Nationalist nonsense exposed (Book Review)

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

Socialists in Edinburgh. (1930)

Party News from the August 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Edinburgh comrades are holding good meetings at the Mound several nights a week. A large part of the time is devoted to answering questions on Socialist policy, in view of the confusion spread here by the I.L.P. and Communist organisations, as well as direct action elements. The decline of Communists is seen in the poorly attended meetings conducted by them in this town, where once they had a large following.

Good sales of literature are being made, considering the uphill work of pushing scientific literature against the sensational and so-called practical rubbish which passes for working class education. All those interested in our work should attend our meetings.

There was no branch or group in Edinburgh at the time this post appeared in the Standard, and there's no contact listing for the Edinburgh comrades in the August 1930 Socialist Standard.

However, there was a notice in the August issue indicating that there SPGB speakers at The Mound - the well-known outdoor speaking pitch in Edinburgh - Wednesday, Friday and Saturdays at 8pm, and on Sundays at 7pm.

Let us re-make the world

All the recent figures highlighting wealth inequality are merely by way of underscoring the tendency that exists in capitalist society, the polarising more and more wealth at one end into the hands of fewer and fewer persons, and at the other, misery, oppression, poverty and degradation as the lot of more and more. This was discovered long ago by Karl Marx and no matter how often it his attacked by the apologists for capitalism, it still remains an inescapable fact.

Under private ownership, production is undertaken to satisfy not the needs of the people as a whole, but to satisfy private profit. If profit cannot be obtained, production shuts down. Businesses compete against each other, not out of a desire to satisfy the needs of the people for clothing, cars or refrigerators but in order to capture the market and outsell their competitors to make more profits. Alternating bubbles and recessions are the only too well known characteristics of capitalist society. The socialist movement has long since rendered its verdict on the capitalist class. They’re all guilty.

The Socialist Party is the only party are prepared to sacrifice their time and efforts for the ideas it holds to be true. At this point the skeptics ask:

“But how many are there of you? Isn’t it true that your Socialist Party consists of only a handful of people? How can such a small party get anywhere?”

The last thing that the Workers Party seeks to do is to conceal the fact that its numbers are small. It has no need to engage in wild exaggerations of its size, as so many left-wing parties do, because it does not regard its present size to be the decisive factor in its ability to achieve its goal. If the achievement of socialism depended upon the strength of the party today then the question of whether the Socialist Party had five hundred or five thousand members would surely make no difference, for one figure would be as inadequate as the other. We therefore see that the question is not one of how we “expect to get anywhere with such a small party.” The real question is this: Are the ideas of the Socialist Party sowing the seeds of socialism which workers will rally to tomorrow?

The fact that socialism is now possible does not mean that workers will strive for it, no matter how alluring a socialist society appears. Socialism is possible but we have to await the time when workers realise that capitalism is proving itself increasingly impossible and those who considers socialism to be a daydream are driven to consider capitalism a nightmare. Socialism represents the economic salvation of our times. Every every worker will come to recognize that capitalism is the common enemy,

The worker is the heart of all wealth. When workers stop production there is paralysis. Compare this indispensability of the workers with the other class in society. Not all the gold in the treasury of the United States could smelt steel in the furnaces. Not all the stocks and shares in Wall Street – certificates of ownership of the means of production – can mine one lump of ore. Not a capitalist – for all their so-called risk-taking and so-called management and who are supposed to be essential – could produce a nut or bolt for a car. When a corporation shuts down one of its factories and stops production, it is no proof of the indispensability of capitalists in the production processes. It only points up the folly of the workers in allowing capitalism to stand between them and the factory of which labour is the heart.

Such a demonstration of labour’s might as we have seen in recent strikes also makes clear the relation between engineers, scientists, technicians and the masses of workers. Absolutely necessary as these brain-workers are, without the mass of workers all the engineering, scientific and technical know-how would be wasted. It is toil that makes reality of new ideas. Even if scientists conceive an automated civilization, it will still be labour that will manufacture the buttons to push. Therefore, both by their all-controlling position in production and by their overwhelming numbers the workers are the mightiest class in modern society.

This mighty class is by no means numbered by industrial, mining and transport workers only. The agricultural and dairy workers, without whom we would all starve, are part of the working class. So are the various categories of white collar and wage-earning “middle-class” professional workers, all necessary in our complex intricate society. By its key position in production, by its vast numbers and by its relation to other elements in society whose security has vanished under capitalism, the working class should be up on top, controlling production in the interest of all the people. However, the working class is not in a command. While strikes show so clearly that without labour there is nothing, the same strikes have shown the limitation the workers can make of their power. The workers have struck for wage increases, shorter hours and improved conditions. Their militancy and solidarity have the had bosses and politicians frightened stiff. Then what happens? Our fellow-workers put away their strength in storage. Production is returned back to the capitalists to direct once more. The government remains in the hands of the capitalist politicians of the major parties. The government, anxious to relieve the capitalists of every “hardship” and mindful of the “risks” of profit-making, grants the employers concessions and passes anti-union laws.

The Socialist Party asks “Why do workers not make full use of their strength to break the vicious circle of capitalism and end the exploitation and oppression?”

Strikes are necessary weapons for definite objectives and for limited periods. But permanently, the affairs of the country are settled by political action to take control the State so as to build a socialist society and be able to plan and control production in the interest of the people. This is the way to break the crazy capitalist control. If workers makes up its mind to do this, nothing can stop it.

This is the Socialist Party

The cooperative movement has a considerable history in  capitalist society. The cooperative movement long ago forgot its origins and is just another capitalist trading organisation. But it does not so regard itself. It still claims to be a movement to help the working people. The operation of the cooperatives are conducted according to normal capitalist rules within the framework of capitalism, create precisely the same outlook as is to be found in any other commercial concern. Of course those responsible for this will indignantly retort that they could not do anything else in the circumstances. Too true. Those who think they can "beat the capitalists at their own game” have no choice but to strive to preserve the great illusion they have created. Is this really surprising? Co-ops has always had a parsimonious existence. They were conceived in poverty, born in penury, cradled in privation, and nurtured in frugality. We only need to add that the Socialist Party will criticise profit-sharing as it has always criticised nationalisation, and for the same reason; that socialism is what the workers interest requires not the perpetuation of capitalism.

The origin of the cooperative movement is the objective result of the indispensable cooperation that exists in capitalist production. It is cooperation that has made possible the development of capitalism. While no doubt that modern capitalist production is collective in character, the problem is that while the labour of the workers is collective, what they produce is privately owned by a small number of millionaires and billionaires, who literally dominate the millions of people. Powerful transnational corporations are the levers which direct capitalist production. It is no exaggeration to say that the bulk of the earth's wealth is firmly in their hands.

The hope of the early Utopians, like Saint-Simon, Robert Owen and others, was to set up cooperatives free of exploitation, an idea seemingly so just, so fair, that it would be irresistible. As they saw it if the worker received the full product of his or her labour, minus the cost of administration and organization, it would be easy to do away with the extortion of the private capitalist, who appropriated the unpaid labour of the workers. The unpaid labour of the workers, according to the Utopians, would then go into the common fund, for health care, housing and all human needs. They grew under the conditions of class warfare. They served as a weapon of the class-war.

The cooperative would also show that the capitalists are really not necessary, that they could be gotten rid of by mere example — no violence needed. Life would show the superiority of the collective over private enterprise. One  strategy for disadvantaged and oppressed groups is to use economic cooperation and group solidarity to create businesses that will provide meaningful work and income, greater control for workers and the possibility of wealth creation.

Unfortunately, the cooperatives — small and scattered as they were, among other reasons — came late on the scene. Capitalism was already a world system by that time, with a world market. In order to undo the capitalist system, the cooperatives had to compete with full-grown capitalist enterprises. Not only was the capital investment of these enterprises formidable and overwhelming, but they had enormous capacity to under-cut the prices of the co-ops, even taking big losses, in order to drive the cooperatives out. Moreover, the capitalist enterprises have a singular advantage: access to credit and financing from the banks. The banks proved the most potent factor in the undoing of the cooperatives, because of their strategic role in dispensing credit. The worldwide cooperative movement was therefore relegated mostly to fringe areas of the economy. For the most part, cooperatives survived in those areas of the economy where the capitalists felt they couldn't get an adequate rate of profit, and driving them out was thus not worthwhile. 

While the cooperatives could set an example, of how work could be made more liveable and humane, free of exploitation and oppression, what stood in their way was the class struggle of the master class against working people. Its drive for greater and greater concentration and centralisation of industry just sweeps away most cooperatives. It is futile to attempt to beat the capitalists at their own game in competition. Cooperatives are now in reality capitalist enterprises, mostly in the consumer field or in farming areas. And the differences between the large capitalist firms and the cooperatives are not of a qualitative, but quantitative character. They do not affect the devastating operations of the capitalist system. The cooperative movement was easily integrated into the capitalist system.  They are in reality an element in capitalist production. It is impossible for them to be used as a lever in the struggle against the capitalist system. The cooperative movement itself, not only can it offer no solution to the problems created by capitalism, but adopts, out of necessity, the commercial techniques of all other  business concerns (wages, profits, competition, management, etc.). To expect the cooperatives by themselves (as so many reformers imply) to effect an emancipation of the working class behind the back of society is to subscribe to sheer utopia.

It may be said that the co-operative society represents a socialistic system of production, inasmuch as it does not produce for the market, but for the needs of its members, while, instead of aiming at profit, it offers its workers the best conditions that are compatible with the vitality of the undertaking under existing conditions. It will, however, be confined to a few branches of industry which directly produce for the personal consumption of the masses. Only a very few commodities which are destined for the personal consumption. The production of the means of production remains practically impossible for it to attempt, and yet this type of production, with the progressive division of labour, tends to comprise the greatest part of social production. Those who imagine that the cooperatives already contain the seed of a socialist order forget an important factor in the contemporary situation: the reserve army [of the unemployed]. Even if we suppose that cooperatives gradually put all capitalist enterprises out of business and replace them, we certainly cannot entertain the fantastic notion that, given the current market relationships, the demand for goods could be filled without a general plan to determine production relationships. The question of the unemployed would remain. Capitalist exploitation has not been done away with at all.

Socialist Standard No. 1392 August 2020

Socialist Standard August 2020 PDF

• Editorial: Why capitalism can’t work for us

• Pathfinders: Dust to Dust

• If not now, then when?

• Cooking the Books I: Big Deal!

• Think about socialism

• Letters: “Reform of capitalism?” – Overpopulation?

• Material World: War drums in the China Sea

• What happens when there is no housing market?

• Imperialism and the ‘Labour Aristocracy’

• The Lessons of Charlottesville

• Summer School

• Normal Wisdom

• Cooking the Books II: Consumption – not the driver

• Party News – Discord in the Ranks

• Proper Gander: Turning The Page

• Reviews

• 50 Years Ago: Human Needs and World Resources

• Obituary: Gordon Docherty

• Meetings

• Rear View

• Free Lunch

Lest we forget

Obituary from the July 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Glasgow branch with regret record the death of our comrade Harry Hill. No matter what anyone may say Harry was “a character”. Even inside a Glasgow branch of the sixties that was full of characters Harry was unique. He had left school at 15 years of age, but long before he had met the Socialist Party he had already seen through the nonsense of religion. In fact the first time we went to Harry’s home, just round the corner from my own hovel, we were astonished at his collection of ‘The Thinker’s Library’. Harry was a unique person. One of his great loves was taking “the piss” out of religion although he once said, “even better is taking the piss out of atheists. They think a world without religion but based on property would work.”

Harry was only officially a member from 1964 until 1974 but long after that he would attend our indoor and outdoor meetings and was a whole hearted supporter of the SPGB. He was particularly adept at arguing the basic party position with new contacts. A measure of Harry’s support for the ideas of world socialism can be gathered from the fact that although he was suffering from a long-term fatal illness he attended our joint Edinburgh/Glasgow day school in May a couple of weeks before his death. To his beloved wife Lydia and all his comrades and friends Glasgow branch extend our sympathy. We have lost a good man.

Glasgow branch

Pete Seeger

Dear Editors

Concerning Roy Beat’s letter (June Socialist Standard), I (mis)spent the 1960s immersed in the Folk Movement and recall nothing positive vis-à-vis the dissemination of Socialist knowledge. Politically the scene was one Leftist/Nationalist mess. Significantly Roy Beat fails to produce any contrary evidence.

The banjo’s early multi-racial history is common knowledge. However in the wake of the Minstrel Shows its image to many Negroes was tarnished and seeing one in the hands of yet another “condescending white, liberal Yankee” arriving to “emancipate” them was further aggravation.

The significance of the inverted commas around “good causes” appears to have evaded him. Socialists recognise the serious limitations of the Civil (and Woman’s, Gay etc) Rights Movements and how at best they can only aspire to parity with their white, male, heterosexual Working Class counterparts within Capitalism. The solution, of course, is Socialism. Who would need “rights” where common ownership and free access prevailed? Likewise, the anti-Vietnam War Movement dealt only with the specifics of that event; not the underlying causes of war at large. On what possible basis therefore could criticising all of this be deemed “sectarian”?

I have much time for Pete Seeger both personally and musically: politically, I have little.

Andrew Armitage, 

Scotland

Socialism is Society Evolving

The history of society since classes first developed has been the history of class struggle. The continuing development of society from a lower level to a qualitatively higher one has been accomplished throughout history by the overthrow of one class by another which represents a more advanced form of organisation of production and society as a whole. Thousands of years ago, when the development of the productive forces first made possible the accumulation of a surplus above what people needed to live, and the accumulation of privately owned means of production, the slave-owning class arose and established the slave system. As the productive forces developed, the feudal landlord class arose within the slave system, finally overthrew the slave system and established the feudal system. With the further development of the productive forces, the capitalist class arose within the feudal system, finally overthrew the feudal system and established the capitalist system. And now it is the turn of the proletariat to overthrow the capitalist system and build a completely new kind of society.

Underlying all this progress throughout history has been the struggle of people – struggle to develop production and science and to fight exploitation and oppression under the existing society. But only now, with the development of the proletariat under capitalism, has it become possible for the masses of people to finally take their place as masters of society and smash all social chains enslaving the producers and shackling production itself. The capitalists cannot eliminate the working class - and certainly cannot convert the working class into capitalists – for then whose labour would the capitalists live off. The working class, on the other hand, can run production and all of society much better without any capitalists at all.

The first great step in realising its historic mission is for working people to overthrow the dictatorship of the capitalist class and establish its own rule. It makes possible for the first time real democracy and political power for the masses of people. And its purpose is not to enforce exploitation, to allow one class to live parasitically off another, but to end all exploitation and create the community of working people, without class distinction.

The working class in power will have inherited from capitalism its “division of labour”–division between mental and manual workers, between workers in industry and working people in agriculture, between the city and the countryside, and between workers in different branches of the economy. The working class must break down these divisions and eliminate all aspects of commodity production (production for exchange, rather than production for use controlled by society as a whole), which contains within it the core of the separation of society into classes, based on private ownership of means of production. The working class must also overcome the inequalities that capitalism fosters between men and women and between different nationalities. The working class must revolutionise the political institutions, the culture, educational system and the very philosophy of the people, developing production and organising society according to the principles of cooperation. The working class, the only class which has no stake in the preservation of any aspect of capitalism or its “division of labour,” must struggle against the ruling class and completely transform society. When all of society has been transformed, the many sores left over from capitalism have been eliminated, and the community of workers has been established, then socialism, a completely class-free society, will have been achieved, and humanity will enter a whole new stage of history. There will no longer be the need for the state, since there will no longer be any class to suppress, and the state will be replaced with common administration by all of society. Socialism ends the anarchy of capitalism and its crises, by common ownership of the means of production and collective planning of the economy guided by working people. This removes the tremendous barriers to production that capitalist relations have erected. Unemployment will cease, because socialism will be able to make full use of the labour of everyone in society, while at the same time introducing new technology to expand output. As machines can replace workers, workers will not be thrown into the streets, but transferred to other jobs and the work day for all workers will be reduced. The nature of work itself will change completely, because the labour of the workers will no longer go to enrich capital to further enslave the working class, but to improve life today, while providing for the future, according to the conscious plan of the working class itself. The pride that workers have in their work will be unhindered by any sense that they are working themselves, or someone else, out of a job, or that they are being driven to produce for the private benefit of some moneybags, under the orders of supervisors  and the constant threat of being fired. The organisation of work will be overseen by the working class itself. Technology will no longer be weapons in the hands of the capitalists to grind down the working class, and workers will no longer be a mere extension of machinery, as they are under capitalism. Instead technology will become tools in the hands of the working people to make society in harmony with nature. All this will release the stored-up knowledge of the working class, based on its direct experience in production, and inspire workers to make new breakthroughs in improving production. Work itself will become a joy and enrichment of the worker’s life, instead of a miserable means to sustain existence, as it is under capitalism.

With no more State and the ownership of the means of production in its hands, the people discrimination in all areas of society will be wiped out. Nationalism, sexism  and racism only serves capitalism.

In capitalist society many individuals are drawn to religion because it represents their hopes and aspirations for a better life – projected, however, into the future and into another realm completely beyond man’s ability to understand. The wealthy promotes religion to convince people that since life is miserable on this Earth – and it cannot be denied that this is so under capitalism–the answer is to hope for a better life “beyond this one.”

Religion serves capitalism by telling people that they are basically helpless before the forces of nature-and the rulers of society–and they should put their faith not in the ability of people to change the world, but in a supreme, supernatural being. And if that isn’t enough, religion can call up the image of fire and brimstone to threaten people. More, those evangelical TV preachers who control many of the churches make huge fortunes while telling the people to wait for “pie in the sky.” These hypocritical leeches live like kings, right here and now, from the sweat and blood, hopes and fears, of the people. These “men of god” and “prophets,” prey on the poor , promising them all kinds of miracles and salvation to ease their misery–for a nice donation, of course. Socialist society will eliminate all need for religions. While at any time there are things nothing in the universe that are not yet known, there is nothing unknowable, there is nothing that is not bound by the laws of nature and society. Once people become conscious of all this, they have no need for belief in supernatural beings or forces of any kind.

Culture, like religion and education, represents the viewpoint of one class or another and is a powerful weapon in the hands of that class for creating “public opinion.” The capitalist class spreads its culture, but through its vast mass media and reflects the outlook of the capitalists. Socialism is not a share-the-wealth programme, but is in reality a method to create and control the wealth.