the Devil is social division. Accordingly, for the Diggers, the Fall is reversible if people begin living according to Edenic – which is to say radically common – principles rather than against them. Long before Marx, Winstanley suggests that social relations should be guided by the imperative that Marx would later propose: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” (Gotha, 10). Specifically, the Diggers assert that the traditional agrarian commons, with its hierarchies and the feudal divide between those who labored and those who merely – by this time – collected rents, had to be radicalized into communes of mutual labor and shared fruits, a condition that they assumed should be generalized to “the whole world” as the originary commons had been (Winstanley, 108). When they attempted to put this plan into effect, however, by squatting and collectively planting corn on “waste” [unused] land, the “powers” – as they referred to elites – saw to it that the Digger encampments and movement were utterly wiped out.
This suppression of the possibility of a radically common “whole world,” and the alienation characteristic of the private property that emerges instead, I want to insist, is the most distinctive and widespread subjective feature of emergent capitalism. From the Digger’s perspective, enclosure was the cultivation of Satan – a fantasy that Michael Taussig has also tracked in latter-day peasant communities when the market was thrust upon them.7 And what this Satan drives out is the common. Joan Thirsk, in an uncharacteristically elegiac passage, comments on the social effects of enclosure thus:
Common fields and pastures kept alive a vigorous co-operative spirit in the community; enclosures starved it. In champion country people had to work together amicably, to agree upon crop rotations, stints of common pasture, the upkeep and improvement of their grazings and meadows, the clearing of ditches, the fencing of fields, and they walked together from field to village, from farm to heath, morning, afternoon and evening. They all depended on common resources for their fuel, for bedding, and fodder for their stock, and by pooling so many of the necessities of livelihood they were disciplined from early youth to submit to the rules and customs of the community. After enclosures, when every man could fence his own piece of territory and warn his neighbors off, the discipline of sharing things fairly with one’s neighbors was relaxed, and every household became an island unto itself. This was the great revolution in men’s lives, greater than all the economic changes following enclosure.
(1967, 255)
The commons that the Diggers advocated attempted to intensify the “vigorous cooperative spirit” at a moment in which even its traditional form was under attack. The implications of the suppression of a potentially global radical commons are even more profound than the demise of the patriarchal and hierarchical English agrarian commons that Thirsk laments. Dispossessed, a growing landless population must sell its labor power to survive. Because they now must buy the means of subsistence, distinct marketplaces are swept together by the generalized abstraction of a national–globalizing market as food, clothing, household goods, and tools, as well as luxuries big and small, are detached from any visible connection to localized labor. As Thirsk observes:
new occupations in bewildering variety appeared in so many townships in the kingdom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, [that they] … set the wheels of domestic trade turning faster, encouraging the making of yet more consumer goods, spinning an ever more elaborate web of inland commerce.
(1978, 8)
Circulating in this “elaborate web,” labor power becomes – potentially – what early modern elites called “vagrant” – that is, in the vocabulary of period legislation, masterless, detached from immediately and identifiably constraining social moorings (though laborers were the accused).
To keep labor power from becoming vagrant, elites not only tried to control the movements of laborers – to secure them in workhouses or in the places where they had been born and were known – but they also increased both the variety of commodities traded as well as the numbers of their partners, expanded empire, and diverted a larger proportion of the population into supporting these maritime activities.8 In this way, the labor power that might have been collectivized in a global commons was diverted to elite purposes both “inside” and “outside” England in a new form and at an expanding scale. Struggles to set history down a different path were vigorously suppressed, and individualism – self-possession – offered instead as a justification and compensation. On the one hand, then, labor – instantiated in commodities – moves around ever more anonymously, profusely, and expansively, while, on the other, the “self” is encouraged to become ever more private and enclosed. And the “market” in which these novel selves and commodities were inserted did not stop at the ocean but pushed across it – as did resistance to it.
Narratives of travel and colonization signal the global dispersion of labor in their virtually ubiquitous habit of list making. Not only do these texts circulate widely themselves, but also they record endless movements of labor in ships, settlers, books, letters, manufactured goods for home, farm and craft, weaponry, and a wide range of flora and fauna, though they tend to obliterate the activity of labor and focus their attention on its end products. Richard Norwood observes in his account of Bermuda, for example:
[T]here hath been brought thither, as well from the Indies, as from other parts of the World, … Vines of severall kindes, Sugar-canes, Fig-trees, Apple-trees, Oranges, Lymons, Pomegranets, Plantaynes, Pines, Parsnips, Radishes, Artichokes, Potatoes, Cassdo, Indico, and many other: Insomuch that it is now become [a] … Nurcery of many pleasant and profitable things.
(lxxxii)
The passive voice here is replicated in text after text. Early settlers were urged to carry myriad items with them from England, including food, clothing, sewing supplies, cooking utensils, bedding and other small consumer goods, as well as farming, carpentry and artisanal tools and materials, which, too, seemingly make themselves (Thirsk 1978, 49–50). Fresh water, fuel, and food for ships stopping en route to mainland and Caribbean colonies or going back to Europe, as well as tobacco, sugar, ambergris, and numerous other primary commodities, circulated off the island in turn. In every case, social labor circulates in these items, without which they would not exist, but as employers increasingly siphon labor, rendering it alien to its agents in the wage relation, it becomes more anonymous, disembedded, and abstract; products confront their users as if they have a life of their own. Thus, the “common” labor they contain does not result in the creation of a global “commons” but rather works to secure its opposite: the estrangement and atomization of laborers. In Norwood’s autobiography, we find a narrative of subjective response to such conditions of continuous circulation, displacement, and containment of labor rather than a detailed depiction of them; just the same, it indicates that the process of cartography and surveying that attempts to limit and control historical movement repeats itself at the level of the subject, albeit not without a struggle.
This struggle is hardly surprising, since we know that as an agrarian improvement project, enclosure did not proceed without resistance either in the England in which Norwood grew up. Thomas Tusser’s monumental best-seller Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (1573) has to defend the conversion of “common” to “severall” [private] fields that inhabitants of highly developed capitalist countries now take for granted in order to help push labor into circulation in its capitalist form while establishing the institutional and ideological conditions of possibility for its reification. He contrasts the poverty, drudgery, and inconvenience that he claims arise from the “common” with the wealth, ease, and comfort of enclosed – or “severall” – land: “Againe what a ioy is it knowen,/When men may be bold of their owne” (fol. 60r). He suggests that the open fields discourage innovation while encouraging laziness and inefficiency; thus, he insists that “more profit is quieter found,/(where pastures in severall bee)/Of one silly acre of ground,/then champion maketh of three” (fol. 59v). “Severall” property might displace tenants, but this is not a problem for him because enclosure provides “more work for the laboring man/as well in the towne as the field” than do commons (fol. 59v). Laborers (and labor) can always travel where they are needed. So, while he