It serves “Paddy the Old Believer” [Patrick Avakuum, Socialism or Nationalism?, WL40] right that he should get a diatribe from James D Young [WL42] in return for writing a ridiculously “soft” review of Young’s “The Very Bastards of Creation.”
“One Scot’s critique of Western imperialism inside the Celtic fringe of Great Britain,” is how James D Young describes his truly wretched book. Young’s starting point is that the Act of Union in 1707 was “when “Scots lost their freedom to a superior English imperialism,” and Scotland became “a subordinate or oppressed nation.”
Since then, “the colonial dimension” of Scottish politics has been “real and tangible.” Scotland “remained an oppressed country until after 1832… The sense of national grievance… was to persist for several decades into the next two centuries.”
“Scotland,” writes Young, “has always been a sort of ‘Third World country’.” Thus, the central task for Scots today is that of “regaining our national independence: independence from British imperialism and multi-national corporations.”
The villains in Young’s typically incoherent and rambling tirade are the British — or, to use Young’s parlance, the “Brits”: “The Brits’ official culture”, “Havelock Wilson’s Brit National Union of Seamen”, “the Brits’ Establishment”, “the Brits’ Prime Minister”, “the Brits’ Labour Party”, and “a Brit Marxist magazine.” (The crime of the latter magazine was that it “had no sympathy for either the Stuarts, Jacobitism or Celtic communism” — something which one can only applaud.)
Young condemns the ruling classes in Scotland not so much for being ruling classes, but for their pro-English, pro-British sympathies. Hence his interminable references to “the Anglo-Scottish ruling class”, “the Anglo-Scottish Establishment”, “the Anglo-Scots Scottish Enlightenment”, “the anti-Scottish Anglo-Scottish ruling class”, and the “Anglo-British state in Scotland.”
High on the list of crimes of this “Anglo-Scottish ruling class” is their denial of a university education to indigenous Scots: “[In the 1980s] highly qualified Scottish students were increasingly kept out of universities in Scotland to make way for incomers (is this the “Brits”?) who could not get into British universities elsewhere.… The Anglo-Scottish ruling class did not want an educated or politically conscious labour force.”
Young counterposes a second Scotland (“from 1688 onwards there were at least two Scotlands”) to that of the “Anglo-Scottish ruling class.” In opposition to “the sleekitness (cunning) of the Anglo-Scottish rulers” there existed “a carnaptious (quarrelsome) radicalism.” “The London-inspired consciousness of the Scottish Enlightenment existed in bitter and hostile opposition to the carnaptious radical culture and consciousness of an older Scotland of the common people.”
Scottish workers developed “their own class identity as Scots and workers.” Influenced by “the nationalism and anti-Englishness of the Scottish radicals and socialists,” stiffened by “the Scots tradition of metaphysics and Marxism”, and “sharpened by the imperialism of the English workers’ movement”, there gradually emerged “a re-made Scottish working class with a new-nation-cum-class identity.”
(The “radical Scottish nationalism of the labour movement of the Athens of the North” turns out to have had some unusual forerunners. Young praises the Jacobites of the 1745 rebellion as “very real opponents of English imperialism”, struggling valiantly against “Cumberland’s modern English imperialist army.” A more orthodox Marxist interpretation would rightly dismiss the Jacobites as forces of feudal reaction.)
Typically Young’s overall political incoherency is reinforced by sweeping generalisations devoid of supporting evidence.
“Scotland has always been preoccupied with metaphysics over profits,” writes Young. Edinburgh, the thirteenth biggest financial centre in the world, is doubtless a prime example of this Scottish disdain for profits.
“Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle anticipated the Communist Manifesto” is another fascinating claim advanced by Young. So perhaps Lenin’s pamphlet should have been entitled: “The Five Sources and Five Component Parts of Marxism”?
Young’s argument that “Scots lost their freedom” in 1701 is a non-starter. The plebian masses had no freedom to lose. And the ruling classes supported the Act of Union in order to benefit from the imperialist expansion of their Southern neighbours. Nor does it make any sense to talk about Scotland in 1707 as if it were a fully-developed nation-state. Nation-states were still only in the process of formation in the early eighteenth century. In the modern sense of the terms, Scotland was neither a nation nor a state.
In any case, at the time of the Act of Union Lowland Scotland had more in common with England than it did with the Scottish Highlands.
Young does not use “British” as a definition of citizenship, just as he does not use “English” or “Scottish” as a definition of national identity. For him, they are definitions of a political identity — English/British is reactionary and imperialist, whilst Scottish is progressive and anti-imperialist. Hence he ends up equating, and thereby confusing, a class identity with a national identity (or, imputed national identity.) On the one hand, there is the “Anglo-Scottish ruling class.” On the other hand, there is the Scottish “national-cum-class identity” of the working class.
Young’s creation of a hierarchy of cultures — with the (pure) Scottish culture of the plebian masses elevated over and above the (adulterated) Anglo-Scottish culture of the Establishment — is a particularly dubious venture, especially for someone who claims to speak as a “socialist internationalist”.
History is littered with individuals and movements which have sought to promote the “purity” of nations and cultures. Their political provenance is not of the left.
Scarcely less dubious is Young’s construction of a Scottish radical tradition which, he writes, has traditionally been portrayed as “eccentric” (by, of course, “English cultural imperialists in the Scottish universities”) but is in fact simply “carnaptious”. He cites, for example, the mentally unhinged John Maclean as an example of this carnaptious, but not eccentric, tradition!
Even a cursory reading of Young’s book, however, leaves the reader with the distinct impression that Young has a vested interest in blurring the distinction between eccentricity and carnaptiousness.
If Young’s book serves any purpose at all, it is to demonstrate the bankruptcy of attempts to merge the ideologies of socialism and nationalism, a particularly popular project amongst sections of the Scottish left at the moment. The gobbledygook of Young’s book merely brings out into the open the absurdity of the project.
