long been out of print and we are issuing it again because, in the words of our Foreword to our original edition:
“It is not often that an accepted master in the arts can express himself with lucid brevity in the language of the common people; and even less frequently is that master able to scientifically diagnose the conditions of his own craft”.
“It is therefore the more refreshing to discover a work by an admittedly great figure in the artistic world which gets down surely to rock bottom facts, and in a style of quite charming simplicity establishes the connection of art and labour, and the conditions of labour which, after all—and however distasteful the information may be to the school of the ‘Intellectuals’—art is, in the final analysis, no more than a reflection”.
“We do not claim for Morris that he was always a convincing and consistent instructor in economics. Indeed, his work in this direction, regarded as a whole, entitles him to no more than a place in the category of the Utopians . . . But this does not blind us to the fact that Morris occasionally struck shrewdly at the pretensions of a vainglorious and shoddy intellectuality, placed art in its proper perspective, and did effective service by his unequivocal insistence upon the necessity, not only of passive working class discontent with, but active working class revolt against, the system of society that enslaves them, robs them of the results of their labours, and incidentally deprives them of that joy in the work of their hands which stands for him at the very foundation of art”.
Executive Committee
Socialist Party of Great Britain
February 1962
A Modern Assessment
I. Morris and His Work
Most of the writings about Morris concentrate upon his work as a poet, interior decorator, printer and designer of coloured glass windows, but neglect the other side of his activities: speaker, teacher, and writer about Socialism.
He was already an international figure in the art world when the poverty, squalor and ugliness that constantly confronted him led him to probe into the problem, and he began to take an interest in Socialism, and finally came to study Marx’s Capital.
He joined the Social Democratic Federation, which claimed adherence to Marxism, in 1881. However, he soon became dissatisfied with its reformist policies and its electioneering tactics. He left the organisation along with Eleanor Marx, Belfort Bax,
Frederick Lessner (and old associate of Marx in the production of the
Communist Manifesto) and Marx’s son-in-law Edward Aveling. They then formed the ‘Socialist League’ in 1884. Along with Bax he edited the ‘League’s’ Journal
The Commonweal. In the first number of this journal, on the front page, there appeared an ‘Introductory’ by Morris and the ‘Manifesto’ of the League. The beginning of the ‘Introductory’ was as follows: – “We beg our readers’ leave for a few words in which to introduce them to this socialist journal,
The Commonweal. In the first place we ask them to understand that the Editor and Sub-Editor of The Commonweal are acting as delegates of the Socialist League, under its direct control; any slip in principles, therefore, any misstatement of the aims and tactics of the League, are liable to correction from the representatives of that body. As to the conduct of
The Commonweal, it must be remembered that it has one aim—the propagation of Socialism”.
This was certainly an innovation and a very promising start. A few paragraphs from the League’s ‘Manifesto’ will further indicate how far Morris and his associates had progressed in understanding:
“Fellow Citizens,
We come before you as a body advocating the principles of Revolutionary International Socialism; that is, we seek a change in the basis of Society—a change which would destroy the distinctions of classes and nationalities.
As the civilised world is at present constituted, there are two classes of Society—the one possessing wealth and the instruments of its production, the other producing wealth by means of those instruments but only by the leave and for the use of the possessing classes.
These two classes are necessarily in antagonism to one another. The possessing class, or non-producers, can only live as a class on the unpaid labour of the producers—the more unpaid labour they can wring out of them, the richer they will be; therefore the producing class—the worker—are driven to strive to better themselves at the expense of the possessing class, and the conflict between the two is ceaseless. Sometimes it takes the form of open rebellion, sometimes of strikes, sometimes of mere widespread mendicancy and crime; but it is always going on in one form or other, though it may not always be obvious to the thoughtless looker-on.
We have spoken of unpaid labour: it is necessary to explain what that means. The sole possession of the producing class is the power of labour inherent in their bodies; but since, as we have already said, the richer classes possess all the instruments of labour, that is, the land, capital, and machinery, the producers or workers are forced to sell their sole possession, the power of labour, on such terms as the possessing class will grant them.
These terms are, that after they have produced enough to keep them in working order, and enable them to beget children to take their places when they are worn out, the surplus of their products shall belong to the possessors of property, which bargain is based on the fact that every man working in a civilised community can produce more than he needs for his own sustenance.
This relation of the possessing class to the working class is the essential basis of the system of producing for a profit, on which our modern Society is founded.”
Although this was written so long ago, how well it fits conditions today, despite the claims that capitalism has changed and society has progressed. There is a further quotation from the ‘Manifesto’ which makes the comparison even more apt:
“Nationalisation of the land alone, which many earnest and sincere persons are now preaching, would be useless so long as labour was subject to the fleecing of surplus value inevitable under the Capitalist system.
No better solution would be that of State Socialism, by whatever name it may be called, whose aim it would be to make concessions to the working class while leaving the present system of capital and wages still in operation: no number of merely administrative changes, until the workers are in possession of all political power, would make any real approach to Socialism.
The Socialist League therefore aims at the realisation of complete Revolutionary Socialism, and well knows that this can never happen in any one country without the help of the workers of all civilisation.”
The last three paragraphs show how far in advance Morris was in relation to the Socialism in one country Communists, the Labour Party, and the multitude of reformers who misuse the word Socialism.
As this pamphlet shows, what was of abiding interest to Morris was to build up a Socialist system, devoid of wage-slavery and degrading toil, in which conditions would enable the producer to find joy in his labour, and would therefore enable him to make articles that were both useful and beautiful.
In Art, Labour & Socialism Morris had something worthwhile to say to his generation; we must consider now whether it is relevant to the conditions of today—and tomorrow. Some of the problems are examined in the following pages.
II. Has Machinery Lightened Labour?
In Art, Labour & Socialism Morris invited his readers to look at the purpose for which employers had used machinery. Like Marx before him, Morris agreed with John Stuart Mill who had written in his Principles of Political Economy:
“It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.”
Mill went on to say:
“They [machines] have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes.”
One evil consequence of the introduction of machinery was that it increased the employment of women and children in the factories.
Sir William Ashley in his work,
The Economic Organisation of England (Longmans, 1921, page 161), wrote of this development:
“The new machinery rendered the work physically so light that it became possible to employ women and children in large numbers; and the sinking of capital in costly machinery made it seem in the interest of employers to work that machinery as continuously as possible. Neither the employment of children nor excessive hours were absolutely new phenomena. Both had been seen in the domestic workshop. But the employment of children was now systematised and extended on a vast scale; and excessive hours, instead of being an occasional episode, say once a week, became a regular thing, every day in the week.”
In the same year that Mill’s work was published, 1848, Marx and Engels had written in the Communist Manifesto:
“ . . . in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of the machinery etc.”
Marx, Mill and Ashley were writing of a period when machinery was taking away the livelihood of craftsmen and forcing them to work in factories under harsh conditions and for long hours. Since then, as the working hours of most workers have been much reduced and child labour in factories has been made illegal, we may ask to what extent the statements made by Marx and Mill in 1848 would be true today. We can accept that there are fewer workers doing jobs which involve heavy lifting, hauling, hammering, excavating and other hard physical effort, but along with a fairly general shortening of the working day and working week labour has been intensified, the speed of machines has increased (and with it the number of accidents) and more workers are compelled to perform monotonous repetition work which can be as tiring as heavy physical labour. It is the aim of employers to exact as much effort in the shorter working week as before, a fact making itself felt in the workers’ fatigue at the end of the day and the week.
The claim made in the early days of machine production that machinery lightens the labour and increases the comfort of the worker is being made now for automation; but again the high capital cost is leading to a worsening of conditions—this time in the increase of shift working. Mr P. G. Hunt of the Labour Relations Staff of the Ford Motor Company wrote about this in 1958. After claiming that with automation “almost invariably . . . the physical effort of the operator is vastly reduced or even completely eliminated”, he went on:
“A further factor that emanates from the high initial cost of automated plant is the need to recoup on capital outlay within a reasonable period, which can be achieved only by high utilisation of the equipment concerned. Such a recoupment in turn can be achieved only by longer hours, and longer hours mean shift working. . . . There is no denying the unpopularity of shift work particularly night work—with the majority of those who are called upon to operate it. It seems clear, however, that the trend towards such working must continue and increase, and that automation is at least in part responsible for this” (Financial Times, 1 December 1958).
Even the reduced hours of work are an illusory gain because, with the concentration of manufacture in big industrial areas, workers are compelled to travel longer distances between home and work.
Machinery has clearly failed to give that lightening of toil that it could have given and that economists and employers claimed in the early days that it would. We have an illustration of this in the picture that industrialisation presents to workers in less developed countries. Far from being invited to enjoy the prospect of having machines to lighten toil for them, and raise their standard of living with less effort on their part, they are being told by their leaders to be prepared to work harder: Mr Jomo Kenyatta, leader of Kenya Africans, hit on the appropriate phrase of calling on his followers to be prepared to work as hard as white men! (Daily Express, 6 November 1961).
III. The Employers’ Attitude to Machinery
We live in a world in which each day brings news of inventions and discoveries in the field of industrial machinery and methods; but not all of them are applied. Some never get beyond the stage of being tested; they are ideas that will not work in a practical way. But some which are proved to be technically sound and practical never come into commercial use. As it is put in a pamphlet on Automation: “Technically about every industrial operation could be made automatic but economically many are impracticable” (What is this Thing called Automation; published by ASSET). It is only the economically practicable ones that are of interest to employers, the ones that will increase their profit.
There could be no clearer illustration of this than the fact that employers, after installing new machinery, will even remove it if it does not pay. Over a century ago a Government Commission of Inquiry into the conditions of hand-loom weavers reported instances in 1834 “where employers gave up machinery and went back to hand labour as it was cheaper” (Industrial and Commercial Revolutions in Great Britain in the Nineteenth Century, Professor L C A Knowles. Second Edition, page 119). That happening in Britain in 1834 has its recent parallel in USA. The pamphlet on Automation referred to above relates how “In Cleveland, Ford management reverted to hand insertion of small liner bearings in the engine-block because automation of this process was uneconomical”.
What most commonly determines whether a new machine will be economic is the level of wages of the workers whom the machine will displace. It follows from this that variations of wage levels can cause machinery to be economic in one place and not in another and at one time and not at another.
Marx wrote about this in the eighteen-sixties:
“Hence the invention nowadays of machines in England that are employed in only North America; just as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries machines were invented in Germany to be used only in Holland, and just as many a French invention of the eighteenth century was exploited in England alone” (Capital, Vol. I. Kerr Edition, 1906, page 429).
It is not labour-saving as such that the capitalist seeks, but cost-saving, and if for any reason wages are relatively low the capitalist will be quite content to carry on production by methods which employ large amounts of labour. As Marx put it, “Nowhere do we find a more shameful squandering of human labour-power for the most despicable purposes than in England, the land of machinery”.
It is the same in our own times. Machinery is manufactured in one country or locality where wages are low for use elsewhere in relatively high wage areas.
It was the scarcity of workers in rural areas of Britain and America during the two world wars that led to a great increase in the use of machinery that had been long available. Milking machines were being marketed for many years before labour-shortage caused them to be taken up in considerable numbers. The Encyclopaedia Britannica has the following on the use of these machines in USA: “The shortage and the high price of desirable labour for milking cows has extended the use of milking machine” (1950 Edition, Vol. 6, page 983). Even so it was estimated that in 1944, nearly 30 years after such machines were available, only 25 to 30 per cent of American dairy farmers used them.
Sometimes new machines are brought into use not because they directly save labour or cost, but because they give additional precision, which is of course indirectly profitable for the manufacturers selling the products of the machine in competition with other, less efficient products. And sometimes the gain is simply speed of production. It may be good business for a company to use machinery which is quicker, but the products of which are more costly, if by this means the products can be put on the market for quick sale, in advance of the cheaper but more slowly completed products of rival firms.
This is a particular example of a widespread waste that results from capitalist competition. The successful competitor who captures the market is not concerned that his success may mean the bankruptcy of unsuccessful rivals and the consequent breaking up of plant and machinery which could still be useful. When competition is keen it will induce profitable companies to scrap their own plant and machinery while it still has years of useful life before it in order to install costly improved machinery that will enable them to keep ahead in the race for markets.
The picture of capitalism’s use of machinery is hardly complete without reference to the construction of a £30,000 mail bag, power machine shop in Leicester Prison in November 1961, ending the years-long prison labour of hand-stitching. Mechanisation was needed “to meet the mail bag supply demands from the Post Office”.
IV. Socialism and Work
The establishment of socialism will bring far-reaching changes in production and distribution, flowing logically from the ownership of the means of producing wealth being transferred to the whole of society.
The products of labour will no longer be privately owned; incomes from property ownership and from employment will alike disappear, along with buying, selling, and profit-making.
In distribution the principle will be “according to need”, and, of course, without the double standards that now exist throughout the capitalist world, of best quality for the rich, and varying degrees of shoddiness for the poor; which, in turn, presupposes that in production every person will give “according to his or her ability” and will see to it that there are no poor quality goods turned out.
Unfettered access to educational and training facilities will enable all to acquire knowledge and skill and end the existing barriers between unskilled and skilled, manual and mental labour.
Great demands will be made on the productive capacity of society but there will be ample means of satisfying them. With the ending of capitalism enormous additional resources of men and materials will become available through stopping the waste of arms and armaments, and the innumerable activities that are necessary only to capitalism, including the governmental and private bureaucracies, banking and insurance, and the monetary operations that accompany every branch of production and distribution. On a conservative estimate this release of capacity will double the number of men and women available for the work of useful production and distribution. In addition, we may expect a continuing annual increase of productivity resulting from the accumulation of skill and knowledge and of productive equipment.
With these large additional resources at its disposal society will easily be able—if need be with some loss of productivity in particular fields—to end excessive hours of work, harmful speed and intensity, and unnecessary night and shift work, and to use machinery to replace human labour for types of work that cannot be other than unpleasant. This socialist policy will be a reversal of the capitalist policy applied in the nationalised coal industry, the head of which, Lord Robens, can declare that “there are literally thousands of jobs in industry which can give no satisfaction to the workers and never could” and can at the same time be increasing anti-social hours of work by pressing for shift working round the clock in order to avoid “expensive machinery” standing idle for a large part of the 24 hours (Times, 9 October 1961, and Sunday Telegraph, 9 July 1961).
Morris and Marx stated a positive attitude to labour, but before considering what they said it will be useful to examine the criticism that both were viewing the problem in relation to the ruin of craftsmanship by machinery, and that in the present century the problem is a different one and needs a different approach.
Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto to which reference has already been made, wrote about the advent of machinery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century:
“Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarian has lost all individual character, and consequently all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.”
One critic of Marx was the late
Henri de Man who published a study of machine work in Germany in the early nineteen-twenties, part of which was republished in England under the title
Joy in Labour (George Allen & Unwin, 1929).
His criticism was that Marx drew a general conclusion about machine work based largely on the textile industries and that while that conclusion remained unquestionably applicable to “large strata of the working class . . . there are other strata to which the technical developments of the last eighty years have made it completely inapplicable, so that of them the reverse is true” (page 85).
Henri de Man’s two conclusions were that even under capitalism “the existence of detail work is not necessarily a cause of distaste for work” and that it is not impossible for skilled machine work to give the work full satisfaction even though much machine work fails to do so. We can accept both points, but they do not affect the validity of the general principle behind Marx’s words. Marx was not arguing that work with machinery is necessarily an evil. Like Morris, he recognised that it would be a positive gain if much unpleasant and degrading manual work was done by machines: as already mentioned, one of his charges against British capitalists was that they had failed to replace labour of that sort by machinery because it did not pay them to do so.
Following on the same train of thought Marx maintained that Socialism would do what capitalists had failed to do and that “in a communist society (*) there would be a very different scope for the employment of machinery than there can be in a bourgeois society” (Capital Vol I, Chapter XV, Section 2).
In a speech made in 1856 Marx had this to say of the possibilities of machinery: “Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it”.
(*) In the middle of the nineteenth century Marx preferred to use the word communism because of the current misleading ideas associated with the word Socialism. Later on, he used the two words interchangeably to mean what the SPGB means by Socialism: which, of course, has no relationship to the misuse of the terms Socialism and Communism as applied to Russia today.
The central point of Marx’s criticism was that man should not be an appendage of a machine, doing monotonous work robbed of all individual character and charm, any more than he should be doing manual work of a like kind.
There are three principles that can be applied to work and production. The capitalist would like to have a working class which “lives to produce”; working class life being subordinated to the need of producing profit. A second attitude is that of many non-socialist workers and trade unions, that workers should “produce to live”; work being accepted as a necessary evil, to be kept to a minimum, and “life” to be lived in the leisure hours.
Marx and Morris took a third view, that the aim for a society of free men and women should be that work is part of life, no more to be neglected than other intelligently conducted human activities.
Marx, writing in 1875, stated his view with force and passion:
“ . . . when the slavish subordination of the individual to the yoke of the division of labour has disappeared, and when concomitantly the distinction between mental and physical work has ceased to exist; when labour is no longer the means to live, but is in itself the first of vital needs; when the productive forces of society have expanded proportionately with the multiform development of the individuals of whom society is made up—then will the narrow bourgeois outlook be transcended, and then will society inscribe upon its banners ‘from everyone according to his capacities, to everyone according to his needs’” (From Marx’s Criticism of the Gotha Programme, SLP Edition, page 9).
There is a certain irony in the situation that while many workers are content to accept tedious, repetition work as a necessity some employers have themselves discovered that its damaging effect on the workers is such that it does not pay. The Economist (2 December 1961), writes about this discovery:
“In the early years of scientific management it was presumed that the greater the breakdown of jobs into their component parts, the greater the efficiency. The trouble with this, however, was that men came to be treated as mere extensions to their machines. Today, industrial theorists have come to realise that beyond a certain point the simplification of work creates so many problems of boredom and dissatisfaction among workers that diminishing returns may set in. as a result, in many firms the pendulum has begun to swing back a little, and some tasks are being deliberately re-combined to make their execution more complex”.
It will be seen that Marx posed the same issue as did Morris. Is it still a real issue? Some people think that automation will abolish all work problems, and that we shall have workless production:
“Today our life is largely shaped by having to produce goods for our feeding, for our clothing, and so on. Suppose we could just turn on a spigot and have all these basic things just as we now have water?” (Robert Jungk, Guardian, 2 November 1961).
That idea came into the minds of many people (Robert Owen among them) in the early days of machinery; but for the foreseeable future it is a fantasy. Not that it would be technically impossible to build a factory operated by very few workers (this is an early possibility); but that is not production without workers, any more than the automatic telephone system or the driverless train system is production without workers. What has been going on for a century or more is the progressive elimination of workers from some manual operations, with simultaneous increased numbers of machine-making workers in the metal, engineering and electrical industries and of workers in engaged on maintaining the machines. Overall, there is a continuing small net saving of labour, but no dramatic developments that would change the present dependence of production on human labour in some form or other.
What then should be the Socialist attitude to the issues posed by Marx and Morris? There is no doubt what the answer must be. In a free society, depending for its healthy functioning on agreement and voluntary co-operation, in which “the government of persons will have given way to the administration of things”, people will not wish to spend the working part of their lives as human automatons serving machines, any more than as human automatons performing monotonous manual operations. The principle must be that people in a Socialist society shall be able to bring to all the various aspects of life, including work, all qualities of body and mind, skill, knowledge, thought and imagination.
Arts, crafts and machine techniques will all have their place as Marx and Morris would have urged. The difference since their day is that powers and methods of production have become vastly greater and more varied; which means that man’s power to control the conditions of his life is correspondingly greater. He has potentially must greater freedom of choice and it is inconceivable that under Socialism man will decide to enslave himself to productive processes of his own making.
We are confident that the reader will find Morris’s work ideas worth thinking about, including that most important idea of all, that in order to get a better system of society it is necessary to get rid of Capitalism and establish Socialism.
