A Trumpet of Sedition : 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.