Well, those 19th century anarchists are proponents of simple life – of poverty, actually. I think their ‘comfort’ means ‘necessities’. They make a distinction between ‘poverty’ and ‘pauperism’ and consider poverty a good thing; I suppose they would say that a truly free person just isn’t gonna want any special wallpaper.

This is silly, of course. Can’t do without some sort of coercion. Although, to be fair, they do suggest a pathetic sort of solution to freeriders, greed and other anti-social phenomena – communal ostracism. See, if you start acquiring all that fancy stuff your comrades will refuse to associate with you – they’ll still feed you, of course – but becoming the leader of the bowling team is out of the question.

Yeah, most of them spent too much time in Jura, it’s lovely there, very peaceful.

Come to think of it, many European welfare societies already have this two-tier system; IIRC Germany has minimum guaranteed income instead of minimum wage. Minimum guaranteed income is, I think, a form of communism.

So suppose, as Kropotkin imagines, some people use their extra four or five hours a day to work together in free association to produce some goods that go beyond those needed for the “comfort of society” – luxury goods in other words. Are they allowed to trade them for other luxury goods made by others? Are they allowed to set the terms of these exchanges themselves? If so, don’t we just kave a full-blown, laissez faire capitalist economy floating on top of the socialist one below? And since some are more skilled in the arts of production and exchange, and do better in these exchanges than others, doesn’t that mean that a social structure of economic classes is replicated? How is this communism?

What about those who end up in the lower classes. Do they no longer experience resentment, or engage in class warfar, because some level of basic comfort has been achieved?

We have already mentioned that by working 4 or 5 hours a day till the age of forty-five or fifty, man could easily produce all that is necessary to guarantee comfort to society.

But the day’s work of a man accustomed to toil does not consist of; hours; it is a 10 hours’ day for 300 days a year, and lasts all his life. Of course, when a man is harnessed to a machine, his health is soon undermined and his intelligence is blunted; but when man has the possibility of varying occupations, and especially of alternating manual with intellectual work, he can remain occupied without fatigue, and even with pleasure, for 10 or 12 hours a day. Consequently the man who will have done 4 or 5 hours of manual work necessary for his existence, will have before him 5 or 6 hours which he will seek to employ according to his tastes. And these 5 or 6 hours a day will fully enable him to procure for himself, if he associates with others, all he wishes for, in addition to the necessaries guaranteed to all.

You can get all the ‘necessities’ you want, but you’ll have to work extra for you special wallpaper.

BTW, Mr. Kropotkin specifically rejects this ‘family’ model – to him it’s not much better than Mr. Morris’ prison, not libertarian enough:

Communism and Anarchy
…The second mistake lay in the desire to manage the community after the model of a family, to make it “the great family” They lived all in the same house and were thus forced to continuously meet the same “brethren and sisters.” It is already difficult often for two real brothers to live together in the same house, and family life is not always harmonious; so it was a fundamental error to impose on all the “great family” instead of trying, on the contrary, to guarantee as much freedom and home life to each individual.

That’s the difference between Socialist and Anarchist, I guess.

I don’t think you have addressed the question.

Suppose there is a certain amount of ordinary, garish wall paper in existence. There is just enough to wallpaper every person’s house, and no more. And everybody exactly possesses that amount. That is, everybody possesses an amount of wallpaper that suffices to wallpaper their house.

Now suppose some artisans design and produce a limited amount of exquisite wallpaper, enough to paper the houses of a few thousand people but no more. What would Morris say about how the wallpaper should be distributed? Should it be distributed equally because, as yet, nobody has an amount of exquisite wallpaper sufficient to paper their house? Is it permissible to distribute it only to a few, because everybody already has a sufficient amount of ordinary wallpaper, and that’s all they have a right to expect – since only ordinary wallpaper, but not exquisite wallpaper, has been deemed “essential” or a “necessity”? Or should it not be produced at all until it can be produced in amounts sufficient to wallpaper every house?

Suppose we live in a society with national health care. That health care provides every person with a certain amount of longevity. I now invent a device that doubles life expectancy. Supplies are limited, and I would like to sell my device to the very wealthy who can pay the most for it. Is this permissible? Would Morris say that once everybody has a “sufficient” amount of longevity, any extra longevity that is produced can be distributed unequally? Is there any such thing as a sufficient amount of longevity? Morris seems to put a lot of weight on “what one needs”, or “what one wants”. But surely what one wants is in part a result of socialization. Having “all one wants” is a function of the expectations one has settled upon; it reflects one’s estimate of how much one can reasonably expect to obtain.

As I said before, for many of life’s greatest goods – unlike chocolate perhaps – there is no “sufficient” amount. We would all like more of them than nature and human work provide. In such cases, the distribution of the good cannot be decided on the basis of sufficiency or “everybody having as much as he wants.” since nobody has as much as he wants. So on what basis is it to be distributed?

Literature, unlike philosophy, describes without prescription, and Morris’ is as much a literary as a philosphical statement. The 19th C. was good for that sort of stuff. I’ve made the same point to Henry about Marx.

The question you should be asking is how to construct and communicate in such a way that might attempt to do justice not to the ideas of ‘friendship’ and ‘trust’ but to the facts of them.
I’m not claiming there’s an answer to the problem- strictly speaking there isn’t- only that the problem exists. In fact it’s the central problem of contemporary intellectual life.
What exactly is ‘art’?

Seriously though, studies have shown that a person judges what’s enough based on comparison with his/her peers. So your perception of whether you have enough depends on the lifestyle of other people in your neighborhood, your income bracket, and your society as a whole. So “enough” is probably not the word to use here. It might be better to set some measurable threshold and then ensure that no one falls below that threshold, but leave it to people to decide whether they are satisfied.

Spoken like a person who has never tried eating chocolate at every meal to see what would happen. I have, and I needed a break after a few days. You could say that you desire to have every bite of chocolate taste like the first one, forever—but we are now outside the realm of any reasonable discussion that starts with William Morris.

And isn’t it the case that settling what is reasonable to expect requires a social choice about how equally one will distribute the leisure time? What about exquisite wallpapers? Is there an amount of these that is sufficient?

Yes. Enough to cover the interior of your entire house. And how big should your house be? At maximum, no larger than you can walk across in a single day. There, wasn’t that simple?

Back to William Morris. The McMansion/SUV lifestyle may be an expression of “desire”, but why then are its practitioners striving to remodel and decorate according to the “Tuscan farmhouse look” or whatever else is the “authentic” fad? The originals of all the authentically gorgeous world-heritage lifestyles turn out to have required very little, comparatively, in the way of material. But they did require a good deal of intrinsic aesthetic judgment, whether conscious or unconscious. Which nearly nobody has got, in industrialized societies, for some strange reason.

Along with the visible bands of injustice which hold industrialized society back, there are also invisible bands, namely: the astonishing vulgarity of everybody’s taste. If people understood how garish and abominable their fat greedy houses were, we would have less political confusion. William Morris wasn’t just a do-gooder who also made pretty wallpaper. His ideals fit together.