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PAH.TISAN REVIEW
deep authentici ty.
Morris was himself simultaneously a disciple of Karl Marx and John
Ruskin. He endeavored to be both a loyal socialist and communist and
someone who hated machines and the culture of industrialism so deeply
that he was driven to become pre-eminent among the founders and lead–
ers of the Arts and Crafts movement of the 1880s, and hence the godfather
of Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, and ultimately the Bauhaus movement. And
Morris did in point of fact manage to be both at once; he was able to con–
tain within himself the opposing tidal pulls, tensions, and contradictions of
his major commitments and embody them in his work. The Nowhere that
Morris's narrator, who is of course himself, awakens to, in the dream vision
that makes up the body of the narrative, is the London of the year 2102-
one hundred and twelve years later than Bellamy's Boston, and a very
different proposi tion from ei ther it or the London of the 1890s. It is a type
of communist-anarchist paradise. There is no government apparatus or
national state; political institutions have simply withered away without the
doctrinal intervention of the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is no
money, no exploitation, no private property to speak of, and in some inde–
feasible sense no work. Work has in fact become play, amusement, pleasure,
arts and crafts, hobbies, and exercise for keeping fit. In making the prob–
lem of work the central issue in his utopia, Morris had touched upon what
was and still remains an intractable problem. It does not bear with partic–
ular salience on the mature or late Marx, but it is excellent early Marx,
since it situates the matter of alienated labor as the critical locus of con–
tention and meaning for any society of the future.
Moreover, the problem of alienated labor, as we have come to appre–
hend it since, is not merely a problem that pertains to a capitalist society,
or a market-driven economy of private ownership; it is an equally beset–
ting trouble for any industrial society, including those in which there is
something like state or common ownership. A disalienated human exis–
tence, in Morris's view, could only be brought about in a deindustrialized
world, a world in which mandatory industrial labor had been abolished; in
other words, it had to be something like Eden again, a home regained, a
world in which work was also and equally play and art. And indeed the
people of Nowhere have appropriately regressed, and, in this recollected
enactment of what will happen in the century after next, most of them
have become child-like in a reattained innocence. Thinking has ceased to
be perplexed or complex, and almost no one muddles his head anymore
with "those idiotic old books about political economy" (including Marx,
one must suppose, upon whose texts Morris himself complained that he
was breaking his own cranium). In fact books in general are dying out, the
"plague of book-making" has passed, and people are ceasing to read. The sub–
title of
Newsfrom Nowhere
is
An Epoch
if
Rest,
and in the implied restlessness
