1776: Whose republic? (2026)

From the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Republic of Washington will grow and grow, until it makes the whole world tremble’ – Marquis de Sade.

In American schools children are taught to call it the American Revolution. Was it? In Britain we were brought up to refer to it as the American War of Independence. But whose independence?

The man mostly urging the colonial owning classes to declare independence from the British crown was an Englishman: the political reformer Thomas Paine. Largely alone in his zeal for the independence of the American commercial class, he would be resisted by the much more timid George Washington and the latter’s clique of slave-owning mouthpieces for ‘liberty’, who were reluctant to go so far, until forced to by circumstances and the sheer ferocity of the British army.

The colonial gentry had launched the cry against imperial taxation and oppression in 1775 and Paine, for whom dissent, anywhere, was an irresistible magnet, became its most zealous spokesman. In his pamphlet aptly named Common Sense he showed the absurdity of the American colonies being ruled by a tiny island kingdom a gigantic ocean away. When the people of his own roots, the pacifist Quakers, warned the rebels of inviting carnage, Paine told them to mind their own business and not interfere in a ‘just’ war (where have we heard that before?).

Oppression is oppression, regardless of who the oppressor is, and Paine was soon to learn this, with the ingratitude and disdain of his supposed colonial ‘comrades’ after they had at last yielded to his urgings that they replace the British rag on a pole with a republican one.

American farmers and ordinary people bore the brunt of British ferocity as the Quakers’ warning came true.

British ferocity, directly caused by the Washington revolt, did indeed provoke a hatred that benefited those riding it and carried them to victory and the overthrow of British rule. War continued, however, beyond 1782 (its official end), with the British navy attacking towns and shipping and in turn put to flight by an American known (ironically) as Captain Nelson, called a pirate by the British. As late as 1812 Britain launched an invasion of the new United States of thirteen colonies, and hostilities would carry on until into the American Civil War of the 1860s.

During the war the British state used the native American Great Lakes tribes against the colonists in the same way that earlier in the century the Jacobites (the political faction supporting the Stuart monarchy of James II) had done in Scotland. Robert Burns did not like the Jacobites, but he admired the tribal Highland people. As his song Ye Jacobites By Name suggests, they stirred up rebellion, seducing the Highlanders to their cause, then, when it failed, scarpered off to France, leaving the Highland people to suffer the vengeance of the British state.

The Jacobites did this twice in the 18th century, and the last time they scarpered, in 1746, it would result in the destruction of the Highlanders who had followed them. The clearances would have been on the cards anyway at some point, because, like the native Americans and other native peoples around the world, the clans were an obstruction to the development of capitalism.

So who benefited? For all the talk of ‘liberty’, certainly not the United States’ four million African-American slaves, no matter how hoarsely and painfully Tom Paine and others implored. The poor farmers’ subsequent revolt, demanding relief from poverty, and stressing their having fought for the Congress, was ferociously crushed. The British during the war had helped secure the later fate of the native people too, using them against the colonists, teaching the natives about scalping, and ensuring the colonists’ eternal hatred for ‘Indians’.

As for Paine, his dedication to George Washington of The Rights of Man did not help him when arrested for ‘moderantism’ by the French Jacobins. Washington ignored his appeals to save him from the guillotine (for that he had to rely on others) while The Age of Reason – a rational dissection of the Bible –finally sealed his fate where the United States of America were concerned.

In short, 1776 marks yet another murderous squabble between capitalist factions. Revolution – the world revolution of those who actually do all the work in society – is yet to come, and when it does it will be truly democratic and thus will not require violence.

A.W.

Land reform in Scotland (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the inception of the Scottish Parliament, land reform has been a significant issue. It is widely recognised that there is considerable concentration of land ownership in Scotland. Typically, land reform is an issue in formerly colonised countries, where the occupying power has concentrated land ownership, such as in South Africa and Zimbabwe, to benefit the colonisers and exert control.

The concentration of land in Scotland, through the famous Highland Clearances, was a precursor and a part of the same process, appropriating land for the ruling class and sending people out to colonise other parts of the world.

According to the Scottish Land Commission: 1,252 owners hold 67 percent of privately owned rural land. Of these estates, 87 are estimated to be larger than 10,000 hectares (67 of these are in the Highlands), 667 are 1,000-10,000, and 371 are smaller than 1,000 hectares. There are 5.5 million people in Scotland.

As they note, this is not unusual:

‘Ownership of agricultural land is becoming increasingly concentrated in Europe, with one percent of agricultural businesses controlling 20% of agricultural land in the EU and three percent controlling 50%. Conversely, 80% of agricultural businesses control only 14.5% of agricultural land (European Economic and Social Committee, 2015)’.

Early in the parliament’s existence, the then Labour government passed laws to abolish the last vestiges of feudal land ownership – no longer requiring the payment of feudal duties and creation of outright ownership of land.

The Scottish Parliament took the opportunity to make changes, now it was no longer confronted by the power of landowners in the House of Lords. By 2004, it passed its first Land Reform Act, which included a broader right to roam than in England and Wales, and also introduced community right to buy, where populations up to 10,000 could register a right of refusal on land sales and transfers. This legislation also placed responsibilities on landowners for the management of their property.

The SNP have continued the process by passing further acts in 2015, 2016 and 2025. The 2016 legislation gave Scottish ministers the power to intervene in land sales. Some of this legislation was refinements of the process following human rights cases that upheld the right of private ownership against the provisions of the Land Reform Acts, particularly Salvesen v Riddell.

The 2016 Community Empowerment Act gave communities rights to intervene in disused or neglected land causing harm to communities (including urban properties). The 2025 Act includes a requirement to consider reasonable requests to lease land or convert parts of it into crofting land. This act also requires a plan which will improve biodiversity, adapt to climate change and contribute to net zero.

The large estate owners continue to fight a rearguard action, maintaining that large estates can be run more efficiently and with economies of scale (eg, when a part of the estate has a lean year, they can cross-subsidise from other parts of the estate to continue paying staff for maintenance and other costs).

Campaigners maintain that there is evidence that large estates stifle development, and concentrate power into a few hands:

‘Scotland’s current pattern of landownership frustrates economic development within fragile rural communities. Most of these responses were very general in nature but the overall perception was that because landowners have a very high degree of control over decisions about how land is used, they also have the capacity to either help or hinder economic development. The implication of this is that where local economic development is not regarded as a priority by the landowner, then it will not happen.’

Further, some landowners are perceived as ‘trophy’ owners, holding the land as a status symbol (mostly for shooting); whereas some charities are seen as hindering economic development in the name of conservation. As the land commission notes, ‘This indicates that the issue here is more to do with concentration of power and resources more generally, and that land holdings are acting as an outlet for the exercise of this power rather than its source’.

These frustrations reflect the desire of small-business folk and entrepreneurs who are locked out by their more powerful rivals. Indeed, part of the impetus behind land reform is securing the votes of rural population, including farmers and small-business people. The fact that the legislation is locked in with significant requirements for Scottish ministers to intervene, means that wealth and social connexion may, however, be the real determinant for how much, or how little changes. It will be interesting to see how much this will affect land held by the King in his own right (rather than as Crown land, which itself is managed by Scottish ministers and accounts for 35,000 hectares), such as Balmoral, and if ministers will be willing to impose conditions and lettings on any of his land.

So far, there has been little change in the pattern of land ownership, and sales and transfers of large estates are few and far between. Much as in land reform in many parts of the world, the power and right of property tends to chafe against any attempts to constrain it.

Where land is owned by public bodies, such as ‘Forestry and Land Scotland,’ commercial imperatives still apply, so the logic of capital predominates regardless of titular ownership. It is this logic that will continue to predominate even if the land is parcelled up into smaller lots.

Socialists want to end the private ownership of land and want to see it used rationally to benefit the needs of the whole community. That means, not state ownership or ownership by forestry commissions or trusts, but common ownership and democratic control.

Land being held in common doesn’t mean that people won’t be free to use their initiative to employ the land, but that under properly understood and agreed common and democratic rules, people would be able to co-operate to meet their individual and collective needs without all the layers of complexity and chicanery that come with the private ownership of land.

Pik Smeet

Highland Fling (1937)

From the July 1937 issue of the Socialist Standard

Brown beach and shaggy woods, romantic dells, Eigg on the starboard, Mull astern! and yet, and yet —

Current issues of the People's Journal (proudly claiming largest circulation north of the Forth) contain material sufficient to prevent a too hasty trek of the working class of Peckham and Hoxton to Dingwall, Inverness, or to the fast-dwindling collection of picturesque hovels dignified by the name of “villages.” Social inequality breeds similar social disease everywhere—aristocratic insolence, capitalist greed, working-class poverty.

The local authority for Corpach approached the Crown representative with a view to joint action in abolishing “abominable smells” in Crown “houses.” The Crown Minister, “all ’aughty-like,” promptly put the 'umble Councillors in their right place. “The Crown, and the Crown alone, was responsible for the sanitary condition of the houses in question” (June 12th). (“Sanitary" is not a misprint for “insanitary,” if you please. Mister Editor.) The People's Journal heads the article “Need for New Laws.” The Socialist Party of Great Britain avers the necessity for a New System of Society—Socialism.

A drive for a Highland “New Deal” is afoot. A cry is going up for more harbours, more power-stations. A pretty quarrel between industrial capital and landed gentrydom is a big factor against compounding of this particular pill to cure an economic earthquake . . .  an old tale, the Highlands must be “preserved” (not, of course, for people who live in smelly houses).

An historical reminder, culled from chapter 27 of Marx’s “Capital,” Vol. 1—read this chapter and previous two; there is nothing “difficult” here, the grim facts, absolutely unchallenged, gleaned from sober Blue Books and similar documents. . . . The Duchess of Sutherland evicted, from 1814 to 1820, practically all her tenancy (15,000) to make money on sheep. British soldiers assisted in eviction. One old woman was burnt to death refusing to leave her hut. The evicted tenants tried fish-catching in the fishing fiords and glittering lochs of the coast. But, alack!

The smell of the fish rose to the noses of the great men. They scented some profit in it, and let the seashore to Billingsgate. For the second time the Gaels were hunted out.—(p.754, Kerr’s Edition; Everyman, vol. 2, p. 809.)

Fish comes into the picture to-day. Big combines are steadily crushing out smaller enterprise; a frantic cry is going up to keep out Norwegian labour on trawlers; plans are afoot to settle fisherfolk in Vancouver, and a strike is yet unsettled in Campbeltown.

It should be noted that clan land was in primitive times actually “clan” land, common property in the widest sense of the word. The gradual usurpation of common rights of ownership of land by “chiefs” is a world-wide social phenomenon known to all students of works such as Lewis Morgan’s “Ancient Society,” or the more accessible “Origin of the Family,” by Engels, not to mention numerous books by definitely non-Socialist writers. The fact is established. Dog-like devotion—older people who have read Scott in their youth will recall instances— was repaid by expropriation. Roderick Dhu’s contemptuous reference to “fellow-clansmen” as “wretched kerns” was blunter in form, but truer in intent than the sickening patronage and fluffy blah which masks modem approach to the position.

The Macleods had a big gathering in Dunvegan Castle—said castle being anything but common property. “Old-age pensioners and all the crofters of the clan marched up to the castle headed by the clan piper.” The sweet lady, “Flora Macleod of Macleod,” was “overcome with the warmth of the clan spirit.” Burns’

“ There’s some are fou' of love divine. 

There’s some are fou' of brandy” 

seems vaguely apposite here. At any rate, the dwellers in smelly crofts and dear old tartan-clad recipients of outdoor relief were “keenly interested” in seeing the ancient relics of their clan— Cockneys do at least get some opportunity of seeing their relics every day at the London Museum. One of the “relics” deserves “special mention ”: Flora MacDonald’s corset!!

Dingwall Town Council, according to the North Star, gave a “typically Highland welcome” recently to Stewart Mackenzie of Seaforth on his return from honeymoon. Replying to an address, the young man recalled negotiations between the Council and the “estate” in connection with a new water-supply. He said he was “glad to think that now Dingwall had a first-class water-supply and that the estate had not suffered through granting this concession ” (March 13th). Is comment necessary? “Concession”!—and a splash heading of the Journal reads “Highlands need help for water supplies.” The situation is described “as little short of alarming.”

“Alarums and Excursions. Enter the Working Class.” Always “ alarums,” whether north or south of Forth for the working class—“excursions,” in the modern sense, sadly lacking, or of the cheap and nasty type.

Socialists (not reform-mongers, whether “charming” Maxtons, “fiery” McGoverns, or tin-pot Gallachers) still stand by “The World for the Workers.” This will include the humble, but highly-necessary water (without “concessions” from anyone).

MacReginald.

Nationalism: deadly enemy of socialism (2022)

From the September 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

To many workers nationalism, like some other prejudices, is just another weird idea left over from the past. However, too many others still identify with countries and nations. Nationalism therefore still plays a large part in keeping workers divided.

Some try to make a distinction between patriotism and nationalism: with patriots identifying with their own imagined country without harbouring any ill-will towards people of other countries and nationalists who, as well as having special affection for their own imagined country, are also more xenophobic.

These concepts are so entangled that it makes no sense trying to disentangle them: it is the unsound nature of these notions which bothers us.

To the nationalists, whether Scottish or English, British, German, Russian, Chinese, American or whatever, the concept of the nation is a very important matter. For some it is the most important matter. Nationalists adhere to the strange notion that the nation, or nation-state, is an entity to which we should have automatic allegiance.

But why should we have such allegiance? And what exactly is a nation, and in whose interests does a nation-state operate?

Until the eighteenth century local feeling was much more important than national feeling. The pre- eighteenth-century community-spirit sense of nationality considered a nation to be composed of people living in a particular area with a common language, culture and history; but not necessarily ruled by the same state.

During the eighteenth century some new countries and nations were created. Great Britain, for example was a nation-state created by a merger between England & Scotland in 1707. This was not a ‘hostile takeover’ of Scotland by England, but a deal done between the ruling class of England and their counterparts in Scotland. Needless to say neither the working class in England nor the workers in Scotland were consulted.

Certain gentlemen in what was then the North American colonies became rather disgruntled over trade and taxation and their lack of representation in the British parliament. These grievances between the gentleman rulers on either side of the Atlantic eventually led to the American War of Independence. The British gentlemen on the American side of the ocean foreswore their allegiance to the King and declared independence from Great Britain. In their Declaration of Independence in 1776 they called the new country the United States of America.

The French Revolution in 1789 and its aftermath gave impetus to the further development of liberalism and nationalism throughout Europe and by the nineteenth century nationalism had become more important and much more assertive than the hitherto existing sense of nationality.

The new nationalism intertwined with liberalism was really part of the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie.

Eastern Europe was relatively backward but north-west Europe had reached an advanced stage of industrial and trade development. Industrialisation and increased commercial development spread from west to east along with the political ideas of the rising bourgeoisie.

The new nationalism was essentially the idea that the nation, whatever it was conceived to be, is the most important unit of organisation in society and should therefore be equivalent to the state: it was the concept of the nation-state.

Nationalism and liberalism posed a threat to the cohesion of states like the Habsburg Empire which contained Germans, Hungarians, Italians, Czechs, Poles, Croats and Serbs within its boundaries. On the other hand, new states could be established if the idea of nationalism captured the minds of Germans and Italians whose nations were both divided into various separate states. So, sometimes nationalism united territories into new countries and sometimes it tended to disrupt and divide existing countries.

In 1861 Italy went from being a ‘geographical expression’ to unification. There was at that time a number of competing notions about what a united Germany might be. The so-called Holy Roman Empire had been dissolved in 1806 leaving a collection of petty states which organised themselves during the course of the 19th century into a number of configurations and confederations which eventually led to unification in 1871.

The old absolutist system of government was diametrically opposed to the needs of a developing and dynamic capitalist economy and it was this antagonism of interests which gave rise to the attack by the middle class against absolutism and the feudal rights of the aristocracy.

Liberalism required the unity, inherent in nationalism, of nationhood in society to ensure the satisfactory operation of a liberal constitution. So bourgeois liberals promoted nationalism to further their own ends. But the acquiescence at least of workers and peasants was essential in achieving national unity and independence.

To maintain national cohesion, nationalist ideology is required. Various paraphernalia like flags and national songs/anthems are used to help indoctrinate the subjects of a nation with the myths and fantasies of nationhood. History books with a twisted account of how the nation arose and how it has done great things are also very useful.

A measure of how successful this indoctrination is can be seen at international sports events, where the participants go into a trance-like state as they sing the national anthems of what they have been trained to believe are ‘their’ countries and many are overcome with emotion.

‘Scots Wha Hæ’

The Braveheart Legend today owes much to the eighteenth century romanticised view of the Wars for Scottish Independence of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, which culminated in the Battle of Bannockburn in June 1314.

These wars were really struggles amongst the aristocracy, who had lands in both England and Scotland, for political power commensurate with their landholdings and their own perceived greatness.

The song Scots Wha Hæ, by Robert Burns, was ostensibly based on Robert Bruce’s speech to his troops before the Battle of Bannockburn, but Burns was influenced just as much by contemporary struggles in Europe and elsewhere when he wrote this song. He also knew that to openly write such a song about the ‘radical’ struggles of his own time, whether in Britain or abroad, could expose him to prosecution for sedition.

In more recent times the rise of the SNP as a political force results largely from the perceived failures of decades of Labour and Tory governments. It could be said, particularly from the 1970s onwards, that the misanthropic projects of Labour and Tory governments led to growing support for nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales.

To the Scottish National Party the nation is the most important thing. The essence of its argument is that the interests of the ‘people of Scotland’, whoever they might be, can be served best by a government in Edinburgh rather than one in London.

They claim nowadays that nationality can be defined in such a way as to include everyone who lives in Scotland. A bit like the USA, where you can become an American or a hyphenated one for a generation or two; or perhaps forever.

It sounds much ‘nicer’ than some of the more virulent and nasty types of nationalism. But unfortunately, many of the SNP’s supporters continue to be the more old-fashioned and nasty type of nationalist.

Change of rulers

Since the collapse of the British Empire after World War II, many nations have gained independence from British rule. None of this has led to any lasting benefit to the workers in these countries. As in the rest of the world the populations of these countries are divided into employers and their wage-slaves.

So, although the nation-state may be a convenient vehicle by means of which a local (national) capitalist class can exploit the workers within its boundaries, it brings no benefit to the workers.

Nationality is therefore something imposed upon the worker. In fact, the workers of the world have no country and therefore should not have any allegiance to this or any other country. Instead of worrying about the interests of the country or the nation to which they belong, their allegiance should be to their own class interests.

Our use of the possessive pronoun with respect to the employers and their wage-slaves was no accident: the countries are theirs – ie, the capitalists – as are we their wage-slaves. But the countries are not ours! We do not own enough of this or any other country to fill a flower pot.

Instead of worrying about the interests of the country to which they belong and its independence or lack thereof, workers should seek independence for themselves: independence from the tyranny of capital and silly flag-waving nations. Nationalism – like sexism, racism, and religious superstition – is anathema to socialists. We can have nothing but antipathy to it. It is totally incompatible with working class interests and the struggle for socialism.

The Scottish National Party argues that social problems in Scotland are caused by London government and that with an independent government in Edinburgh a start could be made in solving these problems.

The Socialist Party argument is that social problems in Scotland are not caused by government from England but, as elsewhere, by capitalism. Re-arranging frontiers or constructing a new state is no more a solution to working class problems than electing a new government of capitalism or changing the Prime Minister.

Such political changes, are irrelevant to the working class, since they leave the economic basis of society – the class monopoly of the means of production – unchanged; and it is precisely this that is the root cause of their problems.

Against all nationalisms

The Socialist Party opposes Scottish nationalism just as it does British nationalism which, of course, is supported by the Tories, Labour and the Liberals. We are opposed to all nationalism and insist that the solution to our problems lies in the establishment of socialism throughout the world.

The First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, has recently proposed holding another referendum on whether or not Scotland should remain part of the United Kingdom. She claims that she has a mandate to conduct one. The SNP together with the Scottish Greens, who have turned tartan in the last few years, constitute a pro-independence majority in Holyrood. Although this majority of nearly 56 percent in the Scottish Parliament is based on only 49.2 percent of the popular vote, it is a greater ‘mandate’ than Boris Johnson’s 43.6 percent of the popular vote which gave him 365 seats out of 650 in the House of Commons and control of the British state.

The question of whether or not the Scottish Parliament has the authority to conduct a referendum has been referred to the Supreme Court. Should the Supreme Court rule that the matter is reserved to the authority of Westminster and if whoever replaces Johnson still refuses to grant Sturgeon permission to conduct a referendum, the SNP will fight the next UK general election solely on one issue: separation. This would, they say, be a de facto referendum on independence.

Therefore the proposed referendum in October 2023 or the next general election in 2024, like past elections, gives us a ‘choice’: vote yes, get capitalism; vote no, get capitalism! It is like being asked if migraine is better than diarrhoea. Capitalism offers us innumerable such ‘choices’, in an attempt to pretend we are being consulted.

To borrow some of Burns’s words: ‘Now is the day, and now is the hour’, but not for supporting some madcap scheme to create a new nation, or restore an old one. It is time to get up off our knees and face the future: not a fairy-tale future promised by politicians but the future that we will make. Not Scotland for the Scottish, England for the English, Wales for the Welsh, or any other nationalist fantasy world.

A long time ago in the aftermath of a bloody war we claimed the world for the workers and called upon you, our fellow workers, to fight for socialism. Over a hundred years later our claim and demand is the same. By overthrowing capitalism and taking the world for the workers, we will have one world for one people. To do anything else is, just like the proposed referendum, an exercise in futility.

John Cumming

50 Years Ago: The Scottish National Party (1989)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In their leaflet "Crisis!'' the Scottish National Party bemoan the extent to which work has been transferred from Scotland to English soil by the railway companies, and the number of factories which have been closed in the former country as compared with the latter. It may not be out of place to remind them that English capitalists do not hesitate to close works in Lancashire and open others in India and China, when it proves profitable, and no British Government has shown either ability or willingness to interfere with this process. Capitalists are not primarily concerned with geographical boundaries or the nationality of the people whom they exploit.

On the other hand, the Scottish nation, whether independent or united with England, is divided into classes, as is society elsewhere. It is this division which accounts for the existence of the evils from which the Scottish workers suffer. English rule did not account for the fact that the depopulation of the Scottish Highlands led to the congestion in its industrial slums. The Scottish chieftains themselves turned out their own clansmen in order to make way. first for sheep and later for deer, in order to fill their own pockets. The notorious Duchess of Sutherland, for example, had 15,000 people hunted out in the six years 1814-1820, and called in British soldiers to enforce the eviction. The political union merely facilitated the development of capitalist robbery with violence.

[From an article "A Scottish Red Herring", Socialist Standard, August 1939.]

Highland Hypocrisy (2000)

From the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spare a tear for that hard-up aristocrat John MacLeod of MacLeod. The poor man’s castle is badly in need of repair so he has had to put on the market his beloved Cuillins. This is an area of real estate consisting of 35 square miles of mountain range, bordered by 14 miles of coastline and two salmon rivers. So desperate for the readies is the poor fellow that he is prepared to let it go for a mere £10 million.

 “I regard the Cuillins as priceless”, he said. “They are part of my soul and putting them up for sale is an extremely painful experience. They are my ancestors. Our clan grew out of the history of the Cuillins” (Times, 23 March).

What the fellow doesn’t tell us of course is that, like all Clan Chiefs, his ancestors stole the land in the first place. The ownership of the land was vested in the whole clan until the Chiefs stole it from them. It is a process that is well-documented by Karl Marx in Capital:

“The Highland Celts were organised in clans, each of which was the owner of the land on which it was settled. The representative of the clan, its chief or ‘great man’, was only the titular owner of this property, just as the Queen of England is the titular owner of all the national soil. When the English government succeeded in suppressing the intestine wars of these ‘great men’, and their constant incursions into the Lowland plains, the Chiefs of the clans by no means gave up their time-honoured trade as robbers; they only changed its form. On their authority they transformed their nominal right into a right of private property, and as this brought them into collision with their clansmen, resolved to drive them out by open force” (Volume I, page 681).

The journalist John MacLeod mockingly describes how the title of “MacLeod of MacLeod” is another piece of robbery as the man exulting in that grandiose title was actually born John Wolridge-Gordon. Commenting on the proposed sale of the estate, he digs up some edifying information about how a previous MacLeod “great man” tried to raise money:

“In 1739 The MacLeod kidnapped dozens of his tenancy and attempted to sell them as slaves to Barbados” (Herald, 4 April).

Richard Donnelly

Scots Nationalism (1975)

From the March 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

The First of Two Articles

Nationalists believe that all classes in society should hold allegiance to “The Nation”. Socialists do not and point out how nations have always been the creation of a ruling group having nothing to do with working-class interests.

What is a nation? It is simply the people and the territory which have been appropriated by a class of robbers at some point in history. It has less to do with a common language, religion, race, culture, and all the other things which nationalists imagine or pretend are essential ingredients in the making of nations.

This is certainly true of Scotland and far from having a common history or anything else the population there are mainly the descendants of native Picts, invaders from Ireland (the original Scots), Western Europe and Scandinavia. After centuries of what were really tribal wars the whole land came under one king by the middle of the ninth century and the nation was born–by the coercion of the people and in the interests of a class of bandit chieftains.

Right up until the union of the Scottish and English parliaments in 1707 there were really two distinct nations in Scotland. The Highlanders  spoke Gaelic and had a culture (way of life) very different from that of the dialect-English speaking Lowlanders. Indeed

“In rural districts, the Scottish dialect or dialects was barely intelligible even to a Scot of another district” (James G. Kellas. Modern Scotland–the Nation Since 1870. p. 7)

So the nationalist idea of a once united Scotland is just a myth. Yet no one can deny that despite over two hundred years of Scotland’s incorporation within the United Kingdom most Scots feel themselves to be part of a separate nation. This can be explained by the fact that the Act of Union allowed Scotland to retain its own law, religion, and education system thus ensuring the continuation of national identity.

Why, then, has nationalism never been a strong political force until recently? The answer is that after 1707 the Scottish bourgeoisie, the only ones who could have provided a nationalist impetus, were far too busy building their fortunes through the Empire trade which had hitherto been denied them by the English Navigation Acts. Later on there was the industrial revolution and even greater opportunity to find wealth and contentment within the Union.

Even so, there were some malcontents and by the middle of the nineteenth century we find some bourgeois complaining

“that England was getting very much more out of the Union than was Scotland . . . that during the last few years public expenditure had been largely for the benefit of England . . . Naval expenditure was almost exclusively allocated to English dockyards, shipyards and arsenals. (H. J. Hanham. Scottish Nationalism, p. 76).

This discontent resulted in the founding of the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights in 1853 and it was composed of Tory and Liberal notables plus some aristocrats. Although the Crimean war soon killed off the Association this didn’t prevent some Scottish propertied interests (the Tory Marquess of Bute among them) returning again and again to the theme that not enough time was devoted to Scottish business in the House of Commons, that public money (their taxes) was being spent unfairly, etc.

And as if to emphasize the propertied interests represented by nationalist ideas the Scottish Home Rule Association was formed in 1886, again comprising Tory and Liberal bigwigs but this time with a sprinkling of Labourites. Basically the SHRA represented those sections of the Scottish owning class who wanted more time spent on and more control over their affairs in a separate parliament in Scotland but still within the United Kingdom. The movement took its inspiration from the Irish bourgeoisie who were struggling to obtain Home Rule for themselves, and Gladstone’s support for this fanned the flames in Scotland.

Of course Home Rule met with opposition from other sections of the owning class who had different interests. Liberal business men who had trade links with Ireland feared any kind of Home Rule, Scottish or Irish, while Liberal MPs representing seats in west and central Scotland had to make sure they didn’t antagonize the Orange vote. The result was a split in the Liberal Party and the emergence of a group of Liberal-Unionists who allied themselves with the Tories against Home Rule.

Tories generally opposed Home Rule for the same reasons as did Liberals. Also the landowning section opposed it because they were outraged at Liberal plans for land reform, while the ambitious politicians were worried about how their career prospects would be affected since there wouldn’t be the same opportunity of landing plum jobs in “the government of Empire” if Scotland were to have its own parliament.

So although support for and opposition to Home Rule cut across party lines the growing band of nationalists usually supported the Liberals who had created the post of Secretary for Scotland and because the party in Scotland was committed to Home Rule. Various Bills for a Scottish parliament were submitted to Westminster until in 1913 one actually looked like succeeding but was cynically dropped by the Liberal government because of political complications over Ulster.

The emergence of independent Labour politics at the turn of the century meant that much working class support was drained from the Home Rule party, the Liberals. By the end of world war one the Liberals were completely shattered so Home Rule looked a lost cause to any Scottish capitalists who had been interested. In any case, as the division between the Liberals and Tories became more and more blurred the owning class had gradually been turning to the Tory Party, which had strong working class support, as the guardian of their class interests.

Nationalist now had to look elsewhere for support and they found it in the growing Labour Party and Trade Union movement in Scotland. John MacLean, plus James Maxton, Tom Johnston, and other prominent Labourites were ardent Home Rulers and they followed in Keir Hardie’s footsteps by pandering to nationalist sentiment in their writings and speeches. Indeed Scotland is currently plastered with a Scottish National Party poster which quotes one of Maxton’s contributions:

“I am convinced we can do more in five years in a self-governing Scotland than could have been done with 25 or 30 years of heart-breaking struggle in the British House of Commons.”

Today the Labour and Communist Parties, along with various “revolutionary” groups continue the reactionary work of spreading nationalist ideas among the working class.

However, the honeymoon with Labour was soon over and eventually it dawned on the nationalists that they could hope for nothing from the three major parties, none of which had even included Home Rule in their 1924 general election manifestos, so the warring groups swept their differences under the carpet and merged in 1928 to become the National Party of Scotland.

The presence of political nationalist ideas is an indication that some groups in society feel its real material interests are being frustrated by forces outside or even inside the nation. Of course the desire to achieve their aims is never expressed in terms of their own needs only. In order to enlist the necessary working class support such arguments as “justice”, “freedom”, and “the nation” are used to justify the real bone of contention and to give it an aura of sanctity. Next month we will continue to show why the workers in Scotland should oppose nationalism.

Vic Vanni

(concluded next month)

Scottish Clearances (2022)

Book Review from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Sutherland Clearances: The Highland Clearances, Volume Three. By Alwyn Edgar. Ebook: ISBN-13: 9781838275 006.

Before the Rebellion of Prince Charles in 1745, each Highland clan owned its own land. No one else, including the Government in Edinburgh, had the power to deprive them of it. (Travellers saw that in the mountains every crag was a new fortress for men defending their own country.) But the Highland Jacobite rebels having been defeated at Culloden and scattered, and the Lowland Government in Edinburgh now being much stronger since the Union with England in 1707, the British authorities decided to incorporate the Highlands into Great Britain in fact, as well as in theory. The anglophone legal system was successfully imposed, and the clan chiefs were made into landlords, owning all the land which had once belonged to their clans. Scots law now gave each chief-landlord the right (for any reason or no reason) to turn his entire clan out of their homes and farms, and keep the whole clan land as his private back garden, if he wanted. So when the new landlords realised that big grazing farms, for cattle or sheep, would make a lot of money, the clearances started. Well-to-do Highlanders, Lowlanders, even a few Englishmen, rented the clan lands; the chiefs evicted their folk; and the chief/landlord found his income shooting up over the years to five times or fifteen times what it had been (and there was no income tax!). Many of the evicted Highlanders were given an acre or two of worthless, barren land, and told to make it fertile: and when by donkey-work the crofters were able to grow a few potatoes, they had to pay rent for the value they themselves had created. Others – either immediately or after years of rack-rented drudgery on the croft – went to the Lowland factories, or abandoned Scotland entirely for arduous pioneering lives in North America (those who survived the journey).

The Earls of Sutherland were chiefs of the Sutherland clan, Murrays, MacKays, Sutherlands and others. Adam Gordon married a daughter of the Earl of Sutherland about 1500, and managed to cheat the rest of the family out of their land-charters. After that the Earls of Sutherland were Gordons. The 18th earl died in 1766 leaving a year-old daughter, Elizabeth Gordon, to succeed him. She inherited nearly two-thirds of the county of Sutherland, over 1250 square miles, an estate about the size of Gloucestershire. The long wars with France between 1793 and 1815 meant there was a desperate need of soldiers, such as the Sutherland small tenants could provide: but (despite being married to one of the richest men in England, the Marquis of Stafford) she wanted the much higher rents which big sheep farms would supply. (You can never have too much money.) She was indifferent to the fate of the small tenants – ‘good many of them’, would ‘inevitably be tossed out’, she wrote; they would be ‘driven from their present dwellings by the sheep farms’. She cleared her estate between 1807 and 1821, greatly increasing her rents. She and her husband became the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland.

The second greatest Sutherland landowner was Lord Reay, the chief of the Reay MacKay clan. Reay cleared his estate even before Elizabeth Gordon, beginning about 1800. (Thirteen smaller landlords owned the rest of the county, and rivalled the countess and Lord Reay with their own clearances.) Reay belonged to a London firm which provided finance to slave-traders, and spent most of his time in gambling dens and brothels. Having wasted vast amounts of money, he sold his estate to the Sutherlands in 1830, and bought a slave plantation in the West Indies. When the slaves were freed in 1833, like the other slave-owners he was compensated. (The slaves weren’t.) – from the blurb.

Interview with the author here: https://youtu.be/CrhSuf9TFl0

Blogger's Note:

Alwyn Edgar gave a talk on his series of books last July via the SPGB discord discussion list.

Nationalist nonsense exposed (2000)

Book Review from the August 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Origins of Scottish Nationhood by Neil Davidson. Pluto Press 2000.

This book’s thesis is that Scotland as a nation-state does not stretch back into the very deepest dawn of time and only came into existence with the advent of the Union with England, and the rise to dominance of a Scottish capitalist class. As such it presents a fundamental challenge, from a Marxian perspective, to the totems and myths of the Scottish nationalists and their intellectual cheerleaders.

Davidson gives a clear account of the way in which Scotland did not come to the same situation of having a national absolutist government that England did (starting with Henry VIII), and thus entered the union as the junior partner, creating most of the national institutions (law, education and Kirk) that are traditionally listed as the reasons for Scotland’s “continued national identity”. Further, he demonstrates that the real divide was within Scotland, between Lowlanders and Highlanders, as the lowlands developed an urbanised élite. The idea that Scotland was a colonial subaltern of England also comes under withering assault, as Davidson shows how Scotland was not just a willing partner, but also a major force in promoting the British empire; and how the experience of Empire further helped shape Scotland as a “national identity”.

As such the book serves a worthy enough purpose, and on one level it achieves most of its ends; however its assiduity and worthiness is undermined by a number of failings. The book has a disturbing tendency towards arguing by assertion: in a discussion of the Declaration of Arbroath, Davidson simply says that its authors had a different meaning when they used the word nation (i.e. as a people/race) from the meaning it has in modern discourse. Considering this point was so important to the book’s case, this constitutes a serious weakness.

Quite often the theoretical expositions fail to adequately express their own application. Davidson’s definition of a nation simply as an “imaginary community” does not capture any notion of the relationship between nation and class interests, nor of its relationship to power. Yet, in his historical analysis, he often refers to national consciousness almost entirely in terms of it being the consciousness of the rising Scottish capitalist class. At other times this concept of national identity being tied to élite consciousness becomes confused, as when he attempts to engage with the arguments of contemporary Nationalists and tries to disprove mass consciousness of nationhood.

The desire to engage with the Nationalists further leads Davidson to make some elementary errors in analysis—in assessing the core/periphery thesis regarding Scotland and England he ends up reifying these supposed imaginary communities in order to show how an aggregate Scotland compares strongly with an aggregate England, none of which takes into account the unevenness within both territorial units, and the core/periphery relationships of provinces to the metropoles within each. In engaging closely with the Nationalists’ nonsense he accepts their flawed presuppositions in order to disprove the conclusions they base upon them.

A central theoretical point of the book is to make a distinction between nationalism and national consciousness—the former being a politics based upon national aims/structures, the latter simply being the knowledge of a common nationality. This distinction seems weak, since any dominant form of consciousness must surely find expression in social being. Thus if people denote their consciousness of subjectivity in terms of nationhood, then, surely, their politics will necessarily be guided by such national consciousness.

None of this, however, stops the book being right at a basic level, rather, it merely makes it weak for use in polemical terms. It often makes excellent points that expose the nonsense nationalists talk, and it builds a very strong case about the historical origins of the birth of “the Scottish nation”. This book is useful, in the main then, as a part of a much wider reading of the subject.

Pik Smeet

Arbroath 1320-1820: A History of Them and Us (2020)

From the April 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tens of thousands of Scottish nationalists would have been parading through the streets of Arbroath this month in their kilts and tartan regalia, flourishing their Saltires and Lion Rampants flags, celebrating a 700–year old document. Far fewer will be commemorating another event which took place 500 years later, this April’s bicentennial of the Weavers Uprising (also known as the Radical War.)

One is a story of a letter to the Pope requesting his papal blessing for the privileges of Scottish nobles and their birthright to the subjugation of their tenants and peasants (the correct title of the Arbroath Declaration is “Letter of Barons of Scotland to Pope John XXII.)

The other story is one of the common-folk’s resistance to exploitation and a struggle against oppression.

Scottish barons

For historians, the 1820 rising of the weavers was a minor insignificant event in the annals of Scottish history but then, of course, the Declaration of Arbroath was swiftly forgotten too, and only resurrected for a propaganda purpose very different from the mistaken belief held by today’s nationalists that it was declaring the independence of the Scottish people. In 1680 Sir George Mackenzie publicised it, not as an expression of nationalism but as support for those who wished to curtail royal power.

Historian Neil Davidson takes the key passage to be:

  ‘Yet if he [Robert the Bruce] shall give up what he has begun, seeking to make us or our kingdom subject to the king of England or to the English, we would strive at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and we would make some other man who was able to defend us our king; for, as long as a hundred of us remain alive, we will never on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English. For we fight not [for] glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up without his life’.

Its message is first directed at the English king, Edward II, informing him that it was pointless for him to attempt to depose Robert the Bruce with a more subservient king, since the remainder of the Scottish aristocracy would not cease its resistance. Secondly, it is also aimed at Robert the Bruce’s dubious past record; they would not accept his jeopardising their interests

The idea that the Arbroath Declaration challenged the Divine Right of Kings with the notion that the nation itself was foremost and the monarch merely its steward, is presented solely to justify Bruce usurping the rightful king John Balliol. The section of the Declaration reading:

  “if this prince [Bruce] shall leave these principles he hath so nobly pursued, and consent that we or our kingdom be subjected to the king or people of England, we will immediately endeavour to expel him, as our enemy and as the subverter both of his own and our rights, and we will make another king, who will defend our liberties.”

It should be read as a cautionary warning and a clear threat to Robert the Bruce himself.

Those medieval signatories to the 1320 Declaration were not leading any ‘liberation struggle’. In fact, John de Menteith, who turned William Wallace over to the English king, placed his seal upon the Declaration of Arbroath.

What did the the document actually mean? It was the ‘freedom’ of the Scottish barons that it was concerned with. The ‘people’ of Scotland were the nobles, the majority of whom at that time were still culturally Anglo-Norman, despite inter-marriage. None of the signatories held the view that the actual people of Scotland should have any say in any issue and they had no concept of popular sovereignty whatsoever

Weavers’ Revolt

If true ‘freedom-fighters’ are required then Scottish workers should look not to the winners and losers of aristocratic medieval family feuds over the throne of Scotland, but to those brave if foolhardy weavers who rose up five hundred years later in April 1820.

The  ‘Battle’ of Bonnymuir  took place on the 5 April, 1820. Thirty-two cavalrymen routed twenty-five, poorly armed, striking weavers. John Baird and Andrew Hardie, who came to be known as the ‘Radical Martyrs’, were sentenced to be hanged and beheaded (along with James Wilson who was later part of a riot that broke prisoners free at Greenock.)

Glasgow was at this time just a collection of small village communities with weaving being the main occupation. The handloom weavers enjoyed skilled status and worked to commission. They could choose their own hours of work if they were willing to forgo some proportion of their earnings. Given that these workers had free time many were able to read and would talk about what they had read, discussing the American and French revolutions. A slump in the economy after the Napoleonic Wars when pay and conditions deteriorated drastically resulted in workers, particularly weavers in Scotland, seeking reforms from an uncaring gentry-controlled government already in fear of revolution.

The ‘Committee of Organisation for Forming a Provisional Government’ put up placards on Saturday 1 April, calling for an immediate national strike. Many in central Scotland came out in support the following week.

The proclamation began:

  ’Friends and Countrymen! Rouse from that state in which we have sunk for so many years, we are at length compelled from the extremity of our sufferings, and the contempt heaped upon our petitions for redress, to assert our rights at the hazard of our lives.’ 

And, it called for a rising:

  ’To show the world that we are not that lawless, sanguinary rabble which our oppressors would persuade the higher circles we are, but a brave and generous people determined to be free.’

One group of strikers decided that attack was the best form of defence. With the purpose of acquiring weapons, about twenty-five weavers, led by Andrew Hardie and John Baird, marched on the Carron Iron Works near Falkirk to capture weaponry which was manufactured there. Tragically for that group, due to earlier underground societies like the United Scotsmen, government spies were active which meant the march on Carron was already known. The Army was given its own marching orders and when the two forces met  the radicals began firing. After a few volleys, the cavalry flanked the rebels and the inevitable end was swift. And so ended the ‘Battle’ of Bonnymuir.

On the day of his execution, Hardie’s words were:

  ’Yes, my countrymen, in a few minutes our blood shall be shed on this scaffold… for no other sin but seeking the legitimate rights of our ill-used and downtrodden beloved countrymen.’

An irate Sheriff ordered him to stop ‘such violent and improper language’. 

Hardie retorted:

  ’What we said to our countrymen, we intended to say no matter whether you granted us liberty or not. So we are now both done.’ 

1820 can be seen as the emergence of peoples’ power later to manifest itself in the Chartist Movement. The rising should be seen in the context of ordinary people from all over a growing industrial Scotland being inspired to overthrow the government in order to secure their rights and better working conditions.

We shall let the reader judge which historic event deserves to be remembered and celebrated.

ALJO

Editorial: Towards a Disunited Kingdom (2020)

Editorial from the March 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The turmoil of the Brexit process has exacerbated the fissures within the UK, which threaten to tear it apart. The Scottish National Party leader, Nicola Sturgeon, seized on the fact that the majority of Scottish voters opted to remain in the EU, and is demanding a second Independence referendum. The border between the North of Ireland and the Irish Republic which appeared to be invisible since the Good Friday agreement became a stumbling block in the Brexit negotiations. Sinn Fein wasted no time in pressing for a border poll which they hope will lead to the reunification of Ireland.

The spectre of Scottish independence is nothing new. Scottish workers were badly affected by the economic downturns of the 1970s and 1980s which hit the traditional industries (shipbuilding, coal, steel) particularly hard. Many workers were also dissatisfied with Labour governments. North Sea oil seemed to promise higher living standards. In these circumstances the SNP was able to position itself as the workers’ party. With the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, the then Labour government thought they had seen off the nationalist threat. However, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, many workers turned away from the mainstream capitalist parties. In Scotland, this helped the SNP to secure a majority in the 2011 elections for the Scottish Parliament and a landslide in the 2015 General Election.

The Irish border has been in contention since 1921. However, with the repression of the Civil Rights movement in the North of Ireland in the late 1960s, Irish republicanism experienced an upsurge of support. In the 1980s Sinn Féin was able to capitalise on the outrage that the British government’s response to the hunger strikes elicited in Catholic working-class areas. It also managed to gain a foothold by providing welfare services to Catholic workers. With the peace process and the IRA laying down its weapons, Sinn Féin was able to reinvent itself as a workers’ party.

In last December’s general election, the SNP increased its seats in Scotland, whereas the pro-Brexit Conservative Party prevailed in England and Wales. In Northern Ireland, for the first time, Nationalists won more seats than Unionists. Sinn Féin has made a significant breakthrough in last month’s general election in the Irish Republic.

It must be noted that the electoral successes of the SNP and Sinn Féin do not always reflect support for their respective aims of an independent Scotland and a united Ireland, but more often a deep dissatisfaction with the political status quo. Nevertheless, these parties will use their increased leverage to push for their aims.

Do the working class have any interest in whether or not the United Kingdom remains intact? Or should they, as the Left urges them to, support an independent Scotland and a united Ireland? We say no on both accounts as, wherever the boundaries are drawn, workers will still be subject to the vagaries of the global market system and will continue to experience problems such as unemployment and low wages. Workers will need to organise for a socialist society which will abolish borders rather than rearrange them.

Land reformism (1999)

Book Review from the December 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Scotland: Land and Power (The Agenda for Land Reform) by Andy Wightman, in association with Democratic Left Scotland. Luath Press Ltd, Edinburgh, 1999. 126pp

There is much of interest to be found in this book, not least the amazing statistic that 1252 landowners own two-thirds of the 16 million-plus acres of private rural land in Scotland. Scotland has a population of 5 million. This of course is a legacy of the universal process behind the rise of capitalism: the war on common ownership and the separation of people from land, by sword and by fraud. Once enough people were denied the autonomy that access to land provided, a class of exploitable wage workers was produced and the rest, as they say, is history.

What exists in rural Scotland, behind the aristocratic veneer, is not really feudalism. In the true sense this is a system in which all land is held by the monarch (ultimately from god) and parcelled out to “superiors” and “vassals” who control the land inhabited by the tenants. This is a dead system, as Scotland’s landowners (as elsewhere) own the land they hold in fact and in law. They are the “kings” of “their” patch. As the authors point out, the proposed abolition of one of the last vestiges of the feudal system, that of the theoretical status of the Crown as “paramount superior”, would actually benefit big landowners as this is also the last vestige of the idea that landownership was conditional and subject to the “public interest” represented by the Crown. Junking “feudalism” would also give the essentially capitalist system of landownership a ore up-to-date image of course, and perhaps further hide the fact that what we are talking about here is the dividing up of stolen goods.

The authors see a solution to Scotland’s unusually concentrated pattern of landownership in “land reform”—to break up large holdings to enable people to purchase property within a regulated framework which insists on residency and limits monopoly holdings” (p.79). Indeed a similar process was undertaken in Ireland between 1881 and 1903. Whether this will happen is questionable. What can’t be denied though is that any such move would have to take place within the confines of the same “market forces” that have brought hunger, clearance and destruction to both Scotland and Ireland (and England for that matter) and depopulated the land. The market system unfortunately doesn’t give a toss about “social justice”, sustainable rural development etc.

Globally, what are the implications for all this of the march of the fully industrialised agriculture system? As land is effectively changed into a system of huge factories, as agri-business corporations like Monsanto move to patent DNA and unleash the “terminator” gene, what does the immediate future hold for those living and working on the land? From India to the Vale of Evesham, things are not looking good.

Ben Malcolm

Highland Clearing (2019)

Book Review from the December 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Clans and Clearance. The Highland Clearances Volume One. By Alwyn Edgar. Theory and Practice. 2019.

In his introduction to this 700-page tome, Alwyn Edgar explains that he first became interested over fifty years ago in the Scottish Highlands and how they came to be depopulated but that he has only now got round to turning his research and notes into a book. Four more volumes are to follow.

In this volume he examines the origin and nature of the clan system as it existed up until 1750 and exposes some of the popular misconceptions about it, for instance that it was overpopulation that led to the later mass emigration from the area to the slums and industries of Glasgow and to North America and New Zealand and that the highlanders were Catholics (he produces figures to show that they were 96 percent Protestant).

We will have to wait for Volume Three to see his analysis of the clearances in the first half of the nineteenth-century by the Duchess of Sutherland, notorious throughout the world thanks to Marx’s mention of them in chapter 27 of Capital on ‘The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population’ as an example of what was required to allow capitalist development to take off.

Wood for the Trees: Through a Glass Darkly (2019)

The Wood for the Trees Column from the November 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘A struggle has been going on in these islands for centuries of which you’re only dimly aware’ is a quote from the 1971 movie version of Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped. It is spoken by the Lord Advocate to David Balfour as part of an explanation of his political ideology. He seeks to communicate the idea that his political insight (or consciousness) is superior to that of his young listener. Balfour’s response: ‘I can’t argue with you; you’ve answers to questions I haven’t even thought of’ is a confirmation of this disparity of political knowledge. The historical context of the novel is the struggle in Scotland between the English-backed bourgeoisie and the reactionary highlanders attempt to restore the Stuart monarchy and its autocratic rule (the Jacobites).

The Lord Advocate couches his understanding of events in ideological terms by referring to his protection of the freedom of religion and equality under the law. A socialist would likewise accuse him of a naïve and superficial understanding of history by reference to the class struggle. We have here an example of three different political perspectives: Balfour’s idealistic insistence on the moral integrity and rational coherence of the law, the Advocate’s belief in the use of realpolitik to further the ideals of the Enlightenment (ideology) and Marxism’s economic and political materialism that exposes the underlying class struggle. We can perhaps boil down these three polemical stances into idealism, ideology and materialism. Of course the three do occasionally overlap but they can still give us an insight into levels of consciousness or, to put it another way, into different degrees of awareness.

Socialists quite often refer to political or ‘class consciousness’ as a higher form of social awareness that is essential in seeing what lies behind the propaganda and ideological values of any given historical period. To some class consciousness is mistaken for an obsession with social status and socialists are accused of having ‘a chip on their shoulder’ or suffering from financial envy. But in reality an understanding of the social tectonics of class is the only way to cut through the ideological overgrowth of ideology that merely serves to justify minority political power. But how can we be sure that this approach to politics is not also ideological? Do socialists force everything into a class context when an ideological or even moral perspective might be more revealing? It would be ironic indeed if Marxism could be accused of being ideological or even idealist since opposing these twin illusions was responsible for its very conception. One way to undermine such allegations would be to examine the existence of the reality, or otherwise, of the different levels of awareness (consciousness).

It would be nonsense to deny that some members of any community are more talented than others in certain areas of conception and/or production. The complexities of the technological age in which we live make a division of both intellectual and physical labour essential. Because everything is socially produced all these talents are totally interdependent and so there should be no question of a hierarchy in production creating any kind of elite (unlike today in class society). So we find a disparity of knowledge between those who studied and have experience of a certain discipline and those who have not. This is just stating the obvious but in politics everyone is expected to somehow have an equality of understanding even if they have made no effort to study the subject.

To object to this nonsense is to risk being accused of elitism. But those socialists who take an interest in this kind of philosophical inquiry are entirely aware that the ideas, language, laptops and electricity are all equally necessary to its creation and is therefore itself conceived of as a part of social production. Avoiding the emotional and intellectual seduction of the language of the idealistic, moralistic and ideological is impossible without some knowledge of their respective origins in terms of context, rhetorical structure and power source. Awareness that these elements obscure, distort and condition our experience of the world is vital if we are to lift the veil from what is real and authentic.

All of the above is, of course, dependant on the existence of an objective world that is, in some sense, independent of how we think about it (materialism). The efficacy of this ‘higher consciousness’ can only be tested empirically: the ability to make predictions based on research, etc. The fall of the Russian (sometimes erroneously called Soviet) empire was no surprise to socialists. Although the ideological rhetoric was a parody of Marxism every socialist knew that it was, in fact, just another form of capitalist economic imperialism that along with all the others of its kind (British, Japanese, German, Spanish, Portuguese etc.) would flourish and then decay with time. We knew this because we are not subject to the emotional, intellectual and moral illusions of ideology. If this is not proof of the existence of different levels of political consciousness then what is?

Those whose beliefs and values are not based on empirical evidence leave themselves open to accusations of dogma, delusion and self-deception which are a testament to the existence of vastly different levels of political consciousness. Such muddle-headedness has resulted in untold suffering and an unerring ability to be wrong time and again. A critical response to the moral values and political mores of the culture into which we are born is not easy and depends on more than just the intellectual deconstruction of propaganda but without such an ability a viable political alternative is rendered inconceivable.

Wez.

Mixed Media: Dick Gaughan: Exmouth Arms, London (2013)

Dick Gaughan in concert.

The Mixed Media column from the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dick Gaughan, the singer-songwriter, recently played at The Cellar Upstairs folk club at the Exmouth Arms, Euston in London. Gaughan, of Irish descent was brought up in the musical traditions and culture of the Gaels; the Scots and Irish in the port of Leith near Edinburgh.

Gaughan began his recording career in 1972 in the Scots-Irish celtic band, The Boys of the Lough, played with Brian McNeill, fiddle player with The Battlefield Band, recorded a tribute album to Ewan MacColl, recorded a tribute album with Bert Jansch to Woody Guthrie, duetted with Billy Bragg on The Red Flag on the album The Internationale, and worked with 7:84, the 'left wing agit prop' theatre group.

Gaughan interspersed his set with anecdotes of his life in music and slices of Scottish radical, nationalist and Irish socialist history. He tells the audience that somebody said he was an 'unreconstructed socialist'. His website lists Karl Marx, Lenin, John Lennon and Groucho Marx as influences, and he supports the Morning Star newspaper. His song Ballad of '84 describes the 1984-85 Miners Strike and salutes Miners leaders Arthur Scargill, Peter Heathfield, and Mick McGahey.

Gaughan performed The Yew Tree by Brian McNeill which describes the 1513 battle of Flodden, and also Calvinist John Knox. He performed Now Westlin Winds by the Scots bard Robert Burns and another Brian McNeill song No Gods (and Precious Few Heroes) which describes the defeat at Culloden. The song Thomas Muir of Huntershill by Adam McNaughton is about the Scots political radical Thomas Muir, supporter of the French Revolution, friend of Tom Paine, and who in 1794 was sentenced to 14 years transportation to Australia for high treason.

Gaughan performed the elegiac Song for Ireland by Phil & June Colclough, and then speaks of the James Connolly, 'Big Jim' Larkin and the 1913 Dublin Lock-Out which involved 25,000 workers and lasted five months. Connolly was a Scot of Irish descent like Gaughan, for a while a socialist in the Scottish Socialist Federation and later the Socialist Labour Party. Stephen Coleman wrote that Connolly's impossibilist ideas (socialism is impossible until the working class understands what socialism means) were an influence, among others, upon Jack Fitzgerald, a founding member of the SPGB in 1904. Connolly later abandoned this socialism and took up Irish nationalism and the armed struggle in the 1916 Easter Rising for which he was executed by the British.

Gaughan concluded his set with Geronimo's Cadillac by Michael Martin Murphey which describes how Indian land was taken by the White Man and the Indian people given capitalism in return.

Steve Clayton

Letter: Scotch Myth? (2014)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Scotch Myth?

Dear Editors

Regrettably ‘Myths of Scottish Nationalism’ (Socialist Standard, August) ended on a low note as no matter how flawed nationalism is, it is not responsible for the prevailing opinion that the Covenanters were freedom fighters. It is a widely held view.

The current SNP would be strange bedfellows with a Covenanting movement, as according to Professor Alan MacInnes the Covenanters had a radical view of Britain that was federal and constitutional.

The article commented on the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, omitting that the majority of Covenanters there made public declaration that they wanted a free General Assembly and free Parliament. The monument to the battle, which was erected by public subscription, is quite clear that the Covenanters stood for Civil and Religious Liberty.

What resulted from the sacrifice and sufferings of so many ordinary Scots and others was not an inquisition but a democratic Church that was acceptable to the majority, a free Parliament and a Bill of Rights that gave us liberties and freedoms much in advance of the rest of Europe. These were the foundations on which our democracy has evolved. That Bill of Rights was a foundation stone for the evolution of our European Human Rights, which ensures liberty of expression and assembly for minority political and religious groups. Fortunately history shows that totalitarian systems are doomed to failure be it long or short term.

David Bryce, 

Hamilton.

Reply:

The purpose of the series was to demonstrate that a Scottish national history is invented and the image presented of the Covenanter movement is one such an example. The Covenanter Movement was not a unified movement and was riven by schisms, not unlike the current Islamic Movement but, for sure, the article was not making the claim that the SNP’s and its nationalism are the legitimate heirs to the Covenanters. It is possible to argue that the details of the 1707 Union fulfilled much of the Covenanter demands and ended any future of the Scottish Kirk being the base for radicalism, its low point, a call for the deportation of Irish catholic immigrants during the 1930s.

As the article acknowledged, there are many who argue that the Covenanters were progressive and revolutionary but by no means is it a universal endorsement, as you would seem to suggest. Gerard Cairns on the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement website, arguing from a ‘catholic gael’ perspective, could write:

  It may seem very Marxist to argue that the Covenanters were class warriors, a mass movement against an absolutist regime. That really would be an example of the mechanical Marxism which tries to hammer a square peg into a round hole. Can we really turn bigots into revolutionaries? …A movement from below led by pedagogues on high who wanted a monolithic Scotland and/or Britain based on Presbyterianism. Everything else was secondary. (LINK) 

  ‘Whereas, Allan Armstrong on the Republican Communist Network website, considers the Cameronian wing of the Covenanters as a proto-Red Army’ (LINK)

Alistair Livingston, however, writes more objectively of this period:

   'In Scotland Charles I managed to piss off both the nobility, who had gained huge chunks of church lands – by threatening to reclaim all previous ‘gifts’ of such lands, and the reformers, by trying to re-impose what they saw as the ‘corrupt’ religious practices of Catholicism on the Reformed church. The result was an unholy alliance between landowners who wanted to hang on to the huge tracts of church land they had got their paws on and the religious types who wanted a spiritual reformation of Christianity. This unholy alliance led to a Holy Covenant between the people of Scotland and God. (There were two Covenants – a National one and a Solemn one)… The belief held by some Muslims that a ‘Godly state’ can be created is not some weird un-British aberration – it was a belief strongly held by thousands of Brits – Scottish and English in the 17th century and created a bloody and violent civil war in which tens of thousands died.’ (LINK)