Scotland's Future.

In a matter of a few weeks Scotland will decide on its future. The Left seems to have lined up behind the Yes-side of the referendum on Scottish independence. We should be asking ourselves, what is the case for unionism here? Surely, there has to be a progressive case here. After all, the Union stood firm against the rising tide of Fascism in the early decades of the twentieth century.

First of all, it has to be affirmed that there is a fundamental principle – the right to self-determination – which is without question. If the Scottish people demand an independent sovereign Scotland then they are entitled to it. The English don’t have a right to impose a form of government not accepted by Scots over Scotland. This goes to the heart of democratic concerns.

What we might call ‘red patriotism’, or traditional revolutionary patriotism, as Hobsbawm called it, has its time and place. English nationalism was tapped into by both Winston Churchill and JB Priestley. The war against fascism coincided with forces vying for the future of the social order. The people who had seen the worst of the 1930s did not want to return to those days and wanted a better life. This is why in 1945 the national government under Churchill’s leadership helped to win the war, but the Labour Party won the election. It marked the beginning of three decades of social democracy.

It was in the Union that the Welsh and Scottish people found a voice in British political life, not through nationalist organisation, but through the opposition – the Liberals and Labour. It was only with the decline of the post-war establishment and rise of Thatcherism, coupled with the death of Empire, that the Labour Party pursued devolution. Then Scottish nationalism became a contender. This should not surprise us. So a vital part of the picture is the rise of neoliberalism.

The neoliberal context

The question of Scotland’s viability is not so uncertain. The country has a GDP per capita of over £24,000. No doubt Scotland would undergo economic reform in order to reorder the institutions which underlie its standing. The real issue is what exactly an independent Scotland will look like.

It seems plausible that an independent Scotland would be opened up to international forces and exposed to the full brunt of neoliberal reforms. This might even be the case if Scotland heads for greater integration into the European system. The power of monetary policy may still be held by Whitehall and this could constrain any government in its policies. Likewise it would be possible for corporations, and even small-scale businesses, to hold the state to ransom – threatening to disinvest the fledgling economy – to shift policy in their own favour. The English government could easily initiate a race to the bottom on fiscal policy with Scotland forcing down its rate of tax and expenditure.

The possibility of a flat-tax haven north of England shouldn’t be dismissed as we have seen the same thing happen in Ireland (where there always was a much stronger nationalist/republican case). Michael Portillo has described this as the Tory case for Scottish independence. He argues it would thrust Scotland into the cold winds of global competition and, by the looks of Brussels these days, we can see how independence may lead to greater neoliberal reform and not less.

This is a point that can’t be dismissed easily as the national takes shape within the international. Contrary to the claims of nationalists globalisation does not oppose nation-states, or even nationalism. Sovereignty of national bodies has long been embedded in a global economic context. Just as the freedom and sovereignty of the individual is not absolute, neither is that of the body national. Capital can easily exploit the proliferation of borders in a world already too bifurcated. This is the reason Scotland will remain within the EU and its currency will remain sterling after independence.

The prospects for distribution

We shouldn’t kid ourselves about the Barnett formula. It’s not the case that there is a ‘trickle-down’ of wealth from the financial colossus in the City of London; but there is a case for widespread redistribution within the Union. It may be said that the United Kingdom has a greater pool of tax revenues together and from the 1940s to the 70s there was a modicum of distributional change. This led to the workers’ share of GDP rising to a peak in the late 60s and early 70s. The battle to restore profitability to the system, firstly, by the Labour government of the late 70s and then by the Thatcher administration ultimately succeeded. Since then the workers’ share of GDP has stagnated while the bosses’ share has skyrocketed.

However, once independent, Scotland would not necessarily have access to capital if a programme of redistribution were secured. The Glasgow Media Group calculated that the top layer of income-earners in the UK – around 10% of the population – were sitting on around £4 trillion in wealth in 2010. The vast amounts of capital amassed over the generations and concentrated in southern English hands would largely remain in London. The potential for redistribution would be left stunted and Scotland would be on the receiving end of a self-imposed scarcity. Under such conditions it seems likely that the Scottish government would take the side of one class over another.

It can certainly be argued that the Union has done much to preserve inequality in Scotland, where the richest 10% now have 273 times as much wealth than the poorest 10%. The richest 100 men and women increased their wealth from £18 billion to £21 billion in 2012. Just in terms of land ownership there is immense inequality in Scotland. Out of the rural landscape, which makes up 94% of Scottish land, a little over 83% of it is privately owned. Out of a population of over 5.2 million people less than a 1,000 people control 60% of the country. It seems plausible that the social inequalities preserved in Scotland by the Union would remain and could potentially be deepened by independence. So the strongest case for Scottish independence has to be a socialist case and not a nationalist one.

Except the world situation seems to make a socialist Scotland unlikely. In the distributional struggle inside the EU the biggest sparks of resistance have been in Spain and Greece. The disenchantment elsewhere in Europe, including in the UK, has not translated into electoral change. This matters because Scottish independence could well open up a new distributional struggle in the country. In the absence of a mass movement capable of waging a fight for workers’ rights the conservative tendencies of the SNP may win in the end.

This article was originally written for The Third Estate on August 23 2014.

The Identity Politics of Reaction.

 

Upon observation the forces of Reaction seem much more adept at identitarian politics, as we have seen consistently for a very long time. It was in the 1970s that the forerunners of the New Right sought to co-op evangelical Christianity as a basis to resuscitate social conservatism and usher in the ensuing culture wars of the 1990s. Around the same time in Iran the collapse of the Shah’s rule created a vacuum into which the radical Islamists moved and crushed the competing tendencies of nationalism and socialism. In the late 1980s and early 90s Europe saw the recrudescence of irredentist ethno-nationalism in Serbia and Croatia to the detriment of Yugoslavia as a socialist federalism. The thoroughly counter-revolutionary and reactionary character of these developments can hardly be ignored with ease. The degree to which we may understand this form of identity politics as a co-optation by right-wing demagogues is a matter worth exploring.

 

One cannot help notice that the language and sometimes the practices of these movements were pilfered from radical traditions. The Catholic rightist Paul Weyrich infiltrated left-wing groups and sought to utilise the similar organising methods to politicise and mobilise Christians into a reactionary electoral base for the Republican Party. Likewise, it was Ayatollah Khomeini who emptied out the Islamic socialism of Ali Shariati only to substitute it for a conservative order within a radical framework. In dying days of Yugoslavia it was Slobodan Milošević and his supporters who appropriated the language of radicalism in condemning their enemies as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. It may be down to the compatibility of particular identity-markers (whether religious or ethnic) with a populist form of politics. In each of these instances we find that the collective identity serves as a means for demagogic leaders to attain power. The key difference is that the Serbs and American Christians can hardly be said to have been repressed in the same way as Shi’a Muslims.

 

Fundamentalism soon became the lynchpin of GOP campaigners and remains so to this day. The politicisation of Christianity came in conjunction with the right-wing reaction to the counter-cultural movements at the level of economics. The basic rights of American workers were soon under an unprecedented assault of Reaganism, while moral issues of abortion, gay rights, drugs and pornography became a means to mobilise millions behind an otherwise bankrupt party-state. It is worth acknowledging that the Islamist forces of reaction were originally mobilised in Iran to help overthrow the Mossadegh government in 1953. Instead of an Islamic regime it was a secular dictatorship which followed as the riots instigated by the CIA and MI6 were used in turn to orchestrate a coup. Khomeini was among the ‘Warriors of Islam’ protesting at the time, he would re-emerge as the Supreme Leader over 25 years later. It was an active policy of American and European governments to support the disintegration of Yugoslavia into splintered sectarian states. This went as far as offering aid to ultra-nationalists looking to secede and refusing aid to the Yugoslav edifice. It was a way to drive a nail into what was left of really existing socialism.

 

We have only to look at post-colonial Africa to find yet more instances of a convergence between identitarian forms of reaction. In the Congo we find the rise of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu brought with it a cultural nationalism opposing all forms of European culture still lingering in the country. As part of the authenticité campaign the suit and tie were banned and the name of the country was changed to Zaire. Mobutu came to power amidst the instability of the 1960s just as socialist democrat Patrice Lumumba was murdered in a coup no doubt supported by the Belgians, Americans and British secret intelligence services. In fact Mobutu was instrumental to the coup and would later to come to dominate the country as a kleptocrat until the 1990s. The soi disant African nationalism of Mobutu’s dictatorship may have functioned as a means of channelling the legitimate grievances of the people ruled by the Belgians through Mobutu. The same process may be found in Zimbabwe where Robert Mugabe maintains a party-state through the appeal to anti-colonial and nationalist sentiment. Stripping away the property of white land-owners has tremendous symbolic value to Mugabe’s regime, only for the property is then handed to the henchmen around the despot backed and funded by the capitalist roaders in Beijing.



A Land with a People.

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In a discussion over the events in Gaza recently I had the following exchange with a friend of mine about the fundamentals of the conflict. Note that the questioner is coming from a Christian perspective on the conflict, while I'm coming from an atheistic perspective. The primary issue is raised is the claim to the land and the specifics of the Zionist project.

Q: I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. And I will enter into judgment with them there, on behalf of my people and my heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations and have divided up MY land..."Does this land belong to Israel or Palestine? Well actually, according to bible scripture, God calls it His land, but the prophetic word from Joel, written 850BC is that it will in fact be divided.

 
"I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. There will be one king over all of them and they will never again be two nations or be divided into two kingdoms." (Ezekiel 37:22)

 
Joshua (great name Joshua, means 'God is salvation' or 'God rescues') rightly calls this a 'miserable situation', it has a long history, Ezekiel was written sometime around 590BC, about 650 years before Israel and Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans and the people scattered to 'the four corners of the earth'. We may ask the question was Israel returned there in 1948, fully in 1967 simply to fulfill prophecy, was it just a self-fulfilling prophecy or is there some authenticity to the prophecy. Will Jerusalem be divided? Certainly according to bible scripture it is not intended to be and if it is, will those responsible incur God's judgement?

A: Well, I don't think Jerusalem should be divided, that's merely the beginning of another problem. I take the position that is enshrined in international law: Jerusalem should be an international city, it's just too precious to belong to any state or religion. This is the same framework that would settle the conflict in a roughly 80:20 split of what used to be Palestine into Israel and Palestine. I won't comment on the scripture as I'm not a theologian, nor am I a religious man (in spite of my cool name! lol) and I think it's fair to say that the Bible is open to a lot of debate and theorisation - just look at the use of the recurring use of Gog and Magog by fundamentalists, from Reagan to Bush II, to explain foreign policy decisions.

We know from Israeli archaeology that there is considerable evidence that there has been a Jewish presence in Palestine for a very long time, this can be determined simply by the lack of pig bones in ancient communities. So there is a legitimate Jewish claim to live there. That's the case even if you don't buy the Bible, which most Israeli archaeologists don't by the way. There is also evidence that suggests the Palestinians are the descendents of the Jews who were living there thousands of years ago. Probably they were converted through conquest. This is all interesting, and somewhat ironic, but it doesn't provide any answer to the crisis in itself. The question of what the Zionist mission ought to be in its finer details is left completely open still. That could be part of the reason why there is opposition to peace from inside Israel, it remains unclear where the expansion should end - if 80% is too little how about 90% and so on? There are those who dream of a Greater Israel, and that will mean a perpetual war with the Arabs.

Example, should Israel be a Jewish state or a state for Jews? That's an important distinction which has never been fully clarified in Zionist circles. This matters because it relates to what kind of law there should be in Israel, as well as the demographic composition - if it's a state for Jews then it doesn't have to be a majority Jewish state for instance. By comparison, Pakistan was founded as a state for Muslims modeled on India but in the 1980s the dictatorship began to change this to the notion of Pakistan as an Islamic state (and even began to compare itself to Israel funnily enough). It impacts the internal politics of the nation-state, Pakistan has been dominated by authoritarian governments sometimes more irreligious at times. I think that Israel could've been founded in a better way than it has been, though in its foundation it was just like every other nation-state (e.g. born out of violence/theft). But we can't turn back time. The strongest claim of the Jews is perhaps based on their need for a safe haven. Again, that doesn't really deal with the details of what Israel should look like.

The important point to stress is that Israel (however defined) can exist with an independent and free Palestine as it's neighbour. To paraphrase Abba Eban, a free Palestine would pose the same threat to the existence of Israel as Luxembourg currently poses to Russia.