Will the Free-Willists Lead Us Out of the Bog?

Floyd Dell, managing editor of The Masses until the Federal government shut it down and then The Liberator, was a highly respected book reviewer, especially of books that took on capitalism and the status quo. 

As he matured in his thinking he was conflicted as to just which flavor of anti-capitalism would best bring us to a future worth living in. Writing just after the Russian Revolution, when many Marxists were boasting that economic determinism had been proven, Dell wasn't so sure. He admired the free-willists who had faced the Czarist guns with hope and determination.

Reviewing G.K. Chesterton's A Short History of England, he wrote:

The movement for the creation or restoration of a small peasant (or as Mr. Chesterton genially prefers to say, “pleasant”) holdings of land, is one which has already begun to bear fruit in almost every European country. Not less ambitious, and very similar, is its newest outgrowth, Guild Socialism – an off-shoot of Syndicalism, arriving in the same way at the supercession of capitalist production, but frankly intending to restore to labor the chief of its medieval virtues, the ancient virtue of handicraftsmanship. In this intention it is more far-seeing than Syndicalism, which has not been able to imagine away our present mode of machine production. It will be noted that the mind which is free from the obsession of the Present is free to conceive a restoration of the Past. To the determinist there is something at once sacrilegious and wasteful in this attempt, which he describes as “setting back the clock.” To the free-willist, however, this is no clockwork universe. Going back to the path from which we wandered a few hundred years ago may be the most progressive thing to do – particularly if we have wandered into a bog.

Chesterton's A Short History of England is a must-read. He argues that we have to go back in order to go forward. Too many blithely assume that means turning off the lights and wearing homespun. This is not the essence of his message and Dell knew it. He was attracted to the future that Chesterton foresaw, the Shire with Wifi.

Whose War?

John Reed wrote this emotional appeal to his country as the United States plunged into World War I (The Mass, April, 1917, redacted). I offer it here in the light of the Chilcot Report to demonstrate that lies have been used before to justify war. 

I know what war means. I have been with the armies of all the belligerents except one, and I have seen men die, and go mad, and lie in hospitals suffering hell; but there is a worse thing than that. War means an ugly mob-madness, crucifying the truth-tellers, choking the artists, side-tracking reforms, revolutions and the working of social forces. Already in America those citizens who oppose the entrance of their country into the European melee are called "traitors," and those who protest against the curtailing of our meager rights of free speech are spoken of as "dangerous lunatics." We have had a forecast of the censorship – when the naval authorities in charge of the Sayville wireless cut off American news from Germany, and only the wildest fictions reached Berlin via London, creating a perilous situation… The press is howling for war. Lawyers, politicians, stock brokers, social leaders are all howling for war. Roosevelt is again recruiting his thrice-thwarted family regiment.

Whose war is this? Not mine. I know that hundreds of thousands of American workingmen employed by our great financial "patriots" are not paid a living wage. I have seen poor men sent to jail for long terms without trial, and even without any charge. Peaceful strikers, and their wives and children, have been shot to death, burned to death, by private detectives and militiamen. The rich have steadily become richer, and the cost of living higher, and the workers proportionally poorer. These toilers don't want war - not even civil war. But the speculators, the employers, the plutocracy – they want it, just as they did in Germany and England; and with lies and sophistries they will whip up our blood until we are savage – and then we'll fight and die for them.

We are simple folk. Prussian militarism seemed to us insufferable; we thought the invasion of Belgium a crime; German atrocities horrified us, and also the idea of German submarines exploding ships full of peaceful people without warning. But then we began to hear about England and France jailing, fining, exiling and even shooting men who refused to go out and kill; the Allied armies invaded and seized a part of neutral Greece, and a French admiral forced upon her an ultimatum as shameful as Austria’s to Serbia; Russian atrocities were shown to be more dreadful than German; and hidden mines sown by England in the open sea exploded ships full of peaceful people without warning.

Other things disturbed us. For instance, why was it a violation of international law for the Germans to establish a “war zone” around the British Isles, and perfectly legal for England to close the North Sea? Why is it we submitted to the British order forbidding the shipment of non-contraband to Germany, and insisted upon our right to ship contraband to the Allies? If our “national honor” was smirched by Germany’s refusal to allow war-materials to be shipped to the Allies, what happened to our national honor when England refused to let us ship non-contraband food and even Red Cross hospital supplies to Germany? Why is England allowed to attempt the avowed starvation of German civilians, in violation of international law, when the Germans cannot attempt the same thing without our horrified protest? How is it that the British can arbitrarily regulate our commerce with neutral nations, while we raise a howl whenever the Germans “threaten to restrict our merchant ships going about their business?” Why does our Government insist that Americans should not be molested while travelling on Allied ships armed against submarines?

We have shipped and are shipping vast quantities of war-materials to the Allies, we have floated the Allied loans. We have been strictly neutral to the Teutonic powers only. Hence the inevitable desperation of the last German note. Hence this war we are on the brink of.