Certainly I am happy to pay homage to the levellers. But strictly speaking they did not go further than Kant, nor especially Locke, who was after all, their contemporary. Like all great thinkers, the levellers were men of their age, just as much as Kant and Locke.
So for example, Christopher Hill precis the Leveller programme at the Putney Debates:
'The Leveller leaders wanted the vote to be given to "freeborn Englishmen". Unless they had fought for Parliament, servants and those in receipt of alms - that is wage labourers and paupers - were excluded from the franchise, because these two groups were not economically independent. Thinking in terms of small household industrial and agricultural units, these Levellers held that servants - apprentices and labourers as well as domestic servants - were represented by the head of the household no less than were his womenfolk and children.' (The Century of Revolution, p111)
I certainly don't cite this to take away from them. On the contrary, I would say that they were right in judging that women, wage-labourers and servants were, at this stage in history, lacking in that degree of economic independence that would make their votes anything more than additional votes for their masters. It is a harsh lesson, perhaps, but principles do not escape their time.
On the other sects of the English revolution, I think you have to be more cautious. There was a rush of scholarship inspired by Hill that looked further and further for seventeenth century antecedents to socialism in ignorance of the basics of historical specificity. Muggletonians and Diggers, Shakers and Quakers have all been arbitrarily painted as communists before their time. But communism before its time is just crazy delusions.
Right-wing historians, seeking to attack Hill and Thompson, made mincemeat of their lesser acolytes by pointing out that many of these sects were of wholly negligible influence, their reputation being derived mainly from the Royalist propaganda attacks on them - attacks that exaggerated the 'red menace's importance.
The diggers were substantial, but their programme of agrarian communism was a utopian gesture without the economic basis to realise it. Their subsistence communities, had they been widely adopted would have pushed England back into the dark ages. Their utopian programme was part of what Hill calls the 'Chiliasm of despair' - the disappointments of the radicals projected into wild dreams, often of a millenarian character.
Winstanley was an interesting figure, who soaked up different ideas of the time and reformulated them in an ideal form, but basically lacked the social base to realise his dreams.
>Now, compare the above discussion of property, freedom, etc. with Lockes's or
>Kant's.
>
>Locke wrote in _The Second Treatise of Government_:
>It is evident that Locke is here arguing against the radial philosophy of the
>commoners (such as Winstanley's) -- "Was it a robbery thus to assume to himself
>what belonged to all in common?" -- suppressing the commoners' needs and
>desires;
But the commons, like the German Mark (see Engels on Peasant Wars in Germany) was a property form that was a barrier to social development. It is certainly true that enclosure was a vicious form of appropriation, but it was the condition of the emergence of the working class. Projecting that class back into an age where it does not exist is just bad history.
>
>The Levellers & Diggers tried to turn the world "upside down," and Locke's job
>is to put the "right side up," so to speak, for the social order that the ruling
>class needs, by way of ideological inversion: the commons and common consent
>become the recipe for starvation, while private property is presented as the
>source of nourishment.
To put in bluntly, private property in the means of production was the recipe for social advance in the seventeenth century. Communism on the basis of this minimal basis of productivity, would have been a return to the primitive communism of universalised misery.
If you make communism a possibility at any point in history, regardless of whether the social and productive conditions that could ground it exist, you depart from the materialist theory of history in favour of idealism.
The reason that we do not celebrate the Hellenic philosopher who first proposed that the Earth went around the Sun (was it Anaxagoras? I have leant the book I read it in) is that his intuition was just that, an intuition, without a real basis in the development of science at the time. In the same way, the premonition of communism in, say, Thomas More, is interesting for what it says about that time, but it is, like the Greek, just an anticipation.
It has as much to teach us as Fourier's proposition that in the future society, the seas will be made of lemonade. -- Jim heartfield