Winstanley’s Ecology By Daniel Johnson The English Diggers Today Beginning in 2011 a festival in honor of the seventeenth-century radical Gerrard Winstanley has been held annually in the town of Wigan, in northwestern England. Through poetry, music, film, and other activities, the celebration commemorates the life and ideas of Wigan-born Winstanley, leader of the Digger, or True Leveller, movement of the English Revolution (1640–1660). Largely forgotten for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the communist thought of Winstanley was rediscovered by German and Russian Marxists in the late nineteenth century, leading to Winstanley’s inclusion in the list of revolutionary thinkers Lenin had inscribed on the obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden. Led by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Winstanley’s name is eighth on the list of nineteen revolutionaries. From the socialists of the late nineteenth century to participants in the Wigan Festival in the early 2000s, Winstanley and the Diggers have provided inspiration for radical leftists for more than a hundred years. In the twenty-first century, True Leveller thought and practice has had a particularly notable influence on environmental and anti-consumerist activists like guerilla gardeners, freegans, urban allotment advocates, and squatters, among others. Read On: monthlyreview.org/2013/12/01/winstanleys-ecology
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 09:58:49 +0000
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