Kevin's Reviews > News from Nowhere

1890’s Communist Utopia…

Preamble:
--Published 7 years after the passing of Marx (and 6 years before the author’s own passing), this novel by a cultural icon (esp. in poetry) of Victorian Britain is an important work to check off in my meandering tour through utopian novels:
i) Socialist/anarcho-syndicalist (with details on economy): Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present (2020)
ii) Feminist: Second-Wave (which I contrast with First-Wave) in Woman on the Edge of Time (1976); Fourth-Wave in Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (2022)
iii) Ecological: Ecotopia: A Novel (1976)

Highlights:

--I’ll let the literary critics bicker about the fictional merits. Sure, the story-telling was not gripping, but I’m here to unpack the nonfiction ideas…

1) Idealism vs. Materialism:
--I’m currently much stricter on the importance of a historical materialist lens when it comes to non-fiction, which I unpack in reviewing the messy The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.
--With fiction, my standards plummet. There just seems to be a lack of rigorous (i.e. materialist) scholars who can write stories. The best compromise I can think of is in critical/materialist anthropology, which combines rigorous scholarship with story-telling (from its cultural analysis). Researching real-world communities living (and thriving) in material conditions that promote egalitarianism, sounds like compelling utopias (see the Dawn of Everything review for a reading list)…
--The article “William Morris. A Vindication” on Marxist.org contrasts:
a) this “utopian romance” set in the future where the State has withered away (“communism”; thus, very different material conditions, and not a treatise for current material conditions/strategies), vs.
b) Morris’ real-life activism as sufficiently materialist/revolutionary, so not to be dismissed as a “Utopian Socialist” politically lacking revolutionary rigour (see Engel’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific).
…My approach aligns with this in a roundabout way (I’m also less zealous with critiquing Morris’ real-life activism given how much more work it is for me to re-construct his context).

2) Class/Capitalism:
--Impressed to see this critique of dualism, which central to today’s decolonization and ecological studies today (Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World):

“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them.”

--How can we not applaud such a mainstream cultural figure in the warring continent of Europe popularizing class analysis/struggle/solidarity and condemning nationalism, which will once again tear up Europe (and eventually the world) in the decades after the author’s passing:

(H.) This is true; and we may admit that the pretensions of the government to defend the poor (i.e., the useful) people against other countries come to nothing. But that is but natural; for we have seen already that it was the function of government to protect the rich against the poor. But did not the government defend its rich men against other nations?

(I) I do not remember to have heard that the rich needed defence; because it is said that even when two nations were at war, the rich men of each nation gambled with each other pretty much as usual, and even sold each other weapons wherewith to kill their own countrymen.

…also see: War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier
--There are also elegant passages on state capitalism, recognizing that capitalism has always required the state to protect capitalist property rights.
--Morris does his best to popularize Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, colloquially describing the colossal machine of capitalism squeezing labour to churn out more commodities for the sake of profit (“sham or artificial necessaries” rather than “real necessaries”):

[…] the ceaseless endeavour to expend the least possible amount of labour on any article made, and yet at the same time to make as many articles as possible. To this ‘cheapening of production’, as it was called, everything was sacrificed: the happiness of the workman at his work, nay, his most elementary comfort and bare health, his food, his clothes, his dwelling, his leisure, his amusement, his education—his life, in short—did not weigh a grain of sand in the balance against this dire necessity of ‘cheap production’ of things, a great part of which were not worth producing at all. […] even rich and powerful men, the masters of the poor devils aforesaid, submitted to live amidst sights and sounds and smells which it is in the very nature of man to abhor and flee from, in order that their riches might bolster up this supreme folly. The whole community, in fact, was cast into the jaws of this ravening monster, ‘the cheap production’ forced upon it by the World-Market.

--On incentives for work, I wonder if Morris had Marx’s critique of Fourier in mind here as he praised Fourier:

“Well, but,” said I, “the man of the nineteenth century would say there is a natural desire towards the procreation of children, and a natural desire not to work.”

“Yes, yes,” said he, “I know the ancient platitude,—wholly untrue; indeed, to us quite meaningless. Fourier, whom all men laughed at, understood the matter better. […] Because it implies that all work is suffering, and we are so far from thinking that, that, as you may have noticed, whereas we are not short of wealth, there is a kind of fear growing up amongst us that we shall one day be short of work. It is a pleasure which we are afraid of losing, not a pain.”

--Similarly, on education, there’s no more need to enforce schooling to survive a life of wage labour struggle; children are open to imitate with information available when they seek it. Once again, not much details but the direction is appreciated.
--While the novel is limited on the “how?” regarding transition, it does mention:
i) a “piecemeal” “State Socialism” phase that was ineffective at counterbalancing capitalists, but eventually provided workers with experience at labour organization that spread to basically all of wage labour (a true proletariat class)
ii) leading to a revolution (this book only specifically mentions England). This follows The Communist Manifesto (1848) in assuming that socialist revolutions will be led by countries with the most advanced capitalist production, i.e. Western Europe. So, it makes sense Morris warns against nationalism (which in Europe’s case casts an imperialist shadow over the rest of the world: Discourse on Colonialism), as the promise of revolution devolves into nationalist/imperialist rivalries of WWI/WWII.
iii) civil war against reactionary forces.

…see comments below for rest of the review…