17th Century Communists

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A Review of the Film "Winstanley" directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo "Wheresoever there is a people...united by common community of livelihood into oneness, it will become the strongest land in the world; for then they will be as one man to defend their inheritance.......Whereas on the other side, pleading for property and single interest divides the people of a land and the whole world into parties, and is the cause of all wars and contention and bloodshed everywhere....But when once the earth becomes a common treasury again, as it must, ......then this enmity 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 and 20th century reservation.

This system was and is to this day the basis of the system of migrant labour in the gold mines of South Africa and the key to the massive profits of the mining companies.

it was instituted in . all the African territories taken over by British colonialism in Southern Africa.

RHODESIA In Rhodesia itself, the expected gold deposits did not materialise, though chrome and iron ore were found.

So, to cut its losses in the early 1900s Rhodes' BSAC - which controlled Rhodesia unti 1932 -sold off the rich agricultural land stolen from Africans to immigrant white farmers. Thus were the origins of Ian Smith and his supporters.

Having dealt with the Africans Rhodes turned to deal with the Boers.

The Boers had looked on helplessly as Mining capitalism and a massive influx of technicians, company staff and skilled mineworkers had flooded into the republics from Britain.

Land prices shot up as prospectors bought tracts of land.

This began to divide the Boers into a few rich landowners and a mass of landless or small peasants.

TYRANNY

Slavery was threatened as Africans escaped to work in the mines swapping the tyranny of the Boers for the tyranny of British Capital.

Kruger, the president of the Transvaal, attempted to get some of the mining profits into the Transvaal treasury by keeping up the Dynamite price through a state monopoly, and tarriffs on the import of mining materials and the export of gold and diamonds.

Between 1883 and 1895 the income of the Transvaal State rose twentyfive fold from these measures and various land licences, stamp duties, etc., - much to the annoyance of the mining companies.

Though a farmer, Kruger had a shrewd understanding of the class conflicts between capital and labour. The vast majority of immigrant miners were English skilled workers.

In South. • Africa they were overseers, engine drivers, technicians and blasters. They were a labour aristocracy.

In the South African context the feeling of superiority of the traditional skilled craftsman towards the unskilled labourer turned into a virulent racism - the unskilled were Africans.

TRADE UNIONISM

One of the earliest attempts at trade unionism among the white miners in the 1890s - the Knights of Labour' - pledged itself to fight nut only the company but "cheap labour competition of any inferior tace"..

Kruger therefore enacted a number of laws benefitting the miners against the company in 1893, including state enforced safety regulations and i a portent of things to come j a colou: bar banning Africans from all jobs involving the use of 1:1-:

T: =3e7 3÷1=22:50200 700-52 • BrITis: :: eT=: A-races (boers) this was essential Ic mantain Boer political power.

Thus when in 1896 Rhodes with the collusion of Chamberlain, the British Foreign Secretary, attempted to foment an uprising in Johannesburg in the Transvaal, as a pretext for the entry of British forces from the Cape, the plan fell flat. The notorious Jameson Raid was defeated by the Transvaal The next in this series of 'Socialist Press' No. 37. in four weeks time.

On May 14th 649, at Burtora, north of Oxford, Cromwell's army, having emerged victorious from six years of civil war against monarchism, defeated also the more radical wing of his own side now in revolt against him.

These were the , Levellers, a nationally organised movement especially strong in the army.

The political programme of the Levellers does. not perhaps look very progressive today. One of their most radical demands was for universal male suffrage and many leading Levellers had by 1649 abandoned even this in favour of a franchise based on property qualitications.

DEMANDS

Even so, the Levellers' democratic demands went far beyond the rest of the Parliamentary side in the war and they had to wait a further 180 years to be introduced.

Six weeks before the Levellers' defeat a group of about 30 "common people" had established a commune in order "to dig up, manure and sow corn upon George Hill in Surrey"

Disillusioned with the compromises of the Leveller leaders, these Surrey communists led by Gerald winstanley and William Everard, called themselves the True Levellers or more commonly the Diggers.

The Diggers, unlike the Levellers were a proletarian movement - not merely in their membership but more portantly in their political ideas.

Though widely read by contemporaries, Winstanley's writings soon disappeared, to remain unknown until the late _19th century when Kautsky and Bernstein introduced them to the socialist movement.

"All laws that are not grounded upon equity and reason, not giving a universal freedom to all but respecting persons, ought.....to be cut off with the King's head"

Marx and Engeis, had they known of Winstanley's work, woutd have seen it as a major pioneering presentation of some of the ideas of scientific socialism.

winstanley, for instance, saw that the spiritual and material problems of the common people arose not from the absence of 'lefts' The 337th anniversary of Crommell's defeat of the Levellers PITE Tony Beze en opportunity to I SEE IS * May 15th. the pulpin is miach be stori. Bean Rare a remartable serinon on the importance of the Christian roots of the 'British socialist tradition'.

These were to be found, he said, as far back as the Old Testament prophets Amos and Micah, not to mention Jesus Christ and radical movements like the Levellers and Diggers who took the bible as their basic text.

All this was a distortion of the politics of the Leveller and. Digger (possibly even of Amos and Mican too!), let alone an astonishing version of the history of socialism (Marx received no mention).

But the speech gave Benn the chance to 'adapt the (fortunately silent) ghosts of the Levellers in support of his own ten-point political "programme" of equality and democratic control over big business. bureaucracy and the mas Phil Oliver as William Everard bourgeois parliamentary democracy but from the existence of property and wage labour.

The origins of wealth, he saw clearly, was exploitation. In 1652, almost 200 years before the Communist Manifesto, Winstanley wrote in his major pamphlet The Law of Freedom that:

...all rich men live at ease, feeding and clothing themselves by the labours of other men, not by their own; which is their shame and not their nobility; for it is a more blessed thing to give than to receive. But rich men receive all they have from the labourer's hand, and what they give, they give away other men's labours and not their own. Therefore they are not righteous actors in the earth"

He advocated refusing to work for wages, a primitive form of general strike action. Through mass action such aș this he hoped to establish a 'universal community' in which 'universal liberty'would flourish because private property would be abolished.

The most specific point made in his vague catalogue was a call for 'the rights of constituents to recall and replace their Parliamentary candidates.

This #as interpreted as a reference to Nesham North East.

This right should be upheld. Benn argued, 'on the same basis and for the same reason, as dissenting chapels claimed the right to appoint and dismiss their Ministers".

This argument is just further confirmation that today's 'lefts' see the fight against the right wing purely as words and abstractions.

Benn was right in one respect. The ruling class in the seventeenth century did feel threatened by what the Levellers stood for.

But there was nothing in Benn's speech to make their contemporary bourgeois successors turn similarly pale.

The Levellers may have been 300 years ahead of their time - but IrE! aere prepared to fight capita.

another"

This would lead to the end of the state which, Winstanley correctly saw, existed only because of the necessary conflict between property and freedom.

Winstanley's • style in expressing these ideas, is often very biblical.

This may create a false impression, for he was not in any recognisable way a Christian.

REASON 'God' to him meant 'reason' and *righteousness' was the rule of reason as opposed to that of property. 'Heaven' was the 'universal community" , which could exist only on earth and would have to be built through political action.

It is one of the few faults of the recent film 'Winstanley! (directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo) that the words spoken by Winstanley himself tend to over-emphasise his religious language and underemphasise his materialist ideas.

In general, however, the film is an absorbing, exciting and convincing account of the 12 months during which the Diggers maintained their commune of St. George's Hill.

The film begins with a rapid summary of the events of the revolution and civil war up to 1649 (in the style of Movietone News) and of a major civil war battle (in the style of Eisenstein).

COMPELLING

Thereafter, the style is that of Brownlow and Mollo and it is extremely compelling. Winstanley's own words are almost directly taken from his writings. The result of this is not to make the film stilted and didactic, as could so easily have happened, but to make it coom maso dantia Nim REIN The conviction is strengthened by brilliant but unobtrusive camerawork and editing which create a vividly realistic impression of the hostile physical environment and climate.

This, along with the astonishing attention to historical detail, counteracts the inevitable slight formalism . of the dialogue and creates a sense of close involvement with the story of the commune -its internal development, the constant assaults on it by the ruling class through violence and the courts, and its eventual collapse.

The collapse was inevitable. The Diggers were attempting to create a communist society when capitalism was still in its infancy and had not passed through the progressive phase in which, at the cost of gigantic suffering, it created the material preconditions for a com munist society.

MARX

Marx showed what Winstanley had failed to realise - that:

...if we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic In 1649 St. George's Hill was occupied by a class which was not yet ripe to lead a revolution.

Today it is mostly occupied by a class which is historically rottea and whose overthrow only waits on the kind of uncompromising an courageous fight which was maga then by the Diggers.

Sutel

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SOCIALIST PRESS. Wednesday, June 2nd, 1976 hige 10

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four articles on the history of Southern Africa will appear in