William Morris and life on the other side of automation

News from Nowhere is a glorious bit of pastoral utopian speculative fiction written by William Morris to show what an ideal world under socialism might look like. This is Morris’s take on the now classic demand that if you’re going to find fault with the world as it is, you should be prepared to propose an alternative – News from Nowhere is the idyllic socialist answer to late-19^th century critiques of industrial capitalism.

In News from Nowhere, a socialist from 19^th century London wakes up decades later, geographically in the same place he went to bed, but in a world he doesn’t recognize. He is initially awed by the fact that these future Londoners have no use for money, do tasks for the pleasure of doing them, and have a society in which everyone is apparently equal (mostly, given that it still carries some very Victorian values about the distinct qualities of men and women, and the protagonist is a bit of a letch). The world is more beautiful and calm than the one he left, with more time for leisure, and with less exploitation of natural resources. People harvest and make what is needed to support the community, and do work not only because it is needed, but because it is stimulating, enjoyable, and nourishing. Morris, as a leading light of his time in the decorative arts (what we would now call design) goes all out on the descriptions of places, people and things. Because the book is set in a post-war (like, really post-war, as is there is no longer any war being waged) pastoral utopia, what conflict there is in the plot is mostly minor and relates to personal relationships.

The characters in Morris's socialist utopia are still people, still engaged in the sorts of gentle interpersonal conflicts that happen even in the nicest places, but they are not beaten down by a lack of moral clarity. They are not tortured geniuses, but content humans going for a row on the river, or travelling to somewhere more rural to take part in the hay harvest. Important to Morris’s vision, they are people who are doing the things they do not because there is a profit in it, and not because a boss forces them to, but because they see the intrinsic value in the tasks – whether that value is in the pleasure of the task, or its contribution to community goals. This emphasis not only on the value of the task itself, but also on the value the task has for the well-being of the community is one of the key points of the book.

Speculate to de-accumulate

The joy of far-future utopian science fiction is that it can present your own facts of life back to you as something about which people ought to be incredulous. News from Nowhere is a parable about the harms of capitalism in the Morris's time. So, he duly puts an explanation of a profit- and production-driven world into the mouth of a character with an interest in the long-ago history of how things were before the revolution:

It is clear from all that we hear and read, that in the last age of civilisation men had got into a vicious circle in the matter of production of wares.  They had reached a wonderful facility of production, and in order to make the most of that facility they had gradually created (or allowed to grow, rather) a most elaborate system of buying and selling, which has been called the World-Market; and that World-Market, once set a-going, forced them to go on making more and more of these wares, whether they needed them or not.  So that while (of course) they could not free themselves from the toil of making real necessaries, they created in a never-ending series sham or artificial necessaries, which became, under the iron rule of the aforesaid World-Market, of equal importance to them with the real necessaries which supported life.  By all this they burdened themselves with a prodigious mass of work merely for the sake of keeping their wretched system going.

Morris is describing the state of affairs at the end of the 19^th century, but the situation hasn’t really changed much in the intervening hundred-odd years. A growth-first mindset and economic system mean that there is a frantic need to do more, make more, earn more, be bigger. Technologies which could save labour are harnessed not to make life nicer or easier for people who work for a living, but to create greater efficiencies and more value for shareholders.

In the beautiful and calm England of News from Nowhere, the system of brutal inequality has ended in war and revolution, followed by a gradual societal move towards equality and fellowship. We enter that world when it is well under-way, norms and practices well-established, and with nearly everyone we meet simply accepting that things are good as they are, and that the world is running on much better lines than it used to.

Life after automation

While the bulk of the book details the wonders of the new world, we conveniently meet a couple of elderly men who fancy themselves historians. They, unlike most others in the easy-going and pleasant society, have an academic interest in the before-world. We met one before, telling the story of the world-market. As our protagonist's journey continues, we meet another who is able to conveniently explain how craft was regained.

But, what was more interesting to us, he had detailed record of the period of the change to the present state of things, and told us a great deal about it, and especially of that exodus of the people from the town to the country, and the gradual recovery by the town-bred people on one side, and the country-bred people on the other, of those arts of life which they had each lost; which loss, as he told us, had at one time gone so far that not only was it impossible to find a carpenter or a smith in a village or small country town, but that people in such places had even forgotten how to bake bread, and that at Wallingford, for instance, the bread came down with the newspapers by an early train from London, worked in some way, the explanation of which I could not understand. He told us also that the townspeople who came into the country used to pick up the agricultural arts by carefully watching the way in which the machines worked, gathering an idea of handicraft from machinery; because at that time almost everything in and about the fields was done by elaborate machines used quite unintelligently by the labourers.  On the other hand, the old men amongst the labourers managed to teach the younger ones gradually a little artizanship, such as the use of the saw and the plane, the work of the smithy, and so forth; for once more, by that time it was as much as—or rather, more than—a man could do to fix an ash pole to a rake by handiwork; so that it would take a machine worth a thousand pounds, a group of workmen, and half a day’s travelling, to do five shillings’ worth of work.

It's amazing how tidily Morris manages to encapsulate the contradictions of capital-intensive automation. The idea that work which, at one point, could be done by individuals, had been mechanized in such a way that it required an expensive machine and a troupe of labourers to do, becoming only efficient when used at a large scale, describes not only the mass production system of industrialization, but increasingly what we see today in the automation of creative tasks.

What, then, does life after automation look like in Morris's utopia? The move towards a craft-based existence, we're told, came from several directions: the recognition that alienation of humans from nature is untenable; the recognition that inequality in society is bad for everyone, not just those who are oppressed, but also their oppressors; the understanding that machines cannot make art, and art is one of life's essentials. This last one is very much Morris writing with the values of the Arts and Crafts movement in mind, but also holds relevance now. Placing ease and abundance above value, skill, and effort eventually impoverishes everyone. Losing our skills, whether we voluntarily give them up or have them taken away, places all the power in the hands of those who own the machines.