Reading Tips

As the working-class protagonist Richard commits himself to political militancy in Morris’s narrative poem ‘Pilgrims of Hope’, he remarks: ‘When I joined the Communist folk, I did what in me lay/To learn the grounds of their faith.  I read day after day/Whatever books I could handle … ‘.  Sadly, the poem doesn’t actually specify what volumes our hero turns to at this point.  But what book or books might we want to put into the hands of a contemporary Richard who sought to give him or herself a good grounding in socialist theory in the early twenty-first century?

There are many candidates, naturally.  But a strong favourite, in my view, would be David Harvey’s Companion to Marx’s Capital (Verso, 2010).  I read his Condition of Postmodernity when it first came out in 1991, and found it a powerful materialist regrounding of the cultural debates around postmodernism current at the time.  As an extraordinarily productive Marxist geographer, Harvey was part of that crucial ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities of which Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies (1989) might be regarded as the manifesto.

Harvey’s Companion to Marx’s Capital, which is based upon his lecture series on Marx’s magnum opus, is a lucid, thoughtful and eminently approachable guide to the great tome itself; and is given a contemporary edge by being written in the wake and light of the capitalist crash of 2008.  As Harvey puts it early on, Marx’s ‘scientific method is predicated on the interrogation of the primarily British tradition of classical political economy, using the tools of the mainly German tradition of critical philosophy, all applied to illuminate the mainly French utopian impulse in order to answer the following questions: what is communism, and how should communists think?’  Plenty there, then, for new militants to cut their teeth on, and no guide could be more genial and searching than David Harvey.  Anyone who wants to sample the original lectures can find them at: davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

Love in Utopia

Why, in literary utopias, do women from the good new society so consistently fall in love with men from the bad old non-utopian one?  Thus, in the transfigured future Boston of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Edith Leete falls in love with the visitor from the past, Julian West; thus Ellen and William Guest begin to fall in love on the upper Thames in News from Nowhere; thus the utopian forester Ellador marries Vandyck Jennings from the bad old world in Herland; all the way through to Ernest Callenbach’s Marissa Brightcloud, who has an intense sexual relationship with the investigative US journalist William Weston, which by the end of Ecotopia (1975) has clearly become permanent.  Thomas More could have enlivened his own Utopia no end if he’d had the young mother who instructs her child about the Anemolian ambassadors fall in love with Raphael Hythloday during his sojourn on the island. 

We might be inclined to attribute such recurrent amatory narratives either to the dire generic necessities of utopia and/or to the literary clumsiness of individual practitioners.  Classical utopias, you might argue, are such desperately dull affairs, narratively speaking, all anodyne geographical tour and turgid sociological disquisition, that they desperately need some plot sweeteners to keep the poor reader turning the pages; and it is then a sign of the ungiftedness of the individual writers that they cannot come up with anything better than this tired old romantic story-line: not ‘boy meets tractor’ of the old socialist-realist novels, but ‘utopian girl meets dystopian boy’.

Well, there may be something in this; but I think that Tom Moylan’s postmodern generic concept of a ‘critical utopia’ might give us pause and prompt us to look for more meaning here than first meets the eye.  It may be that even the classical utopias have more in common with contemporary ‘critical’, i.e. self-critical and self-problematising, utopias than we like to think; and the hackneyed old plot device of utopian girl falling in love with the visitor may be a pointer in that direction.

For in turning to the visitor, is not the utopian woman in some sense (and perhaps unconsciously) looking for qualities which are no longer at work in the utopian men of her own time and society?  Is she not thus implicitly criticising her own society, pointing to its absences and limits?  For it may be after all that new Boston or Nowhere or Ecotopia needs something of what West or Guest or Weston represents, that utopia is not so finished, not so complacently self-sufficient, as we first thought, that, in short, all utopias are ‘critical utopias’ in some way, shape or form.

Where are you, President Sanders?

The US Democratic Party establishment has now paid the highest of all electoral prices for previously sabotaging the candidacy of veteran socialist Bernie Sanders in favour of such a deeply compromised neo-liberal insider as Hillary Clinton.   At moments of deep national crisis and self-division, if you do not offer working-class voters a leftwing populism, you will tend to get a populism of the right –  and sometimes the far right – instead, as we ourselves recently saw with the Brexit vote.  Donald Trump appealed to an American working class which has lost out so deeply to globalisation, with many of its traditional manufacturing jobs exported overseas, and waves of mass immigration undercutting its grasp on the remaining low-wage service jobs at home. 

Can left-liberalism, or even the metropolitan Left itself, simply not see the truth in such arguments, or how deeply they accord with the experience of the US “rustbelt” or of our own working-class neighbourhoods?  Good as he is on many other policies, Jeremy Corbyn clearly doesn’t have a clue on this, as when he announced recently, of EU immigration to London, “I don’t think too many have come”.  Until we have a Left politics that can actually tap into contemporary working-class anxieties, as Sanders in his campaign to be Democratic presidential nominee did indeed seem to be doing, it will be the Right – Trump in the US, the Tory hard-Brexiteers or UKIP over here – that capitalises on the very profound disaffection with the current world economic system that so clearly exists.  

No William Morris link worked in here, I admit; but today's political events are so momentous I feel I can justifiably do without one for once.

In Defence of Libraries

In her epic biography of Morris, Fiona MacCarthy calls him ‘one of nature’s library users, perhaps because he came to behave as if he owned them’; and she tells H.M. Hyndman’s story of Morris effortlessly dating illuminated missals in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.  In News from Nowhere Henry Morsom travels to Oxford to ‘get a book or two’ out of the Bodleian, so it is good to know that in utopia that prestigious institution will be democratised, and become a lending rather than purely reference library.  I think we can safely assume, then, that Morris would support today’s demonstration in London in defence of public libraries, particularly since it involves a march between those eminently Morrisian locations, the British Library and Trafalgar Square.

As an excellent article in today’s Guardian informs us: 1/ spending by councils on library services fell by 20% between 2010 and 2015; 2/ 25% of all jobs in libraries – some 8000 in total – have been lost since May 2010; and 3/ one in eight council-run libraries has been closed or transferred out of the public sector in the past six years.  We might have thought the Tory austerity project had been thoroughly overtaken by the complications of Brexit, but no, it is alive and viciously kicking, just as much as it ever was in the Cameron-Osborne years.  Our public libraries, which are such crucial cultural resources for disadvantaged families (as I know from my own childhood), are being butchered by the Conservatives, so more power to the elbows of our admirable London protestors!

Nephews and Nieces

Many years ago I gave a paper on ‘The Politics of The Rainbow’ to a meeting of the D.H. Lawrence Society in Eastwood Public Library.  Since this was a gathering of amateur enthusiasts, my rather academic paper was perhaps not ideally judged for the occasion.  None the less, everyone listened attentively, and after some thoughtful questions, as the meeting broke up, a little elderly lady sitting at the front came up to me, shook my hand cheerfully, and said, ‘Thank you for your paper, Mr Pinkney, I think Uncle Bert would really have liked that’.  Uncle Bert!  I had hardly, before that moment, even wondered what the H. in D.H. Lawrence actually stood for; and here I now was, to my amazement, meeting his last surviving niece, who had always known him by the contracted form of his middle name Herbert.

That was a wonderful moment for me as a Lawrence scholar, and I can still see the fondness in her eyes as she recalled her Uncle in thanking me.  All these years later I know that kind of fondness myself at firsthand, as when my sister Carole and I lovingly recall our Uncle Harry – miner, sailor in the Royal Navy in World War Two, and prison-officer thereafter - who died seven years ago.  So I am struck, having become a Morris critic  in the meantime, by how little we get in the biographies, all the way from Mackail to MacCarthy, of what William Morris’s nephews and nieces made of him.  Uncle William must surely have been as memorable a figure as Uncle Bert or Uncle Harry, yet we don’t seem to have much in the way of memories of or tributes to him from his gaggle of nephews and nieces.  Or am I missing something here?