SPOKESMAN BOOKS
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Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation
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Catalogue
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Haditha Ethics - From Iraq to Iran?
The Spokesman, 91
Reviews
Phil
Katz, Thinking
Hands: The Power of Labour in William Morris,
Jan
Marsh, William
Morris and Red House,
National Trust, 160 pages, £25
‘William
Morris had an abundance of ideas that were a constant challenge to workers in
the Nineteenth Century and remain so for the Twenty-first.’
This
is the thesis advanced by Phil Katz, in a book which is a celebration of
Morris, and at the same time an affirmation of hopes which do not die, in
spite of all the onslaughts of external capital.
‘Useful
work’ was the credo that Morris gave to a Labour movement which was
increasingly being shaped by people who were labelled as ‘unskilled’. Katz
tells us that ‘Morris saw a need to bring the skills of both brain and hand
to the work’. He believed ‘that everyone could acquire a range of crafts
and that they should seek out work best suited to their talents, rather than
let work define them’.
Today,
useful work is harder and harder to find. Legions of wage slaves toil in call
centres designed to foist unwanted consumer objects or services on reluctant
targets, whose leisure and privacy are violated in the process.
Katz
shows us how neatly complementary are the views of Morris and Marx.
‘The
worker feels himself only when he is not working: when he is working, he does
not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when
he is working. His labour is, therefore, not voluntary but forced. Its alien
character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical or
other compulsion exists, it is shunned like the Plague.’
Phil
Katz does not simply juxtapose thoughts from Marx and Morris: but he strikes
sparks from them to invite us to develop their dialectic. The old Institute
for Workers’ Control wrote on its banner a celebrated dictum of Morris’s:
‘No man is good enough to be another man’s master.’
Katz
invites us to go beyond this in exploring how new generations can learn new
approaches to work and skill, industry and technology, politics and trade
unionism.
Thinking
Hands invites
us to explore the thought of William Morris as a guide to Twenty-first Century
thinking.
Now
William Morris is comfortably installed in the National Trust, which has
recently bought Red House, or to be more strictly accurate, found a benefactor
who has bought it for them. Volunteers enabled the house to be opened to the
public, so that nearly twenty thousand visitors came in April 2003.
Now
Jan Marsh has told the story of the only house that was built for William
Morris by his friend, Philip Webb. The house had to live up to some very
demanding specifications: more, it could not be furnished without the
establishment of a specialist design company (Morris and Co.) which could
produce fit appurtenances to grace it.
Working
from the top, the ceilings came first. Each had a pattern pricked into the
damp plaster as a template for repeat painting. Morris himself, with Janey,
worked on this: they vary from simple stripes to an elaborate series of arcs
resembling peacock feathers. Working down, the scope expanded for murals,
designs and embroidered hangings. In short, there was a great deal for the
design firm of Morris and Co. to do. All this is profusely illustrated in Jan
Marsh’s impressive book.
A
delight for the eye, this book will give its readers some remarkable insights
into the practical skills of our greatest Communist artist-designer.
David
James
