top of page
Peter Critchley

Gerrard Winstanley and the Wealth of the Commons and the Weal of the Commoners


Gerrard Winstanley and the Wealth of the Commons and the Weal of the Commoners


I’m just finishing some writing on my man from Wigan, the True Leveller Gerrard Winstanley and his efforts to inform, inspire and incite commoning all those years ago, and found this article by David Bollier very pertinent.


“In truth, of course, the neoliberal market order, as assisted by the state, has proven to be as zealous and ruthless in enclosing the commons as King John. States and the corporate sector routinely collude in using law to “legally” privatize our common wealth, seen most notably in the predations of the global finance sector. The Earth’s atmosphere is used as a free waste dump by major industries, especially those selling fossil fuels, with little action by the state. Biotech and pharmaceutical companies are allowed to convert lifeforms from genes to bacteria to sheep into private commodities via patent law. Investors and sovereign investment funds are buying up huge swaths of land across Africa and Asia in a massive global land grab, dispossessing commoners and laying the groundwork for future famines. Companies are plundering the oceans of fish and minerals. Mining and forestry companies are ravaging Latin American landscapes through brutal neo-extractivist projects. Everything from words and colors to smells can now be trademarked, and even two-second snippets of sound can now be copyrighted.”


“So the real challenge for our time in reviving the principles of Magna Carta, and especially the Charter of the Forest, is to devise new legal regimes to recognize and protect commoning. Law must be crafted to support spaces for commoning.”


Bollier addresses head on the objection that commoning is a mere historical curiosity, something that disappeared in the Middle Ages or in early modern times, and that attempts to revalue and revive it now in an age of the corporate form are regressive, quaint and ridiculous. St Thomas More attacked the enclosure of the commons vehemently in his Utopia of 1516, and a century later Gerrard Winstanley sought to inspire efforts on the part of the common people to recover the commons. The defeat of his social experiment would seem to have sent the commons into history.


Actually, no, this is not true at all. There is a need to distinguish the principle of commoning from the specific social forms and practices by which commoning has been undertaken. The principle is capable of endless recovery and renewal in the hands of new social agents. As Bollier writes, ‘Commoning is an ancient social form that is constantly renewing itself, and is increasingly rich and robust.’ And it is currently in the process of taking off and expanding the world over. Silke Helfrich and David Bollier have documented how pervasive commoning is becoming in the world in an anthology, Patterns of Commoning, a book which contains more than fifty essays which details the everlasting, indomitable and irrepressible desire of ‘the common people’ to collaborate and share in order to meet their everyday needs.


Patterns of Commoning describes commons of indigenous agriculture and community forests, high-tech FabLabs and alternative currencies in Kenya, commons of open-source farm equipment and collaborative mapping of commons, and much else. The book also focuses on the inner dynamics of commoning as a counterpoint to the ontological premises of standard economics. In other words, human beings are not simply versions of homo economicus, but complex, evolving creatures rooted in very specific geographies, histories and cultures.’


As for Gerrard Winstanley ... what an intriguing man he is, remarkable anticipations of Spinoza, Rousseau, Marx, as well as a commitment to the true ancient law, the ancient social form mentioned above, and "the everlasting law." I can see Blake in there, too, very clearly, in closing the distance between human beings and Christ. And there is an alternative to the capitalist revolution in there too, one that he set out at the start of the whole process. The pages of his works are alive today, burning with protests against injustice and inequality and packed with practical demands to join together to take action to turn the world the right way up. The result, in the words of Kenneth Rexroth, is ‘the first systematic exposition of libertarian communism in English.’ We would have to wait until William Godwin’s "An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice" in 1793 for anything comparable, and we have to bear in mind that Winstanley was an activist in the thick of the social battle, having to defend himself and his community against assault and accusation, as he wrote.


The article above argues that the task today is "to devise new legal regimes to recognize and protect commoning. Law must be crafted to support spaces for commoning." That key statement needs to be read in relation to Winstanley’s attempt to set commoning as a grassroots transformation within an overarching legal and institutional framework in The Law of Freedom. Also worth a read in this respect is this article:


‘The Energiewende – a full-scale transformation of society and economy – arose out of enduring grassroots movements, an evidence-based discourse, concern about climate change, and key technological advances, as well as hands-on experience garnered along the way in Germany and elsewhere.’


There were big anti-nuclear demonstrations in Germany in the late 1970s, but they met with ‘mostly defeats.’ ‘The movement could get huge numbers onto the street but, for the most part, it couldn’t beat the nuclear industry in the halls of power and before the law.’ The activists were ill-equipped to go head-to-head with professionals whose job it was to impact policy, win over politicians, and negotiate complex legal terrain. Grassroots resistance was not enough, activism from below needed to be buttressed by a political, legal and institutional framework, setting a grassroots citizen’s movement within effective legal regimes and policy frameworks.


With the defeat of the grassroots revolution from below, Winstanley saw the need to set commoning within a larger legal and institutional framework. This is what he did in The Law of Freedom, proposing an institutional reformation from above to organise the transfer of land and resources to the common people, transforming the state power in the process to bring about the "true commonwealth." Respect for this remarkable man Gerrard Winstanley ...


The capitalist revolution and the anti-capitalist revolution rose at the same time. James Holstun described the period as simultaneously ‘the first capitalist and anti-capitalist revolution.’ (Holstun, Ehud's Dagger: Class Struggle and the English Revolution 2002, p ix). Holstun argues further that ‘the radical praxis’ of working people played a key role in this anti-capitalist revolution (p. ix). And at the heart of this revolution, affirming and inciting this reality-changing praxis of the common people was Gerrard Winstanley.


More than three hundred and fifty years on, Winstanley’s words remain as alive, as pertinent and as inspiring as they were all those years ago. Even more so, in fact. Rebecca Solnit writes that ‘democracy is flourishing in bold new ways in grassroots movements globally,’ and points out that ‘there is far more politics than the mainstream of elections and governments, more in the margins where hope is most at home.’ Winstanley incited and nurtured that hope amongst the common people, and sought to bring people out of the margins; his entire case rested on commoning, the reclaiming of the physical, political and ethical commons. New forms of governance, economic activity and social relations are emerging, with examples mentioned in this article as well as things such as liquid democracy, e-governance, civic intelligence, platform cooperativism and autonomous self-organisation. We are entitled to conclude, then, that with the completion of the capitalist revolution in the globalisation of economic relations, and in its exhaustion in the social and ecological crisis that has accompanied it, the world is catching up with Winstanley’s thought rather than superseding it. From the very beginning, Winstanley sought to inform, inspire and incite the anti-capitalist revolution. In the long term, should we manage to come out the other side of climate catastrophe in some kind of shape, it will be due to ideas concerning the sharing of the Earth in common that were put forward so forcefully and so eloquently by Gerrard Winstanley at the start of the capitalist transformation of the world. Winstanley's revolutionary dream was defeated quickly at the time, the rich and powerful who have embedded their interests saw to it that the hopes to expand commoning by power of example were ended. Hence the need to take politics and the world of government, administration, law and policy frameworks seriously - which is precisely what Winstanley did in The Law of Freedom (1652) - to ground commoning within a structured political order. There is some suggestion here that Winstanley thereby became complicit with the fallen world of politics and the state power, but that fails to recognise the extent to which the use of state power in the commons transition is also its transformation from "swordly kingly power" to a true and free commonwealth. And, of course, the struggle for justice and equality, things that Winstanley saw as part of an original goodness, will continue as we attempt to live in conformity with the ancient or everlasting law Winstanley cites at the beginning of The Law of Freedom. That is the transcendent standard that against which we judge the laws and institutions and practices of time and place, to which we conform our politics and social arrangements. Winstanley explicitly makes that very point, setting self-made laws, covenants and contracts within a wider frame.


Our revolutionary dream is confronted by the same forces of "the Beast" that Winstanley challenged, forces which are threatening to turn God's "good" earth into a Hell. E.P. Thompson wrote about a certain oddness, even obscurity, in the writings of another of my favourites, William Blake, but on no page is there "complicity with the kingdom of the Beast" he concluded. Blake should be remembered in his own words: ‘He kept the Divine Vision in time of trouble.’ Winstanley did this too, and passed it on. He sought to overthrow all kingdoms and extirpate "swordly kingly power" in all its forms in order to realize the "true commonwealth" as the republic of heaven and of earth.


Should that revolutionary dream finally come to succeed, as we need it to for our own survival, then the three hundred and fifty years since Gerrard Winstanley put pen to paper will be seen as no time at all; and all the defeats and deviations along the way will be considered to be just all parts of the learning process by which we come to know ourselves, and the Earth as our common home, for the first time. There's still a way to go. But we may be closer than we think.


"While this kingly power reigned in one man called Charles, all sorts of people complained of oppression, both gentry and common people, because their lands, enclosures and copyholds were entangled, and because their trades were destroyed by monopolizing patentees, and your troubles were that you could not live free from oppression in the earth.

Thereupon you that were the gentry, when you were assembled in Parliament, you called upon the poor common people to come and help you, and cast out oppression; and you that complained are helped and freed, and that top bough is lopped off the tree of tyranny, and kingly power in that one particular is cast out.

But alas, oppression is a great tree still, and keeps off the sun of freedom from the poor commons still; he hath many branches and great roots which must be grubbed up, before everyone can sing Sion’s songs in peace."

(Winstanley, "A New Year's Gift," 1973, p166).


This is a quick piece I wrote in the week of the Wigan Diggers’ Festival. I am now preparing of more substantial piece of work on the man and his thought and action.


I was at this talk on Gerrard Winstanley given by Dr. David Taylor at Wigan Parish Church, part of a long and enjoyable day at the Wigan Diggers' Festival, and a very good part too. It is well worth a listen. Empowering people, people whose lives were dominated by sickness, prejudice, social discrimination, injustice, self-hatred and rejection - a culture of life, hope and liberation ... that kind of thing ....



"True religion and undefiled is this, To make restitution of the earth which hath been taken and held from the common people by the power of Conquests formerly and so set the oppressed free." "Buying and Selling is an Art, whereby people endeavour to cheat one another of the Land.......and true Religion is, To let every one enjoy it." (Gerrard Winstanley A New-yeers Gift, 1650).


I’m not sure that references to 'mystical religion' or priority of 'spirit over intellect' captures Winstanley's 'Spirit Reason' properly at all, mind, given his rejection of 'imagination' and 'fancies' divorced from 'real knowledge of creation', which anticipates Spinoza (although isn't quite the same, more on this below) .. such views need qualification .. although the points are made, rightly, to emphasize Winstanley as a profoundly religious man and thinker.


"The things that Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers stood for 350 years ago are still here and need to be fought 350 years later. The issues which they highlighted and the issues which they fought against, the enclosure, the taking over of everything, the turning into private property that which belong to all of us, is going on as vigorously as ever before. We have that same legislative framework which tied up and tied down the Diggers in 1649. But this time, we are on top. The Diggers came along at the end of a great social movement. We're here at the beginning. And this time, we can turn things round." (George Monbiot)


And upside down .. the right way up, as things ought to be. As Winstanley put it, he has left it to the hearts of others to see this vision realized in the land. "We're doing it" says George Monbiot.


Winstanley gives us an alternative to what Weber called "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" from the start of that historical development, the road not taken, but he gives us also a "Spirit Reason" located in the body and nature, whilst affirming transcendent truths, that constitutes an alternative to the enclosing of life by a totalising Reason or self-legislating reason that has us confined within Weber's 'iron cage.' Not a single word on Winstanley in Weber's study on "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," which ends with the iron cage of a capitalist modernity whose economy determines life with 'irresistible force'. And there's no mention in R.H. Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism," with Tawney crying out against the surrender of the Church that accompanied this rise. Which is telling, with respect to possibilities suppressed, and buried, and names forgotten - but capable of resurrection, because these alternatives are live issues. Was there an English Revolution? Well, they chopped the King's head off, that usually does the trick ... but that's the end of kingship in name only, not in nature. Winstanley wanted to uproot "kingly power" completely - and realizing "the kingdom" with him very much took the form of a republic of equals. That's the kind of left republicanism in thought as well as politics that Spinoza was to draw upon shortly after.


He is a fascinating man, indeed, is Gerrard Winstanley. Winstanley answers Thomas Hobbes’ (in)famous assertion in the Leviathan that the state of nature is a state of war and that life there is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ before Hobbes had even made it:


‘Now, this same power in man that causes divisions and war is called by some men the state of nature which every man brings into the world with him… But this law of darknesse is not the State of Nature.’ (Gerrard Winstanley, Fire in the Bush, 1650).


In contrast to Hobbes and the secularization and rationalization of the Protestant Ethic that followed in his wake, a conventionalism and constructivism that 'disenchanted' the world, stripping it of value, meaning, purpose and spirit, Winstanley locates God or Spirit Reason in nature and in the body. We can therefore experience and know a spirit that "dwells" in the body. As a result, Winstanley argues that the covetous desire that Hobbes teaches to be natural is not natural at all, it is a human choice shaped by prevailing social relations. The origin of the covetous flesh, the insatiable, bottomless pit of desire that 'engrosses' the earth and consumes the self, lies in our separation from the true love and nourishment that dwells within, it results from disembodiment, from abstraction from God/Spirit Reason/Nature. "This law of darkness in the members is not a state of nature, for nature or the living soul is in bondage to it and groans under it, waiting for deliverance."


Winstanley’s Fire in the Bush was published in 1650. Hobbes’ Leviathan was published a year later in 1651. Since then, our liveliest and most sophisticated social analysts, thinkers and philosophers, from Rousseau to Marx, and those influenced by them, such as C.B. Mcpherson in "The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism" (1962), have pointed out that Hobbes read the aggressive, competitive, and individualistic modes of the emerging capitalist society of his day back into nature, thereby illegitimately naturalising what ought to be historicised, and making characteristics specific to social relations in a particular time and place permanent and eternal features of human nature. Indeed. Winstanley checked the error from the first and emphasised that the power that causes divisions and wars in human society is not the state of nature at all, and not human nature, but social institutions that enhance certain aspects of human nature whilst inhibiting others, specifically private property and buying and selling, which corrupt the original goodness and divert human energies into sterile and destructive channels.


I love the bit where David Taylor tells the story of an event commemorating Winstanley at the church in Cobham. When the locals heard that the Wigan Diggers were coming, one person asked "should I notify the police?" You can hear us all laughing at the story. I wasn't laughing when I reported back on FB and had someone claiming that if the Diggers turned up in my back-garden, then I'd call the police! Talk about missing the point. The spirit of Parson Platt lives on! I can vouch for this from personal experience. I’ve been on the receiving end of such objections from people horrified at what the common people can make of the simple truths in The Bible, people so simple as to believe that the words mean what they say, and dispense with the mediation of scholars, intelligentsia, learned folk and proprietors and appropriators of all kinds.


I'm currently writing on Gerrard Winstanley. I like his emphasis on the inner light and experiential and experimental knowledge. He strikes a chord with me. I see him connected in a long line of descent from John Ball and Piers Plowman up to another of my great favourites, William Blake, poor ‘mad Blake’, who may have been the sanest person who ever lived, 'because he kept the divine vision in times of trouble', and closed distances that have too often opened up within and between religion, people and the world. Jesus is within, Jesus is human, he is at no distance from us; Heaven is no place of glory beyond the skies, and God is within and between us.


I have 400 hundred pages written roughly and will be engaging further with Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant and Marx especially on religiosity (inner and outer - Marx wanted to extirpate both as a condition of freedom, Winstanley wanted to extirpate the latter by freeing and realizing the former, thus affirming truths that are more than human self-invention) (also Nietzsche, embodiment and ressentiment, with respect to institutional mediation).


I’m comparing and contrasting Winstanley and Spinoza on God, Reason and Nature. Winstanley refers to God as Reason and the Spirit Reason within each person and within all things. What he writes is remarkable, he’s a lost voice who locates God in the body and in nature rather than identifying some primordial chaos in the beginning to be ordered. He writes about knowing God through ‘real knowledge of creation’ and emphasises reason over imagination in a manner that anticipates Spinoza on ‘adequate ideas’ and the ‘intellectual love of God/Nature.’ Winstanley slams ‘fancies’, Spinoza rejects ‘mental hallucinations.’ Spinoza’s monism means that God is regarded not as the external cause of specific phenomena, but rather as the truth within all knowledge and right living. That’s Winstanley’s view, too, he rejects the notion of God and heaven as external, but emphasises immanence. That said, I shall be arguing that he does affirm a transcendent conception, he just doesn’t emphasise it or labour it, and thinks speculating about God’s (metaphysical) existence a diversion from acting in the here and now. Many have seen it as a veiled atheism. I don’t think it is at all, not really. But I can see why some commentators describe Winstanley’s view as a ‘religious humanism’ proposing a ‘republic of heaven’ – not so much overthrowing God as getting rid of the throne that is set above all things. Same with Spinoza. I don’t see it as an atheism (and maybe not even a pantheism), I go with Santayana here who describes it as ‘the intelligent affirmation of the Jewish belief in God.’


The views of both Winstanley and Spinoza would seem to indicate that the religious impulse carries within it a humanistic emancipatory significance. I know for certain that that is the view of Erich Fromm, whom I am re-reading. He declared himself an atheist at the age of 26 – and yet retained hopes for the emergence of a religious-like reverence for humanity, for becoming truly human through our capacity to love and to create and to share in solidarity with one another. It’s all of a piece for me, the emphasis on fellowship and care, and on the liberating power of learning to live a good life through developing a critical awareness of our world, our relations to it and to others. For Fromm, this is all integral to the explicit ethical shift me makes a precondition for any movement toward the ideal of solidarity. ‘Humanistic religious experience enjoys a wonderment at the complexity of our life in the world, an ultimate concern with self-realization, and what Fromm calls an attitude of oneness with one’s self, with others and with nature.’ That’s a quote from Lawrence Wilde in his ‘Erich Fromm and the Quest for Solidarity’, a fine fellow who examined my thesis and headed the panel on my viva voce and gave me the thumbs up! (You see how I hold all these seemingly disparate sources and threads together. There is an internal consistency of purpose, but I like to look and examine and find things out, follow wherever the questions take me. Rousseau wrote beautifully on truthseeking. It's the people who want certainty in pressing a particular line that drive me up the wall, monitoring and policing your investigations and searches. I give them wide berth).


Anyhow, this Winstanley is an exciting piece of work I am looking to finish soon, then get back to polishing off that piece on Dante and climate accord from earlier this year, (the sweet symphony of Paradise) and, hopefully, a substantial piece of writing on Lewis Mumford which establishes his contemporary relevance with respect to a unified theory/integral environmentalism (will sketch the outline out this week ... lots on ... I'll probably be a bit quiet on here for a while .. I need to timetable).


Now ... last time on Winstanley I gave the Leon Rosselson's version of The World Turned Upside Down. This time it's Billy Bragg's version, which has extra oomph for a lively Saturday night ... the police may have to be called.


A couple of long quotes to think about, the first from R.H. Tawney, the second from Max Weber.


‘Circumstances alter from age to age, and the practical interpretation of moral principles must alter with them. Few who consider dispassionately the facts of social history will be disposed to deny that the exploitation of the weak by the powerful, organized for purposes of economic gain, buttressed by imposing systems of law, and screened by decorous draperies of virtuous sentiment and resounding rhetoric, has been a permanent feature in the life of most communities that the world has yet seen. But the quality in modern societies, which is most sharply opposed to the teaching ascribed to the Founder of the Christian Faith, lies deeper than the exceptional failures and abnormal follies against which criticism is most commonly directed. It consists in the assumption, accepted by most reformers with hardly less naivete than by the defenders of the established order, that the attainment of material riches is the supreme object of human endeavour and the final criterion of human success. Such a philosophy, plausible, militant, and not indisposed, when hard pressed, to silence criticism by persecution, may triumph or may decline. What is certain is that it is the negation of any system of thought or morals which can, except by a metaphor, be described as Christian. Compromise is as impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the State idolatry of the Roman Empire.

'Modern capitalism', writes Mr Keynes, 'is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.' It is that whole system of appetites and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of its triumph, while the plaudits of the crowd still ring in the ears of the gladiators and the laurels are still unfaded on their brows, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on the lips of a civilization which has brought to the conquest of its material environment resources unknown in earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself. It was against that system, while still in its supple and insinuating youth, before success had caused it to throw aside the mask of innocence, and while its true nature was unknown even to itself, that the saints and sages of earlier ages launched their warnings and their denunciations. The language in which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader too murkily sulphurous; their precepts on the contracts of business and the disposition of property may seem an impracticable pedantry. But rashness is a more agreeable failing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is less pardonable to be silent than to say too much. Posterity has, perhaps, as much to learn from the whirlwind eloquence with which Latimer scourged injustice and oppression, as from the sober respectability of the judicious Paley - who himself, since there are depths below depths, was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by George III.’ (R.H. Tawney ‘Religion and the Rise of Capitalism’ 1926 ch 5).


‘The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment". But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage….

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."’ (Max Weber, ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, 1905).


What is Gerrard Winstanley’s legacy to us? He gave us an alternative to the above, he gave us an alternative radicalism right from the heart of those revolutionary transformations in thought, in society and in politics. He called it 'true religion and undefiled ...'


Winstanley is hugely important on account of his ideas concerning commoning, his activism, his emphasis on experiential and experimental learning, his merging of the spiritual and the political dimensions. He offers the most acute analysis that there is of the propertied Puritan radicalism that shaped the character of capitalist modernity, highlighting the interplay of psychological, religious, social, and political motivations and forces from within that movement. He understood the nature, the origins, the potentials, and class limits of its character; he knew its language, took its values seriously rather than seeing them as a mere ideology concealing social interests. He developed an immanent critique that contrasted its promise with its practice. He understood clearly the way that the partial realisation of the Puritan revolution would bring about a certain kind of future, its success as also a failure, a betrayal of universalist claims, in realising the social interests of some to the detriment of others, propertied interests being institutionalised in a society scarred by personal anxiety and social division, channelling revolutionary hopes into the cul-de-sac of the strong state protecting private property and the capitalist market. The problems he identified so acutely are still with us.


Gerrard Winstanley presented an alternative radicalism from within the Puritan revolution, an alternative led to a community of equals rather than capitalism, a republic of heaven and earth, the 'true commonwealth' of life, not the Megamachine divorced from the ‘real knowledge of creation,’ the global heat machine which, allied to the covetousness and buying and selling of land and labour that Winstanley castigated and sought to end, is consuming the earth today, destroying the sources of life.


The world went the ‘realist’ and sophist way of Thomas Hobbes; but it’s not the right way in the end. From within that movement, Winstanley worked out, in a unified theory and practice, an alternative course based on a radicalism that reaches directly to the moral, social and psychological roots that feed politics. It was the road not taken then, but could still be taken now, in however different forms.


Another World is Possible.


Erich Fromm's criticisms of the psychological implications of the doctrines of Luther and Calvin expose how authoritarian conceptions of human nature prepare the ground for totalitarian outcome. Fromm repudiates all versions of what he terms authoritarian ethics, whether in theological form in the idea of the unworthy sinner in Augustine, Luther or Calvin, or even in the apparently more enlightened moral system of Kant, which, in his view, harbours a deep suspicion of human nature. This was the road taken. Winstanley offered an alternative path. What my old colleague Lawrence Wilde writes with respect to Erich Fromm is rather apposite with respect to Gerrard Winstanley and the alternative his view offered and still offers:


"Fromm was not prone to wild optimism, but he simply refused to accept that nothing could be done about affluent alienation in the rich countries and extreme poverty in the less developed parts of the world. The forces that he identifies as corruptors of the human spirit appear to have grown stronger and more entrenched since his death, and the traditional movements for egalitarian reform appear to have acquiesced to the imperative of retaining competitiveness in the global economy. However, in the new politics of the new social movements and in the global anticapitalist movement we see manifestations of what he took to be the precondition for an effective emancipatory politics, namely, a strong ethical conviction that the world could be changed to meet authentic human needs. "Our only hope lies in the energizing attraction of a new vision." Piecemeal reform is not sufficient because it does not carry with it the impelling force of strong motivation: "The realization of the new society and the new Man is possible only if the old motivations of profit, power and intellect are replaced by new ones: being, sharing, understanding; if the marketing character is replaced by the productive, loving character; if cybernetic religion is replaced by a new radical-humanistic spirit."

The cynics will scoff at such utopianism and point to the overwhelming compulsion of material interest over considerations of social justice, or else they will insist on the inherent destructiveness of humankind. For Fromm, these positions are no more than convenient excuses for doing nothing to make the world a better place. He insists that even though the chances for radical change may be slim, life is too valuable to surrender to the forces of wealth and power. At a global level, millions share that view."



The Diggers, or True Levellers, were few back then, they were as John Rees says, a minority of a minority of a minority ... but there's millions of them now, all ages, all creeds and colours, all over the world.

Great article here written by Anne Power in the New Statesman, to show that the issues Winstanley raised, the forces he fought against, are still with us, and that his example needs to be followed, and his values reclaimed:


"So I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. I want you to be angry. I want you to be angry at a company like Cuadrilla, which puts profit before local concerns about the environment. I want you to be angry at policing tactics which clamps down on the clear wishes of local people, and the right to protest. And I want you to be angry at a government which makes nice noises about the climate with one breath, and forces fracking on communities with the next.

They might have tried to bully me away, but they’ve just made me even more determined to end fracking for good. I’ll be there next Monday. I hope to see you there too."


You noble Diggers stand up now, Stand up now Diggers all!




You noble diggers all stand up now, stand up now

You noble diggers all stand up now

The wasteland to maintain, seeing cavaliers by name

Your digging does maintain and persons all defame

Stand up now, stand up now

Your houses they pull down stand up now, stand up now

Your houses they pull down, stand up now

Your houses they pull down to fright your men in town

But the gentry must come down and the poor shall wear the crown

Stand up now diggers all

With spades and hoes and plows stand up now, stand up now

With spades and hoes and plows, stand up now

Your freedom to uphold, seeing cavaliers are bold

To kill you if they could and rights from you to hold

Stand up now diggers all

The gentry are all round stand up now, stand up now

The gentry are all round stand up now

The gentry are all round on each side the are found

Their wisdom so profound to cheat us of our ground

Stand up now stand up now

The clergy they come in stand up now, stand up now

The clergy they come in stand up now

The clergy they come in and say it is a sin

That we should now begin our freedom for to win

Stand up now diggers all

The lawyers they conjoin stand up now stand up now

The lawyers they conjoin stand up now

To rescue they advise, such fury they devise, the devil in them lies

And hath blinded both their eyes

Stand up now, stand up now

'Gainst lawyers and 'gainst priests stand up now stand up now

'Gainst lawyers and 'gainst priests stand up now

For tyrants they are both, even flat against their oath

To grant us they are loathe free meat and drink and cloth

Stand up now diggers all

The club is all their law, stand up now stand up now

The club is all their law, stand up now

The club is all their law, to keep all men in awe

That they no vision saw to maintain such a law

Stand up now diggers all !



https://mainlynorfolk.info/leon.rosselson/songs/thediggerssong.html


[words Gerrard Winstanley]


Gerrard Winstanley (1609–September 10, 1676) was an English Protestant religious reformer and political activist during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Winstanley was aligned with the group known as the True Levellers for their beliefs, based upon Christian communism, and as the Diggers for their actions because they took over public lands and dug them over to plant crops. [source: Wikipedia]


As to the song, Billy Bragg gives it some oomph. But I do have a soft spot for the way that Leon Rosselson sings it, just beautifully understated, less assertive, which seems more appropriate, because the message is just so right. I caught hell the last time I posted this song – good! – truth should only hurt those who live in denial of it, and who are happy to live well at the expense of others. Winstanley was good at exposing the self-deception at the heart of revolutionary events in the transition to a propertied republic of, at best, formal equality (alongside substantive inequality). Happy to be a True Leveller.


THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

(Leon Rosselson)

"In 1649

To St George's Hill

A ragged band they called the Diggers

Came to show the people's will.

They defied the landlords

They defied the laws;

They were the dispossessed

Reclaiming what was theirs.

We come in peace, they said

To dig and sow

We come to work the lands in common

And to make the waste grounds grow

This earth divided

We will make whole

So it will be

A common treasury for all.

The sin of property

We do disdain

No one has any right to buy and sell

The earth for private gain

By theft and murder

They took the land

Now everywhere the walls

Spring up at their command.

They make the laws

To chain us well

The clergy dazzle us with heaven

Or they damn us into hell

We will not worship

The God they serve

The God of greed who feeds the rich

While poor men starve

We work, we eat together

We need no swords

We will not bow to the masters

Or pay rent to the lords

We are free men

Though we are poor

You Diggers all stand up for glory

Stand up now

From the men of property

The orders came

They sent the hired men and troopers

To wipe out the Diggers' claim

Tear down their cottages

Destroy their corn

They were dispersed -

Only the vision lingers on

You poor take courage

You rich take care

The earth was made a common treasury

For everyone to share

All things in common

All people one

We come in peace

The order came to cut them down."


Thanks to Hélène Domon for sending me this lecture and film.


Now then, that "Winstanley, Marx and Morris" lecture ... I've written at length on Marx.





I am hoping to complete a substantial piece of work on Winstanley in the next couple of months, as above ..


And ... as for William Morris ... would anyone be surprised to know that I love the man's vision and his work. He’s best known in England for inspiring the arts and crafts movement. Much less well known – hardly known at all, in fact, is that he was a socialist revolutionary and a Marxism. I’ve written a decent piece on him too, over a decade ago now (seems like yesterday).



I have lots of Morris' writings, including a huge collection of his articles for Commonweal: 'The Official Organ of the Socialist League.' The socialist tradition is full of ‘commonweal,’ and I took to the language like a natural. Commonweal means common good, as good old Brother Victor, my history tutor, insisted. He taught Tudor history to us. The word cropped up a lot, particular with respect to St Thomas More, his Utopia of 1516, and his scathing criticisms of enclosure. Brother Victor was just reminding the budding socialist revolutionaries in his class that in our demands we were drawing on a much older tradition than Marx, and that we would do well to locate our youthful enthusiasms – which he didn’t put down at all, rather encouraged – in something greater than politics and self-interest … in that "Greater Love" that stands outside of the ephemeral politics of time and place, because in our struggles to come against the forces of money and power we may well come to need it, for those days when the forces of oppression and domination fight back rather than fall over because we call them out as wrong, to sustain us through it all with an ethic of inspiration, devotion and orientation, reminding us the reason why. He was right. And I've done my very best to follow his sage advice and do indeed keep trying (I'd heartily recommend St Thomas Aquinas. I should dig out that 600 pages I did on St Thomas



And it all forms one integral whole.



104 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Power and Land Grab

Last week: The biggest farmland owner in the US, Bill Gates, visits Starmer and Reeves at Downing Street This week: the Labour government...

Truth and Justice - and Power

Governments gaslighting the public as they hide the truth. It seems to be a common problem across the Western world.   I have spent every...

bottom of page