Neither Westminster nor Holyrood but World Socialism

The Socialist Courier once more risks raising the the ire of our nationalist opponents who accuse us of being British unionist enemies of the Scottish people. A lack of confidence in a common socialist  future has caused sections of workers in Scotland to take shelter under a nationalist banner. Some organisations and individuals calling themselves ‘socialist’ have been infected by the disease of nationalism. We fight these “left nationalists" most energetically, because of the fact that they call themselves enemies of capitalism and because they are just as much enemies of the working class movement. Their propoganda threatens to divert the workers from the most important part of their struggle, the conquest of the power of the State and the establishment of socialism. And so it is interests of the practical struggle, that we regard the “left nationalists" as opponents who do not belong to our socialist movement.

 Thomas Johnston wrote in his The History of the Working Classes in Scotland: “Scotland was not a nation: it was a loose aggregation of small but practically self-supporting communities, and scanty supplies and high prices at Aberdeen may quite well have been coincident with plenty and comparatively low prices in Dundee and Glasgow”.

The Scottish commentator, George Kerevan, observed:“The notion that illiterate peasants, who lived and died their short brutal lives within a few hundred yards of their village, had a conception of nationalism beyond a gut xenophobia for everyone beyond the village is stretching the imagination”

Scottish nationalism starts from the assumption that Scotland was a nation from medieval times, if not earlier.  Some even trace the origin of Scotland to the time of the Picts, or the arrival of Scots from Ireland, or MacAlpine kings in the 9th century. Others among the nationalists assert that Scotland achieved nationhood from the war of independence against the ‘English’, William Wallace’s victory at Stirling Bridge (1297), the battle of Bannockburn (1314),  the Declaration of Arbroath (1320) and also by the ‘independence’ of the Kirk, the education system and the law.  Even the dynastic fights between the Stewarts and the Hanoverians of Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, are presented as expressions of Scotland’s national resistance against English colonialism.

The assertion that William Wallace led a people’s revolt in a ‘war of national liberation’ against the ‘English’ does not stand up to scrutiny. The kings and the nobility of  Scotland – were feudal lords, who did not even understand, let alone entertain, modern-day ideas of nationhood, nor could they. They were possessed of a culture drawn from the Norman French, who married across the whole of the north-western part of Europe and were, in this sense, cosmopolitan to their fingertips. To them the very concept of wars of national liberation would have been entirely alien. Their domains of exploitation, their rivalries and their commonalities invariably coincided. They were lords in Scotland who also held large tracts in England. For example, Robert Bruce, the Earl of Carrick and a vassal of Edward I, held 90,000 acres of land in Yorkshire, while his rival, John Balliol, held large tracts of land in Normandy and England, as well as Scotland. Members of the nobility from the kingdom of Scotland, for example John Comyn, fought on the side of Edward I in the latter’s conquest of Wales, while the armies of Edward I and II, deployed in the wars in Scotland, which were firmly rooted in feudal, not national rights, were recruited from their feudal realms in France, Wales and Ireland.

Undoubtedly Edward I laid claim to the kingdom of Scotland and sought to include it into his own kingdom. With 13 rival claims to the throne of Scotland, the barons turned to Edward to settle the dispute. He marched his army to the border, proclaimed himself lord paramount of Scotland, and decided that John Balliol had a better claim than Robert Bruce.  John Balliol was accordingly crowned king and duly paid homage to Edward in 1292. Conflicts within the feudal elite in Scotland, and harsh demands made by Edward on his vassals, drove John Balliol into revolt, but he and his forces were defeated. Balliol was captured and humiliatingly ceremonially stripped of his feudal trappings in 1296, with his tabard, hood and knightly girdle physically removed. Following several shifts of alliances, the feudal elite in Scotland turned the tables on Edward I and then Edward II – at Stirling Bridge (1297).  Moray and Wallace came to be Guardians in Scotland, in the name of the “illustrious king” in exile, John Balliol, not the people.
The so-called war of independence soon turned into a mutually ruinous war between the Bruce and Balliol families. These internecine struggles between competing feudal dynasties were based on the  belief systems of  the then-prevailing notions of fief and vassalage, not on the present-day concepts of nationhood.  The  lords in Scotland were engaged in a desperate struggle to defend and safeguard their traditional monopoly to exploit their peasant serfs against the centralising power of Edward I.

Declaration of Arbroath

The real content behind the Arbroath Declaration, was to allow the feudal elements to continue this exploitation of the peasantry. It was not as nationalist historians claim the clearest “....statement of Scottish nationalism and patriotism in the fourteenth century” nor the finest “... statement of a claim to national independence... produced in this period anywhere in western Europe.”  Far from it.  As the historian Neil Davidson rightly wrote, “The sonorous wording of the Declaration is in fact a clear statement of, among other things, the fact that the feudal ruling class still considered themselves to be a nation in a racial rather than the modern sense”

The preamble to the Declaration is characteristically medieval: it traces the wanderings of the “Scots nation” from “Greater Scythia” to Scotland, celebrates its triumphs over Britons and Picts, and survival from attacks by “Norwegians, Danes and English” .  As Davidson remarks, those who assert that these statements serve to “prove the existence of a primordial Scottish nation must logically also accept the existence of primordial ‘British’ and ‘Pictish’ nations”. Apart from anything else, the names of Roger Mowbray and Ingram Unafraville, among the signatories, are evocative of a descent from Anglo-Norman settlers invited to settle in Scotland during the reign of David, who themselves descended “...from earlier Viking invaders of what is now France from what is now Norway – a place somewhat removed from Scythia” .

A key passage in the Declaration runs thus: “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 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”.

The above passage has been represented by some as the prototype for modern nationalism.  Some have even gone so far as to assert that this represents “the first national or governmental articulation, in all of Europe, of the principle of the contractual theory of monarchy which lies at the heart of modern constitutionalism.”

In truth, this passage suggests the function of the noble estate “as the defender of the kingdom against the claims of the individual monarch in a way that was entirely typical of absolutist Europe” says Davidson.  Its message was two-fold.  First, it was directed at Edward II, informing him that it was pointless for him to attempt to depose Robert with a more subservient king, since the remainder of the Scottish aristocracy would not cease its resistance.  Second, it was addressed to Robert, making it clear that they would not brook his jeopardising their interests – which lay in their god-given right to unhindered exploitation of the mass of the peasantry – through making concessions to Edward.

To attribute to the Declaration of Arbroath modern connotations of nationhood is as false as to impart similar meanings to the Magna Carta.  Both these documents should be seen for what they really were – an expression of the interests barons of the respective kingdoms and their determination to hang on to their privileges, against the monarch. To read into the Declaration the notions of a modern nation, not merely obscures its motives but “establishes a false identity” and “confers legitimacy on a key element in nationalist ideology, namely the primordial continuity of ‘the nation’ throughout history”, according to Davidson.

1707 Union

 The loyalty of the feudal lords to the Scottish Crown took second place to their own local, particular interests. It is hardly surprising that one of the important concessions conceded by the English parliament during the 1707 treaty negotiations was the inclusion of Article 20 which explicitly retained the heritable jurisdictions which were the bedrock of the power of the Scottish lords over their tenants. In the absence of peasant revolts, which were not known in Scotland until the mid-17th century, the peasantry was by and large quiescent, the danger from below which might have compelled the Scottish aristocracy to strengthen the monarchy, instead of exploiting its weakness, never surfaced.  In the absence of the need for an absolutist monarchy to suppress the direct producers, absolutism remained weak, with the result that “the individual lords retained a local weight unparalleled elsewhere in western Europe”.  Between 1455 and 1662, the Stuarts attempted on no fewer than seven occasions to outlaw the jurisdictions that were the basis of the nobility’s power, but they failed – a failure which speaks eloquently of the balance of power between the Crown and the nobility.

The union of England and Scotland in 1707 was the rising Scottish bourgeoisie which began to forge a British identity. This Scottish bourgeoisie found great impetus following 1746 and the victory of the British state over feudalism after the Jacobite uprising. From here the British nation was born. The question of whether Scotland was/is an oppressed nation, a victim of English colonialism albeit, the concept of 'internal colonialism', can be rebutted by presenting various statistics such as to  illustrate the strength of Scottish industry, which  in terms of coal, linen and tobacco, in the 18th century, outstripped the rest of Britain. Success in industry continued into the 19th and 20th centuries. Scottish participation in politics and other professions is well-documented.  The eviction of Scottish crofters in the 18th century was the product of the rise of capitalism, not English 'foreign' aggression. The Scottish bourgeoisie played a leading role in Britain's colonial plunder of the world, most graphically recorded in the account of the rape of India.

The few with their million of pounds demand that the millions with their few pounds be ready to shed their life blood, fighting for what they have conceived and still conceive to be "their" country, when few of them can show title-deeds to so much as a square foot of it. They do not yet perceive that the country they fight for is the master's country and that they fight only because they are hypnotized by the press and political orators into the insubstantial belief that it is their duty and glory thus to fight. The land on which we must live is the property of a class who are the descendants of men who stole the land from our forefathers, and we who are workers, are, whether in town or country, compelled to pay for permission to live on it.  The houses, the shops and factories, which were built by the labour of our forefathers at wages that simply kept them barely alive are owned by a class which never contributed an ounce of sweat to their construction, but whose members continue to draw rent and profit from them while the system lasts. The wealthy took over common land by ruse or violence, declaring themselves its owners; they have established by law that it will always be theirs, and that the right to property has become the foundation of the capitalist constitution. The right to property has extended itself by logical deduction from the land to other instruments: the accumulated products of labor, designated by the generic name of capital.

 Founded on conquest, which has divided the Scottish population into victors and vanquished, neither the instruments nor the fruits of labour belong to the workers, but to the idle rich. Servitude does not consist solely in being  a lord’s serf. He or she is not free who, deprived of the instruments of labour, remains at the mercy of the privileged who are their owners. The nationalists talk of  a “community of interests”,  of solidarity between the capitalist and the worker. How artistically embroidered are the lies and many are fooled.

Let us immediately say that equality doesn’t consist in the partitioning of land or equalising wages. The splitting up of land or lessening income differentials will really change nothing concerning the right of property. It is the re-distribution of poverty and with wealth growing from the ownership of the instruments of labor, rather than through labour itself, the spirit of exploitation left standing would soon through the reconstruction of large fortunes, how to restore social inequality. The free association of the producers alone, in place of private property, will serve the welfare of the people. The Socialist Party struggles for freedom from all tyrants, both foreign and native.  It is the task of all workers regardless of their place of birth to unite and present one front to the common enemy in the common struggle — the fight against the exploitation of those who work by those who own — the fight against capitalist slavery