11.03.1999

Scottish national socialism and its red prince - part 2

Jack Conrad replies to Allan Armstrong of the Scottish Socialist Party

Origin myths and the dialectic of progress

Much of what Allan Armstrong believes has to be discovered through deduction and inductive inference. Hence in the first part of my reply we showed that in his determination to reject the Stalin-Lenin Marxist theory of the nation and the national question the comrade in effect promulgates a thoroughly idealist alternative (which he defensively leaves unstated and thus undefined). Comrade Armstrong’s nations arrive, almost outside history and other material determinants - geography, language, etc - as a consequence of pure subjective will. Therefore he actually attacks Jack Conrad for suggesting that “nations cannot arise until there has been a sufficient development of the productive forces”. The comrade also criticises me for supposedly maintaining that “nations can only be said to exist with the triumph of capitalism” (Weekly Worker February 18).

As a materialist I have no problem whatsoever linking the emergence of the modern nation with objective developments, not least the stupendous growth of the productive forces triggered by capitalism as a reproductive system. And though comrade Armstrong wrongly puts into my mouth idiotic babble about the fully fledged emergence of nations coming about only with the “triumph of capitalism” - instead of the rise of capitalism - there is no doubt that capitalism must be viewed in historic and materialist terms as having played a progressive, albeit contradictory, role (see below).

Incidentally, after turning me into a straw man he pompously lectures us about what we know full well and have written about on numerous occasions. Yes, yes, yes, “the modern idea of nations and nationalism predate both full bourgeois democracy and the development of capitalism” (ibid). Capitalism in Britain - the birthplace of the system - “triumphed” as a mature mode of production, only in the middle of the 19th century, when what Marx called the “real” domination of capital took over from the “formal” domination of capital; relative surplus-value not absolute surplus-value thenceforth becomes the key to accumulation. Suffice to say, this is something I will return to in part three, not least when discussing the kingdom of Scotland and the already well advanced evolution of the British nation.

For the moment let us concentrate on the idea of progress. Comrade Armstrong’s account is very confused. First, as is his wont, he depicts Jack Conrad as a crude mechanical materialist. Apparently I hold that there exists a “one-directional” history, through which socialism inevitably steps forth at a definite stage brought about by capitalism’s ongoing dynamic. Everything which served to bring forth our best of all possible present-day Britains and its heavily pregnant capitalism is therefore to be venerated and retrospectively “supported” as it bears my - Stalin-like - productivist socialism. Hence under the spell of ‘progress’ his Jack Conrad “supports” a whole tranche of enchanting ‘revolutionary centralisers’, from Edward I to William of Orange, and from Cromwell to the Hanoverians.

Needless to say, the real Jack Conrad has repeatedly emphasised the open-ended nature of historic development and the numerous possibilities contained within certain key junctures. Everything depends on the outcome of the clash of class against class. As I have said before, neither the Hussites nor the Levellers nor the sans culottes need have lost. The class struggle in 15th century Bohemia, 17th century England and 18th century France could have produced a radical settlement institutionalised in a wide democracy.

There were material limits to the revolution. I am not suggesting that the masses could have gained the upper hand on a permanent basis. Nevertheless the balance of forces could have been made far more favourable to those below. The counterrevolutions that actually occurred were by no means inevitable in terms of their success, let alone progressive. Neither Pope Nicholas V, nor Charles II, nor Louis XVIII need have won. In other words Jack Conrad does not have a crude ‘either-or’ approach to the idea of progress. There is progress vis-à-vis the productive forces, and there is progress vis-à-vis political democracy and the social and economic position of the masses. There is also, as we will show, a dialectical relationship between the two. But what do such facts about my real world view matter to comrade Armstrong?

It is the same with my “support” for Edward I et al in Britain. No actual textual examples of what I have published are cited. Probably because none would suit. My polemics on the 1296-1424 ‘Scottish war of independence’ and the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite uprisings were designed to expose the fanciful nature of what passes for Scottish nationalist history. That comrade Armstrong interprets my demolition job on the mythological Robert de Bruce and James VIII as “support” for their opponents has nothing to do with me. No, such unfounded conclusions are surely a direct result of comrade Armstrong’s ingrained nationalist prejudices.

Take the so-called ‘Scottish war of independence’. In my November 1998 article, which so upset comrade Armstrong, I included the following passage:

“The popular belief that William Wallace, and following him Robert Bruce, led some sort of ‘war of independence’ against the English is a combination of 19th century myth and Hollywood hokum. The celebrated ‘Declaration of Arbroath’ acquired its ‘status of a surrogate Scottish constitution’ only in modern times (M Lynch Scotland London 1992, p111). In essence the conflict between ‘England’ and ‘Scotland’ after 1296 was no different from the Wars of the Roses: ie, an internal struggle between rival feudal interests whose ideology was based on past notions of fief and vassalage, not future notions of nation and nationality. The castellan Norman lords in Scotland were ‘traditionalists’ defending their exclusive right to exploit their serfs. Edward I was the ‘revolutionary’ centraliser” (Weekly Worker November 19 1998).

In return comrade Armstrong treats our readers to a lengthy rejoinder taking me to task for “supporting” Edward I and extolling the virtues of not only William Wallace but the film ‘Braveheart’. He also corrects me when I refer to the ‘Declaration of Arbroath’ (1320) coming into prominence “only in modern times”. The comrade tells us that it was “resurrected by Sir James Mackintosh in his Vindicatae Gallicae, written in 1791 to defend the French Revolution in the face of Edmund Burke’s attack”. The last, and least important, point first. “Modern times” in most of western histography are deemed to have begun in 1789 with the French Revolution. Far from needing correction, I am correct. Of course, the other, main, bone of contention remains - the ‘Scottish war of independence’.

My premise is that during this medieval period both ‘Scotland’ and ‘England’ were little more than geographical expressions. There was then no war between Scotland and England. Rather wars by the kings of England in Scotland - a crucial distinction. In this context the ‘Declaration of Arbroath’ - which took the form of an appeal to the pope in Avignon - was to all intents and purposes no different from the Magna Carta in England, the Charter of Ottokar in Syria or the Golden Bull in Hungary. Lurking behind the stirring and eloquent phrases about “good men” and being “for freedom alone”, there was indeed the “fight for riches”. Under the rubric of their ancient liberties the ‘traditionalist’ barons were determined to limit the ‘revolutionary’ centralising power of a hegemonic crown so that they could monopolise the surplus product squeezed from the downtrodden peasantry.

The kings and nobles of both England and Scotland were landed feudalists - with a Norman French-derived culture (they married titled women from across the whole of north western Europe). This ‘cosmopolitan’ class entertained no modern-day notions of nation. The idea of a national liberation war would have been utterly incomprehensible to them. Their realms of exploitation, commonality and rivalry invariably overlapped.

‘Scottish’ nobles - such as John Comyn - fought with Edward I in his conquest of Wales. The ‘Scottish’ Balliol family still held lands in France. Robert de Bruce, the Earl of Carrick, was a vassal of Edward I. The Plantagenet ‘English’ kings themselves occupied tracts of France, notably Gascony, and had their own claims on the French throne. The ‘English’ armies of Edward I and II which marched into Scotland were recruited in large numbers from feudal domains in France, Ireland and Wales. Their wars in Scotland were in fact the result of colliding feudal rights. Put another way:

“In essence the conflict between ‘England’ and ‘Scotland’ after 1296 was no different from the Wars of the Roses: ie, an internal struggle between rival feudal interests whose ideology was based on past notions of fief and vassalage, not future notions of nation and nationality.”

Edward I certainly sought to incorporate the territory of the kingdom of Scotland into his feudal empire. At first the means were peaceful. The Treaty of Birgham in 1290 set out terms of a future dynastic union through the marriage of Margaret, the ‘Maid of Norway’, and Edward’s son. The position of the ruling elite in Scotland would have been left unaffected. The merger was to be of crowns with no disturbing change. There was to be no 1066-type takeover.

As we know, the United Kingdom had to wait for another three centuries or so before seeing the light of day. Margaret died and triggered a constitutional crisis in Scotland. Edward I quickly moved to assert his overlordship. John Balliol was appointed king under Edward’s sponsorship and duly paid homage to him in December 1292.

Feudal ambition in Scotland and Edward’s onerous demands placed on his vassals drove King John to rebellion. Instead of meekly accepting Edward’s domination the ‘Scottish’ feudalists mustered an army - including commoners - at Caddonlee. The Scots were comprehensively routed in a 17-day blitzkrieg. Edward I stripped a captured Balliol of his feudal trappings in a humiliating ceremony held at Montrose Castle in July 1296. His tabard, hood and knightly girdle were physically removed.

Yet though Edward’s means shifted from those of peaceful diplomacy to naked force, this ran in parallel with, and often in contradiction to, his individual fief-vassal relationship with the great Norman families in Scotland. Here lies the explanation for the “sinister” role of the elder Bruce, etc, and the constant shifts in alliances as the ‘Scots’ feudalists fitfully turned the tables on the ‘English’ - Stirling Bridge being a crucial early battle. There were in fact no national patriots, defeatists, collaborators or traitors in the modern sense. After winning at Bannockburn in 1314 the ‘Scottish’ nobility sought to expand its influence into Wales and Ireland. The ‘war of independence’ continued in Scotland as an internecine conflict between the Bruce and Balliol families.

Our comrade is determined to defend William Wallace. We can dismiss his charge that “Jack’s support for ‘revolutionary centralisers’, like Edward I, puts him in direct opposition” to the “heroic” struggle of William Wallace. I offer no retrospective support for Edward I or any such feudal monarch. My stated polemical target was not Wallace as a historic personality, but the nationalist myth of a ‘Scottish war of independence’ against ‘England’.

As is only too evident, I am no expert on Scottish history. Nevertheless, what I know, or believe I know, does not lead me to retract or substantially alter anything I have written, crucially that:

Comrade Armstrong puts Wallace and his army in the same league as Spartacus, Wat Tyler and the Levellers: ie, a revolutionary class movement from below. From my reading, things appear somewhat different, somewhat more complex (if I am wrong, and I readily confess that might be the case, then I will humbly apologise). Did Wallace lead a slave revolt? Though the idea is persistent, I think not.

There is first of all a huge difference between rallying an army of commoners and being an army of and for the commoners. Comrade Armstrong makes much - too much - of the fact that Wallace’s forces at Stirling Bridge in 1297 consisted “mainly of foot soldiers” and his tactical deployment of pikemen in dense circular formations (schiltrons). For the sake of our comrade let me simply note that Edward’s army assembled at Newcastle the year before included 4,000 cavalry ... but also some 25,000 infantrymen. It is true that Edward represented a rich feudalism. His elaborately armoured and expensively mounted knights were indeed the tank divisions of the day. It is also true that the kingdom of Scotland was a poor feudalism and could afford neither the same numbers of infantry nor heavy cavalry.

That the ‘English’ feudalists suffered defeats at the hands of the ‘Scots’ feudalists is testimony in my opinion not to a people’s war. Rather it was military incompetence. At Banockburn the ‘English’ army under Edward II fought on almost suicidal terrain and no, doubt due to aristocratic arrogance, launched a frontal cavalry charge against massed pikemen. The ‘correct’ tactic, which soon became standard, was to unleash the English and Welsh longbowmen. These equally plebeian, though highly skilled, forces could easily decimate any stationary formation. They would fire arrows at a rate “three or four times” faster than a crossbow and with as much accuracy and reach (A Jones The art of war in the western world London 1988, p157). The longbow even proved a match against the elite of French feudalism. Needless to say, neither Crécy nor Agincourt make Edward III and Henry V leaders of a slave revolt. By the same logic Wallace and co’s reliance on pikemen proves nothing in and of itself, except that the kingdom of Scotland was a poor feudalism.

All in all, the suggestion that Wallace led a revolt from below in the manner of Spartacus and Wat Tyler is unconvincing. Following Edward I’s victory at Falkirk, many nobles languished in England awaiting ransom. Others had been injured and were unable to take to the field. Others were temporarily cowed. The calling of Edward I’s puppet parliament and plans for a deep feudalism provoked widespread opposition, including from small landowners. However, no ‘natural’ leadership stepped forth willing to fight. It was into this vacuum that Andrew de Moray emerged in the north and William Wallace in the south. Moray was the son and heir of a leading baron. Wallace had a less elevated lineage. He was the son a Renfrewshire knight.

In the summer of 1297 the Moray-Wallace movement made rapid progress. Nevertheless over these two “commanders of the army of the kingdom of Scotland, and the community of that realm” there stood the great magnets, Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow, and James the Stewart, who was Wallace’s lord. The respective roles of Moray and Wallace are much obscured by the fact that the former died of wounds inflicted at Stirling Bridge. Either way Wallace became Guardian in Scotland not in the name of the sovereign people, but the “illustrious king” in exile. He was Balliol’s champion.

Wallace was, however, no military genius. He only successfully fought one set-piece battle: Stirling Bridge. When his army met the ‘English’ feudal host at Falkirk in July 1298 the longbowmen destroyed his schiltrons. His status as Guardian was fatally undermined. The resistance of the high aristocracy receded still further. They opted for a peace deal. Like Bruce after 1309 Wallace was forced to turn to guerrilla or ‘secret’ warfare and raiding the northern English counties. In August 1305 Wallace was captured near Glasgow and taken to London where he was tried, found guilty of treason and executed.

I am sure comrade Armstrong is right in his fine description of how Wallace was later portrayed many years later by advocates of republican democracy in inspiring poems, novels and songs. The same can be said of the long held myth of pre-conquest Anglo-Saxon liberty in England and the Norman yoke. But to confuse origin myths for actual history is a foolish mistake not worthy of anyone who calls themselves a Marxist.

Let me conclude this part of my reply with a discussion of capitalism’s contradictory nature. My opponent cannot quite get his head around it. On the one hand, comrade Armstrong denounces capitalism, and with it materialism, like a true anarcho-idealist. The Marxist view, expounded by both Marx and Engels, that capitalism has a progressive side in that it unleashed the productive forces and creates a global economy, is dismissed as the delusions of what he perversely calls “high social democracy”: ie, not only Kautsky, but Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, etc. On the other hand, he is prepared to admit that as long as it is not “imposed by conquest” and “develops out of internal domestic contradictions”, capitalism “may indeed be progressive” in comparison with “preceding social systems”. The philistinism, insularity, uncertainty and equivocation is revealing, evidently stemming as it does from narrow nationalism.

The only “classic form” of primitive capitalist accumulation was Britain. As is widely known, that involved the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, savage legislation against vagabonds and paupers, the triangular trade in human misery between Liverpool, the west coast of Africa and the American slave plantations, and a factory system which literally destroyed two generations of proletarians (children as young as five were made to work 14, 15 hours a day). Capitalism, as Marx brilliantly described it, comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (K Marx Capital Vol 1, Moscow 1970, p760). British capitalism was not imposed on the British ruling class by force. It was, however, imposed on its people by force and relied on the most brutal exploitation. In terms of their freedom the masses took many steps backward. Yet out of their degradation sprung not only great fortunes, but for the first time in history a class that could end class.

Once capitalist society stands on its own feet relative exploitation comes to the fore: ie, machinery as the main source of increasing the surplus-value gained from the exploitation of labour power. Here we find the reason why Marx considered the system progressive - even if it is exported by conquest or statist emulation. Engels insisted for his part in Anti-Dühring that dreams of the “ideal” future “become possible” when “the actual conditions for its realisation were there”. Socialism becomes “practicable” not because people realise the injustice of the class system, but by virtue of “new economic conditions” (F Engels MECW Vol 25, Moscow 1987, p268).

In its insatiable drive for profit capitalism increases both the number of workers and their productivity. Production becomes more centralised and global as one capital kills many and everywhere seeks out new markets. Along with the spread and integration of capitalism as a universal system of exploitation, the conditions for working class liberation are revealed as necessarily universal.

Without beginning with these global material conditions the idea of freedom today will remain an empty slogan or a cruel trick. Capitalism with its huge accumulation of wealth and productivity creates the possibility for the full development of every individual on the planet. There is, however, nothing “inevitable” about it, if by that passivity is implied.

Comrade Armstrong plays down the global nature of the capitalist system. His Scottish national socialism finds its mental reflection in an emphasis on “unevenness” and linguistic sleights about the inability of capitalism to create a “single integrated” global “production system”. “Production” is hardly the point. Capitalism is a single world metabolism involving production, exchange and surplus extraction.

Capital’s need for unlimited expansion sends it hunting far and wide. No country, no person remains untouched. Raw materials come back to the metropolis in enormous quantities from the most distant places. Commodities are produced across frontiers and sold to a world consumer. Global economy and global ecology mercilessly punish antiquated and blinkered notions of local exclusiveness and isolation. Humanity is interdependent. Exploitation links workers everywhere. They still speak national languages, but mutual conditions - their radical chains - make them a world-class. In the stirring battle cry of the Communist manifesto the emancipation of the workers requires a world revolution, the “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” (K Marx and F Engels MECW Vol 6, Moscow 1976, p519).

Though these developments are objectively progressive in that they make human liberation “possible”, they confound and shatter programmes for instituting socialism within, through or over a single national class state. National socialism or national communism was from its origins palpably utopian. But nowadays - be it Korean, Cambodian, Russian, British, or Scottish - it is also the socialism of fools.

Within neo-liberal establishment circles ‘globalisation’ is more than the latest buzz word. It serves as an ideological drug to lull workers into acceptance of permanent wage-slavery. In a world where capital is meant to be stateless and comprehensively mobile, wage and demands on governments for improved conditions are patronisingly and poisonously attacked as self-defeating. Higher subsistence levels, or so the story goes, will simply see capital packing its bags and moving off to where labour power is dirt cheap. Burma, Mexico, Indonesia. Hence, the apologists of capital insist, ideas of launching a socialist challenge to the system and its logic are a chimera.

We do not, for one moment, accept the new-old ‘iron law of wages’ theory peddled by the academic whores of capital - like the nonsense about complete automation and AI it is a fiction invented in order to sustain the socially constructed image of a capitalism without history and without end. Through class struggle gains can undoubtedly be won. Capital cannot locate just anywhere. Even amongst the transnationals production and sales rely predominantly on the home country. Moreover supplies of “skilled workers and efficient infrastructures” are vital (J Stopford and S Strange Rival states, rival firms Cambridge 1991, p1).

The self-serving economic determinism of the neo-liberals is not only contemptible - morally and intellectually. It makes an easy target for those like comrade Armstrong who want to rescue the national socialist project. By setting up and duly knocking down specially crafted one-sided formulations comrade Armstrong tries to justify a Scottish Socialist Party national socialism - a Scottish road to socialism.

Evidently capital has no “single global political centre”, nor is imperialist competition a thing of the past. Nato, the UN and the EU are by definition intra-state organisations. Most boards of transnationals are mono-national. Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Silvio Berlusconi are respectively British, American and Italian. And, yes, seen from that angle, capital is “multi-centred”. Furthermore, the spread of capital is tremendously “uneven”. There is a strong regional bias. Most exports and investments are between capitalistically advanced countries. For instance, in the early 1990s three-quarters of UK overseas direct investments were concentrated in North America, the EU and Japan.

The neo-liberals indulge in hyperbole. So too does comrade Armstrong. The neo-liberals maintain that the state is powerless. This excuses dismantling the post-World War II social democratic consensus. Comrade Armstrong in turn maintains that because globalisation has been much exaggerated by the neo-liberals, ipso facto the SSP’s breakaway Scottish state can be used as the vehicle for his instant communism. He requires a non-global capitalism to justify this voluntaristic programme.

There is, as the noted Marxist thinker, István Mészáros, suggests, a “mismatch” between capital’s material reproductive structures and its state (I Mészáros Beyond capital London 1995, p65). National capital is by definition tied up with the national state. And, as freely admitted above, global capital has no state formations proper. Nevertheless global capital exerts itself albeit “in an extremely contradictory form” (ibid p68). Capital exists as a single world metabolism, but within a system of national states. Capital by its own logic demands the unlimited exploitation of labour. The national state cannot do this, observes Mészáros - neither economically nor politically. Therefore other solutions are sought out ... at enormous cost in terms of human suffering. The 20th century witnessed two world wars, the rise, decline and rise again of imperialist parasitism, the capitalist national socialism of Adolf Hitler, and the post-capitalist national socialism of JV Stalin.

We have seen on too many occasions what follows from revolutionary experiments in local communism. They are hardly inspirational. In a farcical ‘authoritarian’ coup Bakunin abolished all authority in Lyons in 1870. Spain in the 1870s and Kampuchea in the 1980s ended in bloody tragedy. People’s Korea rots in self-imposed isolation.

Comrade Armstrong will no doubt try and explain away history by lambasting the absence of democracy that accompanied past attempts. But such an absence is inevitable. No single country - not even the richest - has within it the means necessary to positively supersede capital. Individual capitalists can be expropriated through a political revolution. But creating a sustainable and dynamic alternative mode of production is a universal task.

Capital has to be superseded in its totality and replaced by an open-ended communist totality. Without the positive supersession of capitalist society’s division of labour and the domination of living labour by dead labour, the power of capital will reassert itself. That is why for Marxists, though the workers’ revolution starts politically on the terrain of the existing state, the content of our project is to bring the product of society back to society. What decides the matter is control. Does control over the worker continue to be the unlimited self-expansion of dead labour? Or do the associated producers control the products of work and thereby stop being workers?

If capital is grasped as a global relationship, then questions such as whether or not General Motors remains American, or why national governments continue to exist stand revealed as secondary questions at best or else nothing more than smelly red herrings.

For Marx and Engels there could be no socialism, let alone communism, in one country, because socialism must break out of capitalism positively - an outcome “which presupposed the universal development of the productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with them”.

The capital relationship cannot be positively superseded within the narrow framework of the national state, nor, for certain, in a little breakaway fragment of it. An independent ‘socialist’ Scotland would either be a social democratic flash in the pan or a revolutionary prison house for the working class, ruled by SSP wardens. If that were the case a new Hadrian’s Wall would have to be built to stop the liberated population fleeing south en masse to renew their bondage as wage-slaves.

Capital exists at the level of the world market and world economy - and here and only here are the necessary material conditions for socialism and communism. That is why in the German ideology, written way back in 1845,Marx and Engels savaged all notions of national socialism. Universal development produces in all countries a mass of propertyless workers and makes “each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others”. If by foolish design or unfortunate accident the workers’ revolution remained national, “want is merely made general, and with it the struggle for necessities would begin again, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be restored.” So “empirically”, communism is only possible as the “act of the dominant peoples ‘all at once’ and simultaneously” (original emphasis K Marx and F Engels MECW Vol 5, Moscow 1976, p49).

Socialism - as the stage of revolutionary transition between capitalism and communism - must and can only be the act of a world class. National or local socialism spells disaster. International socialism spells human liberation ... and that it what we inscribe on our banner.