Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

Anarchism and libertarian socialism in Britain 21
giving them a glimpse of the socialist future, Morris’s closing words being ‘if others
can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream’. 21 It is
unique as a utopia written by a major socialist theorist and exceptionally unusual as
a utopia in which it would actually be pleasurable to live. Anarchists moreover have
been consistent in hailing News from Nowhere as an anarchist utopia. Kropotkin, for
example, considered that it was ‘perhaps the most thorough, and deeply anarchistic
conception of future society that has ever been written’; George Woodcock that it
portrays ‘nothing less than that paradisaical anarchy dreamed of by libertarians for
three centuries’ and that as ‘a society without government [it] is the nearest thing to
an anarchist utopia’; and Peter Marshall that it is ‘entirely anarchistic’. 22 ‘Nowhere’
is indeed a stateless society without government and representative institutions. The
chapter ‘Concerning Politics’ makes its point partly through its very brevity and
may quoted in full:
Said I: ‘How do you manage with politics?’
Said Hammond, smiling: ‘I am glad that it is of me that you ask that question; I do
believe that anybody else would make you explain yourself, or try to do so, till you
were sickened of asking questions. Indeed, I believe I am the only man in England
who would know what you mean; and since I know, I will answer your question
briefly by saying that we are very well off as politics, – because we have none. If you
ever make a book out of this conversation, put this in a chapter by itself, after the
model of old Horrebow’s Snakes in Iceland’.
‘I will’, said I. 23
In the London of the twenty-second century the former Houses of Parliament
have become literally, instead of metaphorically, a dung-market. Civil and criminal
law have disappeared, since ‘private property being abolished, all the laws and all
the legal “crimes” which it had manufactured of course came to an end’. Decisionmaking
is consensual and by means of direct democracy. If there is disagreement at
the ‘meeting of neighbours, or Mote’, a decision is postponed until the next Mote:
when the Mote comes together again there is a regular discussion and at last a vote by
show of hands. If the division is a close one, the question is again put off for further
discussion; if the division is a wide one, the minority are asked if they will yield to
21 May Morris (ed.), The Collected Works of William Morris (London: Longmans, Green, 24 vols.,
1910–15) [hereafter CWWM], XVI, p. 211. Cf. John Goode, ‘William Morris and the Dream of
Revolution’, in John Lucas (ed.), Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen,
1975 edn), pp. 246, 273. See Morris’s review of Looking Backward, reprinted in Morris, Political
Writings, pp. 419–25, and also CWWM, XVI, p. xxviii.
22 Raimund Schäffner, Anarchismus und Literatur in England: Von der Französischen Revolution bis zum
Ersten Weltkrieg (Heidelberg: Universitätverlag C. Winter, 1997), p. 278; Woodcock, Anarchism,
p. 372; George Woodcock (ed.), The Anarchist Reader (Glasgow: Fontana Paperbacks, 1977), pp.
377–8; Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (London: HarperCollins,
1992), p. 173.
23 CWWM, XVI, p. 85.