Here’s a couple of recent articles highlighting the contemporary relevance of the ideas, example, and vision of the seventeenth century Digger Gerrard Winstanley. Winstanley may not be as well-known as King Charles I or Oliver Cromwell, and his ideas may not be as well-known as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. But his arguments and his example offer an alternative to the purposeless expansionary materialism now in the process of implosion. In Fire in the Bush, Winstanley answered Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’ argument before Hobbes had even made it.
“With the radical injunction of the biblical passage of Acts 4:32 in mind, Winstanley would write that the “earth should be made a common treasury of livelihood to all mankind, without respect of persons.” From his understanding of the communism of apostolic Christianity — combined with the rhetoric of past peasant rebellions, the theology of the radical Reformation, Renaissance humanism, and a more exotic mélange of occult ideas — Winstanley would derive a recognizably modern socialist program whereby the “Earth [was] to be a Common Treasury,” not in some distant future and because of the intercession of a supernatural agent, but in the present due to the labor of actual women and men.”
Others may be “uncomfortable” with Winstanley’s religious allegiances, I am not. They make complete sense, and to remove them or diminish them is to make a nonsense of the man’s ideas. “Even if the Diggers were socialists, or anarchists, or materialists, theirs was still a religious movement. As McLynn writes, for Winstanley a “true understanding of Christianity would lead to socialism.” And any reckoning with the possibility of socialism must remember the soul of socialism.”
This is Winstanley’s strength, not weakness, giving him an extra dimension that a later left republicanism/materialism perhaps lost in an age of disenchanting science. Winstanley is far more important than merely a precursor of Spinoza, Enlightenment rationalism and materialism, and Marx. He has an extra dimension, he supplies what went missing, resulting in a deficiency in the motivational economy. I reinstate metaphysics and morals beyond the sophistry of material interests and power relations. That was the central to my argument on Marx, as I point out in the post below, and I’ll stand by it.
This passage is important, too:
“His [Winstanley’s] proclamation from The New Law of Righteousness that “No man shall have any more land, then he can labour himself, or have others to labour with him in love, working together, and eating bread together, as one” distinguished liberalism from the left in the seventeenth century as it does now, and it remains a potent reminder of what socialism is offering.”
Precisely my view.
Winstanley gets a good mention in Australia, in this book by Jane Goodall, The Politics of the Common Good: Dispossession in Australia.
In place of the neoliberalism she decries, Goodall finds inspiration in Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, a Protestant sect that arose in the 17th century during the English Revolution Winstanley, Goodall explains, ‘‘saw the state of the earth and the state of humanity as bound together, in service to each other.”
In the age of climate change, the Earth must – as Gerrard Winstanley put it – become ‘‘a Common Treasury again.”
This is a sketch of a book I am preparing on Gerrard Winstanley. There’s possibilities afoot for my work being published in hard copy, and I am hoping that there may well be interest in the work I am doing on Winstanley. Maybe, maybe not, we shall see. It would be a dream come true. Here’s hoping. I have plans to publish this myself, in any case. I think I can finish this in a year.