WILLIAM MORRIS, E. P. THOMPSON AND THE THIRD WAY
Peter Cadogan
Lecture to the Ethical Society, 25 October 1998
We need a theory as a means of getting the past, present and future to hang together, to have intelligible meaning. Without it we shall be the victim of someone else's theory. If the twentieth century has taught us anything it has surely taught us that. We have had to endure Communism, Fascism, Naziism, Nationalism, Totalitarianism, Monetarism, Militarism and Thatcherism. We have been asked to choose between a free market and state control (through nationalisation and the welfare-state.) We have had both and look where they got us! Is there a third way? It is plainly a good question, a necessary question. In launching it on public opinion Bill Clinton and Tony Blair have done us a service. Whatever they make of it is up to them, whatever we make of it is up to us. Bad mouthing 'the third way', already a common practice on the Left, just throws away an invaluable opportunity.
We live in a land of victims cowed into silence and inaction by the disasters listed above. Back in November 1979 Edward Thompson gave it acute expression: The freeborn Briton has been bred out of the strain and the stillborn Britperson has been bred in. An operation has been done on our culture and the guts have been taken out. That calls to mind the last words of Winston in Orwell's 1984: 'And he loved Big Brother.' But there was worse to come:
`I doubt whether we can pass our liberties on and I am not confident that there will be a posterity to enjoy them. I am full of doubt. All I can say is, since we have had the kind of history that we have had, it would be contemptible in us not to play out our old roles to the end.' Writing by Candlelight
Like Bertrand Russell in 1960, he saw nuclear war ahead, and no way out. We could but go down gallantly. But within a month everything was changed. Circumstances do indeed alter cases! It was December 1979, the month that the western powers launched their Cruise and Pershing programme in response to the Soviet's SS21s. Edward rose phoenix-like from his own ashes and for six years blazed in the political firmament in a brilliant denunciation of both sides in the cold war. It was difficult to say who hated and feared him most -the CIA or the KGB! With Ken Coates and others he set up END (European Nuclear Disarmament) and called upon the people of Europe to rise against both super-powers. And soon the women of Greenham Common underwrote the same message. It went round the world. It was the Third Way of the 1980s.
From the Deed to the Word
By 1986 the job was done and he was personally burnt out. In December of that year he spoke to a packed valedictory meeting in St. James, Piccadilly. I took notes. He said, 'Since 1980 1 have spoken at 600 meetings and written thousands of words. 1 am exhausted and going back to the study to take up the writing 1 had to stop in December 1979.'
Shortly afterwards we went to India, where his father and mother had met and where the family had deep roots. There, unhappily, he caught the infection that was eventually to kill him. But that is to anticipate. His ultimate chapter was to be as at in words as his penultimate chapter had been in deeds. Of the three books he finished between 1986 and 1993 (the year of his death) most important, for present purposes, was his book on William Blake: Witness against the Beast. For Blake, as for Thompson, 'the beast' was the State, the Church, dogmatist, the authoritarian, the priestly arbiter of morality, the shallow materialist who misread the poetic genius of humanity. On his last page he sounds third way note that was missing in 1979:
Blake's vision had not been into the rational government of man, but into liberation of an unrealised potential, an alternative nature within man a nature masked by circumstances, repressed by the Moral Law, concealed by mystery and self-defeated by the other nature of self-love. Or, as Geoffrey Ashe put it many years ago, Blake's philosophy and vision is out living differently; and political and economic changes will only have real stance to the extent to which they serve that goal. For as Blake put it:
Man is made for joy and woe, And when that you rightly know Then through life you safely go.
The unofficial third way goes back for centuries, but to be fair to Mr Blair what is....
The Third Way -Official?
Tony Blair's own essay, a key text, The Third Way, was published by the Fabian Society in September 1998. It opens:
`I have always believed that politics is first and foremost about ideas. Without powerful commitment to goals and values governments are rudderless and effective, however large their majorities. Furthermore ideas need labels if they to become popular and widely understood. The Third Way is to my mind the label for the new politics which the progressive centre left is forging in Britain and beyond.'
So far so good. What are the goals, ideas and values? The Third Way 'is passionate in its commitment to social justice'; it is 'flexible, innovative and forward looking'; 'its values include democracy, liberty, justice, mutual obligation internationalism'; it is 'beyond an Old Left and a New Right'. It reconciles things? previously thought to be antagonistic: 'patriotism and internationalism, rights responsibilities, private enterprise and a public political attack on poverty and discrimination.' It unites two great streams of left-centre thought: democratic socialism and liberalism.
He then lists four values (1) The equal worth of each individual (2) The widest possible spread of wealth, power and opportunity (3) Responsibility for the environment, including the human environment (4) The communities to which we belong.
But then he adds something ominous: 'freedom for the many requires strong government - a large measure of pragmatism is essential.' Oh! Just what does that mean?
Then comes a test. For years now Tony Blair has taken the 1945-51 Attlee government as his model. In The Third Way he does it again. It was all before his time, but some of us lived through those days and remember. The Attlee Government:
• put all its money on an American alliance and turned its back on Europe.
• resolved on the hopeless venture of restoring the Empire; and put the French Empire back in Vietnam with appalling results.
• decided to make atomic/nuclear weapons without the sanction of Parliament, the Labour Party or the electorate.
• Perverted scientific research and development for military purposes for 50 years.
• Poured all Marshall Aid into the bottomless pit of the Treasury.
• based the future on borrowing -the US and Canadian loans of 1945.
• took a sellers' market for granted and did not try to update our industries.
• had no intelligent answer to the Cold War when it broke into the open in 1948.
• had no political or economic philosophy of its own and just did what it was told by the Treasury, the Foreign Office and the MoD, with disastrous results.
By 1951 it was glad to go. It had 'run out of ideas', so it was said. This was hardly true since it didn't have any ideas in the first place. The 1945/51 performance was pathetic and profoundly disappointing to my ex-Service generation. The huge goodwill and euphoria of 1945 was thrown away. Most of our present disasters can be traced to those days. If Tony Blair can read history as badly as that it is an ill omen for his third way -but it should not put us off from locating our alternative.
How can Tony Blair, a most able man, make such an appalling mistake? There is no secret about it. All politicians make the same mistake. They accept the system as god-given. Their first commandment is this: 'Thou shalt not doubt the Immaculate Trinity: Westminster, Whitehall and the Party System. Before these thou shalt bow down'. No one breaks ranks, not Tony Benn, not Ken Livingstone nor the late Enoch Powell. All thinking, all action has to be within The System.
All systems, even the best, break down eventually. Today we are witnessing the slow eclipse of the nation-state. The Tudors created it, Cromwell reinforced it, Bentharn rewrote it, the Webbs endorsed it -now it is falling apart. For that we can thank the departure of empire, the rise of the multi-national company, the UN, the EU, the end of the Cold War, the globalism of Information Technology, the rise of the regions, the out-dating of great-power warfare and the impending break-up of the UK at the end of the English Empire (over Ireland, Wales and Scotland).
All this has happened but our political constitution remains stolidly in the nineteenth century and is wholly unsuited to the requirements of the twenty-first. Political parties were born of the three Reform Acts of 1832, 1867 and 1884. They served their purpose well. The decay began in 1889 with the Great Dock Strike. We have Peter Kropotkin's word for that. He was there. The strike was a huge success -the dockers got their tanner, the unionisation of the unskilled took off. Politicisation of the movement began with the ILP of 1893 and the Labour Party of 1900. There were jobs, careers, in unionism and politics. The payment of MPs soon followed. The descent had begun. 'Me long arm of money had found its next victim.
A political party today is a company. You are recruited. You rise from the ranks. You do what you are told and you are suitably rewarded. If you question company policy you can expect to be fired. It is a matter of power and pelf. principle? Watch your language!
Gordon Brown, in an unguarded but honest moment, has questioned the whole system. Tony Blair and all his colleagues turn to focus groups (not constituencies wards) when it comes to policy. When it comes to hard practice they know that things have moved on. The writing on the wall in Scotland has been read. Blair's performance in Belfast last Easter Week was brilliant. Now we are promised Executive Mayors. Good! We may even catch up with European regionalism. Germany has sixteen Prime Ministers and one Chancellor. Why are we so slow?
And yet in high places there is still a fearful 'pull-up-the-drawbridge' mentality. Leaders are afraid to let anything go, in case everything goes. Whips rule. means that the situation is likely to get much worse before it gets much better. The age of the representative (MP or local Councillor) is fading as the age of the volunteer? and the partnership dawns. It promises a new kind of democracy, a different decentralised system.
Remember Gorbachov in 1985? He thought he could reform the system and the Party and the Soviet State. But they had failed for over seventy years. They were discredited and had to go - and he went with them. There is a lesson there, somewhere. But deep change means extensive and searching homework. We have used to not using our brains politically. That has now to change.
Roots of Living Differently.
Fittingly they go back a long way. I shall rest with recorded history. Deep down in country, throughout continental Europe, in the Middle East and the Americas is a tradition of great moment. It has no church and no political party. It has various names: Gnosticism, Antinomianism, The Inner Light, Jerusalem. The Gnostics date back to the very beginning of Christianity, before Rome had established its monopoly of the faith in the West. They believed that there were two Gods: the ultimate God who is 'the father' and a lesser God 'the Derniurge' a fallible who made a fallible world. The true believer had access to 'free grace' by of a direct relationship with the Father. Priests are redundant. Authority thus with the individual, not with any church. So, the gnostic Gospel of Phillip:
You saw the spirit, you became the spirit. You saw the Father, you shall became the Father. You see yourself and what you see you shall become. Whoever achieves gnosis becomes no longer a Christian, but the Christ.
And then again from the gnostic Gospel of Thomas:
If you bring forth what is in you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is in you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
No wonder that to this day gnosticism is regarded as the ultimate heresy by all established hierarchical churches. It is a Third Way beyond Catholicism and Dissent.Superimpose that on immensely powerful and persistent folk-pagan traditions of egalitarian substance and we are looking at a great human reserve without a name.
From the first century to the present day the Gnostics have been persecuted crushed by both ecclesiastical and secular officialdom -from Upper Egypt to Bulgaria, from Bosnia to Southern Italy, to the South of France and the Albigensian Crusades against them. In England the tradition surfaces as the Lollards, the Anabaptists, The Family of Love, the Diggers, the Universalists and the early Quakers. It appears in sects like that of the Muggletonians. In face of persecution it tends to take refuge in secrecy, but is ever-recurring.
In the C19 it turns secular and political with the Fourierists, the Owenites, the pre-Raphaelites, the Quaker-Unitarian revival before 1834, the South Place Ethical Society (1793), Morris's Socialist League -always a return to the source, without being over-specific about what 'the source' is. It has something to do with conscience and the 'inner light'. It latched on to the word 'socialism' and was let down by it. It related to the spiritual and intellectual ferment of 1883 and 1889 and of 1956/68.
Enter William Morris:-
Ned, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, was William Morris's life-long friend. He has left us the most remarkable picture of Morris:
When I first knew Morris nothing would content him but being a monk and getting to Rome, and then he must be an architect and apprenticed himself to Street and worked for two years, but when I came to London and began to paint he threw it all up and must paint too, and then he must give it up and make poems, and them he must give it up and make window hangings and pretty things, and when he had achieved that he must be a poet again and then after two or three years of Earthly Paradise time he must learn dyeing and lived in a vat and learned weaving and knew all about looms and then made more books and learned tapestry and then to smash everything up and begin the world anew, and now it is printing he cares for and to make wonderful rich-looking books -and all things he does splendidly -and if he lives printing will have an end -but not, I hope, before Chaucer and Morte d'Arthur are done; then he'll do I don It know what, but every minute will be alive.
That is what Morris wanted for all human kind: 'for every minute to be alive'. That is the heart of the third way; it is wholly human, post-political. If he was a hundred years ahead of his time, then this insight has the deepest implications for us today. He had no time for party politics of any kind or for mere representative democracy. He was for the self-governing community, fraternities of craftsmen and women, Orders of Chivalry & monasticism, Saxon moots, collegiate government, direct democracy. But like Bernard Shaw he had read Marx's Capital in French. It was this that in 1883/4 led him to join Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation, call himself both a Socialist and a Communist and then break away to start The Socialist League with its paper Commonweal. His deepest concern was, he said, for liberty and justice and his favourite slogan was: 'Agitate! Educate! Organise!' His devotion to his new cause was extraordinary. He never did anything by halves.
Recent years have seen two massive biographies, that by Edward Thompson in 1955 and the other by Fiona McCarthy in 1994. The Bume-Jones quotation comes from the second volume. The Thompson date of 1955 is important. It was one year before the annus mirabilis of 1956 when Khruschev's revelation of the truth about Stalin and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution led to an internal explosion in the Communist Party world-wide that was eventually to lead to its demise in 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. From 1946 to 1956 he was an active founder-member of the Party's Historians Group (with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and many others including myself). in 1956 he led the breakaway against Stalinism in the CPGB through his publications The Reasoner and the New Reasoner.
When he was writing his William Morris Edward was a loyal, apparently orthodox, party member. Inevitably he tended to play down Morris's deeply anarchic, antinomian sympathies and make more of his marxist predilections. Three's later, in 1958, he was invited to speak to The William Morris Society on the subject of The Communism of William Morris. The publication of the paper was delayed until 1965.
Speaking of the differences between Morris and Engels he said: 'I was less honest in my appraisal of the difference in outlook which divided them.' He her presents a very different re-appraisal of Morris himself. He quotes Morris:
We are living in an epoch where there is combat between commercialism or system of reckless waste and communism, or the system of neighbourly common sense. (My stress [PC.]) I found that the causes of the vulgarities of civilisation lay deeper then I thought, and little by little I was driven to the conclusion that all these uglinesses are but the outward expression of the innate moral baseness into which we are forced by our present form of society...'
At the end of the day Morris reverted to plain English and dropped the ideological labels in favour of True and False Society as indicated above. Thompson summarises: 'In True Society, the unit of administration must be small enough for every citizen to feel a personal responsibility. The community of Communism must an organic growth of mutual obligations, of personal and social bonds, arising m a condition of practical equality. And between False and True Society there lay a 'river of fire', the Revolution. We cannot shuffle off the business of life onto shoulders of an abstraction called the State.'
And again:
'Morris was a great moralist, a great moral teacher, one of our greatest men because he was a great revolutionary, a man working for practical revolution. It is which brings the whole man together. It is this which will make his reputation as the years advance.'
In taking his ultimate stand on the individual-in-community Morris was echoing Blake's 'brotherhood is religion' and, like Blake, he saw mutual forgiveness he final test. Incredibly, he not only forgave his wife's lovers -Rossetti and Blunt t included them among his closest friends
What is the New Imperative?
Given that (a) the gnostic, antinomian, holistic solution is the authentic third way (b) It needs to find a feasible political form and (c) the virtue of the Blair initiative at it opens this open-ended debate that does not need to accept the constraints of Westminster, Whitehall and party politics -what might be both the heart and the form of the matter now?
The essential clue is deceptively simple. It lies in the feminist slogan of the seventies: 'The personal is political.' When I first heard that 1 felt completely baffled by it. What on earth did it mean? The answer is that it means just what it says. We are not numbers consumers voters clients, buyers or sellers, taxpayers or subjects. We are human beings, individuals with hearts and heads, hopes and fears, feelings and relationships. It is these that are important, critical, and we need a social and political system that provides for them at every level in society.
Civilisation itself is fundamentally flawed. It is based on exploitation, coercion and war. It also has its positive side in the domains of the spiritual, artistic, science and philosophy, but the flaw remains. The Army is the State and money is God. The many have always been the victims of the few. And to be a victim is to be denied the fruits of the personal. To attain the personal is to transcend civilisation itself. As Ned said of Topsy (Morris's nickname) 'every minute will be alive.' The new imperative is to move into post-civilised society, to leave the impersonal behind us.
The challenge is to structure the personal-political. It is not difficult because the elements are all round us, commonplace. What is new is to recognise that they constitute an alternative politics. The power of custom militates massively against any such recognition. People are deeply stuck with Westminster, with constituencies, wards and political parties. That is politics. It was politics! There are four new units that, together, provide a new political base that is different in kind.
Firstly there is the single-figure group whose essential feature is that its size rules out hierarchy. Everything is face-to-face. Doing things together is the norm. We are all familiar with groups from quartets to octets. They may have pecking orders related to different talents, but that is one of nature's assets. The group can expand into modest double figures but there is a danger area -instant communication starts to break down -that has to be watched. The single-figure group is the base of all else. It includes the family. It is a synonym for the team. During the last war this country was run in spectacular fashion by a War Cabinet of five. Personal interaction is both dynamic and conducive to instant decision-making. Philosophy reverts to its original character, the love of wisdom in action.
Secondly, for millions of pre-civilised years we lived in hunter-gatherer groups of fifty, half being children. We are genetically programmed accordingly. There were no military or priestly castes, no inherited rank, no inscribed Law. Custom ruled. It was a static society, but holistic and classless. Its folk-memory gave rise to antinomianism -the rejection of Nomos or the Law, the assertion of liberty and justice, the secular sequel to gnosis. The fifty bracket survives all round us in the neighbourhood, the small company, the voluntary society, the sect, the village. The personal element remains but in the dangerous context of the self-centredness born of competitive materialist society. The threat of hierarchy and of petty empire-building is the inevitable concomitant of augmented size. The agency of correction is that of the small group experience.
Thirdly, and decisively from the political point of view, there is the community. We need to be very particular in defining it, for as Morris and Thompson point out, it is the heart of the Third Way. A community is an aggregation of people in a given geographical area who are substantially self-sufficient. Ibis means that they have their own High Street or its equivalent with nearly all the shops, services and cultural facilities they need. If a Town Hall or College of Further Education is missing then that is a deficient community in need of remedy. Until 1835 and the abolition of all Town Charters save that of London, we had Town Meetings requisitioned by the citizens and presided over by the Mayor. Those meetings survive in Vermont in the USA and there is, today, a move back to them in the guise of community Forums. Governors and governed meet face-to-face, the personal touch sustained. Community sizes vary within the 10/30,000 bracket.
Fourthly and lastly there is the city-region, the product of the industrial revolution, the successor to the county except in certain rural areas where the shires retain their historic position. The city-region is simply a fact of life, an amalgam made necessary by virtue of industry, trade, communication, transport. By and large it takes a city-region to sustain a University. It can pass the test of the personal if it adequate powers (like those of the Prime Ministers of the 16 German regions) is internally decentralised by relating closely to the three smaller social and political dimensions listed above. The city-region is our next great constitutional -experiment, an idea with a great future. The Greater London Authority is its test bench.
Under this dispensation what will be left of London's powers, Westminster's Whitehall's, as the leadership of a nation-state? We shall need a Britannic federation, a Council of the Isles, whereby England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, all presumably regionalised, will do together all those things that they cannot do apart. British Empire has gone, the English Empire (over the rest of the British Isles) yet to go. Then we shall all be free.
That leaves the European Union, its creation and recreation, so that it matches greatness of its classical inheritance, of Christendom, the Renaissance and ,subsequent scientific, social and cultural revolutions, now that it has transcended its curseses i.e. international war within and huge empires without. Both are now behind It is this, no less, that makes a third way possible. It is an entirely new circumstance.
Last Word Rests with Thompson:
Thompson clinched the legacy he left us with his last truly remarkable book: Witness; Against the Beast, a study of William Blake and the antinomian tradition. It presupposes some detailed knowledge of Blake's own work, his life and times, and of the preceding English Revolution of the 1640s. It also says something very important about the author himself. He had given his life to 'the cause' and called it socialism, communism in the marxist tradition. He could never bring himself, formally and self-consciously, to renounce it. He kept his Party card (the Labour ~ card) to the end, even though he had no time for it. But it is, after all, the deed counts and Witness Against the Beast was his deed. In it he rediscovers the knowledge of the human spirit and leaves all else behind.
Thus Thompson:
Blake's unique image of Christ, simultaneously humanist and antinomian [`Jesus was all virtue and acted from impulse, not rules') could be, in the available Philosophy, derived only from the inspiration of a 'madman'. It is exactly the absence of such an affirmative in the complacent doctrine of 'benevolence' to be found in the Godwinian circle which alienated Wordsworth and Coleridge. One it add that these affirmatives cannot easily be derived from materialist thought today. That is why every realisation of these values (such as Blake`s) is a plank in the floor upon which the future must walk.
November 1998
|