Florence Boos at Kelmscott House

‘I’m with the people … the working class people who have been left behind economically … The elites have tried to silence my own voice … I’ll represent you, the working class of England … just another millionaire stockbroker who looks down at the working classes’.  These remarks are not, as you might have thought, quotations from the uncollected Morris lectures that Professor Florence Boos eloquently set before us at the Morris Society AGM on Saturday.  At that event the admirable socialist content of her talk made a welcome contrast with its politically anodyne first half, devoted as that was to Society business and chaired by Stephen Bradley.

No, the class-oriented quotations above are from the European election leaflet from notorious far-right activist Tommy Robinson that I found on my doormat a few days ago.  Fascism is clearly now on the move in this country in a way and to a depth that we haven’t seen for some years; and its rhetoric cunningly ventriloquises aspects of socialism’s own appeal to working-class people.  We always knew there were nasty, dangerous, far-right individuals out there.  Now, however, as Robinson’s North-West election leaflet shows, they have serious money and organisation behind them.

This alarming fact suggests that we recalibrate the purposes of the William Morris Society.  While celebrating the 125^th anniversary of the Kelmscott Chaucer in 2021 is a worthy project in itself, at a time of political emergency such as our own, when the Brexit impasse is allowing the far-right to emerge again (though this is, of course, a global as well as a British trend), a society devoted to the life and work of Britain’s foremost Communist will need to be rather more politically interventionist than that.  It should surely also aim to renew left-wing and utopian thinking in the present – a task in which recovering it from the past, as Florence Boos so skilfully did, is a necessary first step.

Communism and Poetry: Writing against Capital

It looks as though the very book that we need to identify the twenty-first-century successors to William Morris’s militant narrative poem ‘The Pilgrims of Hope’ is on its way to us.  Edited by Ruth Jennision and Julian Murphet, it appears in Palgrave Macmillan’s ‘Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics’ series and will hit the bookshelves in late August this year.  The publisher’s blurb describes the collection as follows:

‘Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital addresses the relationship between an upsurge in collective political practice around the world since 2000, and the crystallization of newly engaged forms of poetry. Considering an array of perspectives―poets, poet-critics, activists and theorists―these essays shed new light on the active interface between emancipatory political thought and poetic production and explore how poetry and the new communism are creating mutually innovative forms of thought and activity, supercharging the utopian imagination. Drawing inspiration from past connections between communism and poetry, and theorizing new directions over the years ahead, the volume models a much-needed critical solidarity with creative strategies in the present conjuncture to activate movements of resistance, on the streets and in verse’.

The only problem with this admirable volume is that you need to be a bit of a capitalist yourself to afford it, since it costs a hefty £89-99 hardback.

Counter-Revolution in Venezuela

In News from Nowhere old Hammond asks William Guest: ‘how can you prevent the counter-revolution from setting in except by making people happy?’  But fortunately for his utopians, Morris does not depict his socialist England as being neighboured by a capitalist superpower which is ruthlessly determined to do everything in its power to destroy their revolution.  If there were such a superpower in News from Nowhere, it would have used every means of economic sanction and sabotage it had at its disposal to subvert the Nowherian economy.  It would also have reached out to the ‘old grumbler’ at Runnymede as its useful idiot or figurehead within Nowhere itself, and he in turn might have persuaded a few ‘obstinate Refusers’ in the Nowherian military to launch a coup in the Thames valley.

All this the United States has been and is doing in Venezuela, of course, in its bid to destroy the Bolivarian revolution through its puppet Juan Guaido; and that process has now reached a critical flashpoint.  Aldous Huxley’s utopian island Pala has an authoritarian military power on its doorstep, Colonel Dipa’s Rendang-Lobo, but Pala’s quietistic Buddhist philosophy means it takes no steps to guard itself and it is ultimately crushed by its neighbour.  Ernst Callenbach’s west-coast Ecotopia is much more aware of the danger from the United States it has broken away from; and its secret police and decentralised militia seem up to the task of defending the ecological revolution against that powerful hostile neighbour. 

How Juan Guaido’s attempted counter-revolution will play out in Venezuela itself, we cannot yet know.  Nicolas Madura is a much less charismatic leader than Hugo Chavez himself, and there are deep internal problems with the Bolivarian revolution which exacerbate the external sabotage it has been subject to; but for now the bulk of the military seems loyal to the government.  Keeping the people happy to avert counter-revolution, yes indeed – old Hammond is surely right.  But what happens when the regional superpower, with its eye on your immense oil reserves, makes even that virtually impossible?