In Praise of Communism

The global coronavirus crisis is leading to a resurgence of the crudest Cold War anti-Communist rhetoric, with the Tory MP Tom Tugendhat in this country being a particularly ardent practitioner.  The Chinese ‘Communist dictatorship’ then becomes the source of every aspect of the global pandemic: from the invention of the virus in a Wuhan laboratory in some conspiracy theories, through the intimidation and silencing of Doctor Li Wenliang who tried to alert China to the emerging health crisis, to the faking of mortality figures and subsequent fake news campaigns.  There may well be some truth in some of these claims; but taken collectively they add up to a new Cold War racist anti-Communism. 

At which point, Morrisians must surely stand up for communism, if not for China.  It was our hero’s preferred term for his political vision, and, as I have suggested before in this blog, aligning the pre-Leninist communism of Morris with the post-Leninist communism of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek and Jodi Dean is a compelling political task for us.  Coronavirus is not, as many politicians have asserted, indiscriminate: it may infect an occasional Boris Johnson, but it hits the poor hardest, since in crowded homes and work-places they cannot social distance, their jobs are lost first in any economic lockdown, and they may not have health cover or insurance.  A contemporary communism must speak out against the grotesque economic and health inequalities we are now witnessing so starkly all around us.

On the more scholarly and historical front, we are seeing some interesting work on the semantics of ‘communism’ in Morris’s texts.  Owen Holland’s splendid William Morris’s Utopianism: Propaganda, Politics and Prefiguration (2017) argues that ‘Morris’s intervention into the pastoral tradition can be construed as an attempt to shift the articulation of the communist idea in the direction of social revolution … [his] utopian text attempted to reorient the meaning of the word “communism” around a definition tied to the primacy of the political, as against the then-dominant identifications with utopian-communitarianism’ (pps.107, 118).  Holland grasps the centrality of the term ‘communism’ for Morris, and shrewdly maps its vagaries, as if it were an Empsonian ‘complex word’.

In thinking about the global future we want after Covid-19, the green-communism of Morris needs to be on the agenda again.  We can’t just be calling for the resumption of ‘business as normal’, in that over-used current phrase.  Capitalism-as-normal is generating appalling social divisions into the 1% and the 99%, and destroying our planet’s biological systems into the bargain (and it is more likely that process, rather than a Chinese laboratory, that gives us Covid-19 and the earlier pandemics of our century).  Far from allowing a reversion to Cold War anti-Communism, we should rework the vision and practice of communism to meet the challenges ahead. 

I would like to see the Morris Societies of the UK, the USA and Canada commit themselves to such a task on their websites: not just to plan tactics of immediate survival and reorganisation (important though these are), but to project some serious utopian thinking and mobilising for the years ahead.  Having handed in my notice to Lancaster University, I am now counting down the months to the moment when I can devote myself fulltime to that work.

Modernism's Rainbow

With the rainbow emerging as a symbol of hope in the coronavirus darkness – the children at the nursery opposite my house have painted a big one on a sheet of cardboard and hung it from their gate – we might recall modernism’s own rainbow, as articulated in the great utopian vision which Ursula Brangwen has in the closing paragraphs of D.H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow (1915).  Here it is:  

'And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill.  And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming itself.  In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of the iris where the bow should be.  Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow.  The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of the low houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven. 

And the rainbow stood on the earth.  She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven.  She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitted to the over-arching heaven'.

So may we, like Ursula, catch glimpses of a juster society emerging from the current crisis.

Coronavirus: Some Morrisian Hopes

A week into the UK lockdown, can we hope, however tentatively, for new progressive values to emerge from the current crisis?  Can people rediscover the new limits imposed on their lives as opportunities, as a sensory re-immersion in the present and its simple local pleasures?  Of course, for many, economic anxieties will be severe, but there is still a chance that we might partially move to that Morrisian ethos evoked in News from Nowhere: ‘they were eager to discuss all the little details of life: the weather, the hay-crop, the last new house, the plenty or lack of such and such birds, and so on; and they talked of these things not in a fatuous and conventional way, but as taking, I say, real interest in them’.

Could those local libidinal investments then acquire a degree of theoretical articulation?  Might they move towards a critique of the frantically fast-moving globalised economic system which allowed a disease outbreak in Wuhan to become a planetary disaster so very swiftly?  Will the renewed admiration for our National Health Service and other expressions of social altruism and self-sacrifice point towards a renewal of solidarity against neo-liberal austerity and individualism?  Will anger at the past decade’s underfunding of public services, which leaves us so stretched and vulnerable at a time of general crisis, emerge and take political shape?

Severe crises affect national ‘structures of feeling’ (to borrow Raymond Williams’s old term) in deep but complex and unpredictable ways.  They can benefit the Right as well as the Left, and no crisis has its political effects of itself, by its own inbuilt momentum.  Hence the Morrisian-utopian task that Alain Badiou has recently enjoined upon us: ‘As for those of us who desire a real change in the political conditions of this country, we must take advantage of this epidemic interlude, and even of the – entirely necessary – isolation, to work on new figures of politics, on the project of new political sites, and on the trans-national progress of a third stage of communism after the brilliant one of its invention and the – interesting but ultimately defeated – stage of its statist experimentation’.

Coronavirus in Utopia

‘For our sick, they were many, and in very ill case; so that if they were not permitted to land, they ran danger of their lives’.  But when ‘we … came close to the shore, and offered to land … we saw divers of the people, with bastons in their hands, as it were forbidding us to land … warning us off by signs that they made’.

These words, which might have been uttered by the captains of the cruise ships Diamond Princess and Grand Princess, which were recently moored off Yokohama and San Francisco respectively without being able to land, are in fact from the opening of Francis Bacon’s 1627 utopian fragment New Atlantis.  Eventually, the 51 passengers on Bacon’s ship (‘whereof our sick were seventeen’) are allowed on shore, but they are then effectively quarantined in the House of Strangers.  The utopians naturally do not wear our modern facemasks in dealing with them, but the first utopian official who greeted the visitors had used a richly smelling fruit ‘for a preservative against infection’.

Early utopias are deeply afraid of infection, both medical and ideological; for New Atlantis has ‘interdicts and prohibitions … touching entrance of strangers … doubting novelties and commixture of manners’ as well as transmission of illness.  To what extent is this true of their successors?  Is Morris’s Hammersmith Guest House in News from Nowhere perhaps a version of Bacon’s House of Strangers, an institution where visitors are vetted to see whether they can be safely allowed to explore the new realm more generally?

Well, it is certainly a place where Dick Hammond is trying to stamp out certain kinds of intellectualism (i.e. the historical interests of Bob and Boffin); and critics have sometimes seen William Guest as carrying an ideological virus into the Thames valley, as when Marcus Waithe refers to the possibility of him ‘contaminating Nowhere’.  Morris’s utopians know that infection can be a political issue, with old Hammond referring to the British Government sending ‘blankets infected with small-pox as choice gifts to inconvenient tribes of Red-Skins’; and this local textual reference presumably inspired Barbara Gribble in 1985 to wonder more generally ‘how Dick or Walter would react to a sudden epidemic’. 

Perhaps we are about to find out, just beyond the boundaries of the text, as it were.  For we never do discover the nature of Philippa the carver’s illness, though it was clearly quite debilitating: ‘I was ill and unable to do anything all through April and May’.  Is she perhaps Patient Zero of the epidemic that Gribble envisages?  And if it were to spread as rapidly as coronavirus is doing in Europe at the moment, then Morris’s Nowhere may be about to face one of the great challenges of its existence.

Flight by Water

I’ve always liked Carole Silver’s description of News from Nowhere as ‘the first of Morris’s final group of romances’.  That generic affiliation means that you can run the hermeneutic traffic between Morris’s utopia and his late romances in both directions: forwards from News from Nowhere, thereby exposing political implications in those otherworldly romances that we might not have supposed to be there; or backwards from the late romances, so that narrative elements of the utopia are revealed as having meanings in excess of their overt political ones.

Why, for instance, should William Guest leave London and head upriver?  Well, officially, because he’s seen the utopian city and now he needs to see the utopian countryside too, thus covering the whole social range.  But then we remember those early exchanges between Birdalone and Habundia in The Water of the Wondrous Isles.  The magical wood-wife informs Birdalone that ‘it is by way of the water that thou shalt fare to the land of men-folk’, and a few pages later the heroine ‘called to mind what Habundia had said to her, that it was by water that she must flee’.  So a journey by water releases you from the captivity of the evil witch-wife who had kidnapped you on the opening page of the book.  Can something like this be true of William Guest’s water journey too?

Well, we might think of Guest as being narratively trapped within old Hammond’s endless expositions in the British Museum.  After all, as readers, we probably feel ourselves shackled during those gruelling expository chapters too.  In a more important because political sense, we might regard Guest as trapped within a narrow, excessively static and pastoral utopia in the transfigured London, and as needing to break out of that to a wider, more challenging world and politics beyond.  He will meet Ellen on his river journey, after all, and she is indeed a dynamic new force in this otherwise too placid future.

Whether Guest’s upriver adventures can be paralleled in any precise way with Birdalone’s tribulations on her great lake, I’m not sure.  Could we think of the cottage at Runnymede as a version of the Isle of Increase Unsought, with the old Grumbler as its dangerous and short-memoried witch – politically short-memoried, in his case?  At any rate, the juxtaposition of The Water of the Wondrous Isles and News from Nowhere will have made us think of aspects of the latter in a new way.  For if a water journey breaks you out of stasis and captivity towards new challenges, then we will have to look at William Guest’s 130-mile trip up the Thames in a new light.