Anarchism, Individualism and Communism: William Morris’s Critique of Anarcho-communism

Abstract

William Morris’s commitment to revolutionary socialism is now well established, but the nature of his politics, specifically his relationship to Marxism and anarchist thought, is still contested. Perhaps, as Mark Bevir has argued, the ideological label pinned to Morris’s socialism is of ‘little importance’ for as long as his political thought is described adequately. Nevertheless, the starting point for this essay is that thinking about the application of ideological descriptors is a useful exercise and one which sheds important light on Morris’s socialism and the process of ideological formation in the late nineteenth-century socialist movement. Bevir is surely right when he says that ‘ideologies are not mutually exclusive, reified entities’ but ‘overlapping traditions with ill-defined boundaries’.¹ Yet the struggle to reify these boundaries in a messy political world is a dominant feature in the history of the Left and one in which Morris was not afraid to engage. Indeed, towards the end of his life he made a concerted attempt to draw an ideological boundary between his preferred form of revolutionary socialism and anarchism. This not only makes him an interesting subject for the analysis of Marxist—anarchist relations, it also raises questions about the adequacy of the familiar charge that anarchism is both inherently individualistic and, as a consequence, ill-equipped to develop a coherent approach to democratic decision-making.