A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

death and then beheaded under the revolutionary pressure of the army,
in those April days of 1649, a small group of men and women occupied
untilled common land near St. George’s Hill, at Weybridge near Cobham
in Surrey. In a situation where food prices had reached an unprecedented
peak, they resolved to farm the common land in common, as an
“entry project” 101 to a just world. In so doing, they invoked the same
creation myth from the Bible to which John Locke would refer thirty
years later. In a declaration signed by fifteen men under the leadership
of Gerrard Winstanley, they addressed the “powers of England” to explain
their intent. Peacefully and rejecting all use of weapons, they had
determined “To dig up Georges-Hill and the waste Ground thereabouts,
and to Sow Corn, and to eat our bread together by the sweat of our
brows.” 102 Their goal, they said, was to remove “Civil propriety of Honour,
Dominion and Riches one over another, which is the curse the Creation
groans under.” 103 The lords of the manor and the armoured power
of the state, and its courts, reacted quite differently than they had in
cases of the private dispossession of common land, although the Diggers
had done nothing other than that which John Locke would call the
rightful transfer of ownership from nature to property through one’s own
labour. This however was a common appropriation and transfer to, and
ownership by, the labourers in the institution of a grassroots democracy,
with the goal that “…everyone shall put their hands to till the earth and
bring up cattle, and the blessing of the earth shall be common to all” 104 –
with no servants, maids or wage slavery, no private property or money,
or purchase and sale of the necessities of life, with no plenty for the few
and want for the many.
101 For this concept, see: Brangsch, Lutz: »Der Unterschied liegt nicht im Was, wohl
aber in dem Wie«. Einstiegsprojekte als Problem von Zielen und Mitteln im Handeln
linker Bewegungen. In: Brie, Michael (ed.): Radikale Realpolitik. Plädoyer für eine
andere Politik. Berlin 2009, pp. 39 – 52.
102 Winstanley et al., The True Levellers Standard,
http://www.rogerlovejoy.co.uk/philosophy/diggers/diggers2.htm
103 Ibid.
104 Winstanley, The New Law of Righteousness, a brief quote at
http://www.spunk.org/texts/quotes/sp000109.txt.
141