ABSTRACT
William Morris' critique of the market was an explosive compound of partially digested Marxian political economy and, more importantly, a profound Ruskinian antipathy to the moral, social and aesthetic consequences of commerce and commercialism. The concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the state would prove but a passing phase and would rapidly yield to an epoch of freedom, simplicity, and abundance and, above all, of rest. Further, the growth of foreign competition with the economic rise of major new industrial producers was beginning to add an international dimension to this source of macroeconomic instability and depression. The soul of Man required the evolution of communism in the direction of an anarchic simplicity and it was in just such a direction that Morris believed it would indeed develop. The roads which remained, for Morris, were those of economic control by the state and an anarcho-communism of utopian, static simplicity with the former leading by stages.
