Gerrard Winstanley

Gerrard Winstanley (* 1609 in Wigan , Lancashire , † September 10, 1676 in London ) was a Protestant reformer and political activist in England . At the time of the Protectorate (1649-1658) of Oliver Cromwell, he led the group of True Levellers ("true equalizers"), who were called Diggers by supporters and opponents alike . They occupied and cultivated public lands and distributed the proceeds free of charge to the needy in order to promote comprehensive land reform and common property . Winstanley based this early communism solely on the basis of the Bible .

Life

Winstanley was born the son of a grocer. As a teenager he moved to London and learned the trade of tailor there . As a member of the tailors' guild , he started his own business in 1635; but in the English Civil War in 1648 his business went bankrupt. He then moved to Cobham near his home and worked there as a cattle herder. During this time he went through an intense religious search in which he temporarily joined the Baptists . He gained his convictions through his own Bible study and experiences that he called “ visions of the inner light”.

Due to such a vision, after Cromwell's victory over Charles I (1649), he and initially only twelve friends - mostly unemployed and dispossessed veterans of the New Model Army - occupied fallow land in Surrey in order to cultivate it together. They called themselves True Levellers in contrast to the Levellers ("equalizers") under the leadership of John Lilburne : These did not strive for common property, but only the individual right to purchase land for every citizen who could afford it. The True Levellers deliberately did not attack private property, but only occupied uncultivated and public domain land and distributed their harvest without asking for anything. Their example quickly found some 50 imitators in Buckinghamshire , Kent and Northamptonshire .

Some local landowners, fearing for their profits, tried to evict the occupiers. After this failed, they reported the case in London. At her instigation, the Chief Justice Lord Fairfax ordered in 1650 to beat the "Diggers" and destroy their crops and tools. After this happened, the experiment was finished in only 90 days.

After temporary imprisonment, Winstanley joined the Quakers in Cobham in 1660 ( Society of Friends ). His former opponent John Lilburne, who had been incarcerated for life, also became a member of this then new religious community while in captivity.

Little is known about Winstanley's late period. It is believed that he again worked as a clothes dealer in London, where he died in 1676.

plant

The early short-lived attempt by a Christian rural commune was only known to posterity through Winstanley's publications. In his writings he developed an agrarian communism , which he justified exclusively theologically with the Bible: apparently without the knowledge of earlier reformers such as John Wyclif or Jan Hus , who had represented similar ideas.

In 1649 Winstanley published a first large treatise on his views: The New Law of Justice . In it he referred to the creation story of the "old" and the Acts of the Apostles of the "new covenant", especially to Acts 2,44f EU :

But all who had believed were together and had all things in common. They also sold goods and possessions and distributed them to everyone when one was in need.

He saw this description of the early community in Jerusalem as a mandate to politics and tried to implement it in his home region as an example. He justified this with the original will of the Creator:

In the beginning of time, God created the earth. Not a single word was initially said that one branch of humanity should rule over another. But selfish imaginations put one man teaching and ruling over another.

Winstanley also found that all human beings descended from the same species without privileges in the 1st book Samuel (e.g. 1 Sam 8) and in Paul of Tarsus , e.g. in Gal 3:28 EU :

Here there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither servant nor free, neither man nor woman; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Winstanley commented on this passage: God does not judge individuals according to social, national or gender-specific differences, but wants them to be abolished.

From these and similar biblical texts he called for the abolition of landed property and aristocratic rule . He understood the non-violent "land grabbing" of the dispossessed, the joint cultivation of the land and free distribution of the proceeds as the actual completion of the liberation of the English nation from the "Norman yoke" of royalty and serfdom , which he viewed as imported oppression. This was later called "communism".

Winstanley resorted to a criticism of feudalism, which had a tradition in England at least since the peasant uprising of 1381 under the leadership of Wat Tyler . Even then, the saying was popular:

"When Adam braided and Eve spun, who was the aristocrat?"

Even after the True Levellers were forcibly driven out, Winstanley stuck to his visionary idea of redistributing the land and published a second treatise in 1652: The New Law of Freedom . In it he again argued on a biblical basis for a society without property and wages and addressed the nobles directly:

“The power to limit land and to own land was brought into creation by your ancestors with the sword. This first murdered their fellow creatures, humans, and then plundered or robbed them of their land. They successfully left it to you, their children. And therefore, even though you do not kill or steal, you still hold this criminal cause in your hands with the power of the sword. And with this you justify the mean deeds of your fathers; and this sin of your fathers will be haunted on your heads and those of your children until the third or fourth generation and longer: until your bloody and predatory power is cut off from this land. "

effect

The model of the Diggers was rediscovered by American artists in San Francisco and, in the course of the early 1960s, inspired many rural California communities , but also the anarchist counterculture in the cities, which distributed free food for the homeless and set up medical care. It is honored not only in Marxism , but also in church history as the first early modern attempt at libertarian communism.

The British author David Caute published the novel "Comrade Jabob" in 1961, which deals with Winstanley's time as a "Digger" in the Cobham Heath. Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo brought an adaptation of the novel under the title "Winstanley" in the cinemas in 1975. In 1988 the British band Chumbawamba used a lyrics by Winstanley ("The Diggers' Song") for a song on their album "English Rebel Songs 1381-1914". The novel “Under the Ashes” by Tom Finnek , published in 2009, also has Gerrard Winstanley as one of its protagonists.

Fonts

Equality in the realm of freedom. Social-philosophical pamphlets and tracts. Selection (= Fischer pocket books. 4393). Edited and appended by Hermann Klenner . Translated from the English by Klaus Udo Szudra. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-596-24393-9 .
Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes, David Loewenstein (eds.): The complete works of Gerrard Winstanley. 2 volumes. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 2009, ISBN 978-0-19-957606-7 .

literature

Claus Bernet : Winstanley, Gerrard (1609–1676). In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon . Volume 36. Bautz, Nordhausen 2015, ISBN 978-3-88309-920-0 , Sp. 1305-1312.
Andrew Bradstock (Ed.): Winstanley and the Diggers, 1649-1999. Cass, London, 2000, ISBN 0-7146-5105-2 .
Gernot Lennert: The Diggers. An early communist movement in the English Revolution. Nevertheless publisher, Grafenau-Döffingen 1986, ISBN 3-922209-73-4 .
François Matheron: Winstanley and the Digger. Constituent multitudes in the 17th century. In: Thomas Atzert, Jost Müller (ed.): Immaterial work and imperial sovereignty. Analysis and discussions on Empire. Westfälisches Dampfboot, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-89691-545-2 , pp. 92–116.
David Mulder: The alchemy of revolution. Winstanley's occultism and seventeenth century English communism (= American University Studies. Series 9: History. 77). Lang, New York NY et al. 1990, ISBN 0-8204-1173-6 .

Web links

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on October 11, 2005 .

personal data
SURNAME	Winstanley, Gerrard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	English land reformer, Christian early communist
DATE OF BIRTH	1609
PLACE OF BIRTH	Wigan , England
DATE OF DEATH	September 10, 1676
Place of death	London