Comrade Jacob and the Class Limits of the English Revolution: A Marxist Reappraisal

Introduction: A Lost Alternative and Its Historical Moment

Over three and a half centuries after a small group of dispossessed people started digging on common land at St George’s Hill, the questions their actions raised—about the origins of property, the meaning of freedom in a market economy, and who has the right to the land—remain unanswered. David Caute’s "Comrade Jacob," first published in 1961 and reissued in 1973, revisits this event not as a historical curiosity but as a serious exploration of one of the truly radical perspectives from the English Revolution: the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley.

Caute wrote the novel during a specific political period. The crisis within the Communist Party following the Soviet-led suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 led a new generation of intellectuals to explore fresh perspectives on radicalism, dissent, and the betrayal of revolutionary ideals. Influenced by his years at Oxford studying with Christopher Hill, Caute turned to the seventeenth century not as an escape from current issues but to analyse them. Therefore, Comrade Jacob is not a nostalgic costume drama but a political novel in a historical context — an exploration of how poor movements emerge, are suppressed, and how religious beliefs and social revolts are connected.

Caute’s novel effectively portrays the importance of the revolution. However, its limitations, along with those of the historiographical tradition it draws from, reveal essential aspects of the class character of the English Revolution and the role of the Diggers in history. Comprehending Caute’s work is crucial for understanding the revolution's boundaries.

The Diggers as Pre‑Proletarian Communists

Caute’s novel and most sympathetic portrayals of the Diggers highlight that they “had no coherent programme for transforming society and never contemplated overturning it by force.” While accurate, the more profound question is why. The answer is rooted not in psychology but in class background. The Diggers originated from dispossessed small producers, rural workers, demobilised soldiers, cottagers, and artisans squeezed by agrarian capitalism. They were not, in the modern sense, proletarians. The industrial working class—the social force capable of abolishing private property in the means of production—had not yet formed. As a result, the Diggers exemplify a form of pre-proletarian communism: a utopian ideal born of hardship but lacking the social power to realise its goals.

Engels’ distinction in "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" is crucial here. Utopian socialists could highlight societal flaws and envision a better future, but they could not identify the class that could realise it. Winstanley fits this tradition. His idea of a “common treasury for all” was morally compelling and historically necessary, yet it was not achievable in the 1640s. This isn't a moral critique but a historical-materialist one. The tragedy of St George’s Hill isn't that Winstanley was prematurely Lenin; it's that the Diggers represented hopes extending beyond the bourgeois revolution, which was the only revolution on the table in the 1640s. Their defeat was rooted in the revolution's class structure.

Christopher Hill, Caute, and the Stalinist “People’s History” Tradition

Caute’s novel is deeply rooted in the historiographical tradition that influenced it. Christopher Hill’s significant contribution—defining the English Revolution as a bourgeois revolution—was groundbreaking. However, Hill’s work also reflected the constraints of the Stalinist “People’s History” tradition, such as prioritising a national over an international perspective, romanticising religious sects, viewing history through a Popular Front lens that grouped rebels into a continuous “radical tradition", and lacking a thorough analysis of the rational, scientific, and materialist aspects of the revolution.

Caute inherits these strengths and weaknesses. His structural device — alternating Winstanley’s first-person voice with a detached authorial perspective — is a genuine literary achievement. But the framework remains essentially national. The English Revolution was not a self-contained eruption of English radicalism. It was part of a continental crisis stretching from the Thirty Years’ War to the Fronde. The ideological currents coursing through it — natural rights theory, anti-monarchical republicanism, radical scriptural hermeneutics — were European phenomena. A novel that situated the Diggers more fully in this international context would have captured something essential about the revolution’s character.

The Diggers and the Pseudo‑Left: Two Movements Without a Revolutionary Class

The Diggers of 1649 and today’s pseudo-left seem vastly different at first. One excavated the commons in Surrey; the other engages in ideological battles on social media. However, both reveal the same underlying issue: a social group expressing aspirations they cannot fulfil due to a lack of class power. The Diggers were not proletarians but dispossessed small producers, rural workers, and demobilised soldiers—victims of primitive accumulation rather than architects of a new social order. Their genuine, even heroic, communism was rooted in pre-proletarian conditions. They envisioned a “common treasury for all" but lacked the class consciousness and power to realise it.

Their strategy relied on moral appeal, scriptural argument, and the hope that Cromwell would complete the revolution for them. However, the English Revolution was fundamentally a bourgeois revolution, and Cromwell was its most consistent figure. While he could overthrow the monarchy, he couldn't eliminate private property. The Diggers were defeated not due to their errors but because they were ahead of their time.

The Pseudo‑Left: Moralism Without Class

The pseudo‑left is the modern equivalent of this limitation — not in content, but in structure. It is the politics of a middle‑class layer: academics, NGO professionals, media workers, identity‑politics entrepreneurs. Economically insecure, politically anxious, socially dependent on the existing order, it cannot imagine working‑class power and therefore retreats into moralism, identity, and therapeutic self‑expression.

Where the Diggers referenced scripture, the pseudo-left relies on privilege, representation, "harm," and symbolic gestures. Both favour appealing to authority over empowering the working class. The Diggers looked to Cromwell; the pseudo-left turns to HR departments, university officials, NGOs, and social media. Both seek protection from above instead of driving change from below.

The pseudo-left serves capitalism by fragmenting workers, replacing class analysis with moral accusations, substituting symbolic politics for real material struggle, and channelling anger into safe, state-controlled avenues. It is not a revolutionary force but an ideological containment mechanism—radical in rhetoric but conservative in effect.

What Caute Leaves Out

Caute briefly mentions the Putney Debates and the Presbyterian–Independent split, but these are more than mere omissions. They are pivotal points in the entire revolutionary process. In 1647 at Putney, the Levellers challenged the Army leaders over the franchise, marking a crucial moment when the bourgeois revolution set its boundaries. This debate was not theoretical; it reflected the recognition that extending political rights to the propertyless would threaten the foundations of the emerging capitalist order. Putney becomes the setting where the revolution defined its limits.

The dividing line in politics between Presbyterians and Independents was clear and impactful. Local Presbyterian gentry primarily led the effort to displace the Diggers from St George’s Hill. Fairfax, on behalf of the Independents, was hesitant to use force against them and did not actively defend them either. This was not simply a struggle between the poor and the wealthy. Instead, it was a conflict rooted in a revolution itself, split over the extent of social change desired.

Cromwell’s Role

Cromwell did not betray the revolution; he embodied its core principles. His suppression of the Levellers and disregard for the Diggers were not mistakes but acts of the revolution firming up its class limits. Trotsky’s observation in Where Is Britain Going? is crucial: the bourgeois revolution could topple the feudal monarchy but could not eliminate private land ownership. The Diggers aimed for goals beyond the revolution’s main objective. Their defeat was thus inevitable, not accidental.

Caute’s refusal to secularise Winstanley is one of the novel’s strengths. The film adaptation flattened Winstanley into a socialist-realist tribune, stripping away the mysticism, torment, and scriptural intensity inseparable from his politics.

This matters. The religious form was not a veil behind which a secular class consciousness was hiding. It was the ideological medium available to people of that class in that period. As Ann Talbot observed in her appraisal of Hill, the ideologues of the English Revolution “ransacked the Bible and half understood historical precedent for some kind of theory to explain what they were doing.”

But the religious form was also a limit. Millenarian Christianity could inspire the poor to dig the commons, but it could not provide a scientific analysis of class forces or a strategy for confronting state power. Winstanley’s appeals to Cromwell — “we are your brothers” — were not tactical manoeuvres. They were the strategy. They could not succeed.

Primitive Accumulation and Contemporary Resonance

Today, St George’s Hill stands as one of England’s most costly and heavily protected residential areas. While this fact appears ironic, it reflects a deeper historical continuity. Winstanley linked the origin of property to the “Norman yoke,” whereas Marx associated it with primitive accumulation. Both recognised that property isn’t an inherent right but a product of historical force and dispossession. The violent removal of the majority from the land isn’t a flaw of capitalism; it’s its very foundation. The housing crisis, land financialization, and the exclusion of the poor from cities aren’t anomalies but parts of a systemic process rooted in dispossession. The Diggers could dig the commons, but they couldn’t lay the foundations of capitalism, which were only beginning to be established. Today, we live after that process. The challenge is greater, but so is the social power we can harness to meet it.

The Unfinished Question

Comrade Jacob is not a perfect history book, but it genuinely helps by portraying the Diggers as real historical figures rather than romanticised forerunners. An even better book would explore their questions sincerely and delve into why they couldn’t find answers. That book still needs to be written. However, the question the Diggers raised — who has the right to land? — remains as pressing today as it was in 1649. It can't be resolved within capitalism's limits and requires a different class, a different revolution, and a new historical basis.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary and Seventeenth‑Century Sources

• Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, ed. Christopher Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).
• Gerrard Winstanley, Selections from His Works, ed. Leonard Hamilton, introduction by Christopher Hill (London: 1944).
• The Clarke Papers, ed. C.H. Firth — essential for the Putney Debates.
• The Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660 — for state policy toward radicals.

Modern Scholarship on the Diggers

• John Gurney, Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2007). The most comprehensive modern study of the Diggers; covers St George’s Hill, Cobham, Iver, Wellingborough, and the wider political context.
• John Gurney, Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy (London, 2013). Important for understanding the modern reception and appropriation of Winstanley.
• Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1972). Classic Marxist treatment of sectarian radicalism; foundational but shaped by the “People’s History” tradition.
• Christopher Hill, The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley (Past & Present Supplement No. 5, 1978). Key text on Winstanley’s millenarianism.

Marxist Historiography and Theory

These works underpin the essay’s analysis of class limits, bourgeois revolution, and pre‑proletarian communism:

• Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I — chapters on primitive accumulation.
• Karl Marx, The German Ideology — on class, ideology, and historical development.
• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific — essential for situating Winstanley as a pre‑scientific communist.
• Leon Trotsky, Where Is Britain Going? — the clearest Marxist analysis of Cromwell and the class character of the English Revolution.
• Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution — methodological model for analysing class forces and revolutionary limits.

On the Pseudo‑Left and Contemporary Politics

These works provide the theoretical grounding for the second half of the essay:

• David North, The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo‑Left (Mehring Books, 2015). The most systematic Marxist critique of identity politics and middle‑class radicalism.
• Chris Marsden & David North, The Heritage We Defend (Mehring Books, 1988). Essential for understanding the degeneration of Stalinism and the emergence of pseudo‑left tendencies.
• Ann Talbot, “Christopher Hill and the English Revolution,” World Socialist Web Site (2003). A sharp critique of Hill’s national‑popular framework and its political limitations.

Additional Contextual Works

• Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (1976). Strong on class structure and popular radicalism.
• Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford University Press, 2002). For broader political context.
• Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire (Allen Lane, 2008). A modern scholarly synthesis of the revolution.

Film and Cultural Reception

• Kevin Brownlow & Andrew Mollo, Winstanley (1975). Important for understanding the secularising distortion of Winstanley’s religious radicalism.

 

55 Days by Howard Brenton: A Drama of Revolution and Its Unresolved Legacy

Howard Brenton’s 55 Days, debuting at Hampstead Theatre in 2012, explores a pivotal moment in English history: the fifty-five days from the New Model Army’s takeover of Parliament to King Charles I’s execution in January 1649. Brenton clearly states his goal early on — “We are not just trying a tyrant, we are inventing a country” — and the play largely succeeds in making this idea convincing. Though it is less than a hundred pages, 55 Days encapsulates a much larger historical scope, including the fall of the Stuart monarchy, the division within the parliamentary-military alliance, and the rise of an English republic.

Cromwell, Charles, and the Drama of Reluctant Regicide

Brenton correctly emphasizes the connection between Cromwell and Charles as the core of the play. Historically, Cromwell was one of the last in the Parliamentary leadership to believe that executing the King was inevitable; during much of the Civil War, he favored a negotiated settlement that could have kept the monarchy intact in a constitutional form. Brenton effectively portrays this hesitation, illustrating that regicide was not the original aim of the war but resulted from Charles’s refusal to accept any restrictions on his authority.

Brenton's most significant liberty is his depiction of a face-to-face meeting between Cromwell and Charles during the trial, a scene that never actually happened. Such dramatic inventions have a long history, from Schiller’s Mary Stuart onwards, and Brenton employs it to heighten the tension. The issue isn't the invention itself but its impact: it risks turning a massive social and political upheaval into a private clash between two consciences. Cromwell’s restraint in late 1648 was influenced more by the complex power dynamics he faced, including an army radicalised beyond Parliament and a Leveller movement even more radicalised than the army. The play is most powerful when it hints at these broader pressures; it weakens when it reduces the conflict to personal psychology.

History as a Mirror of the Present

Brenton consistently uses historical drama to shed light on current political issues, and 55 Days follows this tradition. The play is rooted in a Brechtian approach where history is presented not as mere costume theater but as a debate on political action. While audiences unfamiliar with the period’s factions—Presbyterians, Independents, Levellers—might find it challenging, those willing to engage with the play discover a dynamic work that presents the English Revolution as an ongoing, relevant question rather than just a historical exhibit.

Brenton’s depiction of the regicide is largely historically accurate. He portrays the execution not as an act of personal revenge or religious justice, but as a crucial step for the emerging bourgeois class to eliminate the final barrier to consolidating their power. This represents the play’s most significant historical point, and Brenton openly acknowledges it.

The Levellers and Brenton’s Politics

The play notably includes John Lilburne and the Leveller movement, challenging many modern historical narratives that tend to underplay their significance. Brenton grants them a voice but moderates their political stance: notably, Lilburne’s opposition to regicide is left out, which could have intensified the drama rather than diminished it. Brenton’s sympathies are apparent in his work with Tariq Ali in the late 1990s, and the criticism from the British press over his satire of the Blair government has influenced his reputation. 55 Days reflects these commitments, emphasising the revolutionary nature of 1649 and resisting the conservative view that treats the period as merely a constitutional curiosity.

The mixed costuming in the Hampstead production—Charles wearing a Stuart collar and carrying a cane, while Cromwell and others sport clothing reminiscent of the 1940s—was criticized, yet it can be justified as highlighting the bourgeois nature of Parliament in contrast to the lingering feudalism of the Crown. Although this symbolism may not fully align with current scholarship, it effectively fulfills its theatrical role.

Conclusion: Remembering the Revolution

55 Days is not a flawless history play. Its central invented scene risks personalising a conflict rooted in class forces rather than individual conscience. Yet Brenton remains a serious dramatist, and his willingness to treat the English Revolution as a revolution — rather than as an aberration or a constitutional dispute — is itself a political act. He has recalled being told by a Frenchman that the English seem to have forgotten they had a revolution at all. 55 Days attempts to correct that forgetting. Modern English society, and many of its historians, remain reluctant to reckon with 1649 as a revolution in the full sense. A play willing to insist otherwise, whatever its dramatic compromises, performs a genuine service.

 

The Impact of the English Civil Wars — A Marxist Critique of the Revisionist Counter Revolution in Historiography

Introduction

The historiographical struggle over the English Civil War has never been a mere academic quarrel. It is a battle over the meaning of revolution itself. J.S. Morrill’s The Impact of the English Civil Wars (1991) stands as a defining statement of the revisionist school that, from the 1970s onward, sought to dismantle the Marxist interpretation forged by Christopher Hill and the Communist Party Historians’ Group. The revisionists rejected the English Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, denied the existence of a rising bourgeoisie, and insisted that the conflict was driven not by social transformation but by religious sensibilities and constitutional misunderstandings. Morrill and his allies “set out to demolish this framework,” replacing class analysis with a focus on “short-term political accidents” and local particularities that fragment the national narrative.¹

This historiographical turn did not arise in a vacuum. It coincided with the international shift to the right: the defeats of the working class, the collapse of the post-war consensus, the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, and the deepening crisis of Stalinism. In this climate, an academic orthodoxy emerged that denied the revolutionary character of the seventeenth century and, by implication, the possibility of revolutionary change in the present. The new orthodoxy insisted “there was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie,” a position that functioned to teach that “mass movements cannot fundamentally alter the social order.”² Morrill’s volume must therefore be understood not simply as a scholarly intervention but as a contribution to the intellectual counter‑revolution of the late twentieth century.

The Revisionist Project: Methodological Fragmentation as Ideology

The Marxist interpretation, developed most powerfully by Christopher Hill and the Communist Party Historians’ Group, located the English Civil War within the world‑historical process of bourgeois revolution. It understood the conflict as the overthrow of a feudal‑absolutist state by social forces aligned with emergent capitalist relations. Morrill and his revisionist colleagues—Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe, and others—explicitly set out to dismantle this framework. They denied “there was a rising bourgeoisie,” insisted that “people of all social classes fought on both sides,” and rejected the very notion of a revolution, portraying the conflict instead as a “contingent breakdown of the constitution that got out of hand.”³

This methodological shift was not innocent. The revisionists replaced structural analysis with short‑term political accidents, substituted national dynamics with micro‑studies of localities, and elevated religious discourse to an autonomous causal force. In doing so, they evacuated the conflict of its social content. The result was an historiography that dissolved the English Revolution into a series of disconnected episodes, stripped of class dynamics and historical necessity.

The Political Context: Revisionism and the Neoliberal Turn

The ascendancy of revisionism in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with profound political transformations: the defeats of the working class, the collapse of the post‑war consensus, the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganism, and the accelerating crisis of Stalinism. These developments created fertile ground for an academic orthodoxy hostile to the very idea of revolution.The new orthodoxy insisted “there was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie,” a position that functioned to teach that “mass movements cannot fundamentally alter the social order.”⁴

This was not merely a shift in scholarly fashion. It was the intellectual counterpart to the political counter‑revolution of the period. By denying the revolutionary character of the seventeenth century, revisionism implicitly denied the possibility of revolutionary change in the present.

The Flaws of Revisionism: A Caricature of Marxism

The revisionist claim that the presence of nobles on the Parliamentary side and commoners on the Royalist side disproves the class character of the conflict rests on a crude misunderstanding of Marxism. “No serious Marxist has ever expected a chemically pure revolution where every member of one class lines up neatly against every member of another.”⁵ The decisive question is not the social origins of individual participants but the class interests served by the contending forces and the objective historical outcomes of the struggle.

By these criteria, the English Civil War was unmistakably a bourgeois revolution. It abolished feudal tenures, destroyed the Crown’s independent executive power, established the supremacy of Parliament as an organ of the gentry and merchant classes, and cleared the path for capitalist agriculture and trade. These transformations were not accidental by‑products of a constitutional misunderstanding; they were the necessary results of deep‑seated social and economic contradictions.

Morrill’s insistence on religion as the primary cause is an evasion. The question is not whether religion mattered—of course it did—but why religious conflict assumed the forms it did at that specific historical moment. The rise of Puritanism, the proliferation of radical sects, and the ideological ferment of the 1640s cannot be understood apart from the processes of enclosure, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the broader dynamics of primitive accumulation. To treat religion as autonomous is to retreat into idealism.

The Stakes: Historical Materialism and the Meaning of Revolution

The revisionist dismissal of the English Revolution has implications far beyond seventeenth‑century studies. If the English Civil War was merely a constitutional accident or a religious quarrel, then the concept of bourgeois revolution itself collapses. And if bourgeois revolutions are mythical, then the Marxist conception of history—rooted in class struggle and the transformation of modes of production—is fatally undermined.

This is precisely the intellectual climate in which postmodernism, identity politics, and the rejection of “grand narratives” have flourished. The denial of the English Revolution is part of a broader ideological offensive against historical materialism.

Hill’s work, despite its limitations, remains valuable because it insists on what the revisionists deny: that the English Civil War was a revolution, that it was made by the mass of the population, and that it fundamentally transformed English society. Morrill’s volume, by contrast, must be read as a document of the intellectual counter‑revolution—a scholarly expression of the political reaction of the late twentieth century.

Conclusion

Morrill’s The Impact of the English Civil Wars is emblematic of a historiographical project that seeks to sever the English Revolution from its social foundations and to deny its revolutionary character. By elevating religion to an autonomous causal force, by dissolving national dynamics into local contingencies, and by caricaturing Marxism as a theory that demands “chemically pure” class alignments, the revisionists obscure the profound social transformations that shaped the conflict.⁶ The abolition of feudal tenures, the destruction of the Crown’s independent executive power, the rise of Parliament as the political instrument of the gentry and merchant classes, and the clearing of obstacles to capitalist development were not accidental by‑products of a constitutional crisis. They were the objective outcomes of a bourgeois revolution.

The stakes of this debate extend far beyond seventeenth‑century historiography. To deny the English Revolution is to deny the historical reality of bourgeois revolution itself, and with it the Marxist conception of history as the unfolding of class struggle. It is no coincidence that revisionism flourished alongside the rise of postmodernism, identity politics, and the repudiation of “grand narratives.” Morrill’s volume must therefore be read critically, not as a neutral scholarly contribution but as a document of the intellectual counter‑revolution that accompanied the political reaction of the late twentieth century. Against this, the Marxist tradition—despite its own internal contradictions—remains indispensable for understanding the English Civil War as a transformative moment in world history, a revolution made by the mass of the population and one that fundamentally reshaped the social order.

Notes

1. “Set out to demolish this framework… short-term political accidents.”
2. “There was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie… mass movements cannot fundamentally alter the social order.”
3. “There was no rising bourgeoisie… contingent breakdown of the constitution.”
4. “The prevailing academic orthodoxy is that there was no bourgeois revolution…”
5. “No serious Marxist has ever expected a chemically pure revolution…”
6. “The revisionist argument… reveals a crude, caricatured understanding of Marxism.”