The Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting reports on a new pamphlet for the Young Foundation by Charles Leadbeater, Digging for the Future.

Excerpt:

“Leadbeater takes three aspects of Winstanley’s ideas. The first is the critique of power and his vision of self-organising, self-sufficient communities – the diggers who grew their own food. Leadbeater thinks you can take these ideas and apply them to the web to generate an economy of small-scale, mutual self-help and self-production. The web is the equivalent of the common land of the 17th century. What intrigues Leadbeater are forms of self-organisation, and he cites the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, based on women lending each other small amounts of money. Grameen is an inspiring story but significantly it is not based on the web so it is left unclear whether the web can nurture mutualism – crucially it is hard to imagine the web generating the trust needed for Grameen-type initiatives.

Self-organising collaboration seems to offer the only way, he argues, out of our current impasse where the market has failed – and the state is proving ineffectual, held to ransom by banks too big to fail, and offering nothing but welfare dependency to significant proportions of the population. The centralising statist solutions of the traditional left are part of the popular distrust and disengagement from politics, he maintains. The diagnosis is sharp but the prescription is vague: who funds this self- organising collaboration.

The second aspect of Winstanley which Leadbeater picks up is the focus on land. The Diggers’ interest in the land was self explanatory in an agricultural economy, but it is not quite so obvious how this relates to the 21st century apart from a few environmental points about the need to nurture the land – manure was something of a novelty in the 17th century it seems. Apart from a brief passing reference to the Transition Town movement, Leadbeater doesn’t expand. But there is an interesting history of radical initiatives to claim the land – the Land Settlement Association in the 30s gave unemployed men smallholding plots on which to produce food in a bid to deal with the depression for example – and the increasing interest in growing food is leading to initiatives such as the National Trust offering land for vegetable plots.

The point about the Transition movement is that it has grasped that a sense of place is crucial to developing the kind of communal collaboration which will be essential to sustainable initiatives such as energy. The stage of individual action – installing your own solar panels – is simply not proving effective enough at mobilising change. Transition is trying to pioneer this new kind of community engagement; it clearly shares many sympathies with Winstanley’s thinking but owes more to more recent work such as economist E F Schumacher.

The third aspect of Winstanley which Leadbeater explores – and here you sense is the real nub of his interest – is the 17th-century man’s view of freedom. Winstanley was writing at a time of “teeming freedom” when the world had been turned upside down and all manner of institutions – the monarchy, the church, land ownership – were being questioned. The parallels with today are obvious. In this maelstrom of ideas, Winstanley argued that unlike Hobbes it was not a war of all against all, but freedom lay in recognition of our interdependence; our freedom is constrained by our social ties of one to another.

This is what we need, argues Leadbeater. Our interest in the “self-generating self, created by its own will, from its own resources” ends up producing lonely, isolated people. What Winstanley offers is that freedom and justice are rooted in community – our recognition and understanding of the importance of our relationships with each other. Without that, “our society seems to be eating itself from within”.

In a sentence which sounds like a cri de coeur, Leadbeater writes: “There is a pervasive sense that life is increasingly organised through fleeting, impersonal transactions rather than lasting relationships.” The challenge is to develop a “legitimate community” – not tribalism, but one which allows for criticism, experimentation and adventure as well as solidarity.”