My occasional looks at historical heroes today takes us to 1600’s England and what could be considered the forerunner of movements today like Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock and their relatives.

Little known to many Americans, mid-1600’s England was a time of massive changes and filled with radical movements seeking sweeping societal change, with effects echoing on today.

A major figure of that time was Gerrard Winstanley, a leader among the Digger movement. I've recently read a key work on him, Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger's Life and Legacy, by John Gurney.

Winstanley grew up a fairly ordinary Englishman of the time, from a fairly stable economic background but by no means wealthy, exposed to the shifting and fragile economic realities of life as a commoner, as well as the economic inequality and oppression caused by the wealthy of the time. He also witnessed the harms of closely allied church and state and was active in the public debates and open conflicts over the appropriate role for and historical abuses of king, church, and parliament.

As England’s king and state church were overthrown in the English Civil War and many debated what would come next, Winstanley was both an active writer and a leader of a counter-cultural movement.

His writings advocated against abuse of power by state and religious leaders, and for the establishment of the kingdom of God in the present by individuals coordinating communal work and shared resources to meet one another’s needs. He advocated that people opt out of selling their labor for wages and instead form new societal patterns of contributing labor to communally organized efforts to produce and share what each community needed. His vision for communal life flowed from a religious standpoint and hope for God’s action of transforming societal structures toward justice, encouraging people to live out a foreshadowing of what God would establish, while rejecting much of the teaching and practice of the organized churches of his time.

As leader of an experimental commune, Winstanley’s ideas were the foundation of Digger practice and an influence upon many who have looked back to their efforts for inspiration.

In England, significant areas were treated as Commons, where the local community could practice shared grazing and other activities, meant especially to protect the ability of more vulnerable people to provide for themselves. Throughout English history, efforts by wealthier people to take control of and extract from these areas at the expense of the poor have been a source of significant contention.

(I think a post on the commons and enclosures is needed soon!)

The Diggers formed their movement in protest of actions by the wealthy that took advantage of political and economic circumstances of the Civil War period to grab control of more land and to overly extract resources from land held in common at the expense of those in poverty.

The Diggers gathered to occupy a Commons area (initially one and then the idea spread to other places across the country) and to “dig” in those areas, planting crops and building homes with which they would reside and support themselves communally on that common land. This was not typically how those areas would work, but was done in protest of the unjust extractions and land grabs by the wealthy that was undermining the system of the Commons and leaving people in poverty.

They faced significant resistance including physical violence and destruction of their homes, and eventually the experiment collapsed.

However, this movement could be seen as the forerunner of many communal movements of more recent times, as potentially the first of those occupying public space and establishing communal living and care for one another's needs on that space. That tactic has recently been seen in the various Occupy movements, Standing Rock, the CHOP Autonomous Zone in Seattle in 2020, and others. Such movements not only draw attention to inequitable conditions which they protest, but they also become an experiment in the alternative vision of the world which they hope to see established.

Winstanley’s thought and practice not only is a seed of these later movements but also was likely a significant influence for others from his contemporary George Fox and the establishment of the Quakers (Society of Friends - which Winstanley himself joined) to much later thinkers including Marxists and anarchists of the 1890s and early 1900s who rediscovered and referenced his works.

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