“Morris believed passionately in the importance of creating beautiful, well-made objects that could be used in everyday life, and that were produced in a way that allowed their makers to remain connected both with their product and with other people. Looking to the past, particularly the medieval period, for simpler and better models for both living and production, Morris argued for the return to a system of manufacture based on small-scale workshops.”
That is from a essay by the Victoria & Albert Museum describing Willam Morris and his contribution to the Arts & Crafts movement, which grew in the U.K. in the mid- to late 19th century. It was in large part a reaction to the industrialization of production of goods of all type. There was a belief among many that the manufactories that were becoming part of the landscape of commerce—which certainly provided a benefit for regular people in that objects being made in mass quantities were less expensive than those that were produced for the rich—were stifling the artistic aspects of people, replacing it with undifferentiated commodification. This was not a total reaction against making things such that they would be accessible. As John Ruskin, who was an important commentator on what was going on in his time, wrote: “Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.”
While it is somewhat inconceivable for us to imagine what things were like in the 19th century, when Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” rose up and those who had been working in crafts jobs became cogs in the machinery.
As Marx wrote in 1848 in The Communist Manifesto:
“Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.”
The issue that Marx identified was the estrangement of the worker from the work (although let’s face it: there were and are plenty of jobs that lack any “charm”); the thing that Morris and his colleagues were trying to do was to reestablish, at least in the realm of artistic endeavors that would be a part of everyday experience, some semblance of that charm.
Throughout history—before the 19th century and to this day—the development of applied technologies have caused there to be a leveraging of human capabilities such that the machine can do the job more efficiently than a human. If you’ve ever seen an illuminated manuscript that was carefully created by monks back in the Middle Ages there is a wondrousness visible that is entirely lacking from the printed pages that Gutenberg started cranking out in 1454. Those artisans were displaced and went on to other activities that were probably less engaging, like mucking out the stables.
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