Industrial Nation. Work, Culture and Society in Scotland, 1800-present. By W. W. Knox. Edinburgh University Press.
This is a history of the working class in Scotland - or, more accurately, as the title suggests, of the "traditional" working class, i.e. manual, in fact essentially skilled manual, workers in mining and heavy industry - by a professional historian.
These days there are plenty of people who say that class is irrelevant and that in fact it never was. Knox is not amongst these (after all, he is a former member of the Socialist Party). Clearly, since 1800 a section of society has seen itself as constituting "the working class(es)" and in the 20th century this found expression on the political field in the Labour Party (literally, the party of Labour). It is true that the Labour Party never was a revolutionary, socialist party but merely sought a better deal for the working class within capitalism. In this, however, it accurately reflected the views of those who voted for it and otherwise generally supported it.
This may not have been how Marx envisaged things developinghe expected the working class to develop from a mere economic category (a "class in itself") into a revolutionary political actor (a "class for itself")but at least the process started even if it did get stuck on route as it were. A "class consciousness" did develop among particular sections of the working class but this did not develop into a revolutionary socialist consciousness. It stopped at trade-unionism and Labourism, the idea and practice of the working class as a class within capitalism but which wanted a better deal within this system, not to replace it with a classless and exploitation-free society. Indeed, there is a school of thought which argues that thisincorporation of the working class into the political structures of capitalist societyhas been the historic role, even the conscious aim, of trade unions and the Labour Party.
So, even if a working class "for itself" has never developed, a class consciousness of a lesser sort did, and it is this that Knox studies in relation to Scotland. In contrast to England, a number of differences stand out. First, partly as a result of the Highland clearances, anti-landlordism was more widespread in Scotland, reflected in the domination of the Liberal Party there up to 1914. Second, emigration of both Protestants and Catholics from Ireland kept alive religious sectarianism. Third, there was the ILP, the Independent Labour Party.
Knox argues that the ILP inherited the programme of radical Liberalism (anti-landlordism, Scottish Home Rule, republicanism, pacifism, teetotalism, and municipal "socialism") and was largely an expression of the views of the apprentice-trained skilled craft workers, who were male and, due to discrimination against Catholics, Protestant. They were respectable workers who didn't drink or swear or beat their wife (or so we are told) and considered themselves a cut above the rest of the working class who lived in slums and worked as labourers or depended on the poor law. Until 1932 the ILP was to all intents and purposes the Labour Party in Scotland, but in that year it committed political suicide by disaffiliating from Labour and trying to go it alone.
Knox sees the disaffiliation of the ILP as a key event in the history of Labour in Scotland because it meant thatin a sense, provided the opportunity forthe Labour Party to reconstitute itself on a new and different basis, as a party which rejected pacifism, Home Rule and republicanism and which embraced state intervention, including nationalisation at UK level, as the way forward; in other words, a state capitalism run by remote planners and bureaucrats such as was implemented by the post-war Attlee Labour government and which has now come to be known as Old Labourism.
While many workers in England deserted Labour for Thatcher in the 1980s, workers in Scotland continued to support Labour. Knox explains this by the fact that many more workers in Scotland than in England are dependent on the state for jobs, housing and income and also by a continuing acceptance of the "core values of democracy, fairness and social justice" inherited from the radical Liberalism of the 19th century. In his view, this is why free-market Toryism will never get a look-in in Scotland and why, as Blair continues Thatcher's campaign against the "nanny State", the workers in Scotland may choose to express these underlying core values in some kind of radical nationalism.
One criticism of the book would be that it is a history only of one section of Marx's "working class in itself", i.e. the class of those forced by economic necessity to sell their ability to work in order to live, in that it ignores non-manual workers. Towards the end the amorphous term "middle class" even creeps in. These now even constitute a majority of the working class in itself. Indeed, it could be said that the reality behind the claim that "we're all middle class now" could be more accurately expressed by saying "we're all working class now".
Finally, a quibble perhaps, but surely Knox knows that the British Socialist Party (the reformist party which eventually provided the bulk of the members of the British Communist Party in 1921) was not, like the British Socialist Labour Party, a "splinter group" from the SDF. It was the name adopted by the SDF when in 1911 it merged with a breakaway from the ILP. Could it be that his proof-reader confused (as Lenin once did) the BSP with the SPGB (which could indeed be described as a "splinter group" from the SDF)?
Adam Buick
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