Letter: Nationalist Parties (1976)

Letter to the Editors from the June 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

I should like to ask the Socialist Party view on nationalism and anarchism and some other points.

There is hardly a country in Western Europe that has not spawned a nationalist or separatist movement. Basques and Catalans in Spain, Bretons and Corsicans in France, Frisians in Holland, Scots, Welsh and Cornish in Britain. As all political parties are expressions of class interests, where do the nationalist movements stand on this score? Are these movements fighting to save minority cultures, and if they are is this good? As you advocate Socialism on a world scale you will surely need to satisfy the linguistic and cultural demands of minority peoples.

Second, your views on anarchism. I have read anarchist literature and found that their view of post-revolutionary society is similar to the Socialist Party’s, the disagreements appear to be over the methods used to obtain this objective. This being so, should Socialists work with anarchists?

As the capitalist class has vast wealth not only in cash but also in goods (houses, cars, art objects etc.) will these be confiscated after the revolution?

As the world cannot be expected to become Socialist all at once what would be the relationship between the Socialist and capitalist countries, for instance what would be the relationship between a Socialist Britain and capitalist Saudi-Arabia, considering that the latter supplies most of our crude oil? Would a country becoming Socialist have to achieve self-sufficiency?

Finally, do you think it desirable that the Socialist parties round the world unite to form a single World Socialist Party?

Ian Greenslade

Southminster

Reply:

What makes capitalists a class is that they have in common their ownership of the means of living, and an interest in preserving it and continuing production for profit. However, there are various sections of the capitalist class, and the regime in any one country reflects the dominance of a particular section. In Britain and other advanced countries the industrial capitalist holds sway, and other sections — as, in the recent past, the housing landlord — can be sent to the wall for his benefit. Thus, not one but several parties represent the interests of capitalists; each will favour a particular section, and will argue that to pursue policies on those lines is the best thing for the system as a whole.

The case of nationalist organizations is for local capitalists instead of foreign ones, and this is supported by programmes of reforms which they say would be made possible by the change. There are many recent examples to enable you to form an opinion of the consequences. The desire to preserve regional speech and traditions need fear nothing from Socialism. These suffer under the capitalist nationstate; “education” has ironed them out severely, and many people divest themselves of local speech and manners because they find them handicaps in getting jobs and maintaining prestige.

Socialists have a fundamentally different view of society from anarchists’. The latter see not the capitalist system but “authority”, particularly that of the state, as their enemy and therefore reject the idea of gaining control of the state machine to change society. It is difficult to generalize about anarchists because of the variety of their opinions as to what they seek to do, but anarchist publications continually demand social reforms. What is the use of advocating a free society and at the same time bolstering this one; or opposing the state and at the same time applying to it? We have nothing in common with that.

We are concerned with people getting houses in Socialism because they cannot get them now, not with "confiscation”. You will find that when servants are not available the desire to live in palatial houses will vanish (this is already happening now). When art objects no longer represent large sums of money there will be a different evaluation of them. We have all heard about priceless masterpieces found in attics; presumably they were put there because their owners thought poorly of them, until the discovery of the money connection endowed them with remarkable beauty after all.

To answer your final questions briefly, Socialism in one country is not possible. But you are assuming a one-way dependence. Turn this round and ask how a monarchical dictatorship would manage in a Socialist world, whether it would be capable of self-sufficiency, and how likely it would be in those circumstances to resist the movement towards Socialism in its own territory. There are Socialist parties with the same Object and Principles as ourselves in several countries, and with the growth of the movement we shall no doubt have to consider world organization. Hasten the day!

Editorial Committee.

There Are Words for It (2005)

From the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Around five thousand languages are spoken at the moment, a number likely to be halved by the end of the twenty-first century. This is partly due to the impact of the world’s ‘major’ languages, such as Spanish, Russian and (above all, of course) English. As English becomes a truly global language, the main language of films, popular music and the internet, not only do its words find their way even into languages like German, but it completely displaces many local or minority languages. The decline in numbers is also caused by the growing role of ‘national languages’, those taught in schools and recognised as a country’s main language of communication. TupÆ, for instance, once widely spoken in Brazil, is now down to a few hundred speakers, pushed out by the expansion of Portuguese (though it will live on in words it has given to English, such as jaguar).

Endangered languages like this have existed throughout history, but are now far commoner than previously. The reasons for this are usually seen as straightforwardly political:

“large centralized political units (both the old-fashioned empire and the all-modern nation state) cause the total number of languages in their territory to decline. In so far as the world goes on being apportioned in such units, the total number of languages in the world will go on falling.” (Andrew Dalby: Language in Danger)

This statement is correct as far as it goes, but it plays down the economic factors behind language death. Languages decline and die when the communities of their speakers are disrupted (by conquest, exile, disease, and so on) or when children grow up speaking in daily life a language other than that of their parents. This can happen for various reasons, one being that the ‘new’ language is seen as a means of economic advancement, perhaps just because it has more speakers and can offer better employment prospects or a bigger market. Languages with a few thousand, or even a few million speakers, can hardly ‘compete’ with English, the language of international business.

Even the way a language is written can be affected by political and economic considerations. After the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1991, the governments of the new countries of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan decided to switch from the Cyrillic to the Roman alphabet to write their respective national languages, which are all related to Turkish. This was partly due to anti-Russian nationalism — the Cyrillic alphabet, which is used to write Russian, having been imposed by Stalin in the 1940s. But it is also clearly motivated by a desire to attract tourists and business visitors and to make it easier for people there to learn English. Returning to the Arabic alphabet (which was used in these countries before the Cyrillic) would have been possible, but would not have served the new rulers’ westernising aims.

Besides undermining the status of languages, economic factors can lead to the creation of new languages. In The Power of Babel, John McWhorter traces the origins of Russenorsk, a kind of mixture of Russian and Norwegian, which came into being in the nineteenth century when Russian traders brought timber to Norway every summer to sell. Russenorsk was a very basic kind of language, useful for bartering and various other kinds of social interaction, but not usable for political debate or discussion of any abstract ideas. Languages like this are termed pidgins, and they usually arise when two groups of speakers come together in specific circumstances. Many Native Americans at first spoke Pidgin English when speaking to white people, while maintaining their own languages too. Unlike Russenorsk, which was a genuine mixture, this Pidgin English consisted almost entirely of words from the language of the dominant group — English — since English-speakers rarely had any desire or motivation to learn a local language. This is the usual situation: the language of the conquerors or colonists provides the vocabulary of the pidgin, which the conquered people have to use to talk with their new masters.

Pidgins often die out after a while: the subordinate group may well adopt the language of their conquerors, as happened in North America. Russenorsk ceased to be needed when the Russian Revolution put an end to the timber-trading. But sometimes a pidgin is expanded to become a full-fledged language, not one just used for a few special purposes, but one with its own individual structure and a vocabulary as large as that of any ‘normal’ language. A pidgin which has become a full language like this is called a creole; formation of a creole usually happens when people speaking different native languages and only sharing a pidgin are brought together. McWhorter mentions the case of Sranan, a creole spoken in Surinam, on the northern coast of South America. This was a British-owned slave colony, and slaves from various parts of Africa who were brought there had only Pidgin English in common at first. This eventually expanded to become Sranan, which is widely spoken in Surinam nowadays, alongside Dutch.

In fact the slave trade is the commonest causal factor in the origins of creoles. This appallingly cruel and immensely profitable system of trading in human beings resulted, among other things, in millions of people being uprooted from their homes and families, transported across the world, and set to work in desperate and scarcely-believable conditions. It should come as little surprise to learn that many languages of the West Indies are creoles (Jamaican creole, for instance), as is Tok Pisin, one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea. As creolised forms of pidgin Englishes, these still have vocabularies that are partly derived from English, but they are absolutely not debased forms of English. The languages of other colonising nations have also given rise to creoles, such as a Portuguese-based creole in the Cape Verde Islands in the North Atlantic, and the French-based creole spoken in Haiti. As McWhorter says, “most creoles have arisen amid conditions of unthinkably stark and ineradicable social injustice.”

One, rather controversial, claim is that the development of agriculture about ten thousand years ago led to the wiping out of many languages, as cultivators expanded their territories and settled down, thus overrunning existing groups of hunter-gatherers, who may well each have spoken their own language. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that capitalism, with its globalisation and its tendency to make everything homogeneous, is now killing off languages like nobody’s business. An examination of the current state and historical development of the world’s languages shows how capitalism leaves its ugly footprints everywhere, even in the way we speak.

Paul Bennett

Letters: My Cupboard is Bare (2008)

Letters to the Editors from the November 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

My Cupboard is Bare

 Dear Editors,

Gordon Brown was said to be a great economist. Whatever model he used to predict an end to boom-and-bust capitalism was wrong, however. His thinking was worse than one who thinks-not. Recently he stated that Labour were committed to reducing poverty at the same time as he doubled the income-tax burden on the poorest earners in society. In Manchester he said this was a “mistake”. Are we to take it that the man is simply an idiot? No, he is not an idiot, but a man is revealed by his work. Like most in his position his primary interest is in the retention of power and privilege. The working-poor, whose income-tax he doubled, do not bother voting, (as he knows) for we, the low-paid, realise that there is no-one worth voting-for.

There is no important difference for us, the drivers of buses, the cleaners of houses, the makers of windows, the maintainers of property, the workers in offices, all the low-paid working-men and women of this country, between the Labour and Conservative Parties. What politicians call spin we call bullshit and we want no part of it. Middle-England, on middle incomes, voted Labour into power, and for that voting-base income-tax was reduced in an attempt to retain support for Labour. The books were balanced at the expense of the worst-off, without risk of making the Labour Party worse-off. It was no “mistake”, but rather a ploy so transparent that at the next election even fewer of the ordinary hard-working women and men of this country will bother to vote. The real “mistake” made was that of a government without ideology which assumes those of us who vote-not, think-not.

The front page of the Guardian (30 September) reported that “opposition from ordinary Americans killed the bill” to bail-out their failing banks. Over here, we are repeatedly told by the chancellor that the economic cupboard is bare. This is certainly true of my cupboard. Yet the cupboards in the homes, second homes and yachts of those who have caused and profited-from the banking crisis overflow. If the British government makes yet another “mistake” of having ordinary hard-working British citizens bail-out British banks and the greedy millionaires who helped cause the problem it will be one mistake too far and I for one may be looking to my pitchfork rather than the ballot-box. Somehow I do not think I will be alone.

Stephen Haigh, 

Barnsley.

 

Reply:

We trust that your threat to use your pitchfork rather than your vote is just poetic licence. – Editors.

Language

Dear Editors

I read with interest your article on Belgium (September Socialist Standard). It is also of interest to socialists to note how the ruling classes in Belgium used and in some instances continue to us language to divide and rule. By forcing the majority of Flemish (Dutch) speakers to speak French in education matters and totally ignoring the small minority of German speakers in the East around Eupen they managed to get workers at each others throats just by virtue of the fact that they spoke a different language.

Whether socialist society decides to use English, Spanish, Chinese, Esperanto or any other language as a means of communicating with places which speak a different language will be entirely a matter for the people concerned to decide and will not be imposed by the ruling classes. What is for sure is that in socialism all people will be free to speak and learn whichever language(s) they chose. And I dare venture to say that the enjoyment and pleasure gained by learning a new language because you choose to will be immense compared e.g. to the occupants of a country being forced to learn and/or use the language of someone else choice e.g. British colonies being forced to speak English, state capitalist occupied Czechoslovakia being forced to learn Russian or Hungarian speakers in current Romania being forced to speak Romanian in the Ceaucescu state capitalist dictatorship.

Of course some people in socialism may choose to speak only their own native language(s) and rely on a phrase book if they decide to travel, what is for sure is that that will be a personal choice rather than one forced by economic necessity as in capitalism e.g. Polish speakers being forced to speak and learn English if they want to work in the UK (economic migrants). Of course in socialism people will be free to choose where they want to live and work but that choice will be a matter of personal preference rather than economics driven.

Language of course also plays a part in that scourge of the working classes, religion. Much of the church’s hang up about sex probably derives from young lady being erroneously translated as virgin at some point in history. Also they were as thorough as any East German Stasi thug in preventing information getting to where it could harm them. People were burned at stake for the “crime” of publishing or possessing bibles in the English language at a time when literacy was not widespread. So afraid were they that the bible should be stripped of its mystique if common people who didn’t speak Latin could read it in their own patois.

Colin Brown, 

Grantham

Will Belgium survive? (2008)

From the September 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

No permanent government has emerged from the elections held in June last year. Does this matter to the working class there?

Belgium is a patently artificial state inhabited by people speaking two different languages. It survived for many years with one of them (French) as the dominant language because it was the language of the ruling class. Now that this has ceased to be the case, and Dutch (Flemish) has also become a language of a part of the capitalist class as well as of the state, Belgium is beginning to show signs of coming apart at the seams. Revision of the constitution — How much autonomy should the regions be given? Should or should not Belgium become a federal state? How far out should the limits of Brussels (basically a French-speaking city surrounded by Dutch-speaking communes) go? — has become an issue preventing other issues being dealt with.

Belgium is a state which the then Great Powers allowed to be set up in 1830. Before that the territory that is now Belgium had formed part, first, of the territories of the King of Spain, then of those of the Emperor of Austria. After the French Revolution Belgium became, in 1792, part of France and remained so until after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. While part of France the Napoleonic code of law, which swept away feudal remnants, was introduced and manufacturing industry began to develop in the South. This, together with strategic considerations, was one of the main reasons why in 1815 Belgium was detached from France: not only were the frontiers of France to be moved further back from the Rhine, but France was also to be deprived of a nascent industrial base. Belgium became part of a kind of Belgian-Dutch federation under King William of Holland.

In 1830, in what Belgian history books refer to as a “national revolution”, the wealthy classes of Belgium broke away from those of Holland and set up an independent State. Though Holland protested, the Great Powers let this change happen as it still left the territory of Belgium detached from France.

The circumstances which led to the establishment of Belgium are worth recalling in that they have shaped the Belgian political scene to this day. Holland was essentially a trading and agricultural country and as such its ruling groups tended to favour free trade. The nascent industrial capitalist class in the south of Belgium, however, wanted tariff walls as a protection against British competition. The Dutch government did make some moves to accommodate them but not enough. In the end the Belgian capitalists decided to break away. This was not too difficult in view of the loose, almost federal character of the Belgian-Dutch State; in addition, the population of Belgium was greater than that of Holland. But the nascent Belgian capitalist class in the South needed support in the Dutch-speaking Northern part of the territory. This they managed to do, despite being French-speaking and anti-clerical in the tradition of the French Revolution, by an opportunist alliance with the Catholic Church over the schools issue. The Dutch government wanted to introduce a system of universal state education. The Catholic Church, (the majority religion in Belgium, unlike Holland which was a Protestant State), vehemently opposed this, insisting on its exclusive right to “educate” Catholic children.

The capitalists got their state. The Belgian constitution of 1831 was a model of bourgeois-liberal government. Power was in the hands of a parliament elected only by wealthy property-owners; the king (a minor German princeling imported specially to fill the post) was a mere figurehead. Their language, French, became the official language of the new State, despite the fact that a majority of people in its territory spoke Dutch.

But there was a price to pay: the power of the Catholic Church, and its control of its own schools, had to be respected. From a short-term point of view, the lack of a modern education system had certain advantages for the Belgian capitalists: they were able to extract very long hours of work for very low rates of pay, to such an extent that Marx once described Belgium as “a capitalists’ paradise”.

The industrialisation of Belgium, apart from Antwerp and Ghent in the Dutch-speaking North, almost exclusively in Wallonia, the French-speaking Southern part, brought into existence an industrial working class and, inevitably, working class attempts at political and industrial organisation. A Belgian Labour Party (Parti Ouvrier Belge) was set up in 1885, along the same lines as was later the British Labour Party except that the co-operatives rather than the trade unions provided the bulk of the members and funds. A deliberate decision was taken not to call it the “Belgian Socialist Party” on the grounds that the word “socialist” was unacceptable to many workers. With a start like this, the POB was destined for a pitiful career of gradualism and reformism. The POB was never really even a social-democratic party in the sense that the German SPD was; it never accepted Marxism as its ideology; in fact it had a contempt for theory altogether, concentrating on trying to get piecemeal social reforms for the working class; it was in short a simple “Labour” party.

In its early years the POB was at least militant on one issue of importance to the working class: the right to vote. The general strike of l893, which forced the Belgian parliament to extend a vote to adult males, was a magnificent episode in the history of the Belgian working class. The strike did not achieve “one man, one vote”, since the rich and educated were given more than one vote, but it did force the members of the Belgian parliament, in which there was not a single POB representative, to do what most of them were opposed to: grant a vote to adult (male) workers. Later strikes to try to get plural voting abolished were less successful, but by then the POB had its own members of parliament and had begun to get involved in parliamentary manoeuvres with its new-found allies, the radical bourgeois Liberals.

In fact the Belgian Labourites tended to be, at this time the tail-end or left-wing of the Liberal party. After more than twenty years of Catholic party rule, the Belgian Liberals were feeling left out in the cold, but they realised they were unlikely to get power again without support from the POB. Accordingly, in preparation for the 1910 election they launched a great anti-clerical campaign and attempted to get the leaders of the POB involved. This was easy, as the POB leaders were anticlerical themselves (and indeed many were freemasons). It is quite clear that had the occasion arose (which it didn’t, because the Catholic party won the election) the POB would have supported a Liberal administration and would probably have gone so far as to have formed an anti-clerical coalition with them. This no doubt would have caused a stir in the Second International, to which the POB was affiliated along with other Labour and Social-Democratic parties. After the First World War, of course, all the Social-Democratic parties were prepared to take power within capitalism and accept responsibility for running it, but it is a measure of the depth of the reformism of the POB that they would have been prepared to do this in 1910 when their fellow reformists still had some doubts.

The Belgian Liberals were, by and large, French-speaking and anti-clerical. As in practice their leftwing, the POB shared these characteristics, with unfortunate results for the development of the Belgian trade union movement, which took place mainly after the founding of the POB and partly under its auspices. As the industrial centre of Belgium was in the French-speaking South it was natural that the trade union movement should be strongest there, but it was by no means inevitable that this movement should have been dominated by an anti-clerical political party, thus cutting itself off from workers of catholic origin.

It would be wrong to put the entire blame on the POB for the present split in the Belgian trade union movement into two main groups, each with about a million members: the Labourite Fédération Générale du Travail de Belgique and the self-explanatory Confédération des Syndicats Chrétiens (which is in fact the larger). The Catholic Church shares an equal blame; they combatted the POB before the first world war by organising rival co-operatives, sick clubs — and trade unions. Their trade unions didn’t have much success before the first world war, but grew rapidly between the wars as industrialization spread to the Northern part of Belgium. Employers preferred to deal with the less militant Catholic unions than with the “socialist” unions and their talk of the class struggle. But the Catholic unions also took up a very real grievance which the Labourite unions tended to neglect: the position of the Dutch language, spoken by workers in the North of Belgium.

French was the official language of Belgium after 1830. It was the language of the State and, even in the Dutch-speaking area, the language of the bourgeoisie. Thus in Northern Belgium a Dutch-speaking working class faced a French-speaking capitalist class. The Labourite unions, perhaps for the very good reason of not wishing to split the working class on linguistic lines, did not chose to exploit this situation, but it was taken up to some extent by the Catholic unions.

Today there is virtually no difference except in ideology — the FGTB is, on paper, committed to “the disappearance of the wages system”, while the CSC denounces the class struggle— between the two rival trade union groups. In practice both act as pure-and-simple, bread-and-butter unions negotiating over wages and conditions of work; on the political field their leaders are reformists, being supporters either of the Belgian Socialist Party (as, unfortunately for us genuine socialists, the POB has been called since 1945) or of the catholic political party.

The other great division in the Belgian working class besides the catholic/anti-clerical one is of course language. As stated, despite being the minority language, French was made the official language of the Belgian State set up in 1830. Dutch in fact has only been given completely equal status with French since 1932. Since the last world war the centre of economic gravity in Belgium has tended to shift from Wallonia, the French-speaking South, to Flanders, the Dutch-speaking North, and the numerical superiority of Dutch-speakers has began to make itself felt on the political scene.

The man who must share a great responsibility for side-tracking the French-speaking part of the Belgian working class on the language issue was a militant trade union leader in the Liège engineering industry, André Renard, who died in 1962 and who is still something of a myth for many militant trade unionists in Belgium, Towards the end of the grande grève, the general strike of 1960-1 over the government’s attempt to cut workers’ living standards, Renard suddenly introduced the quite unrelated political issue of “federalism”. Claiming that the workers in the French-speaking south, where the strike was virtually solid, had been betrayed by the Dutch-speakers in the North (where the Catholic unions, following a lead given by Cardinal Van Roey in his Christmas message, urged their members to stay at work), Renard argued that if Wallonia had the power to pass its own laws on economic matters it would be able to carry out various “anti-capitalist structural reforms”. He called for Belgium to be converted into a loose federation which would give Wallonia this power, virtually a demand for independence of course. This demand, and the reformist strategy behind it was supported by both the so-called Communist Party (which, under proportional representation, had a handful of members of parliament) and the Trotskyists (including, conspicuously, their international leader, Ernest Mandel, who was from Belgium).

The effect of this appeal was to heighten language-consciousness amongst French-speakers. In the years that followed French-speaking federalist groups increased their representation in parliament. So, on the other side, did the Dutch-speaking federalists, organised in a series far right parties. Today, it is the Flemish federalists and separatists who have been making the running, reflecting the fact that Flemish capitalists don’t want to continue to pay for the state benefits received by workers in Wallonia where heavy industry (coal, steel, engineering) has been considerably run down since Renard’s day.

That the working class in Belgium should be divided on linguistic lines is, from a socialist point of view a matter for regret, but it also confirms the correctness of our opposition to ”leftwing” groups in that they should be partly responsible for it.

Whether Belgium will eventually split up, or at least become a federal State of some sort, remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: this constitutional issue is of no consequence whatsoever for the working class of the area. Whatever the constitution it will be that of a capitalist State and the working class will remain propertyless sellers of labour-power to the minority who own and control the means of production.

Adam Buick

Algeria: filling the vacuum (1982)

From the July 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twenty years ago this month Algeria became an independent state after a colonial war which had lasted nearly eight years. From a purely military point of view this war had been won by the French army which, by a ruthless policy of repression (tortures, kidnappings, murders, the concentration of the rural population into strategic villages, the mining of the frontiers with Morocco and Tunisia), had succeeded in “pacifying” Algeria. When peace talks started in 1961 there were only a few thousand poorly-armed FLN guerrillas actually inside Algeria, mainly in the more remote mountainous parts of the country.

Politically it was a different story. The support of the Algerian Muslim population had not been won over. International opinion was against France as an increasing number of states recognised the provisional government in exile (GPRA) which the FLN had set up. The Algerian war was draining French resources and destablising its political institutions. Indeed, it was the Algerian question which finally brought about the downfall of the Fourth Republic when a settlers’ and generals’ revolt in Algeria brought De Gaulle back to power in 1958.

De Gaulle had a shrewd sense of political realities and soon came to realise that the only solution was an independent Algeria, if possible closely tied to France ' like the other French colonies which had been given independence in 1960. Negotiations between the French government and the FLN opened in 1961 and eventually led to an agreement which was signed in Evian in March 1962.

The Evian agreement provided for the establishment of an independent Algerian state, if that was what the population showed they wanted in a referendum. The position of the non-Muslim minority in Algeria — some 10 per cent of the population made up of the descendants of European immigrants since Algeria became a French colony in 1832 and of those of the original Arab-speaking Jewish communities which had existed in pre-colonial Algeria — was to be protected by a number of safeguard clauses similar to those negotiated more recently for the whites in Zimbabwe. The referendum gave an overwhelming vote for independence, the safeguard clauses turned out to be quite academic. The non-Muslim population, joined by many pro-French Muslims, simply voted with their feet. By the time of independence in July 1962 some million people, including nine-tenths of the non-Muslim population, had left Algeria never to return.

This exodus decisively affected the future course of events in Algeria as it represented the flight not only of the bulk of the qualified workforce (white collar and supervisory workers, civil servants, even skilled manual workers) but also of the capitalist class large and small, and of the landowners (on the eve of independence 22,000 Europeans owned about 25 per cent of all cultivable land, 40 per cent of land actually cultivated). It also meant the depopulation of the towns, especially those along the coastal strip which had all had substantial European minorities; Algiers and Oran in fact had even had European majorities.

The places, the jobs, the positions, the homes of the exiles were taken by Muslim Algerians; 1962 was a year of rapid upward mobility for those Algerians who had some money and some education. They were able to acquire very cheaply good houses, even whole apartment blocks and small businesses, and rapid promotion to top and middle ranking jobs in the civil service. For this new petty bourgeoisie independence and the flight of the Europeans had been a bit of very good luck.

At the political level too there was a vacuum to be filled and the same struggle for power, place and privilege also occurred here. On independence the members of the GERA rushed back to Algiers to stake their claim to being the new government, but they had acted too hastily forgetting that in the end political power depends on controlling some armed force. When a dispute broke out between them and Ben Bella and the other political leaders of the FLN itself, the armed force — in this case the army of the frontiers, in Morocco and Tunisia, under the command of Colonel Boumédiène whom the GPRA had upset by trying to replace — backed Ben Bella. Boumédiène marched his troops across Algeria from Morocco and installed Ben Bella in power in Algiers. The National Liberation Army (ALN, later the National People’s Army or ANP) was in fact the only organised force in Algeria in the chaotic conditions of 1962 and it was thus logical that whoever won its support should end up in control of political power, another factor which decisively shaped the future course of events in Algeria.

A further feature of this period was the occupation of the farms, and to a lesser extent of the factories, left vacant by the flight of their European owners. The Algerian farm workers organised to take over and run the abandoned farms themselves. This was a normal, even natural reaction in the circumstances — they could hardly have been expected to sit back and do nothing, leaving uncultivated the land which also produced their own food — but it caught the imagination of Leftists outside Algeria. This was the Revolution as they had always imagined it: workers spontaneously taking over the means of production and running them themselves through workers’ councils! The most prominent of those who came to Algeria to help the new regime was the Trotskyist leader Michel Raptis (Pablo) who became an official adviser to Ben Bella.

The government later rubber-stamped the workers’ actions here by officially nationalising all properties left vacant. In time however “workers self-management” became more and more of a delusion as real decision-making power passed to the full-time managers who were in effect appointed by, and in any event responsible to, the central state.

Under Ben Bella Algeria became officially a one-party State, the single party being the “Party of the FLN” The first peace-time congress of this party was held in Algiers in April 1964 and adopted a programme known as the Charte d’Alger. This committed the FLN unequivocally to building “socialism” in Algeria —to developing the country on the basis of state ownership of the main means of production and of central state planning. This was not quite the Soviet model since a large space was to be given at least on paper, to workers’ self-management (autogestion). The FLN Party, however, was still not really a political force in its own right. The only organised force remained the Army under Boumédiène. In the end the Army grew tired of the posturings and eclecticism of Ben Bella who was projecting himself on the international scene as a sort of African Castro. On 19 June 1965, the even of an international conference in Algiers which was to consecrate Ben Bella as a leader of the Third World, the Army seized power and Boumédiène became President, a post he was to occupy for 13 years till his death at the end of 1978. Ben Bella remained a prisoner in Algeria till 1980. He emerged from prison a Muslim fundamentalist.

The first nationalisation measures, as we saw, concerned those properties and businesses left vacant by the flight of the European minority. This was followed in 1966 by the nationalisation of foreign mining interests, the first step in a sustained policy to eliminate foreign-owned businesses from Algeria which had led by 1974 to the creation of a substantial state capitalist sector embracing banks, insurance, foreign trade, heavy industry, mining, oil, gas, pipelines, railways and shipping as well as some sections of light industry and commerce. By 1977, 80 per cent of industrial employment was provided by the state sector. Since this figure does not include civil servants, it is clear that the state is by far the biggest employer in Algeria.

Private capitalist enterprise, however, has not been suppressed, though it only plays a subordinate, supporting role to the state sector. The nationalisation measures of the period 1966-1974 only concerned foreign-owned businesses, “national capitalists” were allowed to survive and were for a period actively encouraged. Private enterprise plays a significant role in the building trade, in the consumer goods sector and in the retail trade (where it predominates), but everywhere has to face the competition of state firms.

Unemployment has remained a chronic problem in Algeria. It has been estimated that in 1975 nearly 40 per cent of the adult male population of working age were unemployed, some 1,500.000 people, a figure greater than those in industrial and civil service employment. With the continuation of the world crisis this won’t have changed much today, especially as since 1974 emigration to France the traditional safety valve for unemployment in Algeria has been stopped.

In addition to this chronic unemployment, workers in Algeria suffer from poor housing (shortage of accommodation, overcrowding, shanty towns), shortage of consumer goods, poor transport, health and other services. Frustration over this, and over low wages and bad working conditions, expresses itself from time to time in strikes and riots as in 1977 and again more recently. The language policy of the government — trying to impose the use of Classical Arabic as the official language (as opposed to the other languages spoken in Algeria, namely, popular Arabic, Berber and French) — has also aggravated the existing social discontent among the minority of Berber-speakers. It sparked off the serious riots in Tizi-Ouzo in April 1980, which had a marked social content over and above their linguistic aspect.

From 1965 to 1976 Algeria existed virtually without a Constitution, with effective power in the hands of a Council of the Revolution composed mainly of army officers and headed by Boumédiène. By 1976 this ruling group had come to the conclusion that the political situation was stable enough to be institutionalised. A Constitution was drawn up and adopted. Constitutions rarely tell where real power lies and the Algerian Constitution of 1976 is no exception despite its frank proclamation of the leading role of a single Party. In actual fact however real power is not in the hands of the Party leadership as such but only to the extent that the leadership of the Party and that of the Army overlap. In other words, real power lies in the hands of the leaders of the Army for whom the Party is a means of political control rather than vice versa as the Constitution might suggest.

When Boumédiène died in December 1978, the Political Bureau of the FLN Party (the old Council of the Revolution) chose as his successor another military man, Chadli Bendjedid, who is the current President of Algeria. The Prime Minister, Mohamed Abdelgani, also comes from the Army, thus clearly indicating where real power still lies in Algeria.

Algeria is one of a number of countries outside the Russian and Chinese blocs which claim to be “socialist”. In Algeria’s case the claim is not yet to be a “socialist country”, but only to be “building socialism”, defined as a system based on the state ownership of the means of production in which the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their labour” will apply. In other words, Lenin’s mistaken definition later enshrined by Stalin in the Russian Constitution of 1936.

This claim has not gone unchallenged. In fact most critics of the Algerian regime both outside and inside Algeria, regard the country as being, economically, state capitalism and, politically, a “bourgeois state”. One of the earliest and most persistent of these critics has been Mohamed Boudiaf. Boudiaf was one of the founding members of the FLN in Cairo in 1954, but ended up on the losing side in the struggle for power which broke out after Algeria became independent in 1962. For him, the Algerian regime represents the rule of a new class, a new bourgeoisie which has emerged out of the “bureaucratic petty-bourgeoisie” (officials of all kinds, governmental. Party, military, economic) which came to the front as a result of the flight of the Europeans.

A similar criticism was expressed in the period 1963-4 but this time from within the FLN by a group associated with the weekly Revolution Africaine. This was (and still is) an official organ of the FLN Party but during this period adopted an independent line as the voice of left-wing elements within the Party. Among its journalists were a number of French Leftists who had come to help the “Algerian Revolution”, such as Gerard Chaliand, later author of a number of books on Third Word struggles. As early as 1964, in his L’Algerie, est-elle socialiste? (“Is Algeria socialist?”) Chaliand wrote:

  Today there exists a bureaucratic bourgeoisie, essentially turned towards strengthening itself within the framework of a State capitalism which it is working to set up.

This concept of a “bureaucratic” or “administrative” or “state” bourgeoisie ruling on the basis of state capitalism is also put forward in a number of other books such as Le Capitalisme d’Etat en Algerie by Marc Raffinot and Pierre Jacquemot (1977) and the excellent collective work, by “Dersa”, L’Algerie en debat, published last year. Even the Trotskyists regard Algeria as state capitalist, somewhat inconsistently in view of their attitude on the very similar regimes in Russia, East Europe, China, Vietnam and Cuba. It is true however that they regard state capitalism in Algeria only as a transitional stage to the sort of fully-fledged private capitalism we know in the West which, in their view, must sooner or later emerge in Algeria.

Even though this affirmation is based on the Trotskyist dogma that a state capitalism without a proper private capitalist class cannot by definition be a stable, lasting system, it is not to be excluded. At some time in the future Algeria could go the way of Egypt under Sadat. On the other hand, the system in Algeria has now lasted some twenty years (which in Russia takes us to 1937, by which time a definite ruling class had evolved there) and shows no immediate signs of changing. Thus the question must be seriously faced of whether or not a more or less permanent bureaucratic class system, or state capitalism, has emerged in Algeria as it did in Russia.

This conclusion presents no problem to those who, unlike the Trotskyists (and, indeed, the ideology of the Algerian regime) do not identify capitalism with the existence of a private capitalist class. It is a conclusion that is well-developed in the collective work L’Algeri en debat:

  The first point that must be noted in this respect can be resumed in this truism: “State capitalism is a species of the capitalist system”. The most obvious particularity of this species is clearly the legal form of property. The private appropriation of the means of production and exchange does not entirely disappear, but the most important means of production are owned by the State itself and it is the economic institutions of the State which effectively control and manage production. This particular form of ownership of the means of production does not in itself involve any fundamental change in the social relations of production. Labour remains paid for by a wage and generates a surplus value (the capitalist expression of surplus labour) over which the producers have no command and whose use they do not control. The criteria for the choice of investments and for deciding the aim of production are determined by the objectives of maximising profits whatever the term used to designate this — and domination of the exploited strata.

So a picture has now emerged of the origin, rise and nature of the Algerian ruling class. On independence in 1962 the group of self-styled “revolutionary patriots.” recruited from various social backgrounds who had led the war against French colonialism found themselves not only in control of political power but also obliged, due to the flight of the European capitalists and to the weakness of the Algerian ones, to assume economic control too. Eventually, on the basis of a predominating state sector, some of them evolved into a replacement capitalist class.

This privileged group is made up of the leaders of the Army and of the Party (often the same), top government and civil service officials, and the senior management of the state industries. Their domination of the most important means of production is not private and individual, nor is there any reason to believe that it will necessarily have to become so, but is collective and as a class. They monopolise — own, in a sociological, non-legal sense — the means of production collectively, as a sort or corporation, through their control of the state in a situation where the main means of production are state-owned.

In other words, for the ordinary workers and peasants of Algeria “independence” has only represented a change of masters.

Adam Buick

The Kurdish Question (1997)

From the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

 There is always a load of myth and romanticism surrounding so-called nationalist struggles and one of the most tortured and least understood is the case of the Kurdish people scattered amongst various states. The popular ‘solution’ is for the Kurds to have their own state, but, in time-honoured fashion, the Kurdish working class would soon find out that this was no solution at all.

The breakdown and imperialist carve-up of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s left Britain and France with a series of subordinate Arab kingdoms, several of which were enormously rich in potential oil resources. But the carving-up process was somewhat disrupted when a senior officer of the defeated Ottoman army refused to abide by the Sultan’s surrender to the victorious Allies, Mustafa Kemal (renamed Ataturk), regrouped like-minded officers and organised a popular resistance movement. This turn of events drew upon strong pressures for reform and modernisation that were already manifest in Turkey before the outbreak of the First World War and it skilfully harnessed the Turkish nationalism which the former theocratic state suppressed almost as ruthlessly as the many other nationalisms festering within the regime known as the “sick man of Europe”.

During the Great War Turkey was an ally of Germany. Berlin found the Pan-Turanian ideas of Enver Pasha fitted in well with their war objectives and gave positive encouragement to his dream of bringing the vast area of Russian Turkestan into the unified control of a new Turkish entity in close association with the Kaiser’s Empire. In marked contrast the rebel officer, Mustafa Kemal, took a less visionary and far more realistic stance. He opted for a Republic confined to the heart of the old Ottoman Empire consisting essentially of Anatolia (Asia Minor), the majority of whose inhabitants were Turkish-speaking Muslims. There were important exceptions nevertheless. Port communities all round the coast but especially on the Aegean had been largely populated by Greeks from classical times onwards. In central Anatolia there were considerable numbers of people who were Greek Orthodox by religion but Turkish-speaking. And there were, of course, the survivors of the Empire’s Armenian population which either had identified with “Holy Russia” during the war or was perceived to have done so. They were targeted as a scapegoat for popular wartime discontent and were subjected to a scale of massacre only surpassed by Hitler’s genocidal elimination of the Jews and Stalin’s mass liquidation of political opponents and recalcitrant ethnic populations.

Imperialist carve-up

The victorious Allies had decided to reward Italy and Greece with Ottoman territory. Italy was awarded the Dodecanese Islands (Rhodes) with their mixed Greek and Turkish population and the Aegean coast and Constantinople (Istanbul) which was the historic seat of the Orthodox Church, to Greece. Athens soon landed troops to enforce the new arrangement but they were rapidly repulsed by Ataturk’s forces. The outcome was a level of “ethnic cleansing” fully up to mid- and late-twentieth century standards. In the process most of Anatolia’s Greeks were expelled and re-settled in Greece. These League of Nations supervised population transfers included the transfer of Greek-speaking Muslims from Crete.

But of all the exceptions to the general truth of there being a Turkish majority in the area Ataturk designated as the territory of Turkey, the most important by far was the Kurdish in eastern Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Even in the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire there had been moves reflecting Kurdish aspirations towards autonomy and when the Kemalist struggle was still not assured of victory, noises were made in the direction of the Kurds suggesting that their assistance in consolidating the new republic would be rewarded with a degree of recognition of their cultural and democratic concerns.

Once the new Turkish state was firmly established any “understandings” arrived at with the Kurds rapidly evaporated and the new Turkish nationalism, confined to Asia Minor only, paradoxically meant that not only was Ataturk’s right-hand man, Ismet Inonu, a Kurd, so too was the ideologist of modern Turkish nationalism, Ziya Gokalp. This hocus-pocus of a theory classified the Kurds as a sort of “lost tribe” of Turks who had forgotten their mother tongue at some point (the Kurdish language is related to Persian and belongs to a quite different language group from Turkish) and who were to be described as “Mountain Turks”. The utterance of their language in public was made illegal.

Meanwhile, Kurds further down the Mesopotamian river basin of the Tigris and Euphrates had the good fortune (bad luck?) to be where the oil was (the Arab-speakers being where the dates were) Britain’s imperial scheme was to incorporate the Kurds into the Iraqi state they were creating. This served the dual purpose of including the oil-field and providing a mixed Arab/Kurdish population where the old divide-and-rule formula could be of imperial service. In the division of Arab-populated territory France got the Lebanon and Syria, the north-east of which included districts mainly inhabited by Kurds. Persia’s western border areas are also populated by several million Kurds and, a small but significant number of Kurdish speakers is to be found in what in the early days of the Soviet Empire was called Trans-Caucasia.

Turkish nationalism

Quantifying the Kurds in any of their home areas has been vitiated by their well-founded fears when it comes to identifying themselves as such to the census enumerators. It is also true that the great growth in Middle Eastern population generally means that the official numbers of Kurds tend to be both out-of-date and massaged by each regime. The usual pattern of migration from rural to urban areas has occurred to a large extent over the last fifty [years]. Ankara’s fourteen-year war to subdue the east. Here Turkey’s NATO weaponry and western-funded, modernised road network has been deployed against the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) guerrillas led by Abdulla Ocalan. Roughly speaking there are at least 15 million Kurds in Turkey, 6 million in Iran, 4 million in Iraq and perhaps 2 million in Syria. Germany’s “guest-workers” include something like a million Turkish Kurds and there are significant numbers of both economic migrants and formal refugees in all the Common Market countries.

During the twenties and thirties, Ataturk’s Republican Party was looked upon very favourably not only by colonial “liberation” movements within the European empires for their successful example of resisting imperialist designs but also by western feminist and reform groups for Turkey’s secularisation of the state, abolition of the caliphate, purdah and religious forms of dress and the establishment of a westernised educational and legal system, equal in its treatment of men and women.

Ataturk’s dictatorship claimed, like so many others, that it was paving the way for parliamentary democracy. Rather less usual was that less than ten years after his death from cirrhosis of the liver (a non-Islamic disorder) a significant level of electoral pluralism was introduced. No sooner was this in effect than the electorate plumped, to the extent that such an option was provided, for the rejection of a substantially state-capitalist economy and an essentially secular social system. This being the trend it was not long before the army which saw itself as the guardian of Kemalist reforms, stepped in to restore the unquestionable, statist, secularist and nationalist set-up whether the electorate wanted it or not.

Just as Lenin’s dictatorship radically altered many aspects of Tsarist Russian society but quickly re-established Moscow’s rule over most of the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire so the Turkish Republic, whilst unable or unwilling to restore any of the former empire, was soon to subject its Kurdish “citizens” to an intense programme of assimilation. This could well have been much more effective were it not that eastern Turkey where they mostly lived, like Italy’s South is the poorest and least economically developed part of the country .So whilst there is no chance of the kids there being made literate in their mother-tongue, a very large proportion are provided with nil or solely primary tuition in the state language. It is often the case that eighteen-year-old army conscripts are screamed at by sergeant-majors in what is effectively a foreign language which they have to learn PDQ.

Language Rights

When I first encountered Kurds in London in the sixties they were mostly here on Iraqi government scholarships to acquire British professional qualifications but in those days the idea of a fully independent pan-Kurdish state was considered a wholly unrealistic objective. This view was normal in Turkey where the prevailing aspiration was the achievement of language rights within a democratised federal version of existing states which retained their existing external borders.

Subsequent events in Iraq were to result in a chronically authoritarian system conceding its Kurdish region in the north of the country a considerable degree of autonomy. This was wrested from Baghdad at the cost of a protracted civil war. The war leader, Mustafa Barzani, father of the present head of the KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party), owed his defeat largely to the weight of Russian-supplied arms. And the conduit within the Baghdad government through whom these munitions were routed was the long-standing Kurdish Moscow-liner, Jalal Talabani of the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan), now in receipt of Teheran’s help in his current rivalry with Masoud Barzani over control of the northern Iraq “safe haven”.

As stated, Persia too has a Kurdish population, of some 6 million. However, unlike the case of Turkey and Iraq there have not been large outward movements of Kurds from either pre- or post-Khomeini Iran. As a consequence there is less contact or interaction with them than with any of the other locations. Nevertheless it was a Persian Kurd who, although his Marxism was reflected through a Leninist distorting mirror has provided us with the most penetrating historical analysis of Kurdish society. Kurdistan and the Kurds by Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou was published in London in English in 1989 (by Collets). The author was assassinated by the Iranian secret police, in Vienna in 1989.

In recent months the war in eastern Turkey has proved so destructive that the demand for federal status within the Turkish republic has been revived in Kurdish circles. For a socialist who has no desire for yet more flags and frontiers and who anticipates that the setting-up of a Kurdish state will no more solve the problems of members of the Kurdish working class than has been the case with scores of other “successful” national struggles, the most promising line of action would seem to be for Kurds in each Middle-Eastern republic to join with other workers to maximise their trade-union and democratic rights so that these can be used as a spring-board for the early attainment of a classless and borderless society. Such a socialist or communist society (they mean the same) will not only enable us to have free access to our material requirements but we shall democratically control the pace and nature of work that we freely choose to undertake. It would also be a way of life in which the language in which we express ourselves and the clothes we wear will be freely determined by each one of us.

Edmund Grant

The Celtic myth (1970)

Book Reviews from the November 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Celtic Nationalism’, by Owen Dudley Edwards, Gwynfor Evans and Ioan Rhys, Hugh MacDiarmid. (Routledge and Kegan Paul. 45s.)

‘Scottish Nationalism’, by H. J. Hanham. (Faber and Faber)

‘Wales: A Nation Again!’ by P. Berresford Ellis. (Tandem Books. 5s.)

The nationalist argument, as propounded by Plaid Cymru in Wales and the SNP in Scotland, is quite simple ― and wrong. The people of Wales and Scotland, they say, suffer because they are misgoverned from England; what they need is an independent State of their own so that they could begin to solve their problems. In fact the problems faced by wage and salary workers in Wales and Scotland are basically the same as those in Britain or Ireland on any other country; they are caused by international capitalism and can only be cured by world Socialism. The setting up of “more frontiers in the world”, as the former Welsh nationalist MP Gwynfor Evans so frankly puts his aim, would be irrelevant and a waste of time.

Socialists reject allegiance to any State and regard themselves as citizens of the world. We accept the boundaries between States as they are (and as they may change) and work within them to win control of each State with a view to abolishing them all. Our aim is the establishment of a democratic world community without frontiers based on the common ownership of the world’s resources.

“Celtic nationalism” is a misleading phrase as the word Celtic, like Aryan, has no real meaning outside linguistics where six languages (Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Breton and the extinct Manx and Cornish) form a distinct group labelled “Celtic”. What Ireland, Scotland and Wales share is that they are areas where now only a minority of the people speak a Celtic language. This, however, does not justify calling them “Celtic countries” or creating a mythology about “the Celtic nations” or, worse, about “the Celtic races” (a phrase which repeatedly occurs in Ellis’ book).

Of course people should be free to speak the language of their choice and, if they occupy a distinct area, to have social affairs discussed and administered in that language. The language question, however, is distinct from the so-called national question. Welsh-speakers have had a real grievance against the English-speaking administration; this to a certain extent and thanks to their protests has now been resolved and certainly would be in a Socialist world. These grievances have been misdirected by the partisans of a separate State in Wales in accordance with the old nationalist slogan “no language, no nation”. This is nonsense. Those who speak Welsh are just Welsh-speaking human beings, not members of some imaginary Welsh nation. Welsh-speaking Socialists have long recognised that they are Welsh-speaking world citizens.

Of these books, Ellis’ is a readable journalistic account from a nationalist viewpoint of Welsh nationalism; Hanham’s is a more scholarly history of Scottish nationalism; the three essays on nationalism in Ireland, Wales and Scotland are a deadly bore. MacDiarmid, the eccentric writer who stood as a Communist against Sir Alec Douglas Home in 1964, has filled his essay with large chunks from the Communist Party’s programme and makes the absurd suggestion that “the Labour Party’s betrayal of the Scottish cause is on the point of being effectively contested by the development under Communist leadership of a Scottish National Liberation Movement”. He should stick to poetry.

Home Rule as distinct from independence, i.e. a separate parliament subordinate to Westminster, was for a number of years the policy of the Scottish TUC and, in view of the current moves of the Communist-led Scottish Area of the NUM to revive this, it is interesting to note some of the views Hanham records as being expressed at the STUC in 1921 :

  “It was disgraceful they should be wasting time over a question like Home Rule. It was of no consequence to the working class”. 

  “While capitalism continued the workers would not be any better off even when Home Rule was in operation”.

Let us hope someone can be found to say the same at the next STUC conference.

Hanham unwittingly confirms the correctness of this view when he concludes by saying that the nearest parallel to an independent Scotland as envisaged by the SNP

  “is to be found in the old Colonial empire, where dominion status or independence simply meant a transfer of power to a new group of politicians, while the structure of state and society was but little changed.”

                                                                                                                              Adam Buick

Language, Class and Nation (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the most remarkable things about human beings is their possession and use of language. Within a few shorts years, every person acquires a knowledge of their native language, including a vocabulary of thousands of words, enabling them to express original ideas and communicate to others on all sorts of topics. Language is also one of the most specifically human attributes, for no other animal possesses a communication system anywhere near as flexible and useful as human language. Animals such as bees and sticklebacks can convey a united range of information to each other but cannot, for example, refer to events in the past or future. The languages of the world, with their rich structures and histories, are a fascinating subject of study. But in the class divided society of capitalism, language is a basis for hostility, prejudice and discrimination.

Our impressions of other people are partly formed by the way they speak. Too often people are regarded as ignorant or unintelligent because they pronounce  the r in a word like cart, say they was, or use a double negative (as in I ain’t done nothing): they are condemned for speaking a “sub-standard” dialect. But from a linguistic point of view, there are no such things as sub-dialects, only non-standard ones which is very different. In the course of a language’s development, one particular form of it, usually that spoken in. a particularly powerful or important area, becomes the standard dialect. This means that it is taught in schools, used in literature, and then spread by radio and television. Becoming powerful and “successful” in such a society usually entails becoming proficient in the standard dialect, so that speakers of other dialects are looked down on as backward and uncultured. But prejudices of this kind are social, not linguistic, judgements. Every dialect of a language, standard or otherwise, is linguistically as good as any other; I ain’t done nothing conveys the same meaning as the standard I haven’t done anything. Speaking a non-standard dialect does not make a person stupid, untrustworthy, or whatever.

Prejudice against non-standard speakers is taken even further when it is said that they have no proper language at all. In particular, some psychologists have argued that black children in the United States have no grammar and speak merely by stringing a few words together. This type of misconception arises from a failure to realise that the children in question simply have a different grammar from standard English. For instance, when a black kid says they mine, is not simply putting two words together (in the way that young children may do).  Instead, this is his equivalent of standard they’re mine, both being reduced forms of they are mine (in standard speech, are is “contracted”, in non-standard it is deleted). The claim that black children have practically no language has been put forward as explaining why they do so badly in American schools, justifying a “compensatory education” designed to make the child fit into the school system. Obviously, this avoids the less comforting conclusion that the children do badly because of the appalling conditions they live in!

A slightly more sophisticated version of this verbal deprivation theory is associated with the name of Basil Bernstein. Bernstein draws a distinction between elaborated and restricted codes, the elaborated code being less tied to the specific “here and now” context than the restricted code. It is claimed that “middle-class” children have access to both codes, while manual working-class children have access to the restricted code only. Allegedly (and Bernstein is none too particular about citing actual data) a “middle-class” child will tend to describe the scene in a picture by saying Three boys are playing football and one boy kicks the ball, while a working-class child tends to describe the same picture by saying They’re playing football and he kicks it. From anecdotes like this, he leaps to the conclusion that, as the elaborated code is expected to be used in school, working class children’s lack of access to the elaborated code is the reason for their comparatively poor scholastic performance. Quite apart from the incorrect view of class, this is unacceptable. All children are able, outside the artificial experimental situations referred to by Bernstein, to use a range of styles, from formal to informal. All speakers of a language, whatever their social status, speak a language which is as flexible and creative as that of any other speaker.

It should also be stated that there is no such thing as a primitive language. No language which exists today, or for which past records are available, consists of just a few words and no true rules of grammar. Nor are there a people, however primitive their way of life, which does not possess a language which is perfectly adequate for all the uses to which its speakers put it. Even where a language lacks a particular concept because its speakers do not need it, they are not cognitively unable to handle it. For instance, some Australian aboriginal languages have no words for numbers higher than two (just words for a few and many), but when their speakers learn English they have no difficulty in mastering the English numerical system and counting as high as you like. There are no such things as backward races speaking primitive languages.

But different people do speak different languages. In a rational society, there would be no reason for this to cause problems, but in capitalism it is the cause of much misery. Nearly every country in the world has more than one language spoken within it (even excluding recent immigrants). Great Britain, for example, has English, Welsh and Gaelic, while Spain has Spanish, Catalan and Basque. Where one language is spoken by an overwhelming majority of the population, that is likely to be the country’s official language. Members of a linguistic minority may be discriminated against in various ways: no books or newspapers may be published in their language, it may not be the medium of teaching in schools, and so on. Speakers of a minority language will often need to learn the official language in order to “get on”. Resentment against such treatment may lead to the demand for political autonomy, as a means of converting a linguistic minority into a linguistic majority, for instance the aim of an independent Basque state. Let it be said that discrimination on the grounds of language is as odious as discrimination on grounds of race. Nevertheless, the call for independence as a means of ending linguistic oppression is not one that workers should support.

To start with, people do not live in blocks consisting of speakers of only one language (there is no part of Wales where no English is spoken), so that independence would create new linguistic minorities. The demand that speakers of each language should have their own nation also overlooks the consideration that the distinction between a language and a dialect is by no means clear-cut. The standard definition is that, unlike different languages, dialects of the same language are mutually intelligible, but this raises a number of problems. Intelligibility is a matter of degree, may go in one direction only, and is not transitive (which means. that dialects A and B may be mutually intelligible, and also B and C, but not A and C). Between Paris and Rome there is a chain of dialects, each intelligible with its neighbour, even though the end-points, standard French and Italian, are not mutually intelligible; on purely linguistic grounds, it is not possible to draw a sharp distinction between dialects of Italian and of French, or between those of Dutch and German. In practice, language and dialect are defined in cultural and political terms, and any attempt to define a nation or state in terms of language is circular. As one American linguist aptly put it, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy”.

But above all, independence does not solve the economic problems of the speakers of a minority language. A separate Basque state would not free Basque workers from unemployment, insecurity and exploitation. These are caused by the economic set-up of society, not by the wrong placement of political frontiers. Capitalism is a world-wide society, and no part of it can escape from world trends and crises. Separatism, whether motivated on linguistic or other grounds, offers precisely nothing to the working class.

Socialism, too, will be a world society, but one without states or frontiers. The concept of linguistic minority will then have no meaning. A language with comparatively small numbers. of speakers will not be discriminated against, and there will be no problem about arranging education in that language, if its speakers so wish. Publishing material in that language will not be restricted by considerations of profit, but by the needs of its speakers. It is possible that an invented auxiliary language, such as Esperanto or Ido, will be used to facilitate communication between speakers of different languages. We look forward to a world in which learning another language will not be the drudge it so often is today, but an enjoyable adventure. All children could be brought up bilingual, and then travel to other parts of the globe to learn a language in its native environment. Becoming multilingual in this way would be the best way of becoming a true citizen of the world socialist community. Socialist society will mean the liberation of all mankind, without distinction of race, sex or language. We ain’t seen nothing yet.

Paul Bennett

Wales: A Nation? (1969)

From the July 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lately the spirit of national identity has been reborn, both in Wales and elsewhere. Backed by the indignities of the past, fired by a renewed interest in the peculiarities of custom and language and consciousness of national resources, it has succeeded in forming an organised opinion which has forced the government of Westminster to take notice. The most important thing of all is that in their written and spoken propaganda nationalists, Welsh and others, maintain their faith in capitalism and are agreed to live within a state system of their own making.

At the moment, the focus is on Wales; attention is being paid by the world press and its general propaganda media on the investiture of the son of the reigning sovereign as Prince of Wales. The reaction in Wales, from that of outright opposition to apathy and support, is intriguing to the onlooker.

The early history of Wales shows it to be a land peopled by tribes for the most part engaged in inter-tribal disputes. Its ’community of interest' was of a plural nature, there being no centralisation of authority which could exist under the prevailing social and economic conditions. The only common features were a common tongue and a common way of life. Outside this their attachments went no further than their local territory (Cwmwd and Cantnef) and their local chiefs.

The Roman occupation, lasting about 400 years, did very little to change the broad pattern of social life though it did impose Roman laws, introduce new settlements and road systems, bring the country into close contact with European trade and culture, and introduce new words and phrases to the indigenous language, thereby enriching it. The occupation produced a class of elite Romano-British, whose future was bound up in Roman affairs; in other words their attitude was that of those who accepted the Roman ’State’. This has been the case ever since — it is in the interests of the minority that the state exists. 'Y Werin', the Folk, have no advantages worth talking about accruing from the State.

And so, we find that with the coming of the Normans, the country was divided into regions loosely ruled by native overlords (Y Tywysogion)—the Princes, who in their turn controlled lesser gentry (Boneddwir). The social set-up was true to the general pattern to be found in feudal society everywhere in Europe. This was the system taken over by the Normans who planted their own lords in place of the Welsh and ruled, first by military might and later by laws. In the meantime the agrarian economy remained unaltered, in the same way that when the Germanic people conquered the Old Roman Empire they did not introduce any new division of labour because conquered and conquerors were in the same stage of economic development.

By the 13th century the Normans and Saxons had become one people and in 1284 they so consolidated their footings in Wales that Edward I proclaimed a principality composed of five shires, so replacing forever the earlier regional groupings based on ‘blood ties’. These shires were given over to his eldest son. henceforth to be called the Prince of Wales. The principality, nevertheless remained politically distinct from England, having no representation in the parliament of the time.

Romantic visions

The Act of Union changed the situation: hitherto Wales represented a colony, now it became a part of England. Continual enactments, intrigue, and corruption tied the knot more securely with the passing of time. The Welsh gentry were in spirit with the English Court and the Welsh peasantry remained the providers of sustenance, content with the visions of an ancient freedom made more romantic by the poetry and songs of their bards. The great Arthur slept, to awake one day to lead them out of bondage.

The advent of the Industrial Revolution saw Wales as a people exploited by the coal and iron masters, both English and Welsh, a situation shared by their brethren throughout the length and breadth of Britain, spoon-fed by the same religious cant and moulded by a similar education system, first church charity then state schools. Mistakes were made of course, as for example the vicious attempts to destroy the native language by outlawing it from the schools. Resurgent Welsh capitalism would do the opposite, knowing that the sentiment of language is a potent weapon in maintaining the State Idea. Westminster, now faced with an awkward situation, has also gone a long way towards this end by providing Welsh in schools, parity of esteem, and recognition in all kinds of minor ways.

The growth of nationalist sentiment is being fostered by a variety of organisations at the present time but it is Plaid Cymru which is the spearhead. The events leading up to its formation are interesting, as they show how almost anybody can utilise nationalistic sentiments to further their ends—even people who call themselves socialists.

In July 1918, the South Wales Labour Federation convened a special 'Home Rule' conference in Cardiff where the leaders explained the purport of the Federation “to become the true Nationalist Party of Wales." The Liberals too, at their Conference before the 1918 election, not to be left out of the picture, favoured a parliament for Wales. In 1925 a group founded at Aberystwyth, composed largely of 'intellectuals', claimed nationalism as their goal and published a journal 'Y Wauw' — the Dawn. This group was quickly supressed by the Government. For a short while there existed a Welsh Republican Party — Gwerinialthwyr Cymru — which included in its manifesto the statement that in republican Wales, "ownership would be by and for use only”. It advocated complete severance from the English crown. This party withered away to be replaced by the present Nationalist Party, formed in August 1925. The present Nationalists are prepared to recognise the Crown and would be content with dominion status. In its journal Draig Goch we find the peculiar statement that capital should be created and then shared out among the people. It is interesting to note that about this time a movement known as Byddin Ymreolwyr Cymru (The Home Rule Army of Wales) had views of their own. The present Free Wales Army may be an attempt to revive some of them in terms of ‘direct action'.

At the present time there are numerous organisations on the fringe of the political nationalists proper, most of them of a cultural nature from the Urdd (a kind of cultural youth movement), to bodies like the Llewellyn Society, the Patriotic Front Welsh Language Society.

Everywhere one finds the nation states built on the broad shoulders of its working class and everywhere workers are subject to poverty, insecurity, and war. Plaid Cymru wish to add another party to the list. "If there is to he a future Welsh Nation there must be a State” (Gwynfor Evans).

Socialists in Wales know that the Welsh language and cultural tradition cannot be created or maintained by the establishment of a separate political state. In a free society the economic and political pressures that now tend to crush minority cultures will no longer operate.

So much for the ‘grand illusionist trick' to be enacted at Caernarvon: the recognition by the English Crown that Wales shall be a nation but part of the English state. This situation has its supporters and opponents among the Welsh people but it means nothing except that the position of the working class will be that they remain working class.

W. Brain.

Why all this fuss about Welsh? (1980)

From the November 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

So Gwynfor Evans did not need to fast after all. Wales will have its all-Welsh TV channel. The Tories, after saying they would break their election promise, are now going to keep it. Nicholas Edwards, Secretary' of State for Wales, after first insisting that his party would not be deflected by threats of violence, justified its second U-turn by saying that it “could not withstand the threat of violence”. “We misjudged our ability to convert opinion”, he added.

In fact, the issue of the fourth channel figured no more than tiny in the preoccupations of the majority of people in the highly populated parts of Wales. A certain number of them would, if asked, have probably declared themselves in favour of a Welsh-only service on Channel 4. But this would only have been because they wished to get rid of the Welsh programmes at present on the other channels. Hunger strike or no hunger strike there was never any question of people getting seriously worked up about TV in Welsh, and still less of their giving support to a campaign of violence in favour of it. A visit to Westminster by the Archbishop of Wales and other assorted dignitaries was enough to convince the Tory leadership that the population of Wales was up in arms and ready to fight to have Welsh on telly. But the powers-that-be got it wrong again, just as they did over devolution.

Ironically it is the Tories’ second change of mind, more than their first, which may do them the most harm among the electorate in Wales. For they will not be thanked by the non-Welsh speaking majority when it fully sinks in, as it has not yet done, that the fourth channel will be seen everywhere in Britain but that only in Wales will it be transmitted in Welsh. And even Welsh speaking viewers will probably be disappointed with a service which is almost certain to be of low quality owing to lack of funds from advertising.

But why all this fuss about Welsh? What is actually happening to the language? Well, from being the majority language in the last century and that of half the population (929,000) in 1901, Welsh is now known, according to the 1971 census figures, by only 20.9 per cent (less than 600,000) of the population of Wales.* And even this figure is probably an overestimate based on false information given by nationalist sympathisers on their census forms. What makes the future for Welsh look even dimmer is the census figure of 13.6 per cent for children aged 3 to 10 knowing the language. This decline is due to the development of British capitalism which in the 19th and early 20th century brought to Wales large numbers of industrial workers from England and Ireland (their descendants now probably form the majority of people living in Wales), which in the inter-war years caused many native Welsh speakers to emigrate to England in search of work, and which all along has exerted tremendous direct pressure on the Welsh language by its preponderant use of English in business, administration, education, technology and communications generally. It has forced Welsh speakers to get to know and use English for reasons of social and economic survival, and the incentive to know, use and transmit Welsh has been reduced accordingly. Now, less than 1 per cent of people in Wales are Welsh- only speakers and between 1961 and, 1971 alone Welsh lost speakers at the rate of about 200 per week.

To arrest this decline in the language and encourage its wider use is one of the stated aims of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, and was the reason given for its leader’s proposed fast. In recent years its efforts on behalf of the language seem to have had a certain degree of success with government agreement to bilingualism on road signs, notices and official forms and an expansion in Welsh-medium schools. But it is doubtful whether any of this or indeed any of its activities at all have actually led to more people knowing Welsh or using it regularly. On the contrary the evidence points to a continued decline in the use of Welsh accompanied by a decrease in sympathy for the language among non-Welsh speakers due to the nationalists’ policy of trying to impose Welsh on those who neither understand it nor want to learn it.

This is a process which will almost certainly be accelerated by the coming all-Welsh TV channel. English-only viewers will resent having to miss programmes available to people elsewhere and this will make them less likely to sympathise with efforts to keep Welsh alive. In addition the lower quality of programme on the Welsh channel will make Welsh speakers more likely to tune in to English programmes instead and so miss what is at present the only contact some of them have with the native language. So by their action Plaid Cymru may well have done the language more harm than good.

Plaid Cymru were successful however in finding the issue they so badly needed to rally support. In last year’s general election only 8.1 per cent of all people in Wales voted for them. Their stock had gone down dramatically after the March 1979 devolution referendum. Here they had hoped for a massive vote in favour of a Welsh assembly, which they saw as a half-way house to independence. The 4 to 1 majority against what in reality would have been no more than a modest administrative reform left them shattered. Their argument that nationalism is the only solution to the problems of a backward Wales where wages are lower and unemployment higher than the national average was emphatically rejected by the people of Wales. After that groups of militants tried direct action tactics (bomb attacks on holiday homes) to attract attention to their cause, but it was the TV issue that gave the nationalists a chance to get back into the limelight “respectably”. It is worth noting however that Gwynfor Evans’s threatened fast, although in itself a peaceful form of protest, carried with it a deliberate menace of violence. “The responsibility for any acts of violence that may occur as a result of my hunger strike lies on the doorstep of our government”, said Evans in a newspaper interview (South Wales Evening Post, 1 September 1980) and this underlined the dictatorial nature of nationalist attempts to impose their will on the non-nationalist majority.

But even if the nationalists managed to win the support of the people of Wales and to bring into being an independent state would the evils they now see as being inflicted on Wales by rule from London be eradicated? For the answer one need only look across the Irish Sea where almost 60 years of independence has left Eire with the same combination of unemployment, inflation, industrial conflict and bad housing as Wales and has left the Irish language virtually dead. A faction within the Welsh Language Society, the direct action wing of the nationalist movement, has apparently learned this lesson and sees the Welsh language and culture as more likely to survive by struggle within the present arrangements than by the winning of formal political independence from the rest of Britain. They recognise that an independent Wales would continue, for all practical purposes, to be totally dependent on its bigger more powerful neighbour and that the pressure on the language would continue and probably intensify due to its supporters sitting back on their victory.

So the nationalists may be cock-a-hoop over the Tory surrender and convinced they have won a famous victory for the language. But, as they will realise later, that victory is illusory, short-term and in reality part of a longer-term process of defeat. In the history of capitalism their action will be seen as a hard fought exercise in futility. For—let there be no mistake about it—as long as capitalism continues to live, the Welsh language will continue to die. 

Howard Moss

* Statistics are taken from: Report on the Welsh Language, H.MSO, 1963; Census 1971: Report on the Welsh Language in Wales, HMSO. 1973; and D. Halsom and M. Burch, A Political and Electoral Handbook for Wales, Gower Publishing Co, Farnborough, 1980.