The Observer newspaper has today given us
just what we need in such politically troubled times with its sixteen-page supplement
of ‘100 Political Classics that Shaped the Modern World’. These seminal texts, from Plato’s Republic all the way to Richard
Seymour’s recent book about Jeremy Corbyn, are reduced to handy digests of 100-120
words each, which are usually lively enough to prompt us to further reading and
investigation.
I had hoped that
Morris’s News from Nowhere might
feature, but didn’t really expect that it would. But I was definitely surprised that Thomas
More’s Utopia didn’t, since that is
the foundational text of one of the most politically important literary genres
of all. There are sections on drama and
fiction in this supplement, so the question of the literary is given some
recognition; but while dystopia features readily enough - The Handmaid’s Tale, say, on the back of its recent Channel 4
version - utopia is a blank for the Observer,
apparently. The supplement doesn’t have a distinct
section on Green politics (though it mentions Rachel Carson), so Ernest
Callenbach’s marvellous Ecotopia
doesn’t get a look in either.
One other political domain that fares
badly here is communism. There are
decent synopses of The Communist
Manifesto and Lenin’s What is to be
Done?, but Will Hutton’s paragraph on Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, is a farrago of Cold War rhetoric: “the inspiration
for the savageries of the cultural revolution … amoral savagery”. Important attempts by Alain Badiou, Slavoj
Zizek and Jodi Dean are in fact under way to rehabilitate the name and notion
of communism; I give a brief account of them in my article in the current issue
of the Journal of William Morris Studies. So we must be grateful to the Observer for what it’s given us, but to
Morrisians the absence of utopia – communist utopia, in News from Nowhere itself – is a weighty one.
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