Where Are We Now?

Abstract

This concluding chapter addresses Morris’s reflections on the nature of work in capitalist society and the possibility of pleasurable, non-alienated labour with reference to the socialist movement’s struggle to limit the working day. Morris’s maximalism and his resolute refusal to countenance palliative reforms remains provocative and strategically stimulating in a twenty-first century context of widespread precarity and renewed capitalist crisis. This is a feature of Morris’s utopianism that has distinctly presentist resonance. Examining the conflicting patterns of mechanical and organic metaphor that animate Morris’s political writings also illuminates a tension between a ‘romantic’ and ‘proto-modernist’ Morris. This chapter shows how Morris’s hostility to the instrumental rationality of Victorian capitalism went together with a willingness to countenance a politicised aesthetic instrumentality, oppositional and anti-capitalist in its ideological content, as well as being proto-modernist in its willingness to treat the mundane and the everyday as a site of intervention.