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.