William Morris

The name of the new world we aim for

The newspaper of the Owenites, the biggest socialist trend in Britain in the early 19th century, was titled The New Moral World . The weekly journal of the German Social Democratic Party in its great days was called New Times ; Antonio Gramsci’s paper in Turin after World War One, The New Order , after a one-off special, The Future City . Karl Marx was sceptical of blueprints. “The working class... have no ready-made utopias to introduce by decree... They have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant”...

Why socialism?

The word “socialism” has been used by all sorts of people to mean all sorts of things. Like “democracy”. That’s really because (like democracy) socialism is such a good idea that all sorts of political tricksters and frauds have wanted to lay claim to it. William Morris was famous as a designer, but also an active socialist. Over 130 years ago, at the time when socialism was first becoming a stable and organised movement, he summed up how he understood it. “What I mean by socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor servant, neither...

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