ABSTRACT
Anti-communist Winstanley scholars are quick to assure us that Winstanley was no seventeenth-century marxist, but they are a little too quick in assuming that everyone knows what it means to be a marxist. Marx, for one, fervently denied that he was one. I argue that Winstanley and Marx were neither marxists nor winstanleyans, but communists. First, I consider Marx’s “regressive” interest in the peasant communism championed by Narodnik radicals. In his later years, he grew fascinated with the Russian peasant commune, or mir, which he thought might be the medium for an immediate transition to advanced communism, with no necessary intervening phase of proletarian destitution. Second, I consider Winstanley’s “progressive” interest in communist improvement. As opposed to traditionalist opponents of agrarian capitalism, Winstanley constructed a materialist theory of history as class struggle, a dialectical psychology, a dialectical theory of the transition from oppressive enclosures to utopia, and a communist theory of agrarian improvement that cancelled and preserved the capitalist science of the Hartlibian Enlightenment. Just as Marx imagined a revolutionary communist Narodism as a third way beyond Slavophile paternalism and capitalist liberalism, so Winstanley imagined communist Digging as a third way beyond feudal paternalism and capitalist improvement. To those who fear that a comparison of Winstanley and Marx necessarily leads to reductive secularization, I argue that there are strong affinities among Winstanley’s agrarian communism, Marx’s vernacular communism, and contemporary liberation theology.
