Gerrard Winstanley, True Leveller

Gerrard Winstanley (1609 – 1676) was a Quaker reformer and political activist during The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Winstanley was one of the founders of the English group known as the True Levellers or Diggers for their beliefs, and for their actions. The group occupied public lands that had been privatized by enclosures and dug them over, pulling down hedges and filling in ditches, to plant crops. True Levellers was the name they used to describe themselves, whereas the term Diggers was coined by contemporaries.

For libertarian socialist scholar Murray Bookchin there is a coincidence of political projects between German Protestant revolutionary Thomas Müntzer and Winstanley. For Bookchin "In the modern world, anarchism first appeared as a movement of the peasantry and yeomanry against declining feudal institutions. In Germany its foremost spokesman during the Peasant Wars was Thomas Muenzer; in England, Gerrard Winstanley, a leading participant in the Digger movement. The concepts held by Muenzer and Winstanley were superbly attuned to the needs of their time — a historical period when the majority of the population lived in the countryside and when the most militant revolutionary forces came from an agrarian world. It would be painfully academic to argue whether Muenzer and Winstanley could have achieved their ideals. What is of real importance is that they spoke to their time; their anarchist concepts followed naturally from the rural society that furnished the bands of the peasant armies in Germany and the New Model in England."

from "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought" Lewis Herber. (Murray Bookchin).

Cover Design from the remastered 1976 film Winstanley

"So long as the earth is intagled and appropriated into particular hands and kept there by the power of the sword......so long the creation lies under bondage."

~ Gerrard Winstanley Fire in the Bush 1650

"England is a Prison; the variety of subtilties in the Laws preserved by the Sword, are bolts, bars, and doors of the prison; the Lawyers are Jaylors, and poor men are the prisoners; for let a man fall into the hands of any from the Bailiffe to the Judge, and he is either undone, or wearie of his life."

"Buying and Selling is an Art, whereby people endeavour to cheat one another of the Land.......and true Religion is, To let every one enjoy it."

~ Gerrard Winstanley A New-years Gift for the Parliament and Armie 1650

GMO Artwork

Grow the Revolution!

Killing Fields & The Meatrix

Killing Fields: The True Cost of Europe’s Cheap Meat (2009)

Cheap meat has become a way of life in much of Europe, but the full price is being paid across Latin America as vast soya plantations and their attendant chemicals lead to poisonings and violence. An investigation in Paraguay has discovered that vast plantations of soy, principally grown for use in intensively-farmed animal feed, are responsible for a catalogue of social and ecological problems, including the forced eviction of rural communities, landlessness, poverty, excessive use of pesticides, deforestation and rising food insecurity. For a full report by Andrew Wasley in The Ecologist, click here.

Rousseau On Land

"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."

(Rousseau, 1754)

Permaculture: A Quiet Revolution

Henry Kissinger once famously said  “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” He also said "If you can't hear the drums of war you must be deaf." The Independent reported in January that some still think Kissinger while in office 'yielded much that was little short of evil' and he has been accused of 'war crimes, crimes against humanity, and … offences against common or customary or international law.'  

Permaculture: A Quiet Revolution is the perfect repost to the psychology of control and dominance that Kissinger and the political class represents. The start of this video quotes Bill Mollison: "I teach Self- reliance, the world's most subversive practice. I teach people how to grow their own food, which is shockingly subversive. So yes, it's seditious, but it's peaceful sedition." 

Bill Mollison Quotes

eden ahbez: Nature Boy

The existence of a nature- centered libertarianism has no doubt been with us as long as there have been artistic human beings. As a counterpoise to increasing industrialization and alienation of modern culture, however, there were notable individuals who eschewed a life in chains, and sought personal and creative freedom in nature long before there were beatniks and longhairs protesting about the war in Vietnam. Eden Ahbez was one such forerunner.

 

To put ahbez in context, Gordon Kennedy (author of Children of the Sun) and Kody Ryan in their article Hippie Roots and the Perennial Subculture, says:

Hippiedom is really just a perennial sub-culture…as old as the first humans that ever walked upright.…That’s why hippies will never go away…because they’ve always been here anyway. 

George Alexander Aberle, known as eden ahbez (15 April 1908 – 4 March 1995), was an American songwriter and recording artist of the 1940s to 1960s, whose lifestyle in California was influential on the hippy movement. He was known to friends simply as ahbe.

Living a bucolic life from at least the 1940s, he traveled in sandals and wore shoulder-length hair and beard, and white robes. He camped out below the first L in the Hollywood Sign above Los Angeles and studied Oriental mysticism. He slept outdoors with his family and ate vegetables, fruits, and nuts. He claimed to live on three dollars per week.

In 1941, he arrived in Los Angeles and began playing piano in the Eutropheon, a small health food store and raw food restaurant on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. The cafe was owned by John and Vera Richter, German immigrants who followed a Naturmensch and Lebensreform philosophy influenced by the Wandervogel movement in Germany. He was a vegetarian. He recalled once telling a policeman: I look crazy but I'm not. And the funny thing is that other people don't look crazy but they are.

Naturmensch followers, known as "Nature Boys" and who included Robert "Gypsy Boots" Bootzin, wore long hair and beards and ate only raw fruits and vegetables. During this period, ahbe adopted the name "eden ahbez," choosing to spell his name with lower-case letters, claiming that only the words God and Infinity were worthy of capitalization. He is also said to have desired the A and Z (alpha and omega), the beginning and the end, in his surname. During this period, he married Anna Jacobsen and had a son.

Wandervogel is the name adopted by a popular movement of German youth groups from 1896 onward. The name can be translated as rambling, hiking, or wandering bird (differing in meaning from "Zugvogel" or migratory bird) and the ethos is to shake off the restrictions of society and get back to nature and freedom. Some authors have seen the ethos and activities of the Wandervogel as an influence on later social movements, in particular the hippy movement which developed in the USA during the 1960s.

In a rotten irony, eden died on 4 March 1995, of injuries sustained in a car accident, at the age of 86.

William Morris: We Sit Starving Amidst Our Gold

“Apart from my desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilisation.” (William Morris, from “How I Became a Socialist”, 1894)

Much of what I have learned about William Morris has come from E. P Thompson’s volume William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. The book was part of an effort by the Communist Party Historians' Group to emphasise the domestic roots of Marxism in Britain at a time (1955) when the Communist Party was under attack for always following the Moscow line. Morris has often been portrayed as “The English Marx”. E. P Thompson is also author of the classic The Making of the English Working Class. Both are door stop tomes, but if you can get over that, Thompson is a rewarding read which fills in a great many blanks about the early labour movement, in which Morris was pivotal. 

I was interested to see that the artist Jeremy Deller has recently opened an exhibition in the William Morris museum at Walthamstow. The mural of a giant Morris striding the ocean like a moral Poseidon whilst throwing Roman Abramovich’s yacht away in disgust particularly demanded attention. It is refreshing that William Morris is not just seen as a “textile maker” these days, but increasingly as a “socialist”. For a while there I had thought there was a conspiracy of silence in airbrushing out Morris’s keenly held beliefs. Although “socialist” is a more willingly applied label, it is not very well known Morris was no glib Blairite grand daddy, bestowing philanthropic benevolence on needy folk for good causes (his co- workers were paid as artisans with good conditions and not as ‘minimum wage lackeys’). Morris was a radical  anarcho- communist who wanted to see the overthrow of capitalism altogether. Many “democratic” socialists who claim him as theirs should remember he was in favour of Irish home rule, and against the notion of Parliamentary representational democracy, and sided with the anti- Parliamentarians during the great split within the Socialist League.

William Morris was a wealthy man, having inherited a fortune, and being a successful interior designer for the homes of the effete middle classes. Could he be trusted to lead up an anarcho- socialist revolutionary party? Morris faithfully bankrolled the Socialist League and it’s publication, Commonweal, as well as maintaining a punishing marathon of lectures, campaigns and protests all across Britain and Europe for nearly 10 years. He frequently bailed out his fellow comrades from the inevitable legal scrapes, but kept his own nose clean with the authorities. He was arrested on September 21, 1885, in a melée at the Thames Police Court, but made no public comment on the incident. The arrest was for disorderly conduct at the trial of Lewis Lyons, a tailor, and others who had been charged with resisting arrest at a mass meeting of Socialists the previous day. Lyons was sentenced by the magistrate to two months hard labour. Among the crowd that protested the harshness of his sentence were Eleanor Aveling, the daughter of Karl Marx, and her husband, Edward. In the end, after identifying himself : "I am an artist, and a literary man, pretty well known, I think, throughout Europe", Morris was discharged without penalty.

Morris was also a rural preservationist (founding Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings), and saw the decimation of folk arts and crafts as an insidious and withering artifact of capitalism, which destroyed the spirit of human beings. What’s changed? Mass production has only led to the amelioration of life quality for millions, a fact that Morris foresaw with plaguing lucidity.  He is without much doubt the founder of contemporary green socialism as a political movement. In fact it was the eco- socialist writer Derek Wall who pointed me in the direction of Morris, in his book The Rise of the Green Left: Inside the Worldwide Ecosocialist Movement.

The conflicting ingredients of Morris's life makes him a complex and juxtaposed man, a nature lover pitched as he was against the industrial revolution, with the burgeoning needs of his art to express itself within commercial constraints, with the shadows of history, his legacy and his status all about him, by nature an uneasy leader enmired in petty squabbles and the slings and arrows of other people’s politicking. To overcome these he was, in short, a visionary human being who extended himself beyond the envelope of what was expected or required of him to make the world a better place. Ultimately the visionary fires which burned so brightly, would consume him.

Above: Kelmscott Manor, home of The Kelmscott Press and the idyll where Morris wrote News from Nowhere, probably the finest example of utopian socialism in literature, which went on to inspire many other writers including Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, and James Joyce.

To me, Morris can indeed be seen as the English Marx. Whereas Marx concerned himself with burdensome economic proofs and overly intellectualised historical “scientific” formulas, Morris appeals to the heart, the poet within, the wild man of the woods, the urgency of fighting against all the alienation and narrow dehumanising technological bankruptcy of capitalism which acts against the free artistic spirit. Marx undoubtedly shaped the 20^th century, but Morris may yet speak to future generations.

“Thus, in this matter also does the artificial famine of inequality, felt in so many other ways, impoverish us despite of our riches; and we sit starving amidst our gold.”  

 (William Morris, from “The Socialist Ideal: Art”, 1891)