The Commune, William Morris issue, Feb 1927.

The Commune,  William Morris Issue
Second Series Vol.ll.No.2 February 1927
Edited and Published by Guy Aldred,
13 Burnbank Gdns Glasgow (Scotland),
 
This book of 1927 a spectrum of essays by William Morris on art and socialism. It also includes Guy Aldred’s essay on William Morris from  revised notes of a lecture he gave at Seamore Picture House in Glasgow October 25th, 1915. Much of the contents are taken from The Spur ” William Morris Issue” Vol. ll – No 8 London, January 1916, (also in SoR Archive) which cost so much to issue that they thought it might be their last and appealed for immediate support.
Aldred on Morris
”Morris’s Socialism, expressed in his poems, his contributions to The Commonweal, and in his lectures, was that economic was greater and more important than political control. That is the message which I want to drive home tonight. There can be no talk of working-class political power in this, or in any other society. There must be an end of political power in society if the workers are to be free. That end will correspond with the social revolution and a clear understanding of the economic position of the people, that will come when they try to analyse the conditions of society, and ask themselves why man is the slave of the machine.”
”He knew, if he could get the consciousness of the people directed towards a sense of the poetry and the drama of the revolution….if he could get their imagination stimulated until they saw all the past destiny of man, at the present sufferings of the slaves in every attic and in every cellar of slumland; there would arise a people against whose liberties noone would dare conspire, a people who would be no more a prostitute civilisation.”
”Morris lives in Socialist history as an Anti-Parliamentarian.”
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