John Lilburne, the Levellers, and the Problem of English
Radicalism: A Marxist Reappraisal
Abstract
This article offers a Marxist reassessment of John
Lilburne and the Levellers: Reappraising the Roots of English Radicalism
(Routledge, 2018), edited by John Rees. While the collection contributes to the
historiography of the English Revolution, it remains shaped by the political
and methodological limitations of the British New Left’s “People’s History”
tradition. Drawing on classical Marxism—particularly Trotsky’s theory of
permanent revolution—this article situates the Levellers within the class
dynamics of the seventeenth‑century bourgeois revolution and critiques the
pseudo‑left appropriation of radical traditions for contemporary political
purposes. The Levellers emerge not as proto‑socialists but as representatives
of a contradictory petty‑bourgeois democratic current whose aspirations
exceeded the structural limits of bourgeois society.
1. Introduction
The English Revolution has long been a site of
historiographical contestation. The collection edited by John Rees seeks to
reassert the centrality of John Lilburne and the Levellers to the revolutionary
crisis of the 1640s. The volume’s contributors challenge revisionist attempts
to depoliticise the revolution, yet the collection also reflects the
limitations of the political milieu from which it emerges. As this article notes,
the volume is “a useful introduction to a genuinely significant body of
scholarship,” but one that “carries certain political and methodological
limitations that demand scrutiny.”
This article argues that the Levellers can only be
understood within the framework of the English Revolution as a bourgeois
revolution, and that their political programme—while democratic and radical—was
structurally incapable of resolving the contradictions of the emerging
capitalist order. It further contends that the editor’s political standpoint,
shaped by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and its offshoots, leads to a
romanticisation of radical movements that obscures their class limits.
2. The English Revolution as Bourgeois Revolution
The central question is whether the English Revolution
constituted a bourgeois revolution. The collection gestures toward this
conclusion but does not consistently develop it. It is right to emphasises Evgeny Pashukanis’s insight that
the Levellers, despite their defence of private property, “objectively
threatened feudal property relations; their ideology was bourgeois, but their
program… would have struck at the foundations of the old feudal order.”
This position aligns with the classical Marxist
interpretation advanced by Christopher Hill and reaffirmed by the International
Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). As Ann Talbot observed in her
appraisal of Hill, his achievement lay in “challeng[ing] the accepted consensus
of Whig history” by demonstrating that the 1640s witnessed a genuine social
revolution in which one class displaced another.
Yet Hill’s work, shaped by the nationalist distortions of
Stalinist historiography, sometimes treated the English Revolution as an
insular national tradition. Peacey’s identification of Lilburne’s debt to Dutch
pamphleteering is a welcome corrective. A Marxist analysis must go further,
situating the English Revolution within the international dynamics of early
modern capitalism: the Dutch revolt, the Thirty Years’ War, and the emergence
of the Atlantic economy.
3. The Class Character of the Levellers
Norah Carlin’s contribution comes closest to articulating a
Marxist understanding of the Levellers. Her argument that they represented “the
small independent producer” and developed a “secular and democratic
perspective” is central to understanding their historical role. The Levellers
were not proto‑socialists; they were the radical wing of the petty bourgeoisie
and plebeian masses whose demands pressed against the structural limits of
bourgeois revolution.
Carlin’s most incisive point—is that the Levellers’
political principles “were opposed to the continued growth of capitalism.” This contradiction is the key to their historical significance. Their
programme, especially the Agreement of the People, articulated
democratic demands that would echo in later working‑class movements, yet its
implementation would simultaneously have cleared the ground for capitalist
development.
This dialectic is illuminated by Trotsky’s theory of
permanent revolution: bourgeois revolutions generate social forces whose
aspirations exceed what bourgeois society can satisfy. The Levellers exemplify
this dynamic. Their conflict with Cromwell’s Independents culminated in the
suppression of the Leveller mutiny at Burford in 1649—an event that marked the
moment when the bourgeois revolution turned decisively against the plebeian
masses whose mobilisation had made it possible.
4. John Rees, the SWP, and the Politics of Radical
Tradition
It is correct to insist that the political context of the
editor matters. John Rees is a leading figure in the SWP and Counterfire,
organisations that the ICFI identifies as pseudo‑left formations which channel
working‑class discontent back into bourgeois politics. The SWP’s “People’s
History” approach, inherited from the Communist Party Historians Group, tends
to treat all rebels as part of a continuous national radical tradition. As the
document notes, this tradition “treat[s] all rebels and radicals as part of an
undifferentiated national progressive tradition.”
The danger is not that such an approach falsifies the
Levellers, but that it instrumentalises them. For the SWP, the Levellers become
a model for broad-front radicalism and extra‑parliamentary protest. For
Marxists, they illustrate the limits of democratic radicalism in a bourgeois
revolution and the necessity of an independent revolutionary programme.
5. Internationalism and Class Continuity
The most serious limitation of the collection is its
national framing. The English Revolution was not an isolated event but part of
a broader European crisis. The Levellers’ political imagination was shaped by
transnational currents—Dutch republicanism, radical Protestantism, and the
circulation of pamphlets across borders. A Marxist historiography must restore
this international dimension.
More importantly, the Levellers’ significance lies not in
their contribution to a national radical tradition but in the historical lesson
they embody: that the plebeian masses of the seventeenth century lacked the
class basis to carry the revolution beyond bourgeois limits. Only the modern
working class possesses the social power to complete the tasks left unresolved
by the English Revolution.
6. Conclusion
The collection edited by Rees contributes to the struggle
against revisionist attempts to depoliticise the English Revolution. Yet its
limitations reflect the political standpoint of the contemporary British left.
A Marxist analysis must go beyond both revisionism and the “People’s History”
tradition. It must situate the Levellers within the class dynamics of the
bourgeois revolution and draw out the lessons that their defeat holds for
revolutionary politics today.
To conclude, “no amount of ‘radical tradition’ building will
substitute for the construction of a revolutionary international party fighting
for socialist revolution.”⁸ The Levellers’ legacy is not a comforting national
myth but a historical warning: democratic radicalism, without a revolutionary
class capable of carrying it through, is doomed to defeat.
