Winstanley’s Ecology: The English Diggers Today

Abstract

D a n I e l J o h n s o n Beginning in 2011 a festival in honor of the seventeenth-century radical Gerrard Winstanley has been held annually in the town of Wigan, in northwestern England. Through poetry, music, film, and other activities, the celebration commemorates the life and ideas of Wigan-born Winstanley, leader of the Digger, or True Leveller, movement of the English Revolution (1640-1660). Largely forgotten for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the communist thought of Winstanley was rediscovered by German and Russian Marxists in the late nineteenth century, leading to Winstanley's inclusion in the list of revolutionary thinkers Lenin had inscribed on the obelisk in Moscow's Alexander Garden. Led by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Winstanley's name is eighth on the list of nineteen revolutionaries. From the socialists of the late nineteenth century to participants in the Wigan Festival in the early 2000s, Winstanley and the Diggers have provided inspiration for radical leftists for more than a hundred years. In the twenty-first century, True Leveller thought and practice has had a particularly notable influence on environmental and anti-consumerist activists like guerilla gardeners, freegans, urban allotment advocates, and squatters, among others. 1 What accounts for the lasting popularity of a relatively marginal social movement and its main theorist in the middle of seventeenthcentury England? More importantly for present purposes, why have Winstanley and the Diggers held a prominent place for modern activists concerned with environmental issues and consumerism? The True Levellers have appealed to anarchists as well as socialists, and the Digger legacy has been claimed by both traditions. 2 The Diggers rejected traditional forms of authority, viewing the state and organized religion as instruments of domination created to subdue and exploit common people. Winstanley's development of this idea therefore provides a crucial analysis of the social function of religion and the state in ways that prefigured later Marxist as well as anarchist theories. Lying at