Brave Community. The Digger Movement in the English Revolution. By John Gurney. Manchester University Press £55.

Gerrard Winstanley has a prominent place in the socialist tradition. In advocating, in 1648-1652 in the course of the English bourgeois revolution, a new social order where there would “be no buying and selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole Earth shall be a common treasury for every man, for the Earth is the Lords’”, he was clearly just as much a forerunner of modern socialism as was Thomas More and his Utopia of 1516. In fact, he went one better than More and tried to put his theories into practice when on 1 April 1649 he and others started tilling and planting crops on (St) George’s Hill, near Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, on a communistic basis as a first step towards spreading such moneyless communities throughout England.

Gurney’s book is a detailed examination of the social, economic and political situation in the area that led to this as well as of the other individuals apart from Winstanley who were involved. The driving force of the English Revolution has been analysed as the “middling sort”, i.e. those who were neither big landowners nor landless labourers. In the countryside these were mainly tenant farmers; they had their conflicts with the lords of the manor which radicalised some of them in and around Cobham in Surrey. But it wasn’t them who became the Diggers, even if Winstanley himself was a “middling sort”.

The year 1649, as the year in which the King had been executed, was a year when to many people anything seemed possible. The previous year had seen a bad harvest and many poor people were in desperate straits. It was to them that Winstanley – whose clothing business in London had failed – preached (and this is the right word, as his motivation was both religious and practical) that God had given the Earth to everyone to be used as a common storehouse from which to feed and clothe themselves and that they should use it to produce what they needed without working for wages and without any buying and selling.

According to Gurney, Winstanley wavered between seeing this as the result of the Second Coming (in people’s hearts) that would restore the original situation of no ownership and seeing it as a practical solution of the landless poor in post-civil-war England.

The occupation of George’s Hill did not last long, only a few months till August, when local opposition from tenant farmers who wanted the land for grazing forced the Diggers to move to another site at Cobham. This lasted a little longer, but it too was over by April 1650 as a result of both legal and direct action initiated by two local landlords.

This prompted Winstanley to publish his Law of Freedom in a Platform which is a classic of socialist literature. According to Gurney, Winstanley stayed on in Cobham for the next twenty or so years as a respectable member of the local community, but by 1675 had moved back to London, apparently relatively well off and a Quaker sympathiser. He died in 1676.

ALB

Being Ernest

William Hart: Operation Supergoose. Timberline Press $15.
(Available from Amazon)

A satirical novel that pokes fun at America’s rulers and makes some good political points in a humourous way — that sums up this book. The hero is Lieutenant Ernest Candide and his military superior is General Pangloss, both references to Voltaire’s eighteenth-century novel Candide.

Candide starts out as an all-American hero (sorry, Plunderian hero, as he’s a citizen of Plunderland). But Plunderland’s president is Buzz Twofer II, and the vice-president is Chain Dickey, so you get the idea of where the satire is aimed. The factory which makes official Plunderland flags is burnt down, and Candide is ordered to track down and kill the leader of the terrorists. The Committee for a World Ascendant Plunderland get the war they want, together with tax cuts.

Like his namesake, Candide is initially completely naive, accepting a rosy-coloured view of Plunderland’s history (for instance, the native Plunderians had poor hygiene, hence they contracted smallpox). But after various adventures, including a stay in Guantanamo, he comes to see things differently. Just thinking for himself, rather than accepting what he’s been taught, is the big step in his political development. As General Pangloss says when a prosecution witness at one of Candide’s trials, ‘When a soldier thinks, the whole military raison d’etre trembles and threatens to collapse.+ not thinking has made me the man I am today.’

A book by Chomsky is among those that help Candide see what has been going on, and his new view of his country’s history includes: ‘Cubaland, Isle of Haiti, Puerta Rita, Panamaland and others were conquered by U.S. Marines and forced to pay tribute as little colonies, with fruit, sugar, cigars, naval bases and nubile women.’ He turns down a request to run for governor on behalf of a new political party and prefers to live quietly with his family (cultivating his garden, as Voltaire had it).

Operation Supergoose is mostly great fun, with some nice swipes at Twofer and other politicians, and good exposes of Plunderian/American actions. Occasionally the satire is dropped in favour of more straightforward presentation, for instance on Zionia/Shrinkistan (Israel/Palestine), and this is less effective. And as Hart says at the end, imagine there really were a Plunderland and how people might act to change it. Or, indeed, to change not just one country but the whole world.

PB

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