Abstract
John Ruskin’s influence alone was not enough to make a socialist. What William Morris owed to socialism and to Marx was the idea of a class society that he registered first of all in its different relations to the world of work. A system of Capital and Wages was one in which some did no work, many did no useful work, and the great majority toiled for the “robbery and waste” of a minority. If Morris is to be regarded as a Marxist, it is not therefore in respect of Marx’s economic theories, but in respect of his sociology and commitment to the idea of class struggle. It was because of this, not in spite of it, that Morris’s legacy was so valued by later British Marxists who had barely a word to spare for Bax or Hyndman. Among syndicalists like Tom Mann, who had also cut his teeth on Ruskin, the same class-struggle reading of Marxism largely prevailed.
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