Early Modern Communism: The Diggers and Community of Goods

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Early Modern CommunismThe Diggers and Community of Goods Ariel Hessayon Freedom is the man that will turn the world upside downe, therefore no wonder he hath enemies. —Gerrard Winstanley, A Watch-Word to the City of London and the Armie (1649), preface I. Positioning the Diggers within a Communist Tradition Since their rediscovery in the nineteenth century—first by Liberal, Socialist, and Marxist historians and then by Protestant nonconformists—the English Diggers of 1649–50 have been successively appropriated; their image refashioned in the service of new political doctrines that have sought legitimacy partly through emphasizing supposed ideological antecedents. In a previous article I demonstrated that recent attempts to incorporate the Diggers within a constructed Green heritage are unconvincing and that at worst these emerging “Green narratives” are insensitive to historical context.1 Similarly, here I want to show how, either through lack of understanding the finer points of Protestant theology or deliberate distortion, most explanations of the Diggers’ implementation of the doctrine of community of goods have been misleading. [End Page 1] Although the term “Communism” is anachronistic in an early modern context—the Chartist Goodwyn Barmby apparently coined it in 1840—Friedrich Engels nonetheless used it in his study of The Peasant War in Germany (summer 1850). Engels, at that time a journalist and political activist with republican sympathies, linked the revolutionary struggle of the German people in 1848 with the defeated uprising of their forebears.2 Moreover, since the 1890s a number of scholars writing in the wake of the emergence of British socialism and burgeoning trade union movement have used the word to describe an ideology that burst forth during the English Revolution. This recurring fascination with the antecedents of communism and concomitant positioning of the Diggers with a constructed if multifaceted communist tradition stretching continuously from the German Peasants’ War to the Russian Revolution—Gerrard Winstanley’s name appears eighth on a list of 19 European radicals commemorated on a twentieth-century obelisk known as the “Column of Revolution” erected in Alexander Garden, Moscow3—has, however, largely obscured an important theological aspect of the discussion. For although the Diggers’ radical activities are best understood as a practical response to the ravages of the English Civil Wars, widespread poverty, desperate food shortages, economic decay, and outbreaks of plague, their adoption of community of goods was based on a proscribed reading of a biblical text: And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. (Acts 4:32) Communal ownership of property and belongings had been a characteristic feature not only of several ancient Christian heresies but also of certain Protestant sects, all of whom envisaged themselves as communities imitating apostolic practice. Probably influenced by Baptist precedents,4 and perhaps aware of the examples of a handful of separatist congregations and even some teachings espoused by members of the Family of Love (a heretical sect founded in the mid-sixteenth century), Winstanley, who like his fellow Digger William Everard had been a believer in adult baptism, envisaged his little group as both a spiritual and temporal community of love and righteousness, members of Christ’s mystical body living in the last days before the destruction of Babylon and coming of the Lord, the King of Righteousness, who would [End Page 2] remove the curse placed upon the Creation and make the earth a common treasury. Indeed, although the Diggers welcomed newcomers who would willingly submit to their communal precepts, Winstanley thought that only those who had undergone an illuminating spiritual transformation could willingly dispense with their possessions and have all things common. Yet Winstanley was also careful to stress that his notion of community did not extend to sharing women; a stigma that had attached itself to the Anabaptists after their forerunners had seized the town of Münster in 1534, proclaiming it the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:2) and forcefully establishing polygamy. Accordingly, Winstanley distanced himself from the perceived sexual excesses of the “Ranters,” condemning their conduct as carnal rather than spiritual. This emphasis on morality links...