Health

William Morris had no faith in electoral politics or its capacity to effect real change. As he wrote in Justice, following a Liberal parliamentary win in Hackney in 1884, “for the workers this is just a battle of the Kites and Crows.” While the Liberal press was exulting in the Hackney victory, Morris instead was “lamenting that, the Hackney Radicals, who have lately issued so Democratic a programme, should have been so blinded by the excitement of an electoral contest as not to see this fact.” I admire Morris’s skepticism about the import of one Liberal victory; for me, however, living in a different time, and temperamentally less optimistic than Morris, his words produce little comfort in the wake of this past November’s election. In the months following the election of George W. Bush, I can remember being inspired and encouraged by Morris’s resolute commitment to a politics beyond electoral politics. But 16 years later, confronted with ever more urgent and intractable global problem