Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

Anarchism and libertarian socialism in Britain 19
considered so important that he printed it separately in 1892 as a Kelmscott Press
book. In his discussion of the worker’s place in the productive process Ruskin rivals
for radical profundity Marx’s analysis of alienation:
You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make
both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and
perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their
fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses,
you must un humanize them…. On the other hand, if you will make a man of the
working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think,
to try to do something worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once.
Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability…but out comes the
whole majesty of him also… 13
In his 1892 preface Morris comments that Ruskin’s teaching is ‘that art is the
expression of man’s pleasure in labour; that it is possible for man to rejoice in his
work…and lastly, that unless man’s work once again becomes a pleasure to him…all
but the worthless must toil in pain, and therefore live in pain’. Morris concludes
that ‘the hallowing of labour by art is the one aim for us at the present day’ and ‘if
Politics are to be anything less than an empty game…it is towards this goal of the
happiness of labour that they must make’. 14 Ruskin had very misleadingly announced
in 1871 that he was ‘a Communist of the old school – reddest also of the red’; rather,
as he was to write only two months later and repeat in his autobiography, ‘I am,
and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school…’ His biographer,
Tim Hilton, grappling to denominate his politics, comes up with ‘utopian Toryism’
and ‘High Tory utopianism’. 15 It was therefore left for Morris to go beyond Ruskin,
using the latter’s thought as a foundation for the highly original socialism he was to
develop himself.
Morris entered public life in 1876 when he became treasurer of the Eastern
Question Association, set up when it seemed that Disraeli’s government might
intervene on Turkey’s side in yet another war with Russia, which was entirely unacceptable
after the recent Turkish massacres of Bulgarian Christians and had led
Gladstone to write his famous pamphlet, The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question
of the East. It was during this agitation that Morris met some of the leading trade
unionists, including Henry Broadhurst, secretary of the Parliamentary Committee
of the Trades Union Congress, yet he found no hope in them for ‘they were quite
13 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1851–3; New York: Merrill & Baker, 3 vols., n.d.), II, pp.
161–2.
14 WMAWS, I, pp. 292–3.
15 John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (Orpington:
George Allen, 9 vols., 1871–87), I, Letter 7, p. 2, and Letter 10, p. 2; John Ruskin, Præterita: Outlines
of Scenes and Thoughts Perhaps Worthy of Memory in My Past Life (1885–9; London: Rupert Hart-
Davis, 1949 edn), p. 5; Tim Hilton, John Ruskin: The Later Years (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2000), pp. 145, 213.