Are socialists utopians? (1981)

From the November 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Look at the world around you. Millions starving while food is destroyed. Mass unemployment and an arms race which threatens human survival. Many murderous regimes overshadowing hints of democracy. But how should change be directed? How should society be organised? Socialists have a clear vision of the way forward, and for this are often branded as utopian dreamers. But Utopians base schemes for a future society on abstract principles such as “freedom” or “justice”, without suggesting how society can be transformed.

The Utopians

For most of human pre-history people lived in communal groups, sharing their food. Conditions were harsh, but hardships were shared. With the advent of slavery, people were forced to become the property of others, to be treated like cattle. The first utopias were romantic visions of a harmonious life, and were placed in the past, For example, this passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written in the first century BC:

In the beginning was the Golden Age, when men of their own accord, threat of punishment, without laws, maintained good faith and did what was right . . . the peoples of the world, untroubled by any fears, enjoyed a leisurely and peaceful existence, and had no use for soldiers. The earth itself, without compulsion, untouched by the hoe, unfurrowed by any share, produced ail things spontaneously, and men were content with foods that grew without cultivation . . . it was a season of everlasting spring.

This tradition continued through the Middle Ages in poems such as The Former Age by Chaucer

What would have been the point of war?

There was no profit, no property;

But cursed was the time, I dare well say,

When men first did their sweaty business

To dig up bits of metal, lurking in the darkness

Looking for gems in the rivers 

With the development of capitalism, the search for a utopia became popular and urgent, and took on a more realistic element by being placed in the present instead of the past. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was located in the “New World” across the ocean. By the nineteenth century, utopias were being placed in the future. Edward Bellamy, who[se] Looking Backward in 1887, said that “The Golden Age lies before us and not behind, and it is not far away”. But as early as 1652, Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger, had tried to combine action with vision. His protest took the form of over the land at St George’s Hill near Cobham for common use, while his hopes were expressed in The Law of Freedom:

If any man or family want corn or other provision, they may go to the storehouses and fetch without money. If any want food or victuals, they may either go to the butchers' shops, and receive that they want without money; or else go to the flocks of sheep, or herds of cattle, and take and kill what meat is needful for their families, without buying and selling.

The eighteenth-century French ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity were seen as the essence of the 1789 revolution Five years later, Buonarotti and Babeuf organised the “Conspiracy of Equals”. They planned an armed insurrection as the way to communism, which they saw as an ideal to be put into practice at any time regardless of the historical conditions, with the help of Spartan asceticism and moral restraint. In the early nineteenth century, utopian socialists drew up detailed schemes as alternatives to the unbearable conditions under which rapid industrialisation was taking place. Saint- Simon envisaged a technocracy, with bankers directing production by the regulation of credit. He wrote of a time when the “administration of things” would replace “government over people”. Fourier explained how “Under civilisation, poverty is born of superabundance itself” and urged the formation of communal groups which he called phalansteres. At New Lanark in Scotland, Robert Owen directed a cotton mill as a “model colony” of co-operative efficiency.

Political action

The socialist movement became practical about a hundred years ago, with the formation of political parties such as the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League. The latter was founded by William Morris, whose vision of socialism, News From Nowhere, was published in 1890. This work tells of an activist from the Socialist League arriving home after a political meeting and dreaming of the kind of society his party sought to establish. It ends as the people in the dream tell their visitor to go back and see

people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives — men who hate life, though they fear death. Go back and be the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle.

Socialism was placed on a practical footing when social development was to be based on the interplay of material forces and the class struggle. This was largely accomplished through the work of active socialist speakers and writers such as Marx and Engels. Capitalism was seen to be a struggle between owners of capital and their workers, the sellers of labour power; a struggle ultimately over control of all the productive resources of society. Marx showed how capitalist employers were able to accumulate the “surplus value” produced by their workers because the ages paid, merely enough to keep us fit for more work, are worth less than the the total value we produce. Previous revolutions have taken place when the forces of production (for example, factories) had grown to a point where further development was prevented by the old-fashioned relations of production (such as lord and serf). The contradiction in capitalism which Marx pointed to remains. Wealth is produced by millions of workers across the world, but appropriated by a small minority. This leads to further contradictions such as mass starvation alongside the destruction of food and the universal desire for peace alongside wars.

The end of scarcity

A report produced by the United Nations in 1970 stated that “the surface of the earth has hardly been scratched”. In 1976 the United Nations Food and Agricultural Yearbook showed that “enough grain is now produced to provide everyone on earth with more than 2 lb. (3000 calorics) per day”. In Bangladesh, where half the people are starving, enough grain is produced to provide 2,600 calories a person each day, but it is exported to be sold.

The Head of Policy Planning at the World Bank referred recently to twenty million tons of “surplus grain” guarded by soldiers in India, while chronic hunger continues. In 1966, the US President’s Science Advisory Committee reported that less than half of the world’s arable land was being cultivated, while in 1978, the EEC destroyed almost 200,000 tons of fruit and vegetables (The Times 14/11/ 78). In Nairobi in 1967 about a million coffee plants were burned (The Times 12/5/67). And in 1962, the Director of the International Agricultural Aviation Centre estimated that “the earth could support a population of 28,000 million if food production were organised on lines now known to be practicable” (The Times 24/9/62). (Present world population in 24/9/62 is about 4,000 million.) In September 1976, Robert Loomis declared in Scientific American that current resources could feed more than twelve times the present population. In the same issue, W.D. Hopper explains that

The world’s food problem does not arise from any physical limitation on potential output or any danger of unduly stressing the environment. The limitations on abundance are to be found in the social and political structures of nations and in the economic relations among them. The unexploited global resource is there.

The problem is that, from Moscow to Washington, production is based on the profit of a few rather than the needs of all.

This is most evident in what Kennedy referred to as “planned and subsidised under-production”, when he was US President. The quota system is a huge and barbarically anachronistic fetter on the production of wheat, rice, sugar, rubber, tin and copper. And all this to defend the dividends of shareholders in companies like Nestlés, which has a higher turnover than the Swiss government’s budget (Swiss Information Groups for Development Policy; Nestles Report 1976) and spends more on advertising each year than the entire budget of the UN World Health Organisation.

All this proves that talk of a problem of over-population is a dangerous lie. People’s impressions of population are distorted by living in small areas of absurdly concentrated population. Of 213 million people living in the USA in 1975, nearly three-quarters lived in cities which occupy only 1.5 per cent of the land. The world’s population could be fitted in theory into an area the size of the Isle of Wight with one square foot each. If overpopulation caused hunger, there would be a link between population density and the level of malnutrition. But according to the 1977 FAO Yearbook, France has the same number of people per cropped acre as India, but far less malnutrition. The US Department of Agriculture has estimated that there are about 16 billion acres in the world, as much as four acres per person.

Socialist visionaries

It takes some imagination to envisage a world cleared of the insanity which dominates it today. Alongside the relentless process of debate, persuasion and struggle in the movement for socialism, there is a need for some vision. Not a religious vision of a perfect “Golden Age” or a utopian, detailed plan for life in a future society. What is needed is the kind of passion with which William Morris portrayed work as the great pleasure when under conditions of democratic control, and creation as the driving force to end the destruction inherent in the profit system. Society will be transformed through people understanding capitalism and desiring socialism. Such consciousness inevitably involves strong human feeling.

About a hundred years ago, Paul Brousse boasted of being a “possibilist”. In other words, he was prepared to compromise politically with the system he claimed to oppose. Like thousands who have followed him since, from the SDF to the SWP, he supported what Karl Popper has called “piecemeal social engineering”. To campaign for mere modifications of capitalism is to be absorbed and swallowed by the very prejudices socialists have to fight against. When the Socialist Party of Great Britain was formed, it was dubbed “impossibilist” because of its determination to stand openly and consistently for a system of society which is yet to be established. In that sense only, can socialism be called “utopian”: utopia is the Greek word for nowhere, and socialism does not yet exist anywhere, although the forces bringing it about are present everywhere within capitalism. Problems which are fully grasped contain their solution within them. Only humans can think conceptually, envisaging something before building it. This capacity can be used to look at history scientifically. By predicting and organising, we can assert control over the constant process of social change.

Anatole France said that “Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked”. It is because of the misery which still prevails that people are interested in the elusive utopias over the seas and far away. But the time has come to reject the American Dream of “free enterprise” and the Russian Dream of dictatorship flattering itself with the false name of “socialism”. To leave the nightmare of the present, all of the tools are to hand. The raw materials, the machinery, the organisation. The rest is up to you. 

Clifford Slapper

Diggers Festival in Wigan (2024)

From the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Diggers Festival in Wigan

‘True commonwealth’s freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the earth‘ (Gerrard Winstanley 1652).

Stripped of his religious, patriarchal views, Winstanley is still relevant today. He saw that:

Freedom has an economic basis and is impossible in a property-based society.

Society is structured to maintain the privilege of a few. Laws are made essentially to defend property and official religion is designed to terrify us into submission.

Buying/selling causes war and keeps us poor.

Winstanley’s answer was much like ours. A society where things are produced purely to meet human need (no form of exchange), where production and distribution are based on democratic, informed consent, and everyone can achieve their full potential.

This is what we mean by socialism. Everyone can have a life of material security – provided the majority takes control of the world’s resources from the capitalist minority.

Even if you came today just for a pint and the music, you might want to consider joining with us to put things right at last.

Leaflet to be distributed at this year’s Diggers Festival in Wigan in September.

Levellers or Diggers? (1995)

From the June 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the end of April a few hundred demonstrators occupied the site of the old Wisley airfield near George’s Hill, in Surrey. This was where, in 1649, the Diggers had set up a communist community with the aim of starting a movement to make the Earth “a common treasury for all” again. The demonstrators called themselves the “New Levellers”. this was appropriate because, like the original Levellers (but unlike the original Diggers), they were demanding a reform of the laws governing land ownership and use rather than the abolition of private property, as the leaflet we distributed pointed out.

Many of the Levellers of the 1640s, being inexperienced in rebelling against the injustices of the market, and yet to recognise the incompatibility between FREEDOM and PROPERTY, sought to reform and make just property relationships. For example, the Leveller leader, Lilburne, in March 1648 wrote that the Levellers had “been the truest and constantest asserters of liberty and property (which are quite opposite to communitie and levelling)”.

THE TRUE LEVELLERS were the Diggers. Their ideas can serve as an inspiration to those of us in the 1990s who detest and reject the iniquities of the commercial system. The Diggers stood not for state ownership but COMMON OWNERSHIP: “The earth with all her fruits of Corn, Cattle and such like was made to be a common Store-House of Livelihood, to all mankinde, friend and foe, without exception” (A Declaration From the Poor Oppressed People of England).

Where all wealth is commonly owned there will be no need for money. In the above-quoted Declaration the Diggers proclaimed that “we must neither buy nor sell. Money must not any longer . . . be the great god that hedges in some and hedges out others . . .” Production must be solely for use and all people able to take from the common store on the basis of FREE ACCESS. As Winstanley explained in his Law of Freedom: “As everyone works to advance the Common Stock so everyone shall have a free use of any commodity in the Storehouse for his pleasure and comfortable livelihood, without buying and selling or restraint from any”. This is a wonderful and compelling socialist vision of a society where all things in and on the Earth are the common property of all; where all people give according to their abilities and take freely according to their needs; where money and other time-wasting features of property relationship are done away with. It is a practical alternative to capitalism’s property mania.

Modern Tory defenders of property assert that owning things makes us free. This false equation between liberty and property was spread by the 17th defenders of property power, and was also accepted by several well-intentioned Levellers, just as it has been by subsequent leftists who have feared to break with the ideas of THE MONEY SYSTEM. In truth, property and money make us unfree. As Winstanley stated: “True freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the Earth”. Those in Britain living beneath the poverty line and the millions in the world dying from starvation should see the sense of that.

Socialists must learn from the wisdom of our Digger predecessors and have the boldness to state the case for A MONEYLESS WORLD SOCIETY – a case now more materially feasible and globally urgent than ever.

The Levellers 1640-1649 (1961)

From the December 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

The word “Leveller” was first heard in 1606 when a band of men roamed the Warwickshire countryside, uprooting or levelling fences and hedges enclosing the once-common lands. These detested barriers had been going up all over England for eighty years.

Enclosing the “waste-land” that from time immemorial had been common property brought increasing misery to the poor and greater .wealth to the rich. Large areas were turned into sheep walks to satisfy the growing demand abroad for superior English wool. In Thomas More’s Utopia we read, “ The sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame and so small eaters now as I heare say be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.” Fresh ideas on farming and improved methods of stock-breeding made squires land-greedy. Enclosing was the polite name for stealing; people were driven from their homes to give pasture to sheep. Their only hope of survival lay in the towns, where they were fleeced even more closely than their woolly competitors.

Inventions and the necessity for larger ships meant bigger outlay and brought a demand for more money in the form of capital. A rich, powerful merchant class came into being. The first bank—the Bank of England, 1694—came with it.

The land lost much of its aristocratic value; the traditional obligations to tenant and labourer tended to disappear. The old tyrant with titles was often superseded by a new tyrant with money. Farmworkers were tricked out of rights of tenure. Though freed from the old bondage they were enslaved in a new and often terrifying system.

Throughout these tremendous changes Charles I remained obstinately feudal in outlook. Something was bound to happen. By 1628 the House of Commons was three times richer than the House of Lords. This gave its members confidence to resist the king's demands for money. So in 1629 he closed Parliament for eleven years, hoping to show his recalcitrant M.Ps. that he alone held power. But in 1639 a rebellion broke out in Scotland, and by 1640 he had been forced to recall Parliament to vote the necessary money to quell the rising. Here was the opportunity the Members had dreamed of. They knew that archaic notions of kingship must give way to a governmental system favourable to the merchants.

As a warm-up for their startling policy they executed the king’s chief minister, the Earl of Strafford, who had been raising an army in Ireland to crush Parliament. At the same time John Lilburne, leader of a “left-wing” group—the Levellers—was released from prison, where he had resided two years for issuing anti-State Church pamphlets. Now free, he got an Army command.

With this widespread opposition came a taste for democratic expression. The popularity of Cromwell's rising faction gave the Levellers a chance to speak out. How and where did they fit into the political ferment?

Parliament was divided. On the right were the Anglican Royalists, conservative and pro-Charles. On the left were the Independents, radical but not united. They were divided into a right-wing called Gentlemen Independents headed by Cromwell, Ireton, and Fairfax, and a left-wing known as the Levellers. The latter reflected the aspirations of small farmers, humbler-tradtsmen, work people and soldiers. They advocated greater political equality than the Independents and had a widespread popular support. 

In addition to political demands the civilian arm of the movement (the Diggers) urged greater economic equality; and in recognising that all political organisations and freedoms spring from or are crushed by the particular mode of land-ownership, they earned for themselves the undying hatred of Cromwell.

At this stage the Levellers were welcomed by the Radicals. All through the struggle the Levellers did best in the army, perhaps because there they were better organised than the Diggers. Both issued a considerable mass of literature, the Levellers maintaining that economic freedom followed from political freedom, and the Diggers seeing it rather the other way.

Common-ownership of the land was the bed-rock of their philosophy. Stripped of its Biblical overtones it stated a view that is still a staggering novelty to millions today. “. . . the time will be when all men shall willingly come in and give up their lands and estates and submit to the community.” They added, “and of that for money there was no need of it” (if men led communal lives). In the letter to Lord Halifax, Winstanley asked, “I demand whether all wars, bloodshed and misery came not upon creation when one man endeavoured to be a lord over another.”

In an article in the Leveller paper, The Moderate in 1649, after some men were executed for cattle-stealing, a writer suggested private property was the cause of a great deal of crime committed by the poor, “ We find,” he wrote, “some of these felons to be very civil men, and say, that if. they could have had any reasonable subsistence by friends, or otherwise they should never have taken such necessitous courses for the support of their wives and families.” The paper was suppressed after September, 1649, by “democratic” Cromwell.

The Levellers just as clearly saw that religion with its mirage of a happy future life was the carrot that encouraged the poor donkey of a labourer to stagger on. Winstanley wrote, ". . . to know God beyond the creation or to know what he will do to a man after the man is dead, in any other wise than to scatter him into his essences of fire, water, earth and air of which he is compounded (a belief handed down by the ancient Greeks) is a knowledge beyond the line or capacity of man to attain to while he lives in his compounded body.” Richard Overton, too, wrote in Man's Mortality that the idea of the soul was ridiculous.

The New Model Army (Roundheads) was Parliament’s striking force, its job to overthrow the king. But because its ranks were filled with many pro-Leveller men the Levellers saw in it a means of getting better conditions for the poor. On May 20th, 1647, “a great petition” was sent to the Commons demanding political reforms and the re-organisation of the Constitution. When the re-imprisoned Lilburne (he was in and out of gaol between 1646-1648 for various attacks on authority) heard that the common hangman had been instructed to burn it, he looked to the army for support. He declared the power of the land vested in the army, and at this point Cromwell agreed. Next, a manifesto, The Case of the Army Truly Stated, was presented to General Fairfax on October 15th, 1647, and later An Agreement of the People, which dealt more with civil matters.

Fearing the support gained by the Levellers, the Presbyterians compromised with Charles. Enraged, the Independents with the Levellers marched to London, entered the House and passed a measure to thwart any attempt to corrupt the army; the Presbyterians were crushed. Though Cromwell had been aided by the Levellers, he refused to free Lilburne. When we see what the Levellers were after, we can understand why! The Case of the Army Truly Stated listed thirteen points:

1. New election for new parliament.
2. House of Commons to be cleared of royalist sympathisers.
3. Army’s supremacy to be made known officially.
4. Excise tax to be lifted from the poor, Better tax-laws.
5. Trials to be speeded up and improved conditions for prisoners.
6. Greater religious tolerance.
7. Abolition of tithes.
8. Oath of Supremacy to be abolished.
9. No oaths from those with conscience scruples.
10. Law reform to enable laymen to understand legal matters.
11. Removal of privileges. All to be subject to same laws.
12. Enclosed land to be returned to common use.
13. Pensions for disabled soldiers, widows and children.

The stir that these programmes made, forced Fairfax, Cromwell and the others Grandees (as they were somewhat derisively called) to allow their discussion in a series of debates held in Putney. Cromwell reasoned that if these fiery demands could be proved too extreme or impractical. Leveller influence would diminish and the threat to his supremacy would disappear. The main point was that the vote was the birthright of all men, and to this Ireton replied, “. . . voting was a property right. Only those who owned a house worth 40s a year in rent or who had a freehold interest in land should vote. The protection of private property was of the utmost importance, now that freedom had been won. Everyone was free to make money, and to own property, and the law was there to protect them while they did it.” Rainborough for the Levellers retorted that what was required in voting was reason not property. And Sexby added, “. . . as things are today unless a man has fixed property, he has no rights in England at all.”

Cromwell had the Case of the Army condemned in Parliament. Next, he set out to quell his army and persuade the least influenced to sign a pledge of loyalty at Corkbush Field, Ware, in Hertfordshire. There the Agreement of the People was presented to Fairfax. He accepted it, but told the men to go on signing and they did. But then up rode two dissenting regiments singing and wearing the Leveller colours. Immediately Cromwell drew his sword and rode angrily among them, tearing away their colours. His sudden action quietened them. The ringleaders were arrested; three were found guilty and one of these was shot.

It was a serious defeat for the Levellers. They tried resistance again, but were imprisoned and Lilburne remained in the Tower. At Carisbrooke Castle, Isle of Wight, Charles in 1648 launched another attack (the Second Civil War). All the contesting elements of Parliament sank their differences again in preparation for the fray. The artful Presbyterians released Lilburne, hoping he would stir the army to mutiny. But he supported Cromwell, presumably regarding him as the lesser of two evils.

After the royalist defeat more discussion on the Agreement of the People followed and it actually reached Parliament, but lay in abeyance while the king’s fate was decided. On January 30th, 1649, Charles, king by the grace of God, died by the grace of the merchants.

M. Brown.

(to be concluded)

Voices from the Past: Gerrard Winstanley 1608 ? - 1660 ? (1960)

From the October 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

War

“Wheretofore is it that there is such wars and rumours of wars in the nations of the earth? And wherefore are men so mad to destroy one another? but only to uphold civil property of honour, dominion and riches one over another.  .  .  . But when once the earth becomes a common treasury again, as it must . . . then this emnity of all lands will cease, and none shall dare to seek dominion over others, neither shall any dare to kill another, nor desire more of the earth than other.”

The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649).

Labour

"No man can be rich but he must be rich either by his own labours or by the labours of other men helping him. If a man has no help from his neighbour be shall never gather an estate of hundreds and thousands a year. If other men help him to work, then are those riches his neighbour's as well as his; for they be the fruit of other men's labours as well as his own.  . . . Rich men receive all they have from the labourer's hand, and what they give, they give away other men’s labours, not their own.”

The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652).

Law

“Shall we have no lawyers?

There is no need of them, for there is to be no buying and selling; neither any need to expound laws; for the bare letter of the law shall be both judge and lawyer, trying every man's actions. And seeing we shall have successive Parliaments every year, there will be rules made for every action a man can do.”

The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652).

Religion

“ [Priests] lay claim to heaven after they are dead, and yet they require their heaven in this world, too, and grumble mightily against the people that will not give them a large temporal maintenance. And yet they tell the poor people that they must be content with their poverty, and they shall have their heaven hereafter. But why may not we have our heaven here (that is, a comfortable livelihood in the earth) and heaven hereafter too, as well as you? "

An Appeal to all Englishmen (1650).

These extracts from the writings of Gerrard Winstanley are taken from The Good Old Cause (Lawrence & Wishart). edited by Christopher Hill and Edmund Dell.

Brave community (2007)

Book Review from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Brave Community. The Digger Movement in the English Revolution. By John Gurney. Manchester University Press £55.

Gerrard Winstanley has a prominent place in the socialist tradition. In advocating, in 1648-1652 in the course of the English bourgeois revolution, a new social order where there would “be no buying and selling, no fairs nor markets, but the whole Earth shall be a common treasury for every man, for the Earth is the Lords’”, he was clearly just as much a forerunner of modern socialism as was Thomas More and his Utopia of 1516. In fact, he went one better than More and tried to put his theories into practice when on 1 April 1649 he and others started tilling and planting crops on (St) George’s Hill, near Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, on a communistic basis as a first step towards spreading such moneyless communities throughout England.

Gurney’s book is a detailed examination of the social, economic and political situation in the area that led to this as well as of the other individuals apart from Winstanley who were involved. The driving force of the English Revolution has been analysed as the “middling sort”, i.e. those who were neither big landowners nor landless labourers. In the countryside these were mainly tenant farmers; they had their conflicts with the lords of the manor which radicalised some of them in and around Cobham in Surrey. But it wasn’t them who became the Diggers, even if Winstanley himself was a “middling sort”.

The year 1649, as the year in which the King had been executed, was a year when to many people anything seemed possible. The previous year had seen a bad harvest and many poor people were in desperate straits. It was to them that Winstanley – whose clothing business in London had failed – preached (and this is the right word, as his motivation was both religious and practical) that God had given the Earth to everyone to be used as a common storehouse from which to feed and clothe themselves and that they should use it to produce what they needed without working for wages and without any buying and selling.

According to Gurney, Winstanley wavered between seeing this as the result of the Second Coming (in people’s hearts) that would restore the original situation of no ownership and seeing it as a practical solution of the landless poor in post-civil-war England.

The occupation of George’s Hill did not last long, only a few months till August, when local opposition from tenant farmers who wanted the land for grazing forced the Diggers to move to another site at Cobham. This lasted a little longer, but it too was over by April 1650 as a result of both legal and direct action initiated by two local landlords.

This prompted Winstanley to publish his Law of Freedom in a Platform which is a classic of socialist literature. According to Gurney, Winstanley stayed on in Cobham for the next twenty or so years as a respectable member of the local community, but by 1675 had moved back to London, apparently relatively well off and a Quaker sympathiser. He died in 1676.

Adam Buick

Imagine a world without law (2000)

From the November 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism will be a society without law, but not without problems

The Law Society of England and Wales represents 76,000 solicitors. At the end of 1999 in the Society’s official poll for “Lawyer of the Millennium” the clear victor was Sir Thomas More the 16th-century Lord Chancellor. In some ways such a result seems unsurprising as More was an eminent lawyer of his day and has been respected by many subsequent generations of lawyers. On the other hand, it can be seen as a little more surprising when you consider that in Utopia, his most famous book, More depicted with apparent approval a society without law or lawyers. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, but lawyers, it seems, are possessed of a little less electoral foresight.

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia

More began writing Utopia in 1515 and it was published the following year. There is academic argument about whether the text should be read as a blueprint for More’s desired future or whether it should be seen simply as a provocative picture designed to generate debate. Either way, it is certainly worthy of our close consideration. Let me quote to you a few extracts. This is Raphael, the traveller who had visited the island of Utopia:

“I don’t see how you can ever get any real justice or prosperity, so long as there’s private property, and everything’s judged in terms of money—unless you consider it just for the worst sort of people to have the best living conditions, or unless you’re prepared to call a country prosperous, in which all the wealth is owned by a tiny minority—who aren’t entirely happy even so, while everyone else is simply miserable” (Penguin, 1961, translated by Paul Turner, p.63).

And again, and this is a theme worth warming to:

“I am quite convinced that you’ll never get a fair distribution of goods, or a satisfactory organisation of human life, until you abolish private property altogether. So long as it exists, the vast majority of the human race . . . will inevitably go on labouring under a burden of poverty, hardship and worry. I don’t say that the burden can’t be reduced, but you’ll never take it right off their shoulders. You might, of course, set a statutory limit to the amount of money or land that any one person is allowed to possess . . . You might make it illegal to buy, or even to apply for public appointment . . . laws of that type would certainly relieve the symptoms, just as a chronic invalid gets some benefit from constant medical attention. But there’s no hope of a cure, so long as private property continues” (p.66)

He goes on later to say that it was better “to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody’s under the frightful necessity of becoming first a thief and then a corpse”.

In More’s perfect society there are no lawyers and every citizen was counted a legal expert. Since Utopians needed so few laws the simplest interpretation would always be the right one:

“they think it is better for each man to plead his own cause . . . the point at issue is less likely to be obscured . . . for if nobody is telling the sort of lies that one learns from lawyers, the judge can apply all his shrewdness to weighing the facts of the case”.

In Utopia he also says “they have no lawyers among them, for they consider them as a sort of people whose profession it is to disguise matters . . .” and as for the Utopians themselves he said,

“everyone of them is skilled in their law, for as it is a very short study, so the plainest meaning of which words are capable is always the sense of their laws . . . for it is all one, not to make a law at all, or to couch it in such terms that without a quick apprehension and much study, a man cannot find out the true meaning of it . . .”

Marx and Engels on law

In the 19th century the views of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels included an analysis of the way that law worked. In general it was their view that law was made to serve the interests of a ruling elite. For example consider this view from Engels:

“Laws are necessary only because there are persons in existence who own nothing; and although this is directly expressed in but few laws, as, for instance, those against vagabonds and tramps, in which the proletariat as such is outlawed, yet enmity to the proletariat is so emphatically the basis of the law that the judges and especially the Justices of the Peace, who are bourgeois themselves, and with whom the proletariat comes most into contact, find this meaning in the laws without further consideration. If a rich man is brought up, or rather summoned, to appear before the court, the judge regrets that he is obliged to impose so much trouble, treats the matter as favourably as possible, and, if he is forced to condemn the accused does so with extreme regret, etc etc and the end of it all is a miserable fine, which the bourgeois throws upon the table with contempt and then departs. But if a poor devil gets into such a position as involves appearing before the Justices of the Peace—he has almost always spent the night in the stationhouse with a crowd of his peers—he is regarded from the beginning as guilty; his defence is set aside with a contemptuous ‘oh, we know the excuse’, and a fine imposed which he cannot pay and must work out with several months on the treadmill.” (The Condition Of The Working Class In England).

In some ways, things appear to have changed:

• Today’s judges, most of whom are younger than Mick Jagger, are proponents of human rights and are against the death penalty
• The law is sometimes seen to be applied against erstwhile very powerful figures like Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer
• The 30,000 magistrates of England and Wales are drawn from a wider social band within the working class—witness last year’s poster campaign from the Lord Chancellor’s Department “Have you thought about being a Magistrate?”, depicting ordinary people standing at a bus stop or mending a road

But all these recent changes to the composition of the judiciary are rather superficial and cosmetic.

Protecting the profit system – there will be no need for law in a classless society

The class system, and the chasm between the rich and poor is still here. Look at Bill Gates. As Bill Bryson points out in his marvellously funny book Notes from a Big Country (1998), if you initialled one dollar per second you would make $1,000 every 17 minutes. After 12 days of non-stop effort, you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million, and 1,200 days—something over three years—to accumulate $100 million. After 31.7 years you would become a billionaire, but it would still take you over 1000 years of signing a dollar every second to become as rich as Bill Gates.

The bulk of law accepts and promotes the existing set of social relations. It could when you think about it, do no other.

Writing in Theories of Surplus Value, Marx is quite sardonic about what it is that law has actually contributed to civilisation, he notes,

“The criminal moreover produces the whole of the police and of criminal justice, constables, judges, hangmen, juries, etc; and all these different lines of business, which form equally many categories of the social division of labour, develop different capacities of the human spirit, create new needs and new ways of satisfying them. Torture alone has given rise to the most ingenious mechanical inventions, and employed many honourable craftsmen in the production of its instruments.”

There is an absolutely enormous quantity of law (and lawyers) governing our social relations today. And it is growing. There has certainly been a significant increase in the number of lawyers per capita of the general population. In 1968 there were 54 million people in Britain of whom 23,000 were solicitors, whereas today we have a population of 60 million (11 per cent growth) and 75,000 solicitors (44 per cent growth).

The law in the library has also grown considerably over the years. In his inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1883, the distinguished constitutionalist A.V. Dicey noted that even until well into the 19th century it was possible for a person to read the entirety of English law (presumably within the compass of an ordinary adult life). It could be contained in under 200 volumes. Today, an earnest reader would probably need to live for over 600 years to read all law and regulations applicable in Britain.

But, after all, law does confer some advantages on us. Listen to Marx again:

“The effects of the criminal on the development of productive power can be shown in detail. Would locks have ever reached their present degree of excellence had there been no thieves? Would the making of bank notes have reached its present perfection had there been no forgers? Would the microscope have found its way into the sphere of ordinary commerce . . . but for trading frauds? Doesn’t practical chemistry owe just as much to adulteration of commodities and the efforts to show it up as to the honest zeal of production? Crime through its constantly new methods of attack on property, constantly calls into being new methods of defence, and so is as productive as strikes for the invention of machines. And if one leaves the sphere of private crime: would the world market ever have come into being but for national crime? Indeed, would even the nations have arisen? And hasn’t the Tree of Sin been at the same time the Tree of Knowledge ever since the time of Adam?”

Law as propaganda

There are, of course, a great many branches of law, of which Criminal Law is only one. The question sometimes arises as to why this particular area of law plays such a vital part in ordinary public discussions, is covered so extensively by the mass media, and is always high on political agendas? A proposed change to the perpetuity rule in constructive trusts would not usually be the newspaper editor’s choice for a front page banner headline, whereas a relatively small and technical change in the criminal law or procedure (like the current debate about the right to jury trial) is usually presented as a major item of news. The basic reason for this is that criminal law carries a symbolic and propaganda value as well as being the main set of rules to govern public order. Alan Norrie has pointed to the political use to which the criminal law was put in the 19th century, quoting the 1843 Report of the Criminal Law Commissioners:

“The high and paramount importance of the Criminal Law consists in this consideration, that upon its due operation the enforcement of every other branch of the law . . . depends. [And] there is [no branch] which is so capable of being made intelligible to all classes of persons, or which, in its relations and bearings, is calculated to excite greater attention and interest—none, the knowledge of which can tend more effectually to convince all ranks of Your Majesty’s subjects that the laws are founded on just principles.”

The historian Douglas Hay’s Albion’s Fatal Tree (1977) has also looked at the operation of law in a class context. In his account of Criminal Law Processes in 18th-century England it is Hay’s opinion that “criminal law more than any other social institution made it possible to govern the country without a police force or large army”. He looks at the apparent paradox that this century witnessed—both an enormous expansion in the number of capital offences, but at the same time a weak and declining enforcement of the law with frequent acquittals of defendants on technical grounds as well as frequent pardons or commutations of the death sentence.

Contemporary reformers of that time argued to little avail that property could be better protected and crime more efficiently controlled by a more serious commitment to the detection of crime and to certain but graded punishments. This argues Hay, though seemingly irrational, is explicable if we adopt the perspective that the social function of the criminal law was not the management of crime but the sustenance of the moral authority of the gentry and the creation of a complex and richly articulated system of social relationships of personal dependency that constituted the structure of power. The law was important as gross coercion. But it was equally important, he argued, as ideology. It’s majesty, justice and mercy helped to create the spirit of consent and submission, the “mind—forged manacles” which Blake saw binding the English poor.

Not all rules are law

The Soviet jurist Eugene Pashukanis in his work Law and Marxism: A General Theory (1929) developed a theory of law which saw it as arising from commodity relations. He used an example provided by Marx who analysed exchange in terms of the labour theory of value, albeit that the price-form of commodities extends to cover things which do not contain labour or have no economic function at all, e.g. a rare bird. In much the same way Pashukanis claimed that public law relations, for example criminal law between the state and the individual are simply an extension of forms generated by relations between commodity owners, albeit that the contents of such public law relations are less than adequate to this form.

In bringing out the specific character of legal regulation of behaviour, Pashukanis contrasts it with technical regulation by arguing that in the latter, singleness of purpose can be assumed whereas the basic element in legal regulation is contestation—two sides defending their rights.

Pashukanis illustrates the distinction between technical and legal regulation by assigning to the former such a thing as a railway timetable and to the latter a law concerning the responsibility of the railways to the consignors of freight. Those drawing up the timetable assume that all concerned are interested in the smooth running of the service whereas those parties to the freight contract have an eye to such things as who should suffer the consequences if something gets lost.

Pashukanis (who was liquidated by Stalin in 1937), wrote:

“human conduct can be regulated by the most complex regulations, but the juridical factor in this regulation arises at the point where differentiation and opposition of interests begin”.

In a socialist society, critical decisions affecting whole communities will not, as is so often the case today, be made undemocratically by a Board of Directors meeting privately or by some autocratic state committee as in China or Cuba. Decisions will have to be made democratically by anyone in the community who wishes to participate in the process and vote. Everyone will need to have access to any information they require. There will be no separate economic interests, as now, but there will of course be multifarious social interests. Experts and campaigners will disagree. If that sort of debate and progression through the clash of ideas ever ceases, society will stagnate. Some people will favour more rail transport infrastructure and others will be opposed, some will favour one form of energy development while others will disagree. These disputes will need to be democratically settled according to set procedures not dealt with all over society in a sort of random, capricious, chaotic way according to whatever mode of decision-making happened to prevail in a particular area at a particular time.

In order for this to be done reliably, and in a way which allows all citizens the comfort of knowing in advance of any decision how it will be made and how, if need be, it can be challenged, there will need to be rules. Anyone who thinks that all rules, by definition, are bad would need to ask whether he or she would say, if caught in a hotel fire, “bugger the Fire Rules about the procedures to be followed in the case of a fire, I’m not being dictated to, I’m jumping out the 12th floor window”. Rules are not always made by one person or group to oppress another.

A socialist society will have to operate according to rules. There will be lots of them. Who can practise medicine, who can pilot planes, who can drive cars, what procedures will be required to be followed in order to stop an allegedly incompetent person from practising, the procedures for deciding on whether society wishes to build more roads, and the priorities of using resources will all need to be governed by a democratic process which will require rules. A democratic process is not something you can make up as you go along.

Laws are a consequence of a buying and selling society that casts people in oppositional positions. And as Gerrard Winstanley put it in an early observation in 1649:

“. . . we must make use of gold and silver, as we do other metals, but not to buy and sell withall; for buying and selling is the great cheat that robs and steals the earth from one another. It is that which makes some lords, others beggars, some rulers, others to be ruled; and makes great murderers and thieves to be imprisoners and hangers of little ones, or of sincere hearted men” (“A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England”, in The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, ed. Christopher Hill, 1973, p. 101).

Gary Jay

1688 and all that (1988)

From the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year is a good one for patriots as there are three big anniversaries for them to celebrate. The shipwrecking of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the colonisation of Australia by British convicts in 1788 and the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. This last is perhaps the least well known. Not that this is such a bad thing since there was nothing glorious for ordinary people in the revolution which replaced King James II by King William III.

1688 did, however, have an immense importance for the propertied classes of Britain as it established a stable property regime that has lasted to this day, under which those who held property at that time were legally established in their rights and their descendants have ever since enjoyed the full legal backing of the Courts against the kind of arbitrary dispossession that frequently occurred up until then. It also established the constitutional principle that the sovereign is subordinate to Parliament. Although he was more than the well-paid rubber stamp that present-day occupants of Buckingham Palace are, William was appointed king by Parliament. He did not claim to rule by “divine right” as had all previous monarchs, including his immediate predecessor James, who paid dearly for his illusion, as did his father, Charles I, who had his head chopped off in 1649 in the course of the English bourgeois revolution that much more deservingly merits the title of “glorious”.

The ideological defence of the 1688 revolution was provided by John Locke whose Two Treatises of Government is still required reading on political philosophy courses in English-speaking universities. This work is not only a defence of the “rule of law” as drawn up by a parliament of property-owners but an explicit defence of private property as against common ownership. Locke was forced to do this in order to refute any embarrassing literal interpretation of the Christian doctrine which he quoted in the chapter “Of Property” in his second treatise: “God gave the World to Men in Common”. Political argument at the time was conducted in religious terms — which takes some getting used to for those, like socialists, who know that god is a myth and religion a collection of superstitions, but less than 40 years before William III replaced James II, Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers had interpreted Christianity in just such a communist fashion.

Locke’s way round this embarrassing aspect of Christian dogma was to argue that God did indeed give the world to humanity in common, but that it wasn’t his intention that it should remain so. According to Locke, it was clearly God’s intention that humans should take action to keep themselves alive and that to do so they should consume products from nature, insofar as they worked to obtain these products (even if the only effort involved was reaching out and picking an apple from a tree) they were entitled to ownership rights over them. As Locke, speaking for God, put it:

Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men.

Locke’s argument here, that natural materials that are “common to all Men” can legitimately lose this status and become private property when they are mixed with human labour, is not as obvious as he assumes. For it could just as logically be argued that the natural materials from which all wealth is fashioned should remain common property even after they have had human labour mixed with them. This, at any rate, was the prevailing view in those societies which practised common ownership. Nor is human labour the individual product Locke assumes, but a social product — all humans acquire their skills in and through society — and, in fact, since human beings are a part and a product of nature, human labour is itself a natural force.

Locke used the same principle of labour to justify private property in land: a person was entitled to own the land which they had worked because they had mixed their labour with it. At one point in his argument, however, Locke contradicted himself, writing about his right to own “the Turfs my Servant has cut” whereas, on his own argument, these turfs ought to be the property of the servant, who actually did the work and mixed his labour with the natural material, rather than of the servant’s employer who had done nothing. This was probably only a slip on Locke’s part, but a revealing one, as it demonstrated that Locke took for granted the division of society into masters and servants and the right of the master to appropriate the product of the labour of the servant. It was, of course, by exploiting this contradiction that early socialists, at the time of the Chartists, were able to turn the labour theory of property against the landlord and capitalist classes and to denounce them for the parasitic exploiters of other people’s labour that they were.

But Locke was concerned not just with justifying the private property of the working farmer or artisan but also with justifying that of the rich merchants and large landed estate-owners who existed both before and after 1688 and whose rights the revolution was intended to consolidate. Here again he came up against Christian dogma which taught that humans were entitled to take from the common store of nature and make their property only what they needed and no more. In fact, to the extent that taking more than was required for personal use deprived someone else of their basic needs, this was robbery and the person in need was fully entitled to take what they needed from the greedy person’s surplus.

Such a doctrine provided no justification for the accumulation of capital and the concentration of property ownership that were necessary for the development of the capitalist society that the 1688 revolution was designed to accelerate. On the contrary, it ruled out the accumulation of property beyond the personal needs of the property-owner. So, after refuting common ownership, Locke had to go on to refute also the idea that there were limits to the size of property holdings. He did so in what has to be admitted was an ingenious, if entirely specious way.

Agreed, he wrote, property-owners have no right to own more than they can use but the reason for this limitation is that they have no right to let any surplus to their own needs go rotten. If however, he went on, some means could be found of accumulating a surplus in a form which didn’t rot this would be all right from a moral point of view. This could be done, Locke concluded triumphantly, if the surplus in the form of perishable agricultural products is converted into non-perishable metals like gold and silver, in other words, if they are sold for money and accumulated as such.

Locke took the argument even further. In agreeing to the use of money and to the putting of a value on it, humans had tacitly agreed to the accumulation of property and the unequal distribution of wealth ownership:

But since Gold and Silver, being little useful to the Life of Man in proportion to Food, Rayment, and Carriage, has its value only from the consent of Men, whereof Labour yet makes in great part, the measure, it is plain, that Men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the Earth, they having by a tacit and voluntary consent found out a way, how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus, Gold and Silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one, these metalls not spoileing or decaying in the hands of the possessor. This partage of things, in an inequality of private possessions, men have made practicable out of the bounds of Societie, and without compact, only by putting a value on gold and silver and tacitly agreeing in the use of Money.

It is for having provided this pathetic justification for unequal property society that Locke is regarded by contemporary capitalist society as the greatest political thinker of the 17th century and is taught in English-speaking universities throughout the world. Winstanley, on the other hand, who was by far Locke’s superior, both in style and quality of argument, is dismissed as a minor religious fanatic. But then, he defended common ownership and denounced the rich merchants and landowners as robbers and usurpers while Locke flattered them and justified their riches.

Locke was, however, right on one point: the link between money and the unequal distribution of wealth. A money economy is, or inevitably soon develops into, a society characterised by two main classes, those who own and accumulate wealth having a monetary value and those who don’t. It is because the so-called Glorious Revolution was designed to stabilise such an unequal society that we socialists won’t be celebrating it. After all, as class-conscious members of the majority propertyless class in society, why should we celebrate the consolidation of the property rights of the ancestors of today’s property-owning minority?

Adam Buick

Early Communist (2011)

Book Review from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gerrard Winstanley: A Common Treasury. Presented by Tony Benn. Verso, 2011. £8.99

Verso have republished this selection of writings by Winstanley chosen by Andrew Hopton. It first appeared in 1989. The publishers have given it a new title, a new Foreword (20 pages) and an introduction by Tony Benn (3 pages). Winstanley, an early advocate of making the Earth a common treasury for all, is always worth reading. The selection here includes only his writings from 1648-9 and so does not include his main work The Law of Freedom.

Adam Buick

Editorial: A Genuinely Radical Movement (2012)

Editorial from the September 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The history of capitalism is also, inevitably, the history of radical movements that have resisted the exploitation and conflict upon which the system rests.  Working people, men and women, have always felt the inequality and oppressiveness of capitalism’s class ownership and class power.  They experienced at first hand the lack of freedom of the propertyless labourer, forced to work in another’s man’s fields and factories, in his warehouses and offices, and they understood more-or- less clearly how their lives were being used up for the benefit of others.  From that experience and understanding they repeatedly challenged capitalism’s institutions of privilege and power.   They called for justice and for democratic accountability.  They cited scripture, natural law and the universal declaration of human rights in support of their cause. They fought and are still fighting for their dignity as human beings in the streets, on public platforms and on the internet, often summoning resources of great courage and determination. They have left behind them a record of frustration, indignation and anger.

Working class history records these individuals and movements: Gerrard Winstanley who in 1649 led his Diggers onto St Georges Hill in Surrey, seeking to turn the world into “a common treasury for all”;  the London crowds of the 1770s, roaring for, ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ and denouncing the monarchical government of George III; the Luddites of the early 1800s smashing machinery to protect their livelihoods, and thirty years later, the massed meetings of Chartists attentive to speakers like firebrand, Feargus O’Connor, and voicing their demand for parliamentary representation.  In the 20th century, innumerable radical movements have emerged:suffragists; liberationists; anti-war and anti-nuclear groups; environmentalists; and ‘anti-capitalists’ among them, and already in the new century, we hear, unmistakably, that same frustration, indignation and anger from Occupy as it searches for an adequate response to the banking crisis of 2008 and the current recession.

A few of these movements, like the Diggers, were truly radical and visionary. They attempted to create a new way for human beings to relate to each other, a way that was not based on property and exploitation.  The Diggers failed, because they were few, and the forks and hoes they used to cultivate St George’s Hill belonged to a technology that could not yet feed or free the world.  In later centuries, most radical movements, like the Chartists and much of Occupy, have searched for ways to make capitalism work on behalf of the working class.  They failed, or will fail, too, because social conflict and exploitation of workers is built into the body of capitalism itself – it’s part of the system’s DNA – and cannot be eliminated by modifying institutions or changing a few governments or laws.  But technology has moved on, and what was beyond the grasp of the 17th-century Diggers is well within ours.  Our message then to fellow members of the working class is to act together in a genuinely radical movement, not to prune back the system of exploitation, but to grub it up wholesale by its roots and turn the world’s resources into a common treasury for all.

Winstanley – A Man Before His Time (1968)

From the October 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gerrard Winstanley was born at Wigan in 1609. Little is known of his life. After school he went to London to work in the cloth business. Like many others he was ruined in the Civil War and withdrew to the country. Somewhere in the Thames Valley friends gave him a home in return for which he acted as their cattleman.

In 1648 his interest turned to politics and he wrote The New Law of Righteousness, a sort of Communist Manifesto of his day. In 1649-50 he worked and wrote for the Diggers. In 1652 he published The Law of Freedom in a Platform, a call to Cromwell to lay the foundations of a ‘communist commonwealth’. In this he sketched a classless society, a blend of the radical democracy of the Levellers, the ‘communism’ of More’s Utopia and his own secularism. Like More he advocated an economy without money, organised around public storehouses to which each would bring the product of his labour and from which each should satisfy his needs.

Although his book lacked More’s literary imagination, in the history of the development of socialist thought it was more significant, since not only did it spring out of a ‘workers’ movement, but actually proposed a workable plan. More clearly than any who preceded him, he saw that the source of all exploitation was private property. He said “labour is the source of all wealth and no man ever grew rich save by appropriating the fruits of others’ work”. He also saw that this exploitation was the source of all oppression and war. Economic inequality degrades those who must submit to it and infests them with a consciousness of their ‘predestined’ inferiority. “The enslaved worker looks upon himself as imperfect and so is dejected in his spirit.”

Although Winstanley was sympathetic to the Levellers, he was not one of them. He did not want peasant ownership but ‘community life’, by which he meant both team work and ‘eating at a common table’.

Although he never quite abandoned the idea of a God, this God bore no resemblance to that of any religion; he described God as follows:

  "God is reason. Neither are you to look for God in a place of glory beyond the sun, but within yourself and in every man. He that looks for a God outside himself and worships a God at a distance, worships he knows not what".

He knew organised religion as the instrument of the owning class. In his The Law of Freedom he stated

  “this doctrine (religion) is made a cloak of policy by the subtle elder brother to cheat his simple younger brother of the freedoms of the earth. For saith the elder brother “The earth is mine, and not yours, brother. You must therefore not work upon it unless you will hire it from me and you must not take the fruits of it unless you will buy them from me by that which I pay for your labour; for if you should do otherwise, God will not love you and you shall not go to heaven when you die but the devil will have you and you must be damned in hell. You must believe what is written and what is told you and if you will not believe, your damnation will be greater.” The younger brother, being weak in spirit and having not a grounded knowledge of creation nor of himself is terrified and lets go his hold in the earth and submits himself to be a slave to his brother for fear of damnation in hell after death and in hopes to get heaven thereby—so his eyes are put out and his reason is blinded.
   “So that this divining spiritual doctrine is a cheat, for while men are gazing up to heaven, imagining after a happiness or fearing a hell after they are dead, their eyes are put out that they see not what is their birthright and what is to be done by them here on earth while they are living.”

Thus, two centuries before Marx, Winstanley said in plain English “religion is the opium of the people”.

Eva Goodman

Winstanley: A 17th Century Utopian Socialist (1978)

Woodcut by Clifford Harper

From the June 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gerrard Winstanley’s writings were only rediscovered in 1894 and even now not much is known about his life. He was probably born in Wigan in 1609 and later went to London where he eventually became a freeman of the Merchant Taylors’ Company. By 1643, however, he was bankrupt and was forced to leave London to live on the land, at Cobham in Surrey. It was here, amidst the ferment of ideas stirred up by the Civil War between Parliament and Charles I (in which he wholeheartedly supported the parliamentary side), that Winstanley developed radical ideas.

Basically, he held that the earth had originally been given to mankind by God to be held in common and that landlords were usurpers. He urged that the original common ownership and free use of the land be restored and proposed that a start should be made by allowing the landless poor (one of whom he now was) to use the commons at St. Georges Hill near Cobham; hence their name of “Diggers”.

The Diggers did not parcel out the land amongst individuals, but worked it in common with the intention of later sharing in common the fruits of their joint labour. But they were never to enjoy these fruits; for right from the start they were harassed by the local landlords: they were taken to Court for trespass, their goods were seized, their houses pulled down and their crops destroyed. While this was going on Winstanley wrote a number of pamphlets putting the Diggers’ case. Later, in 1651, he decided to put their views into systematic form; the result was The Law of Freedom in a Platform, addressed to Cromwell, that appeared the following year. This proposed a communistic — and democratic, with annually elected officials and councils — society without buying and selling or money, to be established first on the commons and on the lands seized from the King, the bishops and royalists but with the eventual aim of embracing the whole of England.

Unlike Sir Thomas More in his Utopia (which appeared in 1516 and which is more widely known among socialists), Winstanley was not painting a mere picture of an ideal society but was putting forward a practical programme for action. Needless to say, Cromwell did not take up his suggestions and Winstanley and his ideas disappeared into oblivion — we do not even know when Winstanley died.

There was in fact no reason, apart from the opposition of the landlords (including the new ones created under Cromwell by the sale of royal and episcopal lands), why Winstanley’s ideas could not have been put into practice on a small scale. In the 19th century many colonies based on similar principles were to be established and to function for a while, especially in those parts of America where there were no landlords to sabotage them. Thus, in this sense, Winstanley can be said to be the first of the “utopian socialists” anticipating by over 150 years the projects of Fourier, Owen and Cabet.

We reproduce below an extensive passage from The Law of Freedom from which the extent to which Winstanley grasped that common ownership necessarily involves the disappearance of buying and selling and of money can be seen.

The Law of Freedom (1652)

The earth is to be planted and the fruits reaped and carried into barns and storehouses by the assistance of every family. And if any man or family want corn or other provision, they may go to the storehouses and fetch without money. If they want a horse to ride, go to the fields in summer, or to the common stables in winter, and receive one from the keepers, and when your journey is performed, bring him where you had him, without money. If any want food or victuals, they may either go to the butchers’ shops, and receive that they want without money; or else go to the flocks of sheep, or herds of cattle, and take and kill what meat is needful for their families, without buying and selling. And the reason why all the riches of the earth are a common stock is this, because the earth and the labours thereupon are managed by common assistance of every family, without buying and selling.

Even as now we have particular trade in cities and towns, called shopkeepers, which shall remain still as they be, only altered in their receiving in and delivering out. For whereas by the law of kings or conquerors they do receive in and deliver out by buying and selling, and exchanging the conqueror’s picture or stamp upon a piece of gold or silver for the fruits of the earth, now they shall (by the laws of the Commonwealth) receive into their shops and deliver out again freely, without buying and selling.

They shall receive in as into a storehouse, and deliver out again freely as out of a common storehouse, when particular persons or families come for anything they need; as now they do by buying and selling under kingly government.

For as particular families and tradesmen do make several works more than they can make use of, as hats, shoes, gloves, stockings, linen and woollen cloth and the like, and do carry their particular work to storehouses, to work upon without buying and selling; and go to other storehouses and fetch any other commodity which they want and cannot make.. For as other men partakes of their labours, it is reason they should partake of other men’s.

* * *

Every tradesman shall fetch materials, as leather, wool, flax, corn and the like, from the public storehouses, to work upon without buying and selling; and when particular works are made, as cloth, shoes, hats and the like, the tradesmen shall bring these particular works to particular shops, as is now in practice, without buying and selling. And every family as they want such things as they cannot make, they shall go to these shops and fetch without money, even as now they fetch with money.

* * *

As silver and gold is either found out in mines in our own and, or brought by shipping from beyond the sea, it shall not be coined with a conqueror’s stamp upon it, to set up buying and selling under his name or by his leave; for there shall be no other use of it in the commonwealth than to make dishes and other necessaries for the ornament of houses, as now there is use made of brass, pewter and iron, or any other metal in their use.

(Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, edited by Christopher Hill, Pelican Classic, 1973)

Early Christianity and Communism (2017)

From the June 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

When our representative was interviewed on BBC2’s Daily Politics Show in the context of the general election, Polly Toynbee commented that socialism seemed like early Christianity (see: LINK). But there is a difference: they were only concerned with communism in consumption while modern socialism is about common ownership of the means of production.

Omnia sunt communia (‘all things in common’) is attributed to Thomas Müntzer, a radical theologian who during the German Peasants’ War, in February 1525, took control of the town of Muhlhausen where he imposed a ‘communist’ community in the name of Christianity. It was an epoch where itinerant preachers preached ‘the Kingdom of God on Earth’ which was biblical language demanding that the common lands the nobility have taken for themselves be restored to the community and the end of serfdom. Omnia sunt communia expressed the idea that everything belongs to everyone or in modern parlance, common ownership.

Some, such as James Connolly in Labour, Nationality and Religion, argued that early Christianity was originally ‘communist’-inspired, citing some of the church fathers.

• “What thing do you call ‘yours’? What thing are you able to say is yours? From whom have you received it? You speak and act like one who upon an occasion going early to the theatre, and possessing himself without obstacle of the seats destined for the remainder of the public, pretends to oppose their entrance in due time, and to prohibit them seating themselves, arrogating to his own sole use property that is really destined to common use. And it is precisely in this manner act the rich”. – St. Basil the Great.
• “The use of all things that are found in this world ought to be common to all men. Only the most manifest iniquity makes one say to the other, ‘This belongs to me, that to you’. Hence the origin of contention among men.” – St. Clement.
• “Nature furnishes its wealth to all men in common. God beneficently has created all things that their enjoyment be common to all living beings, and that the earth becomes the common possession of all. It is Nature itself that has given birth to the right of the community, whilst it is only unjust usurpation that has created the right of private poverty.”   and “The earth belongs to everyone, not to the rich.”   St. Ambrose
• “The earth of which they are born is common to all, and therefore the fruit that the earth brings forth belongs without distinction to all”. – St. Gregory the Great.

These ideals re-surfaced in the Middle Ages when John Ball, a preacher in the Peasant’s Revolt, was reported as declaring:

  When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should   be   bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty

In the 15th century, in the town of Tabor in Bohemia, there arose a religious sect, the Taborites, who tried to put these ideas into practice. They went one step further than most, ‘Everything will be common, including wives; there will be free sons and daughters of God and there will be no marriage as union of two — husband and wife.’ Historians describe how ‘Every one who came was ‘brother’ or ‘sister,’ as all social distinctions were unrecognised. The priests shared the work among themselves; some preaching in designated places (men and women being kept apart), others hearing confessions, while a third part communicated in both kinds. Thus it went on till noon. Then came the consumption in common of the food brought by the guests, which was divided among them, the want of one being made good by the superabundance of another; for the brothers and sisters of Mount Tabor knew no difference between mine and thine.’

The Taborites taught that ‘In these days there shall be no king, ruler, or subject on the earth, and all imposts and taxes shall cease; no one shall force another to do anything, for all shall be equal brothers and sisters. As in the town of Tabor there is no mine or thine, but all is held in common, so shall everything be common to all, and no one own anything for himself alone. Whoever does so commits a deadly sin.’

Any layman might become a priest. The members of that order were chosen from the community, and they, in turn, elected the bishops; but they were financially dependent on the community. Their functions, like those of the medieval priesthood in general, were in the main similar to those of the present state and municipal officials and teachers in Germany. Their duties were to organise and manage the various institutions of the Brotherhood, and regulate the connection between the several communities, as well as the relations of these with the outer world.

During the Reformation, various religious sects arose that advocated equality ‘in the sight of God’. Karl Kautsky in his History of Christianity described the Anabaptists as ‘the forerunner of the modern socialism.’ An Anabaptist advocate, Jan Matthys, took control of the town of Munster. Since the New Testament said money was the root of all evil these Christians abolished private ownership of money. Instead, it was collected and put in the hands of the Church which used it to hire ‘outside’ workers. The food was also collectivised and rationed out by the Church. Communal dining-halls were created and private homes were declared public property open to the countless poverty-stricken seeking God’s kingdom. Another sect at the time, the Hutterites said, ‘private property is the greatest enemy of love.’

When the English Civil War erupted, it was the custom of the times for the Bible to be quoted on every occasion with meanings read into the text and the political writings were cloaked in religious phrases. The Digger, Gerrard Winstanley, used the ‘Good Book’ to advocate a socialistic society.

  ‘Every tradesman shall fetch materials… from the public store-houses to work upon without buying and selling; and when particular works are made… the tradesmen shall bring these particular works to particular shops, as it is now the practice, without buying and selling. And every family as they want such things as they cannot make, they shall go to these shops and fetch without money…The earth is to be planted, and the fruits reaped and carried into barns and store-houses, by the assistance of every family. And if any man or family want corn or – other provision they may go to the store-houses and fetch without money. If they want a horse to ride, go into the fields in summer, or to the common stables in winter, and receive one from the keepers; and when your journey is performed, bring him where you had him, without money. If any want food or victuals, they may either go to the butchers’ shops, and receive what they want without money; or else go to the flocks of sheep or herds of cattle, and take and kill what meat is needful for their families, without buying and selling.’, (The Law of Freedom) 

‘ . . . buying and selling is the great cheat that robs and steals the earth from one another. It is that which makes some lords, others beggars, some rulers, others to be ruled; and makes great murderers and thieves to be imprisoners and hangers of little ones, or of sincere hearted men.’, (A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England.)

Another Leveller, William Walwyn, explained that the only true religion consisted in helping the poor:

  ‘What an inequitable thing it is for one man to have thousands and another want bread! The pleasure of God is that all men should have enough, and not that one man should abound in this world’s goods, spending it upon lusts, and another man (of far better deserts and far more useful to the commonwealth) not to be worth twopence.’

He said that ‘ the world shall never be well until all things be common’.

Then, there were the Ranters. ‘Have all things in common, or else the plague of God will rot and consume all that you have.’ declared Abiezer Coppe while Thomas Tany maintained that all religion was ‘a lie, a fraud, a deceit, for there is but one truth and that is love.’ He demanded that the people’s lands were rendered to the people.

Had these movements succeeded they may well have become themselves some sort of theocracies such as the puritanical state the religious radicals of the English Revolution imposed, for as Engels pointed out in The Peasant War in Germany, talking about Thomas Müntzer, ‘The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government at a time when society is not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents and for the measures which that domination implies…Thus, he necessarily finds himself in a unsolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions and principles, and the immediate interests of his party and what he ought to do cannot be done. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe. In the interest of the movement, he is compelled to advance the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with talk and promises, and with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. He who is put into this awkward position is irrevocably lost.’

There are two essential aspects of socialism. One involves the common ownership of the means of production. The other involves the distribution of the means of consumption according to their needs. In was the latter ‘consumption communism’ which prevailed in those early social movements and they were unconcerned with common ownership in the sphere of production. The Taborite ‘communism’, for instance, was based on the needs of the poor, and not on production. While the needs of the poor engendered the struggle for ‘communism’, there existed the persistence of private proprietorship in production and these owners grew less willing to relinquish their surplus for the benefit of the poor.

What was lacking for a fully functioning socialist society was the capacity to provide for the needs of individuals and the community. But today we have the technology to supply everyone and as Sylvia Pankhurst explained, ‘Socialism means plenty for all. We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance . . . We do not call for limitation of births, for penurious thrift, and self-denial. We call for a great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume.’

Modern socialism is concerned with who owns the means of production and distribution. The answer is everybody and nobody.

ALJO