Hello, you're very welcome to Long Reads, a Jacobin podcast where we look in depth at

political topics and thinkers. My name's Daniel Finn, and the features editor here at Jacobin,

and I'll be presenting the show. William Morris is renowned for his work as an artist and designer,

but he was also one of Britain's greatest socialist thinkers. Morris combined his

opposition to capitalism with a deep understanding of environmental questions that was rare in his

own time. Our guest today is Matthew Beaumont. He's a professor of English at University College

London, and his books include The Spectre of Utopia. Many people will be familiar with William

Morris, perhaps primarily as an artist and a designer who still has a very high reputation to this day,

but he was also deeply engaged with the world of politics. How did Morris define himself politically?

Well, he defined himself as a communist from the mid-1880s. It was a long journey to that point,

but he firmly asserted that communism was the ideology with which he identified in the last

10 years of his life. There are various reasons for doing that. Socialism was an extremely

factional and fissiporous entity in the late 19th century in England, and he believed that

socialists on the whole were those who identified themselves with a reformist tradition,

so he was in calling himself a communist, identifying whether or the different revolutionary

tradition derived from the Paris commune among other things. But you're absolutely right to say

that that will come as a surprise to many people today, because he is very much associated still

with the textiles and tapestries that one finds in museums all over the world, and in sort of bourgeois

drawing rooms, as it were. He was almost concertedly turned into what Robin Page Arnott in 1934

called a harmless saint. He was a sort of bourgeois saint, a saint of bourgeois design for many,

many decades, and it wasn't until various scholars and particular socialist ones like E.P. Thompson

started to take another look at him and to open up the revolutionary tradition that he had himself

...