Socialist apocalypse

One Commonwealth era apocalyptic Utopian sect was True Levellers that formed around Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1666) in 1649. Originally called True Levellers so that they wouldn’t be mixed with Levellers – an earlier group that aimed at social equality – they were soon given the name the Diggers.

Diggers were mostly landless and poor people. They were drawn to Winstanley’s idea of communal ownership and living, based in a verse in the Book of Acts that speaks for common ownership. Winstanley’s ideal community was to be a land-based equality, where the private ownership of land was to be abolished. This would happen peacefully, when the workforce left to farm the common land in Digger communes. The land thus freed would be divided among the landless.

Winstanley’s vision has been called a proto-Communist utopia. The new world order would be based on rural lifestyle and agrarian work. The aim was to return the humankind to the pure and sinless state it had been before the Fall, which would herald the Millennium. The society would be controlled with laws, and the task of the government would be to govern peoples’ manners.

Winstanley and his followers put the theory into practice, too, and began to farm the common lands. The land-owners reacted swiftly, and employed the army to dispel them. In the end, however, they resorted to the courts of law, where Diggers lost. Digger communities were small, scattered, and without strong leaders. Faced with the determined opposition, they dispersed and disappeared within a year.

The declaration and standard of the Levellers of England, 1649.