{ Part 1 : Autumn } cont.

In planting the papaya seedlings, we invoke the name of another group who were maligned simultaneously as insignificant and a massive threat to the security of “the public”: the Diggers.

The first Diggers organized themselves as such in the seventeenth century in one part of the space re-organized as 'England' during this time. Their movement rose in defense of 'the commons' that were being systematically destroyed by the violent land reforms, privatizations and thefts characteristic of the formative period of industrial capitalism and the ongoing consolidation of European colonialism. We see our planting of papayas in 'public' space as a continuation of their struggle. By making many of the same points, we are trying to recall and revamp their methods of resistance. Common land belonged, in perpetuity, to the community as a whole. Self-sustenance was dependent on the ability of people to common (i.e. to hunt, graze, forage, fish and, later farm). Commoning was well understood as the only way of life in which people could remain free from complete bondage. The Diggers knew that the continued existence of the commons was vital to the independence of individuals and collectivities from the arbitrary demands of rulers. The retention of lands as a commons was equally essential to their freedom from hunger and desperation. The liberatory politics of the Diggers thus integrated a politics of eating. The Diggers came together to fight against the expropriation and transformation of their common lands into either parcels of private property or into the public property of the nascent national state. The Diggers and their allies (the Levellers, the Ranters, the urban rioters, the rural commoners, the fishers, market women, weavers, and many others) were waged in a battle that was about no less than trying to retain (or regain) a communal life. The Diggers therefore raged against the drive to entrap displaced people as either slave or wage labour in the nascent factories, plantations and ships of the emerging capitalist system.

The Diggers movement organized itself on behalf of all - not only one subsection of an increasingly parceled portion of humanity. In fact it seemed subtly aware that during the early seventeenth century the nascent idea of what was 'European' was integrally related to the ongoing appropriation and parceling of land characteristic of colonization. The Diggers were thus equally concerned with the dispossessed of 'Europe' as they were with the diverse people in Africa, Asia and the Americas being dispossessed and enslaved through colonial expansion. Theirs was neither a prototypical version of Eurocentric universalism nor simple charitable humanitarianism. Instead, the movement articulated the radical call for self-determination for all people and the recognition of their increasingly global interconnections. The Diggers then, were as much opposed to the project of making 'Europe' as were those who would be colonized by it in the centuries to come.