Winstanley's Ecology: The English Diggers Today

In: Monthly review: an independent socialist magazine, Band 65, Heft 7, S. 20-31

Abstract

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). 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. Winstanley and the Diggers were unique among political groups in the English Revolution in their advocacy for the interests of the impoverished rural working classes; integral to this support was a unique concern with land use and the environment. Adapted from the source document.