Diggers: then is another part of now
Thursday, September 25th, 2008James Holstun's essay Rational Hunger: Gerard Winstanley's Hortus Inconclusus in Pamphlet Wars, Prose in the English Revolution, is refreshing reading. He hits the nail on the head in both the way he exposes certain historians disregard for the historical significance of the Diggers, and in his clear insight into why the Diggers are still relevant today and how the oppression that they faced is still being faced today. It also clarifies that the problems of enclosure don't ever dissipate. It is well worth a lengthy quote:
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.
extracted from James Holstun, Rational Hunger: Gerard Winstanley's Hortus Inconclusus,
included in Pamphlet Wars, Prose in the English Revolution, [Frank Cass, 1992]
included in Pamphlet Wars, Prose in the English Revolution, [Frank Cass, 1992]
