Winstanley 'The Law of Freedom' and other Writings

Author : Winstanley, Gerrard.
Editor:  Hill, Christopher.

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd (October 25, 1973)
• Language: English 
• Condition: Good
• Price: $6
  

This review is from: Law of Freedom and Other Writings (Pelican classics) (Paperback)

As the document under review, True Leveler Gerrard Winstanley's agrarian socialist utopian tract from the 1640's, demonstrates the notion of a socialist solution to the problems of humankind has a long and storied history. The solutions presented by Winstanley had and (in a limited sense still do) do represent rudimentary ways to solve the problem of social and economic distribution of the social surplus produced by society. Without overextending the analogy Winstanley's tract represented for his time what the Communist Manifesto represented for Marx's time. And those with property hated both in their respective times.

One of the great advances of Marx over Winstanley was that he did not place his reliance on an agrarian solution to the crisis of society as Winstanley was forced to do by the conditions of social development of his time. Marx, moreover, did not concentrate on the question of distribution but rather on who controls the means of production that all previous theorists had either failed to account for or did not know about. Thus, all pre-Marxist theory is bound up with a strategy of moral as well as political persuasion as a means changing human life styles rather than the question of creating social surplus so that under conditions of plenty the struggle for daily survival can be taken off the human agenda and other more lofty goals put in its place. Still, with all the True Levellers weaknesses and the improbabilities of their success in the 1640's Cromwellian England we today still doff our hats to Winstanley's vision.