East Anglia had a history of social protest prior to 1830 and the combatants involved in the riots, marches and demonstrations had learnt to their cost that open displays of protest brought in their wake punishments ranging from the death penalty at worst, to imprisonment at best. One has to remember the traumas and psychological impact that these sentences had on small village communities. In the village of Withersfield, for instance, with a population of 500, it must have been painful to witness the transportation of six labourers, who were later joined by their wives and children. In all, a short-lived riot permanently thinned this small village of well over twenty inhabitants. Many of these open confrontations were also unsuccessful in achieving their desired aims, the riots of 1835-36 especially so. Therefore there was little incentive to organize or protest if the ringleaders were to be singled out and given harsh sentences while points of grievance continued to exist. Open confrontation was also hindered by the increase in population, since employers held the whip hand on the employment market. Thus one major avenue of rural protest was closed up and the alternatives of individual terrorist action became a more viable proposition. Practicality was a strong driving force; fear of detection, fear of punishment, fear of association, all created a climate of secretiveness. The army, the yeomanry and the special constables were all powerless against such night-time attacks on property. To this extent Hobsbawm and Rudé were correct to view incendiarism as an active response to defeat.

If incendiarism was, as often argued, so detrimental to the economic interests of labourers, why then did it develop to such an extent before 1850? Farmers before 1830 were probably not insured and the fires would have caused financial hardship, but after that date insurance protected the majority and the fires were not so economically devastating. But was the main purpose of incendiarism to cause financial loss to property holders? The answer was considerably more complex than simple economics. Incendiaries never aimed to kill or injure property holders and their choice of targets was often discriminatory. That much we can be sure of. These acts of protest should be placed into a similar category as 'ceffyl pren' of Wales and the 'rough music' of rural England. It was a psychological weapon with a great deal of impact in the small communities. The sufferer was a target of hatred and he and the rest of the community knew as much. The victim had been singled out for special treatment and the fire was there to publicize the fact that he, more than any other person, had transgressed against someone or some custom. One labourer made the telling remark of an incendiary victim: 'the sooner he's out of the country the better.' In another case, Peck of Congham (Norfolk), although insured, claimed another incendiary fire 'would oblige him to relinquish business altogether.'

The publicity factor of incendiarism was important, for some fires were reported to have been visible across forty miles of countryside and they attracted large celebrating crowds, up to 3,000 in one or two cases. It is impossible to quantify the fear of fire but undoubtedly the farmers' fear was considerable. In a letter to Melbourne, the Home Secretary, the Reverend Brett of Congham wrote that 'panic generally prevails' in the county after the large number of fires. Labourers maintained 'nothing scares the farmers like a good fire'. This quite natural dread cannot be emphasized enough as a psychological weapon. Such a 'flash and a scare' provoked a repsonse from employers, often a favourable one, and to that end it has to be considered successful in a limited way.

Labour was adversely affected after a large stack or granary fire, especially if the fire occurred before the threshing season, but the incendiary's hatred transcended such considerations. To him the stacks and barns were symbols of wealth, oppression and power and the fires were a method of 'getting even'. If this was the case then it was more than likely that fires were lit in a less discriminating fashion during periods of greatest distress, because all employers would have been regarded in a similar way as oppressors of labour. Campbell Foster thought this to be the case in 1844 when he wrote:

Can we feel surprised that a labourer out of work half the week, and leaving his home, without having broken his fast … , should return a dangerous man, ready to strike a lucifer match and thrust it into the farmer's stack, who will not give him work, or into any stack, because it is the evidence of wealth and comfort, which, hungered and starving, he hates to see?

While farm work may have been adversely affected by incendiarism on a very localized scale—the individual farms which experienced arson attacks—regionally, employment was created by farmers keen to lessen the possibility of incendiarism in their neighbourhoods. Nightwatchmen were employed extensively during intensive periods of incendiarism. In a number of cases they proved ineffective and in at least two cases nightwatchmen were actually convicted of incendiarism. One labourer reportedly said 'the fires did poor men good, for they now get two shillings a night watching them'. General farm work 'not actually required, that is not immediately beneficial, such as marl and clay carting, cutting down fences, cleaning borders', likewise increased. Arson also halted intended wage reductions and, in some cases, forced them to rise by a shilling or two a week.

Incendiarism was primarily a response by labourers, especially the younger ones, to the oppressive social and economic conditions which they were forced to endure. It is possible to describe the fires as disorganized and uncoordinated acts of protest kindled by a work-force lacking bargaining power and fearful of open confrontation.

Four main anti-socialist strategies have emerged for detaching the Diggers from their future. We might characterize them briefiy as snubbing, sneering, periodizing and Stalinizing.

The first technique is a mode of strategic avoidance. In her massive Agrarian History of Britain and Wales, Joan Thirsk spares the Diggers barely a page. There, she agrees with the Diggers' gentry opponents that their communal project constituted a gross affront to local landowners, and that the land they cultivated was poorly chosen anyway — as if the gentry would have found a better-situated commune less provocative. Of their theory of agrarian praxis, she says nothing. Similarly, Kevin Sharpe laments the "disproportionately large number of pages" historians have spent in analysing "minor sects and crackpots," given that "Land and liberty never became the slogan of the English Revolution; radical millenarianism never infected the poor; the radical groups, especially the most important, never appealed to the poor." Never, never, and especially never; except, of course, when they did. So long as raillery and brisk impatience can pass for sober historical judgment, the Diggers will have a hard time assuming their true historical importance in our understanding of the seventeenth century.

In a second technique, revisionist historians have tried to enclose Winstanley in an eternal present, in which his prophetic socialism is a mere alibi for his non-ideological pursuit of personal gain and revenge inside a fixed social system. Richard T. Vann led the way by examining Winstanley's pre- and post-Digger career and constructing a psychological explanation for the Digger movement: "The experiment in Digger communism would seem to have come between the ruin of a career as a Merchant Tailor and the scarcely propitious beginning of one as a steward and corn-trader. These few facts about his life seem to invite the interpretation of the radical as one who turns on a system in which he personally has failed." James Alsop has followed up on Vann, investigating Winstanley's business dealings with the dogged ferocity of a delinquent accounts collector. Winstanley's early inability to succeed in the business world led to his resentful radicalism with a sort of fumy necessity, while his later small success in that world confirms with stunning force the insincerity of his Digger days. This seems an unusually coarse example of the genetic or "Whig" history that revisionists claim to find offensive in socialist historians. And it may seem less than generous to fault a poor man for seeking wage labour and some measure of financial security in the 1650s and 1660s; Winstanley's alternative was not a continuation of Digging (the violence of the gentry had made that impossible), but poverty, isolation and starvation.

The third technique encloses the Diggers in a pre-modern past with some such claim as, "Winstanley is a religious thinker, not a social revolutionary." This is a peculiar binary opposition that can survive only inside a hermetic version of the history of ideas. Inside the sociology of religion (or the history of political languages, or social history), however, religion is simply one mode of social practice among others, so a rigorous distinction between religion and society makes about as much sense as one between apples and fruit. Of course, the sociology of religion can and does talk about spheres of religious experience and institutional life within a social totality, but it seems particularly unhelpful to attribute faith in a closed religious sphere to the Diggers, given that they spend so much time attacking the social institutions that made that sphere possible in mid-seventeenth-century England (tithing, the universities, a caste of professional clerics), and also the conceptual oppositions (between spirit and matter, clergy and laity, heaven and earth, contemplation and labour, the millennium and human history) that help to justify and reproduce this sphere. These historians of ideas have been unable to assimilate Sabine's 50-year-old insight: "By what may seem at first sight a paradox, the very universality of religious experience in the life of the saint gives to Winstanley's personal philosophy a tone of secularism. …In short, religion was for him a way of life, not a ceremonial, a profession, or a metaphysic".

The fourth technique is the invention of J.C. Davis in Utopia and the Ideal Society. Davis attacks socialist partisans of Winstanley not by denying their connection to him, but by insisting on it — with a twist. Particularly in The Law of Freedom, he argues, Winstanley reveals an authoritarianism endemic to all socialism; scratch a socialist and find a Stalinist. Davis develops this thesis through two primary distortions. First, he exaggerates the severity of the Digger disciplinary mechanism, saying (with no apparent evidence) that The New Law advocates "slavery" for all those who resist Digger discipline, and that The Law of Freedom threatens them with "judicial slavery" — a rather scary name for the rather familiar phenomenon of penal correction. Second, Davis plays down the extent to which Winstanley's indubitable movement towards disciplinary severity in his final work simply responded to the systematic and violent harassment of the Digger colony from its inception to its demise a year later. The Diggers were subjected to economic boycotts, threats, lawsuits, pullings-down of houses, trampling of crops, and vicious beatings — as a result of which one Digger miscarried, while another almost died. In what Winstanley calls the "pitched battle between the lamb and the dragon", Davis hears only the bleating of the lamb, while the customary coercion practised by English property owners remains silent, natural, part of a picturesque landscape. Jumping the English Channel and 140 years, we might compare Davis to the French revisionists, whose bicentennial paroxysms over the Terror drowned out the far greater economic and political violence of the ancien régime and counter-revolutionary Europe.

It seems to me that the Diggers' hortus inconclusus opens up more readily into contexts other than that of twentieth-century totalitarianism — notably, into the traditions of Quakerism and communist sectarianism, English prophetic literature (Milton, Bunyan, Blake, Whitman), and social utopianism (Bellers, Plockhoy, Fourier, Marx, Morris). Here, I will concentrate on the context of continuing resistance to agrarian enclosure. If large-scale resistance tended to disappear in England after the Restoration, then conflicts between rights-based and property-based conceptions of the forests certainly did not, as E.P. Thompson has shown in Whigs and Hunters. In Scotland, the disruption of traditional agriculture by improving enclosure did not reach its height until the Highland Clearances of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; in Capital, Marx traces this process as part of the continuing narrative of primitive accumulation. The Clearances disrupted the patriarchal economies of the clans, as scientific improvers (many of them English or Lowlanders, but working in tandem with Highland nobility and landowners) brutally evicted the crofters and converted their communal small-holdings into pasture land and deer parks. This conflict continued almost into the twentieth century, with the Crofters' War and the Battle of the Braes on the Isle of Skye in 1882. The cult of Scots picturesque, built on bleak landscapes and ruined crofts, shows that aestheticization is the last phase of capitalist genocide.

The seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century invaders of North America presented their genocidal clearing and enclosure of the indigenous common lands as a programme of providentially-sanctioned and rational improvement. Something like a country house ethic re-appears among North American environmentalists working in the tradition of John Muir, for whom national parks are nature reserves rather than monuments to exterminated social ecologies. For instance, what is now Yosemite Park was, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, part of the Miwok nation of "Digger" Indians (so called because of their harvesting of tubers), who "were the most numerous native tribe in North America. …Their complex systems of land use, land tenure and land management had modified a diversity of California landscapes, and supported the greatest human population density found in the Americas north of Mexico." They were decimated by disease in the 1830s and by military attacks throughout the nineteenth century.

We can see an even more striking and contemporary version of the controversy over the commons in South America. An aestheticized environmentalism has led most Americans and Europeans to see the struggle over the rain forest as a battle between tree and bulldozer rather than one between two economies: between the destructive economy practised by ranchers and log-harvesters, and the renewable economy of petty extraction (rubber tapping, small farming, nut gathering) practised by the two million forest people — Indians, river bank peoples and rubber tappers. Hecht and Cockburn point out that "The extinction is not only of nature but of socialized nature: what is also being exterminated in the Amazon is civilization". The last 30 years have proved particularly devastating to the forest peoples: "From the sixties until today the entire Amazon has been convulsed by an enormous enclosure movement easily rivaling the conversion of public land to private property in early modern Europe. … Indeed, the Amazon is the site of one of the most rapid and large-scale enclosure movements in history as more than 100 million acres pass from public to private ownership."

This process has provoked responses analogous to those of European peasants resisting enclosure, including the Diggers: the formation of new political collectives such as unions of rural workers, the emergence of a group of self-educated organic intellectuals such as the late Chico Mendes (who was murdered by a landowner in 1988), and the development of techniques of non-violent resistance to enclosure such as the empate, the sit-down strikes of forest peoples resisting workers with chainsaws employed by the great landowners. We might also compare the green millennialism of the Digger pamphlets with the Forest Peoples' Manifesto of 1985 and 1989, which proposes an end to the division of the forest into lots for colonists, a new technology that will benefit the people of the forest, the establishment of extractive reserves, and "Administration and control of reserves directly by the extractive workers and their organizations".

These extractive reserves of rubber and brazil nut trees, which envision a new/old variety of collective life on the land, resonate strongly with the Digger utopia. Ailton Krenak, a self-educated Krenak Indian, describes them in terms that Winstanley would find striking:

Extractive reserves bring into play part of the population which came to the Amazon to "civilize" it along with the Indians, but who instead learn from them a new way of living with nature. Rubber tappers learn how to humanize nature and themselves. Thus the reserve brings a new form of social culture, and economic character. Migrants to this region came in search of land, but the property of the people cannot be commercialized. An extractive reserve is not an exchange item, and it isn't property. It is a good that belongs to the Brazilian nation, and people will live in these reserves with the expectation of preserving them for future generations. This is tremendously innovative.

Here, we might compare the Digger declaration from Iver, which sets the mark of Cain on what it calls "Earthmongers," saying that "we affirm that they have no righteous power to sell or give away the earth, unless they could make the earth likewise, which none can do but God the eternal spirit". Refusal to sell the land is a pledge with the future.

Of course, the projects of the Diggers and the forest peoples are radically diverse and subject to their proper dynamics. The political contexts are quite distinct: a national revolution with strong but stifled egalitarian elements on the one hand, a Fascist military government moving towards an ostensibly democratic one on the other. In place of the long-term history of religious conflict in Winstanley's England, we have a long-term ethnic conflict in Brazil, where developers have sent flu-infected settlers into Indian lands in order to infect and exterminate them — a primitive but effective mode of genocidal germ warfare. Furthermore, the process of enclosure has proceeded much more rapidly in the Amazon, and the conversion of Brazilian rain forest to pasture (and rapidly thereafter, to wasteland) is even less reversible and more devastating than the conversion of English arable to pasture or common lands to private holdings.

But these differences should not blind us to the process tying the two times and places together, for the Diggers and the forest people respond to the same phenomenon: global capitalism in the phase of primitive accumulation. Primitive accumulation, as Marx discusses it in Capital, is that early- or pre-capitalist phase that divorces producers from the means of production, and prepares them to become mere sellers of their labour power. To link early modern England and contemporary Brazil in this fashion is not to venture into anachronism, since capitalism is not a system, not even a mechanical sequence of systems (early, middle, late), but a complex, non-synchronous narrative. A single "phase" like primitive accumulation may appear again and again in different places. Conversely, any given historical moment incorporates more than one "time," more than one mode of production. Winstanley's England, for instance, contained the remnants of a feudal agriculture, an early capitalist and possessive individualist agriculture driven by a dynamic of improvement and primitive accumulation, and (among the Diggers) a small-scale practice of communism. Our own historical moment includes the primitive communism of a few uncolonized aboriginal peoples, primitive accumulation in the industrializing Third World nations, early capitalism to rival Engels' Manchester in the industrialized Third World (and in the un-unionized and environmentally degraded First and Second), and even the plausible spectre of a post-industrial "information order" in some ruling class ambients around the world.

It is crucial to remain sensitive to these different times within a single historical moment, since critical and utopian consciousness resides precisely in the lived experience of and critical reflection on this non- synchronous dissonance — the clashing of time, and times, and half a time that pervades everyday life. Given the tendency of many contemporary historicisms to equate history with a rigorous periodization, which carries us along from one dominant mode to another, it is particularly important to note these moments of rational hunger, like that of the Diggers', that reveal critical dissonance with a dominant mode, affiliative resonance with a far-distant moment. When the Diggers cultivate George's Hill, the broken enclosures open up into the rain forest, and we see the common human desire of Diggers and Forest People to create themselves freely through collective praxis on the land. The Diggers' Eden on George's Hill and Winstanley's prophetic writings are certainly of the seventeenth century, and he certainly was not a seventeenth-century Marxist (as periodizing, anti-socialist historians never tire of pointing out). Yet his vision of a once-and-future human relationship to the land, based on common preservation rather than enclosure and rigorously divided ownership, remains non-identical to the oppressive dominant culture of his present, and affiliates itself with distant visions such as Ailton Krenak's of a once-and-future Amazon: "It is for this that the region is so beautiful, because it is a piece of the planet that maintains the inheritance of the creation of the world. Christians have a myth of the garden of Eden. Our people have a reality where the first man created by god continues to be free. We want to impregnate humanity with the memory of the creation of the world." In Bloch's phrase, this memory of a humane socialist future is the Diggers' not-yet-conscious, and might be ours.