It is a very long time since I have read anything so coloured by the mentality of the “intellectual” thug, by utter moral bankruptcy and by unimaginably anti-intellectual sectarianism as Stan Crooke’s review (WL43) of my book The Very Bastards of Creation. From my own viewpoint, the only positive aspect of Crooke’s review is that it will guarantee that more copies will be purchased by public libraries in England. Keep it going, Stan.
It is now tragically evident that Crooke is not, in the 19th-century Scottish phrase, “pregnant with bright parts”. On top of his lack of perception, he is further handicapped by his self-imposed militant ignorance, obsessive sectarianism and cultivated nastiness. I really feel sorry for someone like him.
To the best of my knowledge, though I am not an expert on the history of the 1990s left- wing sects, sectarianism or the working of the religious sectarian mind, Crooke and the editors of Workers’ Liberty did not object in principle to the appearance of E. P. Thompson’s seminal essay “The Peculiarities of the English”. For daring to look at “The Pecularities of the Scots” in my book The Very Bastards of Creation, Matgamna — otherwise known as Pope Patrick Avakuum or sometimes as Bishop Paddy Dollard — and Crooke denounce me for being “a Scottish nationalist” who has abandoned his lifelong socialism. Why is Edward Thompson exempt from your generous comradely wrath? However, when Crooke accuses me of being soft on the Anglo-Scottish ruling class, it is crystal-clear that he has not read — or, at least, understood — anything that I have published on Scottish workers’ history. If he would read outside the prescribed texts and look at the books and articles on Workers’ Liberty’s Index, he would be aware of the comment by Frank Maitland, one of the 1930s British Trotskyists, that in Scotland “capitalism has reigned with an absolute sway that has no parallel”. Though I don’t for one moment expect Crooke to understand or absorb this, in 1930s England the orthodox English Trotskyist C. A. Smith wrote:”Scottish history differs from English in the recency of servile conditions and the comparative suddenness of the transition to modern capitalism.” Moreover, in all of my nine published books I have tried, in the phrase of the American socialist Daniel De Leon, “to identify with the ancient lowly”.
In spite of the brillance of the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels said little useful about nationalism. Unlike the dunderhead Crooke, Marx did not assume that socialist ideas were eternally valid and applicable in all times and places irrespective of changing circumstances. Since Crooke seems desperately to need some old-fashioned socialist tuition, he ought to ponder over the words in S. S. Prawer’s book Karl Marx and World Literature (1976): “Marx came, in fact, to realise this and consistently distanced himself from his followers, who underestimated the power of national feeling. In 1866 he ridiculed the French delegates to a Council meeting of the First International for announcing ‘that all nationalities and even nations were antiquated prejudices’... Later still he praised the Russian economist Flerovsky becaue he had ‘a feeling for national characteristics’, and he took up the cause of the Irish as a ‘national question”’.
When considering that Crooke called for “an orthodox” Marxist (rather than an anarchist) interpretation of modern history in a context where he is clearly not at all well read, I suspect he is destined to remain a prisoner of his aggresssive and militant ignorance. So, instead of addressing Ignazio Silone’s “anarchist” socialist criticisms of Victor Serge and the intolerant, authoritarian Bolsheviks, Crooke had to “rubbish” me. Of course, he was really rubbishing himself. Poor Stan, whose pen name is, I am told, Mark Osborn, is never on the mark.
For the record, my book The Very Bastards of Creation received very favourable reviews in the Scottish press; and one reviewer in The Scotsman asserted that “Young is a writer who is as entertaining as he is uncompromising”. And yes — though it narks Crooke and his sectarian friends — I do have the bare-faced cheek to call myself a socialist, an internationalist and (in this age of militant ignorance in socialist ranks) a scholar and a teacher. In spite of Crooke’s scarcely literate comments on my books over the years, other fine socialists with whom I have not always seen eye to eye have recognised the importance of what I have been doing in often hostile circumstances. So, when Raymond Challinor was reviewing my biography of John Maclean in an American publication, he said: “James D. Young is, in my opinion, one of the finest historians of the British working class”. Furthermore, at the end of his review of The Very Bastards of Creation in the current issue of the American socialist magazine New Politics, Challinor, with the generosity typical of socialists of our generation, concludes: “Though it is unclear how long he will be able to continue, one thing is certain — James D. Young will die with a pen in one hand, his other raised in a clenched-fist salute.” Will anyone, I wonder, ever say anything like that about the sectarian bully Stan?
Far from my trying to offer, in Norman Mailer’s words, “advertisements for myself’“, I think your readers ought to know that intelligent, non-sectarian socialists — and nonsocialists — have seen some merit in the books I have written during a time of reaction and sloth when ruling classes everywhere are struggling to lower democratic consciousness. However, in recommending Edward Thompson’s fine essay The Poverty of Theory inside the pages of Workers’ Liberty’s self-enclosed sect of pure socialist saints (as distinct from justified socialist sinners like me), I am not going to be silenced by some would-be Holy Proletarian Emperor.
In defence of my own “Marxist-humanism”, I would like to suggest that The Very Bastards of Creation will remain and endure for a long time as, in E.P. Thompson’s words, “the best emetic to prescribe to Marxist theologians and theoretical practitioners — a sectarian emetic to be adminstered only to sectarians”. But, while proclaiming my socialist outlook and taking action on the side of those who are struggling for social justice as well as contributing to scholarship and enlightenment, I am prepared to match my own five- decades’ track record in the labour movement and on picket-lines with anyone active in any of the various sects.
James D Young
P.S. Since you doctored my reply to Pope Paddy’s review of The Very Bastards of Creation, and left paragraphs out of it, I hope you will publish this letter in full without your unco-guide “proletarian” censorship.
Editorial note: No, we did not “doctor” James D’s delightful diatribe. Nor have we edited references to persons and identities in this contribution.
SM.
