Stand up now, Diggers all!

Dave Bangs

I extemporised, and as I did I found (to my own stupid surprise) that I had to swallow hard and blink back tears. How did the Diggers story evoke such strong feeling?

And why, on April 3rd, so long after these near-forgotten events, did 300 or so land activists, anarchists, Marxists and other radicals, old and young, gay with wacky costumes, march through the revolting subtopia of Weybridge to commemorate their failed piece of direct action?

Some words of Gerard Winstanley, the Diggers’ leader, may illuminate. "The earth (is) a common treasury of livelihood to all mankind, without respect of persons" "The earth is to be planted...by the assistance of every family and as everyone works to advance the common stock, so everyone shall have a free use of any commodity in the store-house". "All offices in a commonwealth are to be chosen new ones every year"...

There we have it. Though working within a society still entangled in medieval ideas, in which the new working class was small and unorganised, the Diggers formulated a collectivist, class-based theory and a strategy for putting it into action.

For a year they maintained a land occupation against all the thuggery of the landlord class, negotiated and polemicised with their enemies, and sought out alliances with rank and file soldiers, city radicals, and other like-minded rebels.

They represent a pinnacle of achievement which the modern communist movement still only rarely equals.

Political background

When the Diggers founded their communist colony, around April 1st 1649, the English Revolution had reached its highest point. For nearly 7 years the forces of the big bourgeoisie and modernising landlords had fought a civil war against the discredited absolutism of King Charles.

Through a long process of political differentiation the most radical elements of the bourgeoisie, small freeholders and independent craftsmen, had forged a "New Model Army", under Fairfax and Cromwell, whose discipline and élan had swept aside the moderates and crushed the Royalists.

In a model of democracy not to be equalled again till the Russian Revolution in 1917 the rank and file soldiers elected "agitators" delegated to form soldiers councils, who thrashed out new, democratic political theories.

In January 1649 King Charles was beheaded. Fierce clashes took place between the left-wing democrats – the Levellers – and the conservative army generals and Parliamentarians. In March both monarchy and House of Lords were abolished.

Diggers in action

In this time of hope, the Diggers seized their chance. Through all the exactions and economic ruin of the war, they argued, the poor have stood firm with the rich against kingly tyranny. But what had they gained?

"For kingly power is like a great spread tree. If you lop the head or top bough and let the other branches and root stand, it will grow again and recover fresher strength".

Church lands, Royal Forests, and royalists lands had been confiscated by the Commonwealth, and about one third of all land still remained as waste and common, Winstanley estimated, even after centuries of clearance and cultivation. If these resources could be appropriated by the landless poor, then everyone would get a livelihood.

The relationship of forces did not allow of a frontal attack on all private property. That would have been political suicide. But there was an ongoing class conflict over the appropriation of wastes subject to common right. Cromwell himself had defended commoners in the Fens.

So, whilst making a general theoretical case against all private property and all buying and selling, Winstanley and the Diggers seized the land over which the landlord class had the weakest authority: the commons.

The Digger colony, on St George’s Hill, Walton-on-Thames, soon had 20 or 30 adherents and may well have had 2 or 3 times that number. They planted corn and vegetables and used the landlord’s timber on the common to build their huts.

Soon the stir they caused brought them into contact with Fairfax, the laid-back army commander. He left them alone.

Not so the local ruling class, though, whose privileges were more directly threatened. The Diggers were systematically harassed by the landlords’ enforcer gangs, who illegally imprisoned them, beat them up, trashed their crops, tools and huts, and stole their cattle and timber, so that "those diggers that remain have made little hutches to lie in like calf-cribs".

The Diggers were not acting alone, though. Other Digger groups started land occupations at Iver, just across the Thames, Kent, Wellingborough, Herts, Beds, Notts, Leicestershire, Middlesex and Gloucestershire. Undercurrents of democratic and communist thinking were probably strong amongst both rural and urban poor, fresh with the confidence of a rising revolutionary wave.

The Diggers were forced to abandon St George’s Hill after action for trespass and further brutal attacks, and moved to another common in the next parish of Cobham. Here the local Parson Platt, a Parliamentary supporter and Lord of the Manor, led a new campaign of harassment, which finally forced the Diggers to abandon their experiment in April 1650, one year after its commencement.

In that year the political tide had already moved decisively against the revolution’s far-left wing. During April 1649 five regiments had mutinied, refusing to take part in the war in Ireland (which their best representatives argued was unjust).

At Burford the mutinous Leveller regiments were routed and 3 leaders shot against the church wall. In 1650 the first Act was passed to curb the freedom of the left-wing sects. The limits of freedom were already being constructed.

The ideology of the Diggers

The Digger movement was not dead yet, however. Winstanley did not publish his best work, the communist programme called "The Law of Freedom in a Platform" till 1652. By this time his thought had matured towards a thorough-going revolutionary, democratic, collectivist materialism.

Of the capitalist freedoms of the new Cromwellian plutocrats - "in the free use of trading, and to have all patents, licences and restraints removed", and "to have ministers to preach...without being restrained or compelled" - he says: "all these and such like are freedoms: but they lead to bondage and are not the true foundation-freedom. True commonwealth’s freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the earth".

Men were to work collectively, but to take only according to the private needs of their families. Public store houses were to be created, overseen by annually elected officials, for the free distribution of goods. Other officials would be elected to control trades and education, and to act as dispute peacemakers. Both military officers and judges were to be elected. The Parliament was to be annually elected, too, and was to guarantee social ownership and defend the new republic in war.

For Winstanley was no pacifist. He had supported the successful war against feudal monarchy. Winstanley believed profoundly that people are peaceful, co-operative and naturally loving towards each other, but he knew that the new republic would have to "beat down all that arise to destroy the liberties of the commonwealth".

Though, like all seventeenth century revolutionaries, his discourse was couched in biblical terms he approached very nearly to an explicit atheism, reducing God to the spirit of reason within all things. He believed that scientific discovery and its inventions would ease the cause of human liberation, and that what knowledge brings is all that we can know.

Priestly divinity was pure bunkum, "for many times when a wise understanding heart is assaulted with this doctrine of a God, a devil, a heaven and a hell, salvation and damnation after a man is dead...he...cannot attain to it: for indeed it is not knowledge but imagination.

The Diggers today

The Diggers’ programme for the collective cultivation by the poor of the commons and the confiscated lands of the ruling class was a powerful and rational solution to the needs of the expanding population. Instead, though, newly liberated capitalist agriculture was to unleash 2 centuries of landlord-led enclosure that was to utterly pauperise the rural working class and drive them by the millions into factory wage labour and colonial emigration.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century the economic struggle for the preservation of rural common rights merged with the new, urban-led struggle for the protection of the commons as space for recreation and the enjoyment of nature.

The Diggers would no doubt be the first to laugh with us at the irony that modern socialists struggle desperately for the preservation of those last remaining commons (that they sought to cultivate) as reservoirs of wild nature against the "improvements" of productivist agriculture.

In Britain now, land struggles are focused against over-production, not under-production, and for the restoration of nature’s place, not for its further taming and eradication.

Many in the old social democratic and Marxist left correctly see the place of the Diggers as the founders of modern collectivism. But in their practice they have not taken on board the re-birth of the politics of land in its new matrix of the struggle for the preservation of nature and the creation of a sustainable system of exploitation.

Many of the new land activists see the Diggers and Winstanley only as a sort of original direct actionist, reclaiming the pure life of the cultivator against the evils of "industrialism".

But the Diggers were far, far more than that, or just the "precursors of the New Age Travellers" as Marion Shoard, the radical countryside campaigner, calls them.

On St George’s Hill today lives General Pinochet, protected by high walls and top security. Those Chilean communists and socialists who chant at his gates for his extradition are the true heirs of Winstanley, as is every fighter – woman and man, black and white – who struggles against oppression and for a new world based on collectivism, equality and loving comradeship.