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Communalism
From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century
10. Winstanley, The Diggers
11. The Near East and Russia
Surprisingly the seventeenth century with its almost continuous wars of religion was
not a good time for the radical Reformation. Cujis regio, ejus religio —
religion had become a matter of large-scale politics. Wars fought between nations and
alliances of nations divided Europe into blocks of Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists.
Small groups of the elect were crushed out by the sheer weight of the contending monsters.
Then, too, the Thirty Years War, which was fought to destroy the Holy Roman Empire as the
dominant power in Europe, also crushed or profoundly distorted the culture of the various
parts of the empire. Germany emerged fragmented and wasted and did not recover for
generations. The radical Reformation had been a natural outgrowth of the culture of the
late medieval middle of Europe and the Thirty Years War destroyed its roots. In the
Netherlands, Switzerland, and amongst the Hutterites in their remote refuges, a process of
fossilization had set in.
The English Civil War and commonwealth were essentially a product of class struggle,
and the proliferation of sects in the latter days of the Civil War took place almost
entirely in a lower middle class and upper working class context. In spite of their name,
the Levellers were far from being unbridled democrats. They proposed to extend
participation in power only to men of substance — small, middle-class substance
— like themselves. The Fifth Monarchy men were such extreme chiliasts as to have no
real social program.
The Ranters were only incidentally millenarians. Basically they were a revival of the
Brotherhood of the Free Spirit, who believed that once divinized and absorbed into the
Godhead the soul was incapable of evil. Like the Adamites who were expelled from Tabor
they lived exalted in an amoral ecstasy. If they practiced community of goods, nudism,
speaking with tongues, and sexual orgies it was all part of a frantic, hurried, and hunted
life lived in a state of unrelieved excitement. Some Ranters were simply extreme
Spiritualists, descendants of Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics; and with the
Restoration of Charles II they were absorbed into the Quakers. They really lay completely
outside the development of English Puritanism.
The agitation of the Levellers lasted only three years. They were primarily a political
party who wished to see the promises of the Rump Parliament — the recruiting
propaganda for the second stage of the Civil War — fulfilled. Their leader, John
Lilburne, had been an associate of Cromwell’s at the beginning and the Levellers were
perfectly right when they accused him of selling out. Although the final form of their Agreement
of the Free People of England, their political manifesto, proposes a broader
democracy than would come to England until the end of the nineteenth century, they did not
believe in universal franchise, but excluded servants, paupers, farm laborers, Roman
Catholics, Episcopalians, Royalists, “heretics,” and, of course, women.
Essentially they were left-wing Calvinist republicans. By the end of 1649 they had been
completely suppressed.
In 1653 the Nominated or “Barebones” Parliament, chosen from the leaders of
the Independent Churches, sat briefly; but its attempts to inaugurate the rule of the
saints were so radical and disorganized that Cromwell dissolved them and became dictator
— “Protector.” This led to a revolt of the more extreme millenarians, to
whom Cromwell became the “Little Horn” of the Beast of the Apocalypse. They
proposed to establish a ruthless despotism of the elect in preparation for the final
kingdom of the millennium. The Fifth Monarchy movement, lacking both ideology and social
program, sprang up through an inflamed rhetoric which consisted exclusively of the
reiteration and rearrangement of the apocalyptic language of the Books of Daniel and
Revelation. It was a massive hysterical outburst of rage by men who knew they had been
betrayed. Unlike the Levellers, they took to armed revolt. In April 1657 a handful of men
rushed about London fighting as they went and were quickly suppressed. In January 1661
another, even more frantic and desperate attempt occurred, and those who were not killed
in the streets were executed, and the sect came to an end.
Movements like the old Family of Love, the Seekers, and the Quakers grew in the
interstices of the English Reformation, at first so clandestinely that from Henry VIII to
the emergence of the Quakers we know surprisingly little about them. Various groups were
accused of practicing community of goods; but although the movement was widespread, at
least in the imagination of its persecutors, each individual group seems to have been a
tiny conventicle, with members meeting in one another's’ homes and sharing their
resources. Theologically the older Anabaptism died out in England and was replaced by
Spiritualism. The modern Baptist sect which arose in those days was an independent
development which owed practically nothing to continental Anabaptism but was rather a
special form of Calvinism. In the writing and preaching of George Fox and the earliest
Quakers there were no special social or economic concerns, and it was only after the
Restoration with the consolidation of modern Quakerism in the days of William Penn that
the Quakers became anti-political.
A little group of unemployed laborers and landless peasants gathered at St.
George’s Hill near Walton-on-Thames in Surrey on April 1, 1649, and began to dig up
the common land and prepare for sowing vegetables. Their leaders were William Everard and
Gerrard Winstanley. At first their activities aroused curiosity and a certain amount of
sympathy but as time went on the local lords of the manor, the gentry, aroused the
populace and the mob shut the Diggers up in the church at Walton until they were released
by a justice of the peace. Again they were captured by a mob and locked up in the nearby
town of Kingston and again released. On April 16 a complaint was laid before the Council
of State, who sent two groups of cavalry to investigate.
The captain, Gladman, reported that the incident was trivial and sent Everard and
Winstanley to London to explain themselves to Thomas Fairfax. They explained that since
the Norman Conquest England had been under a tyranny which was now abolished, but that now
God would relieve the poor and restore their freedom to enjoy the fruits of the earth. The
two men explained that they did not intend to interfere with private property, but only to
plant and harvest on the many wastelands of England, and to live together holding all
things in common. They were certain that their example would be followed by the poor and
dispossessed all over England, and in the course of time all men would give up their
possessions and join them in community.
A month later Lord Fairfax stopped by on his way to London, to see for himself what was
happening, and decided it was a matter for the local authorities. In June another mob,
including some soldiers, assaulted the Diggers and trampled their crops. Winstanley
complained to Fairfax and the soldiers were apparently ordered to leave the Diggers alone.
In June the Diggers announced that they intended to cut and sell the wood on the common,
and at this point the landlords sued for damages and trespass. The court awarded damages
of ten pounds and costs, and took the cows Winstanley was pasturing on the common, but
released them because they were not his property.
Perhaps because of the judgment, and because their crops had all been destroyed, the
Diggers moved in the autumn to the common of Cobham Manor, built four houses, and started
a crop of winter grain. By this time there were over fifty Diggers. When they refused to
disperse, Fairfax finally sent troops who, with the mob, destroyed two of the houses and
again trampled the fields. The Diggers persisted and by spring they had eleven acres of
growing grain and six or seven houses and similar movements had sprung up in
Northamptonshire and Kent. The landlord, a clergyman, John Platt, turned his cattle into
the young grain and led a mob in destroying houses and driving out the Diggers and their
women and children.
On April 1, 1650, Winstanley and fourteen others (Everard, who seems to have been
demented, vanishes early in the story) were indicted for disorderly conduct, unlawful
assembly, and trespass. There is no record of the disposal of the indictment, but this was
the end of the little communist society at Cobham.
This is all there was to the Digger movement, a trivial episode which was a ninety-day
wonder in the news sheets when it first started, and which was almost without influence at
the time, and easily could have been lost to history — except for the writings of
Gerrard Winstanley. All during the course of the experiment he issued a series of
pamphlets which, as his ideas rapidly evolved, came to constitute the first systematic
exposition of libertarian communism in English.
All the tendencies of the radical Reformation seem to flow together in Winstanley, to
be blended and secularized, and become an ideology rather than a theology. Spiritualism,
radical Unitarianism, apostolic communism, evangelical rationalism — one could easily
believe that he was well read in the entire literature of the radical Reformation. Yet we
know nothing of his intellectual background, reading, or influences. He never quotes a
secular authority, only the Bible, in all his writings, and we know nothing about his
education, and little enough about his life. He says again and again that his ideas owe
nothing to any other man or to any book, only to the Inner Light and to its
“openings” in visionary experiences. Perhaps that is true.
Gerrard Winstanley was born in the village of Wigan in 1609, in a family of small
gentry and merchants that had long been prominent in England. His father Edward was
registered as a mercer and the son was raised in the cloth trade. Somewhere he must have
received a fairly good education for a provincial middle-class boy because, although he
never uses, as did everybody else in his day, a classical quotation, this very avoidance
would indicate not only that he was well educated but quite sophisticated, and the prose
style in his later pamphlets is that of a highly literate man. At the age of twenty he was
in London, apprenticed to Sarah Gater, widow of William Gater of the Merchant
Taylor’s company, and at twenty-eight he became a freeman and went into business for
himself. Three years later he married Susan King. In the depression which began in 1643 he
went bankrupt, and he was still being sued by one of his creditors in 1660. After his
bankruptcy, he left London to stay with friends in the neighborhood of Cobham and
Walton-on-Thames in Surrey where, to judge from his troubles over the cows, he made a
living pasturing other people’s cattle on the common.
At some time before his first publication Winstanley joined the Baptists and may have
been a preacher for them, but before 1648 he had come to believe that baptism was only an
unimportant form and had ceased to attend Baptist conventicles. Rather he met with those
little groups of Seekers who gathered in one another’s homes and waited for the Inner
Light, and spoke only ex tempore. At this time he went through a period of
temptation, guilt, fear of death and damnation, of devils and ghosts, and a sense of loss
and abandonment, a time of spiritual crisis universal in the lives of the great mystics.
Finally, he came to an abiding consciousness of God within himself, the assurance of
universal salvation, and the peace which comes with direct experience of mystical
illumination. His first two publications are really devoted to assimilating this
experience. They move from a highly spiritualized chiliasm, developing a well-reasoned
doctrine of universal salvation, to a highly spiritualized philosophy of history rather
than a theology.
Even in these early pamphlets Winstanley has original insights. His chiliasm does not
take the form of the salvation of a handful of the elect but of the divinization of man.
In his teachings on sin and salvation the original sin of Adam was not lust but
covetousness — selfishness and the desire for power — in which Winstanley shows
himself an incomparably more astute moralist than the Puritans. Ultimately, the God who
operates in history, in all things, and consciously in the soul of man, is called
“Reason.” It would be a mistake to decide from this, as some modern writers have
done, that Winstanley was a precursor of eighteenth-century rationalism. His reason is the
ineffable God of Plotinus and Meister Eckhart apprehended in the mystical experience,
though not separated from man as the Omnipotent Creator, but as the ultimately realizable
in all things. So for him the narrative of the Old Testament and the life and passion of
Christ cease to be historical documents about something that happened in the past and
become symbolic archetypes of the cosmic drama of the struggle of good and evil that takes
place in the soul of man.
When the Digger tracts began with the adventure at St. George’s Hill,
Winstanley’s basic appeal was not to the practice of the apostles or to an
eschatological ethic in preparation for apocalypse. His communism begins with an
“opening,” an actual vision, and the appeal is always to his transcendent and
imminent Reason — to a spiritualized natural law, not unlike the Tao of Chuang Tsu.
Likewise I heard these words: “Worke together. Eat bread together. Declare all
this abroad.” Likewise I heard these words: “Whosoever it is that labours in the
earth or any person or persons that lifts up themselves as Lords and Rulers over others
and that doth not look upon themselves equal to others in the creation, the Hand of the
Lord shall be upon the labourer. I the Lord have spoke it and I will do it. Declare all
this abroad.” [The New Law of Righteousness, 1648]
This vision came not as a command from on high, but as a voice opening out of the
experience of nature itself, for, says Winstanley, the doctrine of an anthropomorphic
deity, set over against and independent of nature,
is the doctrine of a sickly and weak spirit who hath lost his understanding in the
knowledge of the Creation and of the temper of his own Heart and Nature and so runs into
fancies. [The Law of Freedom in a Platform or True Magistracy Restored, 1652]
To know the secrets of nature, is to know the works of God; and to know the works of
God within the creation, is to know God himself, for God dwells in every visible work or
body. And indeed if you would know spiritual things, it is to know how the Spirit or Power
of Wisdom and Life, causing motion or growth, dwells within and governs both the several
bodies of the stars and planets in the heavens above and the several bodies of the earth
below as grass, plants, fishes, beasts, birds and mankinde. [Ibid.]
Belief in an outward heaven or hell is a “strange conceit,” a fraud by which
men are delivered over into the power of their oppressors,
. . . a fancy which your false teachers put into your heads to please you
with, while they pick your purses and betray your Christ into the hands of flesh, and hold
Jacob under to be a servant still to Lord Esau. [The New Law of Righteousness]
True religion and undefiled is this, to make restitution of the Earth which hath been
taken and held from the common people by the power of Conquests formerly and so set the
oppressed free. [A New Yeers Gift for the Parliament and the Armie, 1650]
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, 1649]
And this particular propriety [property] of mine and thine that brought in all misery
upon people. For first it hath occasioned people to steal from one another. Secondly it
hath made laws to hang those that did steal. It tempts people to do an evil action and
then kills them for doing it. [The New Law of Righteousness]
Now, this same power in man that causes divisions and war is called by some men the
state of nature which every man brings into the world with him. . . . But this
law of darknesse is not the State of Nature. [Fire in the Bush, 1650]
. . . the power of Life (called the Law of Nature within the creatures)
which does move both man and beast in their actions; or that causes grass, trees, corn and
all plants to grow in their several seasons; and whatsoever any body does, he does it as
he is moved by this inward Law. And this Law of Nature moves twofold viz. unrationally or
rationally. [The Law of Freedom in a Platform or True Magistracy Restored]
In the beginning of time the great creator Reason made the earth to be a common
treasury . . . not one word was spoken in the beginning that one branch of
mankind should rule over another. [The True Levellers Standard Advanced, 1649]
. . . the power of inclosing Land and owning Propriety was brought into
the Creation by your ancestors by the Sword which first did murther their fellow-creatures
men and after plunder or steal away their land. [A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed
People of England]
They have by their subtle imagination and covetous wit got the plain-hearted poor or
younger brethren to work for them for small wages and by their work have got a great
increase. [The True Levellers Standard Advanced]
By large pay, much Free-Quarter and other Booties which they call their own they get
much Monies and with this they buy Land. [Ibid.]
No man can be rich, but he must be rich, either by his own labors, or the labors of
other men helping him: If a man have no help from his neighbor, he shall never gather an
Estate of hundreds and thousands a year: If other men help him to work, then are those
Riches his Neighbors, as well as his own, for they be the fruit of other mens labors as
well as his own. But all rich men live at ease, feeding and clothing themselves by the
labor of other men and 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 laborers hand, and what they give, they give way other mens labors not their own.
[The Law of Freedom in a Platform or True Magistracy Restored]
. . . if once landlords, then they rise to be Justices, Rulers and State
Governours as experience shewes. [The True Levellers Standard Advanced]
. . . the power of the murdering and theeving sword formerly as well as
now of late years hath set up a government and maintains that government; for what are
prisons and putting others to death, but the power of the Sword to enforce people to that
Government which was got by Conquest and sword and cannot stand of itself but by the same
murdering power. [A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England]
. . . the Kingly power sets up a Law and Rule of Government to walk by; and
here Justice is pretended but the full strength of the Law is to uphold the conquering
Sword and to preserve his son Propriety. . . . For though they say the Law doth
punish yet indeed the Law is but the strength, life and marrow of the Kingly power
upholding the Conquest still, hedging some into the Earth, hedging out others; giving the
Earth to some and denying the Earth to others, which is contrary to the Law of
Righteousnesse who made the Earth at first as free for one as for another. . . .
Truly most Laws are but to enslave the Poor to the Rich and so they uphold the Conquest
and are Laws of the great Red Dragons. [A New Yeers Gift for the Parliament and the
Armie]
Winstanley borrowed from the Levellers the idea that in Anglo-Saxon England there had
been an equitable sharing of land; and that at the Norman Conquest great estates had been
created, and the old population dispossessed or driven into serfdom; and that this unequal
division of the basic wealth of the land had been perpetuated ever since solely by the
power of the sword; and that law and established religion were just devices to uphold the
sword; and finally, that the overthrow of the king, the heir of the Norman power, had
resulted in no important change. The old laws still stood. A new Church, first of the
Presbyterians and then of the Independents, was established, and the grandees of the new
commonwealth were enriching themselves like William the Conqueror’s knights, while
the common people sank deeper into poverty. Winstanley’s interpretation of English
history has been considered naïve, but there is much to be said for it. Anglo-Saxon
England was in fact a frontier country, and all through the Dark Ages, following the
catastrophic depopulation that began in the fifth century, there was much free land all
over Europe and even more in the British Isles.
He says of caterpillar lawyers that “they love money as dearly as a poor
man’s dog do his breakfast in a cold morning and they are such neat workmen, that
they can turn a cause which way those that have the biggest purse have them.”
O you Parliament-men of England, cast those whorish laws out of doors, that are so
common, that pretend love to everyone, and is faithful to none. For truly, he that goes to
law, as the proverb is, shall die a beggar. So that old whores, and old laws, picks
men’s pockets and undoes them . . . burn all your law books in Cheapside,
and set up your government upon your own foundations. Do not put new wine into old
bottles; but as your government must be new so let the laws be new, or else you will run
farther into the mud, where you stick already, as though you were fast in an Irish bog. [A
New Yeers Gift for the Parliament and the Armie]
As for the church:
And do we not yet see that if the Clergie can get Tithes or Money they will turn as the
Ruling power turns, any way . . . to Papacy, to Protestantisme; for a King,
against a King; for monarchy, for Some Government; they cry who bids most wages, they will
be on the strongest side for an earthly maintenance. . . . There is a
confederacie between the Clergy and the great red Dragon. The sheep of Christ shall never
fare well so long as the wolf or red Dragon payes the Shepherd their wages. [Ibid.]
For Winstanley private property, but especially the property in land as the source of
all wealth, “is the cause of all wars, bloodshed, theft and enslaving laws that hold
the people under miserie.” Private property divides man from man and nation from
nation and leads to a state of continuous war on which the state power flourishes.
Winstanley was the first to discover that axiom made famous by Randolph Bourne —
“War is the health of the State.” He also had the curious and original idea that
only in time of war does the power structure encourage scientific invention.
“Otherwise the Kingly Bondage is the cause of the spreading of ignorance in the earth
for fear of want and care to pay rent to taskmasters hath hindered many rare inventions
and the secrets of creation have been locked up under the traditional parrot-like speaking
from the Universities and Colleges for Scholars.” War, says Winstanley, makes the
rich richer and the poor poorer and tightens the bonds of power.
Winstanley was a devout pacifist all during the Digger experiment; and one reason for
the violent abuse of the Diggers, the destruction of their shanties, and the injury and
killing of their livestock, was due to the fact that they put up no resistance. They
believed that their example, if only they were permitted to cultivate the commons and
wastelands, would be so infectious that soon it would be followed by all the poor of
England; and that when they had established a community of love, interpenetrating all of
English society, their success would lead even the rich and powerful to join them, and
eventually all Europe would turn communist persuaded only by example.
Socialists, modern Communists, anarchists, all claim Winstanley as an ancestor. In fact
his ideas bear most resemblance to those of the left-wing followers of Henry George’s
Single Tax. For him the source of all wealth was in land and its development in the
application of labor to the resources of the earth. If these resources were held in
common, and all men were permitted to develop them freely, and men labored in common, then
the resulting wealth, even of crafts and manufactures, would naturally become
communalized. Modern contemporary Marxists have called this economics naïve, but it was
held at the beginning of the twentieth century by an economist who was anything but
naïve, Henry George, who attracted many thousand intelligent followers, and it is after
all the fundamental assumption of Marx himself. But it was not his economics that was most
important to Winstanley. What he sought was a spiritual condition in mankind which would
be in harmony with the working of Reason in nature — the return of man, who had
fallen into covetousness, to the universal harmony. Winstanley’s communism was not an
economic doctrine, but mutual aid followed from his organic philosophy as a logical
consequence.
After the suppression of the little commune of Diggers Winstanley was quiet for a
while. Then in 1652 he published, with a preface submitting it to Cromwell, his plan for a
new commonwealth — The Law of Freedom in a Platform or True Magistracy Restored.
The Digger pamphlets present no plan for administrative or governmental policy. Winstanley
seems to have assumed that the example of small anarchist-communist groups working in
occupied land in brotherhood would sweep all before it and convert England and eventually
the world. The problems of self-defense and internal disruption are met by total pacifism
before which power must simply dissolve. The violent suppression of the Diggers by both
mob and authority forced Winstanley to consider the question of power anew.
The Law of Freedom, after a general introduction, is concerned largely with
administrative plans, and the introduction is an appeal to Cromwell to use his power to
introduce the new commonwealth. If you do not, says Winstanley, abolish the old power of
conquest of the king and nobles, but only turn it over to other men, “you will either
lose yourself or lay the foundation of greater slavery to posterity than you ever
knew,” a chilling forecast of the dark Satanic mills of early British capitalism.
In the preamble he outlines the principal popular grievances, lack of religious
toleration, survival of the old priesthood, the burden of tithes — a tenth of all
income for an established Church, arbitrary administration of justice, the old laws are
still enforced, the old feudal dues and obligations are still used to oppress the people,
while the upper classes ignore their feudal obligations and enclose or abuse the common
lands. These are the same grievances we are familiar with from the Hussite Wars and the
Peasants’ Revolt in Germany.
Winstanley points out that true freedom does not consist in free trade, freedom of
religion, or community of women, but freedom in the use of the earth, the natural treasure
of society, and that the first duty of the new commonwealth should be to open the land to
all people and to take over the former holdings of the king, the Church, and the nobility.
To do this properly, and to use the land fruitfully for the good of all, society needs
true government, administrative officers who will be devoted to freedom and the
commonweal.
The original root of magistracy was in the family, and the first magistrate is the
father, as the finally responsible member of a group in which all are mutually
responsible. Officers of the society should be chosen by complete manhood suffrage for all
over twenty, and at first only representatives of the old order need to be barred,
although notorious evil livers are not fit to be chosen. They should be above forty years
of age and hold office for one year only so that responsibility can be rotated throughout
the community. First are the overseers, the peace officers who form a local council in
each community. They preserve public order and suppress crime and quarrelling and disputes
over household property and other chattels which remain in private possession. Others plan
the distribution of labor and assign the young to apprenticeships. Others oversee the
production of the craftsmen and farmers. Winstanley envisages manufactures as being
carried on largely in people’s homes with a few public workshops. Apprenticeships
normally take place within the family; only boys who do not wish to follow their
fathers’ trade are assigned to the public workshops. Others organize the distribution
of goods and food which go to warehouses and shops, both wholesale and retail, from which
both craftsmen and consumers are free to choose what they wish.
In each community there is a “soldier,” what we would call a policeman, whose
duty is to enforce the decisions of the peacemaker, a taskmaster to whom is given the rule
of those convicted of crimes against the community and who assigns them to common labor.
There is also an executioner who administers corporal or capital punishment to the
hopelessly recalcitrant. Winstanley’s system of penalties may seem excessively severe
to us, especially in a utopian society, but in their day, when people were hung for petty
theft, they were relatively mild. In the county or shire the peacemakers of the towns, the
overseers, and the soldiers, presided over by a judge, form the county senate and court of
first appeal. Over all is parliament, which Winstanley seems to have thought of as
primarily a court of final appeal, and he is very strongly opposed to its indulging in
promiscuous legislation. Laws should be as few and simple as possible. What Winstanley had
in mind was a polity like the Israelites in the Book of Judges — in fact the
neolithic village with spontaneous justice administered by the elders sitting under a
tree. Curiously he says nothing about juries or any other form of democratization of
justice. Society defends itself by a militia and Winstanley has a most perceptive section
on the evils of standing armies, militarism, and war.
Education in the new commonwealth is free, general, compulsory, and continues through
life. Everyone is to be taught a trade or a craft at which he is to work part-time,
whatever else he comes to do. No caste of intellectuals or academicians set apart from the
people by booklearning is to be permitted to arise, although after the age of forty men
“shall be freed from all labor and work unless they will themselves.” The death
penalty is decreed for those who attempt to make a living by law or religion. In each
community there shall be a “postmaster” who corresponds with all the others in
the country directly and through a central postmaster in the chief city. They exchange
news, especially news of progress in science, invention, and technology. Sunday is a day
of rest. The people gather to listen to a reading of the laws, the news of the postmaster,
and what we would call papers on learning and science. Religious services are not
mentioned. The people are apparently at liberty to attend them if they wish. Marriage and
divorce are civil, exclusively at the will of parties, and take place by simple
declaration before the community with the overseers as witnesses.
Winstanley’s utopia has been criticized as being excessively simple and himself as
naïve; and even more naïve, his idea that Cromwell would put in force such a policy, or
probably even bother to read his pamphlet. Ideological discussion with his sectarian
opponents was, whenever he had time, an indoor sport with Cromwell, but he never allowed
it to influence him. We must not forget he lived in a time of revolutionary hope. In those
days, as in the beginning of the Reformation on the continent, it seemed quite possible to
intelligent men that an entirely new social order might be established. Everyone was
something of a millenarian and believed that a new historical epoch was beginning. They
could not foresee the rise of industrialism, capitalism, the secular State. To us, their
future is the past and seems to have been inevitable. There was nothing inevitable about
it to them. Perhaps if Cromwell, or even Luther, had foreseen the horrors of the early
industrial age in the nineteenth century, or the genocide and wars of extermination of the
twentieth, they might have chosen the commonwealth of Winstanley or the community life of
the Hutterites. In each great crisis of Western European civilization, the Reformation,
the French Revolution, the revolutions of 1848, the First World War, the Bolshevik
Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, it has seemed quite possible to
change the world. It is only after the fact that the historical process appears to be the
only way in which events could have worked out.
Was Winstanley’s utopia a workable polity? Within limits, yes. Whether he knew it
or not, it is remarkably similar to that of the Taborites, the Moravian Brethren, the
Hutterites, and the most successful and enduring communalist settlements in
nineteenth-century America. His plans went into the common stock of ideas of later English
communists and directly or indirectly influenced John Bellers, Robert Owen, Josiah Warren,
William Morris, Belford Bax, Édouard Bernstein, David Petegorsky. Other socialists,
Communists, and anarchists wrote extensively about him in the first half of the twentieth
century and after the Second World War he became extremely popular. Revolutionary
communalist groups in England, America, Germany, and France would even call themselves
Diggers.
Although the Quakers are by far the best known and largest, and a still surviving
community descended from the Spiritualist Anabaptists, and hence ultimately from the
underground apostolic community of the Middle Ages, they did not practice community of
goods. Rather each Seventh-Day Meeting, as they called their conventicles, had a common
fund for the relief of members in need. As a majority of Quakers became prosperous —
due to their strict honesty in trade and crafts and, prior to 1760 when they refused to
pay tithes and so gave up farming, their advanced agricultural methods — these common
funds became quite large and many poor people joined the Society of Friends to obtain
welfare funds vastly superior to contemporary poor relief. At first this caused problems
but within a generation members who had joined for these reasons had been absorbed into
the general economy of Quaker mutual aid and poor Quakers were less than a third of the
proportion of poor in the general population, while well-to-do members were
proportionately three times as many. Quaker welfare funds came to be used more and more
for the general relief of the poor in systematic ways which would foster self-help.
Quakers were the principal, almost the sole, financiers, besides himself, of Robert
Owen’s model factory town of New Lanark, and they have continued to invest in
communal and cooperative movements of which they approve to this day.
In his youth at Manchester College Owen’s closest friends were the Quaker John
Dalton and another young Friend named Winstanley, quite possibly a descendant of the great
Digger.
Far more than Robert Owen, the most systematic theorist of a cooperative labor colony
was the Quaker John Bellers, who greatly impressed Marx. Owen always denied that he was
influenced by Bellers and claimed that he had never heard of him until Francis Place
showed him a unique copy of his forgotten pamphlet in 1817. Owen immediately had a
thousand copies printed and distributed them to those he thought would be interested, and
so Bellers survived.
Bellers was born in 1654, a birthright Quaker. He became a friend of William Penn and
other leading men of the time. In 1695 during the long economic depression in the last
years of the century, he published Proposals for Raising a College of Industry of All
Useful Trades and Husbandry. He called it a college rather than a work house or
community because the first was identified with the servile institutions of state poor
relief and the second implied that all things should be held in common. For a capital
investment of fifteen thousand pounds — worth considerably more than ten times as
much today — Bellers envisaged a self-sustaining colony of three hundred adults with
shops, commissary, crafts, farm land, barns, dairies, pottery. The community was to be
self-sufficient even in fuel and iron. All members, from common laborers to the overseers
and managers, were to be paid in kind. The dwelling house would have four wings — one
for married couples, one for single men and young boys, one for single women and girls,
and one an infirmary. Meals were to be in common. Bellers, like Winstanley before him,
placed great emphasis upon education in the humanities, in the arts, and in crafts and
trade combined. Bellers thought that the creative life of the community and the advanced
educational methods would attract many who would wish to come as visitors or even
permanent boarders; and even more would wish to enroll their children in school, and for
these privileges they would be expected to pay well. He worked out in considerable detail
the projected bookkeeping of his community and demonstrated that the original investors
would gain a considerable profit, while at the same time the standard of living of the
members would be far higher than that of the contemporary working class. The first edition
of the pamphlet was dedicated to the Society of Friends, the second to Parliament, but no
one came forward to invest in such a colony. During his remaining years Bellers issued a
series of pamphlets, some of them devoted to a careful economic analysis of a
semi-socialist economy, others proposing a league of nations, an ecumenical council of all
Christian religions, a national health service, a reform of Parliament and the electoral
process, a total reform of prisons, and a reform of the Poor Laws.
Although Robert Owen had worked out his own system before he read Bellers’s
pamphlet and although Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Cabet had certainly never heard of him, he
anticipated most of their more practicable ideas and in far more practicable form.
Although all his writings soon became excessively rare, he should be considered the
founder of modern, socially responsible Quakerism of the Service Committee variety.
Furthermore the various measures he proposed in his reformist practice have almost all
been incorporated in the modern welfare state. Although Marx called him “a veritable
phenomenon in the history of political economy,” amazingly there has never been an
edition of his collected works nor, with all the immense flood of scholarly research and
Ph.D. theses, has anyone written a book about him. He is not even mentioned in Beer’s
History of British Socialism. Most information about him is to be found in the
final chapter of Édouard Bernstein’s Cromwell and Communism.
In the Near East, where it first appeared, the communal life of the neolithic village
has endured, warped and crippled by the invasions of the State and an external economy, to
the present day. Until the Second World War or until the discovery of oil in the vicinity,
life in an isolated village in the Middle East went on very much as it had for eight
thousand years. So it is not surprising that communalist movements have come and gone in
the very birthplace of the centralized State, nor that they have failed, since the larger
economy based on irrigation, regional granaries, and national planning of agriculture
demanded a centralized administrative apparatus.
The official Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, could be considered a reflex of the
centralized State of the Near East, with its palace system and its absolute monarch. The yasnas
of the Zend Avesta contain many maxims directed against communism, disrespect for
nobles, pacifism, and the nomadic freebooting community, yet communalist tendencies were
there, working underground, to emerge in the religion of Mazdak in the latter years of the
Sassanian dynasty.
Mazdak was born toward the end of the fifth century and his preachers spread his
doctrine so rapidly over Persia that they soon converted large numbers of important people
and eventually King Kawaz himself.
For Mazdak the source of all evil was due to the malevolent action of the devils, Envy,
Wrath, and Greed, who had destroyed the primitive equality and community of man.
Mazdak’s disciples held all things in common including, according to their enemies,
women. Like most heretics they were accused of indulging in sexual orgies. On the other
hand they were also accused of extreme asceticism, vegetarianism, and the refusal to take
life under any circumstances. Communism was not incidental to Mazdaism, but central. The
greatest of mortal sins were those of possessiveness and violence, and the greatest
virtues were those of the community of love.
We have inadequate information as to what happened following the conversion of the
king, but the social effects must have been drastic and supposedly led to his temporary
deposition by his brother Jamasp. On his restoration his son, later Khusraw I (Chosroes
I), tricked Mazdak into coming to court with all his disciples to receive Khusraw’s
formal submission and public profession of the new religion. As the Mazdaites entered one
of the royal gardens to partake of a great banquet, each group was seized and buried head
downward in the earth with their feet protruding. Khusraw then led Mazdak through the
garden and said, “See the crop which your evil doctrine has brought forth,” and
had him buried, head downward, in the midst of his followers.
The massacre, which took place in A.D. 528, did not exterminate the sect. On
Khusraw’s accession three years later a new persecution broke out and the Mazdaites
were hunted throughout Persia. However, a remnant seems to have continued underground, to
pass on their doctrines and practices to the strange sects which broke forth from the
Ismailians and Assassins, themselves schismatics from the main body of Islam. For his
efforts in defending orthodox Zoroastrianism Khusraw was given the title Nushirwan-Anushak-Ruban
— “of immortal spirit” — and is still venerated by the Persians as a
saintly hero.
It is unfortunate that we know practically nothing of the details of what after all was
a major historical episode. Zoroastrian, Muslim, and Christian sources, though some of
them are by eye-witnesses, substitute abuse for economics and sociology. We know even less
of the communism attributed to the inner circle of the earlier Manichaeans whom their
opponents called Zandiqs, who corresponded to the Cathari amongst the later European
Albigenses descended from the Manichaeans. Amongst the Zandiqs communism seems to have
been practiced by an elect minority who chose to follow counsels of perfection similar to
the Christian monks. Far more than Mazdaism, which flourished only within the limits of
the Sassanian empire, Manichaeanism, and later Gnosticism, profoundly influenced the
development of Islamic heresy. Since, most especially in its early days, Islam partook of
the character of an immense band of nomads led by caravan merchants, raiding the settled
societies on its ever-expanding perimeter — a war of the steppe against the sown
— there was always an element of piratical communalism in its social ethic and to a
lesser degree in its practice. Although Mohammed was a merchant and spoke for the
mercantile communities of Mecca and Medina, the distinction between rading Bedouins and
trading merchants was hazy. The latter had evolved from the former and remained dependent
upon them. The difference, an essential one, was between loot and profit. The nomad band
shared loot; the merchant kept his profit for himself. So those communities of Islamic
heretics who practiced communism were usually pirates of the desert and the steppe, or,
like the Assassins, a secret society of extortionists.
Yet the source of most Islamic heresy lies not in the main body of Mohammedanism,
Sunnism, the religion of most Arabs and of the lands they conquered and held, but in the
Shia, the religion of Persia. The Shiites reject the notion of an elected caliph and of a
clergy that functions as a kind of rabbinate with a body of law always subject to
discussion — like the Talmud — in favor of an hereditary caliphate descending
from the prophet through Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed, through a line of divinely
ordained successors, the seven (or the twelve, depending on the sect) Imams who come to
acquire the character of direct emanations of the deity. In Persia the line also descends
from the last of the Sassanian kings through the daughter of Yazdigird, Harar, the
gazelle, the wife of the martyr Husayn, and the mother of Ali Asghar. Thus combined in one
hereditary line are the mystic divine incarnation of the Persian King of Kings, the
Hellenistic Basileus ó Soter, the incarnation of Ahura Mazda, and the divinely
sanctioned caliphate, all together as an emanation of the deity. The final Imam is hidden,
only to appear at the end of the world, and is represented before the world — a
saviour or Mahdi, himself usually inaccessible and represented before the people by dais,
missioners — who carry on their propaganda clandestinely. Sometimes the Mahdi and
Imam are identified, or in the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt, function as actually ruling
caliphs. Amongst the Ismailians the final vanished Imam is the Seventh, Ismail, on whose
reappearance, like the Second Coming of Christ, the world will come to an end. In most
Ismaili sects he is the final emanation of the series of seven, not to be confused with
the Seven Imams who are all spiritually identical, but of a Gnostic, metaphysical
character, similar to the Aions of the Gnostic Valentinian or of the Sephiroth of the
Jewish Kabbala. We are dealing here with an emanationism, a soteriology, and an
apocalypticism which goes back to the dawn of recorded religion in the Near East —
for instance, to the Egyptian “Memphite theology,” and finds analogues in
Mahayana Buddhism. The resemblance to the prevailing form of Zoroastrianism, a religion
which has varied widely under the Sassanids immediately before the Muslim conquest, and
even more to its heretical expressions, is pronounced. Shiism has been called the revolt
of Persia against Arabic Sunnism, although Shiism flourished for a time in Egypt, and even
as far away as Spain and Indonesia. It is the present religion of Persia, and of the
Ismailis in India, whose Mahdi is the Aga Khan.
Both in structure and in doctrine most advanced forms of Shiism are like Chinese boxes,
a hierarchical government becoming ever more inaccessible, and an occult religion, an
inclusive series of mysteries whose final secret is that there is no mystery. The appeal
of such a religion and secret society is immense, especially when it is coupled with
actual worldly power.
Contemporaneously with the establishment of the Fatimid dynasty at the end of the ninth
century in Tripoli and the conquest of Egypt in 972 A.D. the closely related sect of the
Carmathians developed in the lower end of the Mesopotamian valley and along the
northwestern shores of the Persian Gulf. The orthodox Sunnite Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad
was preoccupied with a great revolt of Negro slaves, the Zanj insurrection. The
Carmathians attempted an alliance with the Zanj leaders. This proved to be impossible, but
they were able to pursue a parallel opposition and after the suppression of the Zanj
revolt the Carmathians not only were in secret control of the northern shores of the
Persian Gulf, but had organized subversion in Yemen, Syria, and even Baghdad itself. In
900 A.D. the troops of the caliphate were defeated at Basra and from then on the
Carmathians controlled Bahrayn, sometimes Basra, and many other towns between Mesopotamia
and Arabia, cutting the pilgrim routes to Mecca, and usually the sea connections of
Baghdad. Here they established what was probably the only communist society to control a
large territory, and to endure for more than a generation, before the twentieth century.
The Carmathians also raided the pilgrim caravans to Mecca, often killing thousands of
people, and laid siege to cities as far away as Damascus, where they seem to have had a
considerable body of secret followers. Finally they attacked Mecca itself and carried away
the sacred Black Stone, the holiest object in Islam, as well as immense loot (928 A.D.).
Within Bahrayn itself there was a complete absolutist communism. The citizens paid no
tribute or tax; their welfare was guaranteed from birth to death, in sickness or health.
All hard, menial, or unpleasant work was performed by Negro slaves, who seem at first to
have been the defeated remnants of the Zanj revolt who fled to their quasi-allies and
voluntarily chose slavery with the Carmathians rather than extermination with the
Sunnites. The orthodox accused the Carmathians of community of women and all manner of
orgies. As a matter of fact they were strictly monogamous, a military caste something like
Plato’s guardians or the Teutonic Knights, who led a pure, severely regulated life.
The use of wine and all minor vices were strictly forbidden. Women were unveiled and
circulated freely in public and enjoyed considerable influence. The specific ordinances of
Islam, however, were not enforced, not even the Friday meeting, the daily prayers, or the
eating of food that was taboo. The esoteric practices of Mohammedanism were replaced by a
cult of Light, a contemplative mysticism related to Sufism, and very like that of the
greatest Sufi theologian, Ibn el Arabi. Like the Sufis the Carmathians dressed exclusively
in white and placed great emphasis on moral and physical purity. We are still in the world
of the Essenes, the Therapeutae, and the Light by Light emanationism of Philo Judaeus. If
any of the accusations of their persecutors or any of the secret traditions of the
occultists are true of the Knights Templar, this is their source.
In 1084 A.D. Bahrayn was overthrown, but another branch of the Ismailians, a new
brotherhood of mystery and adventure, the Assassins, arose, far to the north in Syria and
on the Caspian Sea. Based on a series of fortress communities in remote desert and
mountain areas, of which Alamut was the most famous and the longest lived, the Assassins
functioned all through the period of the Crusades as a secret brotherhood of extortionists
— and assassins — who terrorized the entire Near East. They were able to extract
loot, exert political influence, and exact obedience from Christians and Muslims alike.
The authoritarian communism of the Carmathians gave way to a pure authoritarianism in
which the rank and file were supposedly controlled by a kind of mass hypnosis induced by
the excessive use of hashish, hence their name, Hashishim. Their fortresses were destroyed
and they were exterminated almost to a man by the Mongols under Hulagu, who seems to have
specially hated them. After the Grand Master of Alamut was captured, sent to Hulagu, but
escaped, they survived as the followers of the Aga Khan.
The Carmathians and the Assassins are the first clear examples of a communal
mutual-benefit society living on the plunder of other communities. Such a body can only be
interstitial and function in the gaps between classes in a highly organized State, or on
the marches of two antagonistic States, or on the borders over against less highly
organized societies. This is the communism of the urban gang or the roving band of robbers
in times of social disorganization — like the band immortalized in the Chinese novel,
The Water Margin (All Men Are Brothers), and, of course, in the tales of
Robin Hood. The Carmathians flourished in the march between the fundamentally antagonistic
Arab and Persian civilizations. The Assassins were the most famous of several similar
esoteric religious communities who lived by plundering their neighbors along the northern
borders of Persia, in the Caucasus, along the Caspian, and across the Oxus, and in what is
now Afghanistan.
Before the Crusades, Islamic civilization was incomparably higher and wealthier than
that of Western Europe. The Crusades themselves were a species of religious brigandage,
just as Islam had been, when the Bedouins and traders of Arabia looted the Byzantine
Empire. So it is not extraordinary that the type of organization invented by the
Carmathians and Assassins should pass to the Crusaders. The Knights Templar and the other
military orders were at the beginning similar, authoritarian, communist societies of
religious bandits distinguished only by their vows of celibacy.
If we are to accept anything of the charges made against the Templars when they were
suppressed by Philip the Fair in 1307, they had copied not only the organizational
structure of the Assassins but also their graded esotericism, leading to skeptical deism
and accompanied by rites and practices the orthodox considered blasphemous and obscene.
The Templars were accused of spitting on the cross upon initiation, institutionalized
pederasty, and nocturnal orgies, but they were suppressed because they had become the
wealthiest organization in Europe and a state within a state, independent of both kings
and papacy, as well as an immense corporation of “international bankers.”
On the shores of the Baltic and into the interior, the Teutonic Knights were organized
similarly to the crusading military orders except that they were fixed to specific
territory. As the Templars had succeeded to the Assassins and Carmathians, so the Teutonic
Knights were successors to the pagan Varangian communities that dotted the waterways from
the Baltic to the Black Sea, fortified communities of Scandinavian trader-warriors amongst
the more barbaric populations of Finns, Letts, and Slavs. They seem to have practiced the
economy of robber bands, sharing the wealth, but with the biggest share going to their
chiefs. They were not celibate like the Teutonic Knights. Their women were slave
concubines taken from surrounding peoples, and in some instances seem to have been
immolated on the death of their chief and master. One of their principal commodities of
trade with the Byzantine and Persian Empires were blonde slaves. The Varangian colonies of
greater Russia never managed to unite to form a single Scandinavian state, although they
laid the foundations for the Kievan monarchy, and even the Romanovs pretended to be
descended from them. However, for a while, in the Viking period, the Jomsvikings from
their fortress city of Jomsburg somewhere on the southwestern shore of the Baltic (the
site has never been certainly identified) functioned as a state on equal terms with
Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.
The Mongols’ conquest destroyed the Scandinavian power in Russia and the
settlements on the Baltic withered. As the Mongols overwhelmed the interior and destroyed
Slavic and Varangian domains alike at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the
Teutonic Knights shifted their activities from the Holy Land to pagan Prussia where they
subjected the Finnish and Slavic population in genocidal war, and eventually came to
control the entire southern shore of the Baltic.
This type of predatory, parasitic, mutual-benefit association would drop its communist,
and to a certain degree its religious, characteristics and emerge at the beginning of the
capitalist epoch in the great Oriental trading companies, the Dutch and English East India
Companies and similar joint stock, chartered bodies of combined military brigands and
traders.
In such society juridical or implicit contractual relations, which prevail between the
members and are scarcely felt, are exchanged for the warm fraternity of men united by
constant danger and the hope of wealth without hard labor. Obedience, loyalty to the
death, devotion of self to the cause, sacrificial help to brethren in distress, flourish
far more in a society of bandits than amongst the refined citizens of a stable community.
Such a body grew in antagonism to the values of the societies outside itself, whether more
civilized or more barbaric. It gained strength by presenting a mysterious face to all
outsiders, and developing onerous rites of initiation and grades of advance. In the
highest circles, which deliberately trained and manipulated the lower ranks, complete
skepticism usually prevailed and when one was admitted to the governing, final council,
the last secret was revealed to be that there was no secret. Another characteristic of
such a society was the merciless purge of all members from bottom to top who could not
adapt to sudden changes of rule or policy. Community depended upon absolute obedience and
in the most perfected form authority continuously narrowed until it vanished in a
pinnacle, the metaphysical principle of authority itself. Such societies, whether
Templars, Jesuits, or Bolsheviks, have always filled the surrounding greater societies
with terror, been the subject of horrifying legends, and subjected to ruthless
persecution.
Scientific historians dedicated to unemotional weighing of evidence, and usually
committed to a social gospel of liberalism, have almost always dismissed the charges of
outrageous and obscene conduct brought against secret societies, heretical groups, and
occult movements as products of the diseased minds of their accusers. Partly this is due
to prior commitment to the doctrine of the inherent goodness of man. Many pages have been
devoted to proving that the Carthaginians did not sacrifice babies to Moloch, that
pederasty has never been known on Mount Athos, or that the witches were just crazy old
women. One can reject the evidence if one wishes, but there is certainly a mass of it to
the contrary. The witches of Europe and New England may have confessed under torture to
things that they did not do, but all over the world in Asia, Africa, and primitive America
witches and shamans still do precisely those things.
* * *
The social relations that prevailed in the neolithic village community in the fertile
agricultural regions bordering the great Eurasian steppe from the plains of the Danube
basin across the Ukraine and into Siberia — what American ecologists would call the
long grass prairie climax — endured for millenniums, in a sense down to the twentieth
century. The environment was such as to permit an exceedingly stable mixed farming, with a
basis of small grains, and the sedentary domestication of animals for meat and milk. Such
communities were subject to continuous raiding from the nomadic pastoralists who ranged
over the great sea of the steppe beyond them. Most centralized states were imposed on this
peasant community by the nomads, and came and went in a few generations, as other nomads
pushed them aside.
A way of life endured in a typical Ukrainian or Great Russian village from as far back
as there are archaeological traces, until the imposition of serfdom in the modern epoch,
and proved singularly resistant to the special Slavic form of feudalism and its later
serfdom. The Slavic peasant community survived even the abolition of serfdom and the only
partially successful attempts of the State and the new upper classes to “free the
serfs” and establish a wage-labor and sharecropping agriculture — which would
permit the primitive accumulation necessary to capitalist development. Even the long
struggle of the Bolsheviks to industrialize agriculture, abolish the small communities,
and substitute agricultural towns on vast collective and State farms has never been
completely successful. The collectivized agriculture of modern Russia, however highly
rationalized and communalist it may be in theory, lags far behind the productivity per
capita and per acre of Western European, much less American, large-scale agriculture, and
so far has proved to be less productive than the old time, two-hundred acre, mixed farming
of the American Middle West. This is true although the Slavic lands, but most especially
the Ukraine, include some of the most fertile soils in the world.
Thousands of years ago, when man first entered these regions, he developed a way of
life, and with it a kind of community, almost perfectly adjusted to this special
environment, and all attempts to change it have only brought about disorder, inefficiency,
and demoralization. For fifty years every Soviet or Party congress has had to face a
permanent agricultural crisis, however the facts may have been disguised with oratory.
Russian literature and revolutionary theory, except for Marxism, is full of a mysticism
of the Russian peasant community. Typically the Socialist Revolutionaries, the majority
Party of the Russian Revolution, hoped to reorganize Russian society in forms developed
from the peasant community, the mir, or even the upper-class community administrative
unit, the zemstvo — in other words they envisaged a kind of peasantization of the
entire industrial and civic structure. This is in fact what the early Soviets really were,
and they had grown up spontaneously in the 1905 revolution amongst workers, citizens,
soldiers, and sailors, a majority of whom had come, in one or two generations or less,
from peasant villages.
Certainly the peasant community was highly idealized by the entire revolutionary
populist movement, from Narodnaya Volya — “the People’s Will”
of the nineteenth century — to the Socialist Revolutionaries. Thousands of educated
young men and women “went to the people” in the belief that if only the peasant
were educated he would spontaneously produce a special Slavic communism which would redeem
industrial society — eventually all over the world. The brutal facts of peasant life
are well enough shown in the stories of Chekhov, and it is probable that the leftist
Social Revolutionaries would have found it as difficult to introduce a neolithic village
ethic into modern factories and banks as the Bolsheviks have found it to industrialize
agriculture. Still the fact remains that communal forms whose origins were lost in the
most remote antiquity appeared quite naturally, though briefly, in the 1905 Revolution,
and in the 1917 Revolution until the Soviets and farm communes were suppressed by the
Bolsheviks in the two years after their seizure of power.
In modern times, of course, the Slavic village community was not communist. It was very
far from sharing all things in common. Poverty and grinding exploitation made the peasant
desperately rapacious. However, Russian dissent is characterized by an overall drift to
communism. Russian Anabaptism appears in history about the same time that it does in the
West — during the sixteenth century — but, as in the West, there are indications
that it led a clandestine occult existence dating back to the first centuries of
Christianity in Russia. The two leading Baptist sects, the Doukhobors and Molokani, have
continuously budded off communalist groups which were usually ruthlessly suppressed,
however harmless and insignificant. This process has continued in the immigrant
communities in Canada, South America, and the United States, but none of the schismatic
movements has endured very long. There are a number of extreme sects which somewhat
resemble the Gnostics and Manichaeans, and may be related to the
Paulican-Bogomile-Cathari-Albigensian movement that spread in the Middle Ages from Asia
Minor to the south of France. Other groups like the Khlisti and Skoptsi, ecstatic
orgiastic cults, who nevertheless are celibate to the point of emasculating themselves,
bear more resemblance to the Mandeans of the Mesopotamian marshes, or to some of the more
extreme cults which have developed out of Shiite Islam, than they do to Christianity. The
peasant background and the savage persecution they have suffered has often created an
enforced communism amongst them, but they never established permanent communities where
all things were held in common.
After the Hutterites and Mennonites were settled in Russia they had a certain influence
on the peasant society about them. There still exist Russian-speaking Anabaptists who are
essentially Mennonites, although if there were ever purely Russian communities which
followed the strict Hutterite communist way of life they are unknown.
In the first years after the Bolsheviks took power they had hoped to use the inherent
communalism of Russian dissent in the development of a program of communal farms, as
distinguished from collective farms, and for a while such farms, both secular and
Dissenter in leadership, flourished in spite of bureaucratic meddling. With Stalin’s
drive for the collectivization of agriculture, the first Five-Year Plan, and the
suppression of all political dissent as “Trotskyism,” both communal farms and
Dissenters were suppressed, and the former were liquidated. During the great purges
probably fifty percent of all Russian Dissenters were exterminated, and most especially
those whose way of life could be interpreted as political heresy.
Of all those who idealized both the Slavic peasant community and the inherent
communalism of the Russian Dissenter by far the most influential, more influential as a
single person than any populist party, was Leo Tolstoi. Under his inspiration many little
communities of intellectuals dedicated to communism, pacifism, vegetarianism, and a
secularized mystical religion sprang up here and there in Russia in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Often, like the Polish Anabaptists, landowners turned their
estates into communes, invited their bohemian friends from the city, and urged
“their” peasants to share in the building of nuclei of a new society in the womb
of the old. As might be expected, few of these lasted more than a couple of years and
their tragi-comic stories make pensive reading today. Although there were many such
communities and a few of them were successful, there is no history of them in any Western
European language, unless Czech is classed as such. Both the Yugoslavs and the Czechs
during their brief period of intellectual freedom have shown great interest in all aspects
of the history, religious and secular, peasant and industrial, of communist groups and
movements.
A special Russian development of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was
the establishment by wealthy industrialists, who were also great landowners, of heavily
subsidized communities of artists. These, of course, however strong their community life,
were far from being economic communist groups. They included some of the leading artists
of pre-revolutionary Russia and they had a profound influence on Russian art and
indirectly at first through the ballets russes, and then, through their emigrated
former members, upon modern painting in the West. The famous Bauhaus, almost all of whose
leaders were free communists and many of whom had been in Russia in the first, exciting,
pre-revolutionary years, was for its short life under the Weimar Republic an attempt to
realize the disappointed hopes of the Russian Constructivists, Comfuturists, and other
modernists for a community of artists which would by its work and teaching revolutionize
the mind of capitalist society. Alas, Hitler destroyed the Bauhaus and dispersed the
artists, most of whom became very capitalist industrial designers and architects in the
United States.
Copyright 1974. Reproduced by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth Trust.
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