The Diggers, 1649-’52

In April 1649 a dozen Protestant men settled on common land in St George’s Hill, Surrey, south of London. They called themselves “Diggers”, or “True Levellers”, and they were moved by a radical belief in the possibility to create an egalitarian, classless society.

One of the movement’s founders, Gerrard Winstanley, brought together a group of commoners and soldiers who collectively decided to occupy common land to stave off starvation and promote their revolutionary political agenda. From the Diggers’ perspective there was no comprise on how to organize society: man would either live in total freedom or under tyranny.

England is not a free people, till the poor that have no land have a free allowance to dig and labour the commons.

— Gerrard Winstanley, 1649

Despite a protracted violent campaign by local landowners and the clergy, the rural commune continued to grow and successfully resisted eviction by the army for over a year. The Diggers’ belief that there could be no political freedom without economic freedom would be echoed in the demands of the French Communards more than 200 years later.

Pirate Communes

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries there were few groups that placed themselves so explicitly outside of polite society as the pirate and buccaneer communities that could be found from the Caribbean all the way to the east African coast. Long before the French Revolution and its values of freedom, equality and brotherhood captured the collective imagination in Europe, many pirate communities—both on shore and on the ships—were already structured along radically democratic lines.

The organization of the pirate ship in the early 18^th century was an experiment in radical, anarchistic forms of democratic organizing which were explicitly opposed to the systems of authority on conventional sailing vessels.

— Chris Land

Pirate ships have been described as “floating democracies” and were characterized by highly egalitarian forms of social organization. Pirate codes such as the one established by the Brethren of the Coast—a collective of buccaneers based in Tortuga, off the coast of Haiti—often stressed the equality of all signatories and were formulated and agreed upon through collective and egalitarian processes.

Libertalia

Possibly the most famous pirate colony was Libertalia, reportedly founded in northern Madagascar in the late 17^th century. It began when Captain Misson and the crew of his French warship were converted to a form of atheist communism by a renegade Dominican priest called Caraccioli.

The wealth of the ship was collectivized and the party embarked on a career of piracy. Slaves were freed from conquered slave ships and welcomed to the collective. In the Bay of Antongil, blessed with fertile soil, the pirates founded their independent colony, renouncing their previous nationalities and calling themselves “Liberi” instead. According to legend, Libertalia continued to exist for approximately 25 years, continuing to take in freed slaves and other pirates.

The vast Difference betwixt Man and Man, the one wallowing in Luxury, and the other in the most pinching Necessity, was owing only to Avarice and Ambition on the one Hand, and a pusillanimous Subjection on the other.

— Caraccioli

Some controversy remains over whether Libertalia is anything more than a popular myth—the only source is Captain Charles Johnson’s book, A General History of the Pyrates, published in 1728. Although the existence of Libertalia was never proven, individual aspects of the story were almost certainly true. In the words of historian Marcus Rediker:

“In a deeper historical and political sense Misson and Libertalia were not simply fictions … Libertalia was a fictive expression of living traditions, practices and dreams of an Atlantic working class, many of which were observed, synthesized and translated into discourse by [Johnson].”

Communalist Colonies

Cecilia Colony, 1890-’95

In March 1890 the Italian anarchist Giovanni Rossi arrived in Palmeiras, Paranà, in Brazil where he founded the Cecilia Colony. Since his early youth, Rossi had been fascinated by utopian socialism and communitarian ideas. At the age of 22 he published the novel Un Comune Socialista (1878), in which he laid out his theory on the organization of anarchist communities.

Earlier, in 1887 Rossi was invited by a left-leaning local landowner to found the agricultural cooperative Cittadella between Milan and Bologna. Although the cooperative thrived economically, the peasants who made up the cooperative had little interest in anarcho-communist thought, which led Rossi to abandon the project in 1889.

The Cecilia Colony was founded by just half a dozen men, but grew to about 250 members in less than a year’s time. Around 80 acres of land were cultivated collectively, and several workshops were set up. The intention was also to found a school based on libertarian pedagogical principles, but it opened only irregularly.

Rossi’s hoped to create a community without hierarchical forms of organization, bureaucracy or coercive discipline. After five years, the commune succumbed to pressure from neighboring hostile communities and the antagonism of the local administration.

Socialist colonies in the US and UK

Around the turn of the 19^th century a number of so-called “colonies” were founded in the US and UK. Some of these colonies lasted for only a few years, but others were more successful.

In 1895 followers of the anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin established the first explicitly anarcho-communist community in the UK: the Clousden Hill Free Communist and Cooperative Colony. For seven years the small cooperative worked the land, aiming to put its ideas of personal improvement, mutual aid, and intensive agriculture combined with industry into practice.

The Home Colony was founded in 1896 in the state of Washington, in the far northwest of the US. It was an intentional community based on anarchist philosophy where over the course of its 23 years in existence hundreds of anarchists, communists, feminists and freethinkers found a home.

The Whiteway Colony is a particularly notable example of an autonomous community that has withstood the test of time: founded by Tolstoyans in 1898 it continues to exist to this day. It has since lost the explicitly anarchist outlook that characterized the colony in its early days, but a number of communal facilities continue to be held in common and the community is still governed by a general meeting of its residents.

From 1914 to 1939 the New Llano Colony was a cooperative community founded on 20,000 acres of land in west central Louisiana by socialist organizer Job Harriman. More than its ideology, it was the practice of social cooperation that attracted large numbers of new members. Poor leadership and social and cultural shortcomings eventually led to its demise.

20^th Century Mass Movements

Free Territories, 1918-’21

When a significant part of the Ukraine was liberated by the anarchist Makhnovists in 1918, the region soon came to be ruled by confederation of worker unions, farmer committees, and neighborhood and soldier councils.

Protection for the libertarian communes that sprung up both in the countryside and in the cities was provided by Nestor Makhno’s Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army—anarchist militias characterized by a direct democratic form of organization. The Free Territories were under constant attack from four different armies: Russian Bolsheviks and monarchists, Ukrainian nationalists and German imperialists.

The majority of the laboring population saw the organizing of agricultural communes as the healthy beginning of a new social life.

— Nestor Makhno

Despite the continuous threat of war, serious efforts were made to set up agrarian communes, or “free worker-peasant soviets”, in the liberated territories. Property that had formerly belonged to large landowners was redistributed, and control over the land was seized by members of the communes. The Makhnovists were eventually defeated after their betrayal by the Bolsheviks, who saw the anarchists as a fundamental threat to their power.

Shinmin Autonomous Region, 1929-’31

One of the lesser known communalist projects in history is that of the avowedly anarchist Korean People’s Association in Manchuria. At a time when Korea was under attack from both Japanese colonialists and Soviet imperialists, revolutionary forces declared an autonomous region that was home to around two million people.

One of the leaders of the movement was the anarchist general Kim Jwa-Jin, who oversaw the construction of independent communes linked together in a confederal system. In the three years before the revolutionary project succumbed to ongoing outside attacks, its hundreds of interconnected rural collectives were governed by councils at the municipal, district and regional levels.

General Kim Jwa-Jin was assassinated in January 1930 while repairing a rice mill that was built to increase the farmers’ independence from outside merchants. His revolutionary project would outlive him only by 1,5 years.

Revolutionary Spain, 1936-’39

After General Franco’s coup, republican and revolutionary forces united across Spain to resist the spread of fascism. State power collapsed in many rural areas where in response thousands of agrarian collectives were formed under the auspices of the CNT-FAI, the confederation of anarcho-syndicalist unions. These collectives were organized on the principles of libertarian communism and mutualism, and were governed by village assemblies and councils of ordinary citizens. In many places money was abolished and production levels went up significantly.

Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it.

— George Orwell

Zapatista territories, 1994 — …

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation, or EZLN, rose up against the Mexican state on January 1, 1994. Before long the EZLN was caught up in fierce battles with the federal army and paramilitary groups that eventually led to the liberation and creation of autonomous zones, municipalities and communities in Chiapas. Across the region, different ethnic groups organize themselves in caracoles, where decisions are taken at the community level by local assemblies.

The Lacandona Commune is not a regime, but a practice…a laboratory of new social relations…[that] recovers old aspirations of the movements for self-emancipation. .. Their existence isn’t the expression of a moral nostalgia, but the living expression of a new politics.

— Luis Hernández