 In January 1881 Morris was involved in the establishment of the Radical Union , an amalgam of radical working @-@ class groups which hoped to rival the Liberals , and became a member of its executive committee . However , he soon rejected liberal radicalism completely and moved toward socialism . In this period , British socialism was a small , fledgling and vaguely defined movement , with only a few hundred adherents . Britain 's first socialist party , the Democratic Federation ( DF ) , had been founded by Henry Hyndman , an adherent of the socio @-@ political ideology of Marxism , with Morris joining the DF in January 1883 . Morris began to read voraciously on the subject of socialism , including Henry George 's Progress and Poverty , Alfred Russel Wallace 's Land Nationalisation , and Karl Marx 's Das Kapital , although admitted that Marx 's economic analysis of capitalism gave him " agonies of confusion on the brain " . Instead he preferred the writings of William Cobbett and Sergius Stepniak , although he also read the critique of socialism produced by John Stuart Mill . 
