The battle is now for the very soul of the country. It isn't for a loud voice in the margins.
This view strikes me as remarkably similar to John McTernan's reading of politics in Scotland, even tho he's coming from the exact opposite goals.
I think Shafi is wrong here because I think he fails to appreciate 1) what the SNP represent, 2) what the Labour Party now is, and 3) what Scotland is.
1) The SNP have always proposed a 'Scotland for the smaa fowk.' This can be dismissed as populism masking nationalism, but this seems like putting theory in place of lived reality. Yes there have been historical shitty compromises, and yes there have been stupid leaders and political illiteracies. There is however no getting away from why people join the SNP. One person in thirty three people in Motherwell is not in the SNP because they are sentimental souls. It also neglects a generation of history.
Scottish Labour have been attacking the SNP from the right, first in government, and then in opposition for two decades now. In that time the SNP has moved further left. It has become a mass party of the working class. This was the vision of the 79 group, more or less. As if to underline that point the current deputy leadership contest has become a debate about the responsibility of the party to the (largely) Jacobin mass movement it has invoked and fostered.
2) On the question of Labour, and organic crises, it ceased to be a Workers Party (in the technical sense of that phrase) at the point when Progress seized the leadership, a generation ago. In form under Blair it was more really a traditional fascist, conservative or Stalinist state style capture of the unions for the ruling elite. At this point it became a party of the Establishment in control *over* the organised working class. The furore over the recent Falkirk selection battle demonstrated conclusively that over two decades on not only was this *still* the case. That furore happened because Unite had a failed challenge in asserting agency in the relationship, something which remains anathema to the party's rulers. Because of this 'outrage' Miliband determined it required a change in rules over party funding. The Labour Party remains a Tory Party under Miliband, representing the section of the Establishment which aims to control the unions as the basis of its political power.
This is a direction of travel Blair and Brown were explicit in pursuing. This ruling class perspective, this course can be summed up in their phrase "the natural party of government" - ie the government that rules forever and ever. The terms of referenence for the policy debate among its rulers, outside of the wee Stalinist-Unionist rump in Scotland, is that of traditional Tory liberalism and Progress' dangerous neo-conservatism. It is the latter grouping which could be set to trash the last defiant Scottish Stalinist rump, and, in doing so, wipe out the Labour Party in Scotland.
To imagine that Scotland's leading Tory party will force the SNP to the right seems like a misreading of the situation. That idea that Labour continuing to be Tories, as they obliviate themselves, will force a party that is now a mass movement into a right wing box seems like narrative over logistics. The SNP is comprised of working class socialists and social democrats. It's led by a lefty lawyer and machine politician. We're not going to see some massive rightward shift, because neither the leadership nor the engaged membership are in politics just for the sake of exercising power. Labour itself counts for much of its vote on centre left low information voter pensioners, but there are diminishing returns in reliance on that demographic. They have long been the tactical Unionist vote, and perhaps the SNP stands to lose some of the centre here if there is a reaction against the explicitly revolutionary component of the mass movement. This is possible, but that's a circle it has been able to square in the past while leading one of Europe's most centre left administrations. And frankly Tories know exactly what the SNP is, which is why they have been nervously and perfervidly shuffling and jeering and voting against it since 2007, so appealing for their votes was never going to work. Labour - the party which stands for government for its own sake - may have to appeal for those votes however.
Is it not time to capture the centre for the smaa fowk and finish the job instead of trying to build a small group of Cassandras?
3) The reason there isn't a need for a Jacobin movement in most countries but there is in Scotland is obvious. Solutions which elide these relations omit the central question of working class political power in Scotland, which is the Union or democracy. Now that The British Road To Socialism is as long dead as Clause 4 and the old CPGB and the working class is represented in government by a well turned oot bunch of Jacobins is it not time to just sweep the bastards out?
One third of our land is ruled over by a tax exempt hereditary elite, kept as a desert producing no food, nor profit, nor widespread human use values, locking the remaining poor of our 'interior' into a life of insecurity and poverty, and presenting a barrier to development. We are the only Western country to take a broadly stable government arrangement of roughly one third of our populace and reduce that to a wasteland populated by retirees, with the vestigial working class. This vestigial working class - still frequently Gaelic speaking by the way - remains in hoc to the gentry and the new bourgeois rulers who've bought up the massive estates to live out the big house fantasy.
We are a state of people who control absolutely the very flow of our water, but who do not control whether we let the poor starve. We pay for this privilege of inertia in the form of tribute and that our finances be doublechecked in England's parliament (where we maintain, under sufferance and sectional alignment a token minority of legislators). This arrangement is immensely popular with our shrinking violet upper middle classes, who are as privately educated as their Southern peers. They benefit from obscurity and the crystallisation of class relations we often term 'The Unionist Establishment' or 'Committee Scotland.'
That Ross and others were able to funnel a space for the Labour Establishment into this otherwise private school Edinburgh Tory elite that made its compacts with Henry Dundas 200 odd years ago does not obscure the general principle that Committee Scotland is rarely met but often encountered.
Talking in terms of 'populism' with reference to the SNP is missing the real empirical basis upon which the Pairty o the Smaa Fowk rests, and the necessity of the revolution it represents. Scotland is a backward country in dire need of land redistribution, changes to property ownership and taxation, democracy and real local government, openness and transparency, a fairer social wage, full employment, Keynesian investment and a political reckoning, all of which the SNP, the mass party of the working class, stands for.
"the question that the socialist left in Scotland must seek to answer if we are to defend what’s left of our social security system, and present an overall challenge to neoliberalism. This answer is not, it is our contention, with the SNP[...] In a possible future Scotland, Labour and the SNP join in a permanent battle of the civic nationalisms; one British, one Scottish. In this permanent fore-grounding of national antagonisms more vital issues of social justice can be lost[...] This is especially possible should the next leader of Labour in Scotland attack the SNP from the right, in which case the SNP, especially if it believes the left flank is secure, will draw to the centre."
This view strikes me as remarkably similar to John McTernan's reading of politics in Scotland, even tho he's coming from the exact opposite goals.
"The SNP are busy constructing a myth that Scotland is a wildly Left-wing, working-class country. It is not. As the referendum result showed, it is a solidly middle-class, and – dare one say it – moderate Unionist country. “No thanks”, the final slogan of the No campaign, captured that perfectly[...]That was the key to the victories in Scotland of Tony Blair, Donald Dewar and Jack McConnell. And that is precisely where there is vacant ground in Scottish politics – space for a moderate, modern party representing the mainstream middle, that doesn’t blame “London” for all its problems. When your opponent makes a mistake, as the SNP has done, don’t ape it. Exploit it."
I think Shafi is wrong here because I think he fails to appreciate 1) what the SNP represent, 2) what the Labour Party now is, and 3) what Scotland is.
1) The SNP have always proposed a 'Scotland for the smaa fowk.' This can be dismissed as populism masking nationalism, but this seems like putting theory in place of lived reality. Yes there have been historical shitty compromises, and yes there have been stupid leaders and political illiteracies. There is however no getting away from why people join the SNP. One person in thirty three people in Motherwell is not in the SNP because they are sentimental souls. It also neglects a generation of history.
Scottish Labour have been attacking the SNP from the right, first in government, and then in opposition for two decades now. In that time the SNP has moved further left. It has become a mass party of the working class. This was the vision of the 79 group, more or less. As if to underline that point the current deputy leadership contest has become a debate about the responsibility of the party to the (largely) Jacobin mass movement it has invoked and fostered.
2) On the question of Labour, and organic crises, it ceased to be a Workers Party (in the technical sense of that phrase) at the point when Progress seized the leadership, a generation ago. In form under Blair it was more really a traditional fascist, conservative or Stalinist state style capture of the unions for the ruling elite. At this point it became a party of the Establishment in control *over* the organised working class. The furore over the recent Falkirk selection battle demonstrated conclusively that over two decades on not only was this *still* the case. That furore happened because Unite had a failed challenge in asserting agency in the relationship, something which remains anathema to the party's rulers. Because of this 'outrage' Miliband determined it required a change in rules over party funding. The Labour Party remains a Tory Party under Miliband, representing the section of the Establishment which aims to control the unions as the basis of its political power.
This is a direction of travel Blair and Brown were explicit in pursuing. This ruling class perspective, this course can be summed up in their phrase "the natural party of government" - ie the government that rules forever and ever. The terms of referenence for the policy debate among its rulers, outside of the wee Stalinist-Unionist rump in Scotland, is that of traditional Tory liberalism and Progress' dangerous neo-conservatism. It is the latter grouping which could be set to trash the last defiant Scottish Stalinist rump, and, in doing so, wipe out the Labour Party in Scotland.
To imagine that Scotland's leading Tory party will force the SNP to the right seems like a misreading of the situation. That idea that Labour continuing to be Tories, as they obliviate themselves, will force a party that is now a mass movement into a right wing box seems like narrative over logistics. The SNP is comprised of working class socialists and social democrats. It's led by a lefty lawyer and machine politician. We're not going to see some massive rightward shift, because neither the leadership nor the engaged membership are in politics just for the sake of exercising power. Labour itself counts for much of its vote on centre left low information voter pensioners, but there are diminishing returns in reliance on that demographic. They have long been the tactical Unionist vote, and perhaps the SNP stands to lose some of the centre here if there is a reaction against the explicitly revolutionary component of the mass movement. This is possible, but that's a circle it has been able to square in the past while leading one of Europe's most centre left administrations. And frankly Tories know exactly what the SNP is, which is why they have been nervously and perfervidly shuffling and jeering and voting against it since 2007, so appealing for their votes was never going to work. Labour - the party which stands for government for its own sake - may have to appeal for those votes however.
Is it not time to capture the centre for the smaa fowk and finish the job instead of trying to build a small group of Cassandras?
3) The reason there isn't a need for a Jacobin movement in most countries but there is in Scotland is obvious. Solutions which elide these relations omit the central question of working class political power in Scotland, which is the Union or democracy. Now that The British Road To Socialism is as long dead as Clause 4 and the old CPGB and the working class is represented in government by a well turned oot bunch of Jacobins is it not time to just sweep the bastards out?
One third of our land is ruled over by a tax exempt hereditary elite, kept as a desert producing no food, nor profit, nor widespread human use values, locking the remaining poor of our 'interior' into a life of insecurity and poverty, and presenting a barrier to development. We are the only Western country to take a broadly stable government arrangement of roughly one third of our populace and reduce that to a wasteland populated by retirees, with the vestigial working class. This vestigial working class - still frequently Gaelic speaking by the way - remains in hoc to the gentry and the new bourgeois rulers who've bought up the massive estates to live out the big house fantasy.
We are a state of people who control absolutely the very flow of our water, but who do not control whether we let the poor starve. We pay for this privilege of inertia in the form of tribute and that our finances be doublechecked in England's parliament (where we maintain, under sufferance and sectional alignment a token minority of legislators). This arrangement is immensely popular with our shrinking violet upper middle classes, who are as privately educated as their Southern peers. They benefit from obscurity and the crystallisation of class relations we often term 'The Unionist Establishment' or 'Committee Scotland.'
That Ross and others were able to funnel a space for the Labour Establishment into this otherwise private school Edinburgh Tory elite that made its compacts with Henry Dundas 200 odd years ago does not obscure the general principle that Committee Scotland is rarely met but often encountered.
Talking in terms of 'populism' with reference to the SNP is missing the real empirical basis upon which the Pairty o the Smaa Fowk rests, and the necessity of the revolution it represents. Scotland is a backward country in dire need of land redistribution, changes to property ownership and taxation, democracy and real local government, openness and transparency, a fairer social wage, full employment, Keynesian investment and a political reckoning, all of which the SNP, the mass party of the working class, stands for.
