The nature of modern economies, and their ideological dimensions. The cultural challenges of capitalist economies and their “socialist” alternatives.

This article unpicks William Morris’s relationship to Marxism and the influence of Marxism on Morris’s social and political thought. It looks at Morris’s political activities in the 1880s and 1890s, including his membership of the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League and the Hammersmith Socialist Society, as well as his political speeches and journalism. Morris was clearly a socialist and described himself as a communist, had read and was influenced by Marx, and was also an active participant in socialist and Marxist debates both in Britain and Europe. But Marxism did not harden into an orthodoxy until the 1890s and has been contested ever since. It is thus very difficult to distinguish Marxist from other socialists in the period of Morris’s political engagement, as many themes were either shared or cut across this distinction. A key issue has been Morris’s utopianism, in particular News from Nowhere, written for the socialist paper Commonweal in 1890. Morris’s utopian method permeates his political essays: this is how it is, this is how it could/should be. This, perhaps, renders Morris more than Marxist, rather than less, in his insistence on keeping the vision of a better world active as an inspiration to political change.

This chapter opens by pointing to the popularity of utopian fantasies, or ‘prophetic romances’, at the fin-de-siècle, before exploring some of the possible socio-economic and political reasons for this situation, not the least of which was the impact of the Paris Commune on the late nineteenth-century anti-socialist imaginary. The chapter proceeds to an outline of the US journalist Edward Bellamy’s best-selling utopian fiction, Looking Backward (1888), undoubtedly the most influential of these publications on both sides of the Atlantic. In his review of this book, Morris offers a critique of Bellamy’s ‘temperament’ – which he suggests is typical of late nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology in so far as it is decidedly ‘modern’ – as ‘unhistoric and unartistic’. The chapter concludes, then, by claiming that the distinctiveness of Morris’s contribution both to the tradition of utopian fiction and to contemporaneous debates about socialism lies in his characteristic insistence on a future society that is historic, artistic and, finally, erotic.

This chapter examines the series of prose romances that William Morris wrote in the 1850s, 1880s and 1890s and that were rediscovered in the twentieth century by writers, editors and critics of fantasy. The first section, ‘Romance and Fantasy’, recovers the moment of Morris’s canonisation as the ‘inventor’ of imaginary-world fantasy and briefly considers his influence on J. R. R. Tolkien, before tracing fantasy’s roots back to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century definitions of the romance genre. The second and third sections, ‘The Romances of the 1890s and the Germanic Romances’ and ‘The Political Romances and the Romances of the 1850s’, provide an overview of the key formal and thematic characteristics of Morris’s texts, proceeding in reverse order from his final medievalist fantasies, via his socialist timeslip dream visions to the short-form romances of his student days. These sections highlight the variable significance of communalism at different stages of Morris’s writing career and introduce comparisons with contemporary works by Mark Twain and Edward Bellamy. The final section of the chapter offers a case study of The Story of the Glittering Plain (1890), focusing on the themes of mortality and kinship.

As an undergraduate Morris was enthralled to read the work of John Ruskin, especially The Stones of Venice (1851–53). This book would profoundly influence Morris’s thinking for the rest of his life. The Kelmscott Press would publish a chapter from it – ‘The Nature of Gothic’ – in 1892. Morris developed Ruskin’s argument that the Gothic craftsman of the Middle Ages achieved pleasure in his work as a result of creative freedom and collaborative effort denied him by the factory system of industrial capitalism. Although Ruskin’s values were deeply rooted in Toryism and Christian morality, Morris accommodated Ruskin’s ideas and simultaneously embraced socialism. In 1883, Morris told an audience in the hall of University College, Oxford that he was ‘a member of a socialist propaganda’. Ruskin, seated on the platform throughout the lecture, reportedly rose at the end to praise Morris as ‘the great conceiver and doer, the man at once a poet, an artist, and a workman, and his old and dear friend’. This chapter describes the nature of the relationship between Morris and Ruskin and considers the significance, extent and limitations of his influence.

This chapter explores the interplay between sex and socialism in the Soviet Union, Cold War Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, and Vietnam. It examines how sex was legislated, represented, and managed by the state, placing this analysis within the context of religious beliefs and cultural mores, Westernization and globalization, and generational change. Considering sexuality as both a procreative and a recreative practice, it demonstrates that concerns about regime consolidation, demographic growth, public health, and popular legitimacy, more so than commitment to gender and sexual equality or personal pleasure, shaped state approaches to sex. Yet while the state instrumentalized sex for the purpose of building socialism, some experts were genuinely devoted to enhancing citizens’ knowledge of sexual health and satisfaction, eschewing ideological concerns. Meanwhile, socialist regimes had to contend with traditional values and religious influences, which were often contrary to the modernizing impulses and progressive policies states hoped to institute, and, as socialism wore on, younger generations who supported liberalizing tendencies. They also had to contend with external forces, such as the opening to Western culture. Thus, state policies and representations of sexuality varied across time and space, affecting individuals in different ways.

Shanghai is often seen as the exemplar of Chinese cosmopolitan modernity, including gender and sexual progressiveness under Western influence. This chapter argues that Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism is also rooted in migration, activism, and state policies. The early reforms of patrilineage coincided with influxes of migrants and refugees, who constituted the majority of Shanghai’s urban population. As the hotspot for China’s industrialization, women’s economic empowerment and social activism occurred almost simultaneously. The semi-colonial status of Shanghai before 1949 that protected groups such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in extra-territorialities also made possible the survival of sexual minorities. These historical and social conditions created an urban environment that has made negotiations of the most intimate aspects of human life both possible and difficult. Shanghai as the pioneer of gender equality and sexual modernity in China must be viewed through those intimate negotiations, in which people transform the definitions of freedom, belonging, and modernity.

After the official transition to socialism in the mid-1930s, the state continued to rely on urban women’s labor outside the home. With socialization of household tasks still a distant dream, domestic service was reimagined as an integral part of the socialist economy, signaling a major change in the understanding of housework’s place in Soviet society. The domestic worker became a reliable house manager, responsible for the maintenance of the Soviet housing stock, a dedicated nanny who raised Soviet children, and a professional caregiver who indirectly contributed to her employers’ productivity by taking care of their needs at home. Yet, the recognition of domestic workers as equal builders of socialism only solidified the gendered hierarchy of labor. Urban men and women working outside the home had the privilege of transferring the responsibility for housework to peasant migrants or women from other marginalized categories. As a result, many Soviet citizens continued to view domestic labor as degrading.

The conclusion analyzes the rapid decline of residential domestic service in the last decades of the Soviet Union. The disappearance of live-in domestics did not prompt a discussion about who was now doing the housework. Instead, Soviet citizens relied on female part-time “helpers” and “sitters” or unpaid labor of grandmothers to make up for deficiencies in the Soviet service industry. With the growing concern with birthrates and divorces in late Soviet society, the metaphor of a kitchen maid to rule the state lost its revolutionary appeal. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it now serves to ridicule its original promise of egalitarianism. The book concludes with reflection on the key issues in the study of paid domestic labor as a global phenomenon such as its dependence on inequalities, the importance of government regulation of domestic service, and the potential of socialism to solve the problem of housework.

China’s economic boom was based on three legacies of its socialist era: vastly improved population health, eradication of illiteracy, and a country’s population divided into two classes by household registration status. A healthy, largely literate, and underprivileged rural population was the main driving force for China’s economic boom. China had an abundant supply of labor, but it was not just cheap labor – it was good labor, and labor made cheap by China’s socialist legacies that subjected the rural population to secondary citizenship status.

This chapter addresses the political and intellectual context for Wagner’s revolutionary socialism. The nineteenth century stood in the light and shadow of the French Revolution, emboldened and fated to revisit and to relive many of its questions and practices. Wagner’s life mixed revolutionary theory and practice: in the Dresden uprising of 1849, but also in its ‘Vormärz’ prologue and in its apparently counter-revolutionary aftermath. Wagner experienced revolution on at least three geographical levels, European, German, and Saxon, the third receiving particular attention here. The focus is on Wagner’s most unambiguously revolutionary period, the 1840s and early 1850s, yet these ideas continued to play out in life, thought, and dramatic oeuvre: not only until completion of the Ring in 1874, Wagner’s revolutionary ‘fire cure’ reaching fulfilment in the final conflagration of Götterdämmerung, but in Parsifal and beyond. Earlier themes did not go unchanged; they provided shifting foundations for further dramatic exploration.

This chapter discusses the conceptual foundations of the notion of social justice during the Enlightenment before surveying the volume’s achievement in historicizing twentieth-century European proposals. Social justice presupposed the invention of the “social,” in and through the insight into informal cultural and institutional ordering. And while social justice was coined earlier in the nineteenth century, the concept became unavoidable later in the century as both left liberals and Roman Catholics responded to individuals and laissez-faire, in part by innovating a new ‘social science’. This chapter concludes by speculating about the future trajectory of claims on the notion of social justice.