workingclasshistory:

On this day, 10 September 1676, pioneering English revolutionary Gerrard Winstanley died aged 66. He was a tailor, then farmworker and the primary theoretician of the movement called the Diggers, or True Levellers during the English civil war who took over enclosed lands and farmed them collectively.
In 1649, prefiguring many later communist and anarchist thinkers, Winstanley wrote in The True Levellers Standard Advanced: “In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man, the lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another.”
He went on to argue that: “Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thous shalt not steal, nor kill.”
Pictured: illustration of Winstanley by Clifford Harper https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1804420129743129/?type=3