Christian monastic communalism seeded later socialist insurrectionary movements

Evidence

Indeed, the communal life was taught and practiced among both the monastic and lay lower orders of the church. The church thus incorporated the oppositions of feudal privilege and Christian dogma. Eventually, this contradiction would erupt, informing the heresies of the fourteenth century and beyond as well as the revolutionary eschatology of the numerous peasant revolts that occurred in the last Middle Ages. Both the doctrine of primitive communalism and the movements of insurrection would become a part of the socialist tradition. Surveying the history of feudal Europe, Marx and Engels recognized the predecessors of socialist praxis in such movements as the sixteenth-century Anabaptists in Germany, and in seventeenth-century England, the Levellers; Engels had called them forerunners of the “modern proletariat.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 284

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in origin stories of radical traditions; parallels Robinson’s own project of locating Black radical origins in pre-capitalist sources. — connects to: Millenarian movements formed a continuous utopian tradition of communal revolution. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 363