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.
