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ONSIND are an acoustic pop punk band from Durham. Their name is in reference to the lack of abortion facilities in some areas of America.

I recently attended a gig put on by the Make That a Take DIY (anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-homophobic) collective in Dundee featuring ONSIND and was blown away at how incredibly good their set was. Their gig had more people at it and more politics in it than most public meetings by parties.

The album is a really nice package which contains liner notes including full lyrics and each song accompanied by a quotation. Philosophers have only interpreted the world…the point is to change it – Karl Marx should give another taster at their lyrical content which also mentions weighty lefty tomes. The majority of the song are two male vocalists, one lead; one backing with acoustic guitars. Occasionally other instruments and backing singers pop up. But it should certainly be a more accessible punk album to those who don’t normally listen to the genre or it’s millions of sub-genres.

The album opens with the lines Homophobes are terrified to admit that during their lives there have been moments where they’ve wavered in their minds on the track heterosexuality is a construct. It fills you with incredible hope to be a straight male in a crowd of 90% straight males singing along to I’m not a heterosexual man, I’m not ticking your boxes, that’s not who I am and love is not a crime. To quote a recent comment on Twitter Yes, I support gay rights. No, I’m not gay. I’m against deforestation and that doesn’t make me a tree.. These kinds of attitudes and behaviour are surely a massive step forward and something possible in the kind of space provided by Make that a take that you may not get in less socially conscious live music spaces. Normally punk/metal/alternative shows are filled with macho posturing men faux fighting with their male friends. Most times it’s fine but sometimes it can spill over into the rest of the crowd and drives everyone else to the back of the venue or out of the music scene altogether.

Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped should be listened to by anyone on the left.

We have nothing to lose but our chains…I’m just another naïve prole, with revolution on the mind, but I’d fight a line of riot police if it’d help to clear the sky…Melancholia and Marxism, this must be where I belong…I’d bomb the Royal Bank if it’d blow the clouds away

A song openly calling for revolution shouldn’t need much more comment.

The other essential track to hear is That Takes Ovaries. A call at arms for men to help smash patriarchy from our position of burden and privilege as something more productive [to do with] all that spare testosterone you have to throw around. A welcome addition to the discussions around feminism and patriarchy I’m sure you’ll agree.

The closing song I could carve a better man out of a banana tells the story of a female victim of domestic violence resorting to killing her abuser. she took a knife and drove it through his back with all the strength she had left – the first song the band ever recorded showing from the start they intended to set powerful political lyrics to tunes.

Author: Alan Graham

Jim Aitken is a regular contributor to Emancipation & Liberation. He has published several books of poetry. Here Mary MacGregor, also a teacher of English, reviews Jim’s Last Calendar of Events, which covers his last year of teaching.

“And I gave them ideals

and have held on to then still

a youthful spirit unbroken.”

On finishing Jim Aiken’s The Last Calendar of Events, there is no doubt in my mind that Jim Aitkin is a “youthful spirit unbroken”. Political integrity is a rare commodity especially in politicians but Jim’s book oozes with integrity and commitment, which is inspirational in its honesty and emotion. This is far more than a diary of a final year’s teaching; reminiscing in a dewy eyed fashion about decades of struggle and achievements. Nor is it just a polemic against the bureaucracy and box ticking which has defined teaching in the last few years. It is something much more important. It is a book about the complex relationship between a man and his life’s work. It is a monument to the fact that despite the brutalisation and alienation that capitalism throws at us, human beings are capable, through the very essence of their humanity, of living a life imbued with justice and compassion and are capable of sharing that with those around them.

I don’t remember ever meeting Jim Aitkin; never had a conversation with him; never watched him teach. But I know. I know that he has changed the lives of so many young people and colleagues over the years. His daily acts of revolution – passing on e-mails to staff on the economic inequalities of 21^st century Britain, bringing the relevance of the Arab Spring to disaffected school students, representing staff as a union rep, challenging trade union bureaucrats – show not only what needs to be done but what has to be done. I have spent a lot of my life with people who talk the socialist talk but Jim walks the walk.  Through this diary, we have a tremendous insight into the ways so called “ordinary people” live and think and act in their daily lives in an unselfish and conscious way to try to improve the world we live in. That is part of the inspiration of this book, it shows that we can all further the cause of socialism in the here and now and we must not wait till the great revolution before we begin.

The style of the book is interesting. As a diary, we see the mundane juxtaposed against the huge geopolitical events of our time. We see the personal and the political inextricably intertwined. At times this could seem banal but instead, it makes the politics all the more profound and real. It is a style reminiscent in its power and application to Tom Leonard’s poetry.

The love that Jim feels for his family is palpable, particularly for his baby grandson Michael. Yet he links this love and concern to the need to maker a better world for them all. He dreads that education in its current form will knock the imagination and wonder out of Michael and process him like so many others: skills not imagination being the order of the day. This is no grey faced ranting lefty devoid of feeling and sentiment. This is a man who is not afraid to speak of love or his ill mum as well as speaking out against the Afghan war, the bombing of Libya or the trams in Edinburgh.

As he contemplates another union sell out, he still finds the joy of going out for a curry with his department and laughing and going to see a play. Thus, Jim’s humanity shines through. He does not lecture or scold – he is not that kind of a teacher – he gently allows us to form a picture of what is wrong with our society and how it can be put right.

There are great touches of humour in this book and I don’t think you have to be an English teacher to laugh out loud at his “lost scene from Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men”. I will be sharing this with colleagues and classes!

For me, the fact that he is so conflicted about his retirement is particularly relevant. I have only 5 years to go – if they don’t change the goalposts again! I recognise these mixed emotions, “Marx makes the distinction between working time and living time ……I should welcome the chance of living rather than working…. but my emotional part does not feel entirely like this.”

As teachers, we are very lucky that despite the undoubted ridiculous workload and educational nonsense imposed from on high, so many of us enjoy our jobs – the daily acts of rebellion when we can go off message and actually encourage young people to think! We have access to sensitive, sometimes damaged students who can with our intervention at times show creativity and insight, which defies the grey fog of capitalism. As the months progress, the retirement niggles then looms then eventually is embraced by Jim. But it is not a simple process. Sometimes on the left, we fail to recognise the complexity of our relationship with work. Jim talks about the work ethic that is so much part of his character. Rarely off sick, a sense of responsibility wanting to do the job well – so many of us have that schizophrenic relationship with a job that is often killing us. It will never be any different under capitalism which will squeeze every drop of productivity out of us but it is the wonderfully subversive act of remaining human which confounds the system completely and it is that which Jim exemplifies.

There is no doubt in my mind that with more time on his hands, we will see even more of Jim’s poetry and that his activism will continue in various forms. He just is that kind of man. He will not give up the fight. There are things that I disagree with Jim about particularly on the nature of young people now compared to back in the day. Maybe some time I will be lucky enough to have a blether with him about this. But until then, I will recommend his The Last Calendar of Events as a book, which shows what teaching should be about and what kind of future we should strive to create,

 

“Nothing short of changing the world,

was where I started and now end,

drying my face in the towel.

See Emancipation & Liberation interview with Jim Aitken at:-

http://republicancommunist.org/blog/2007/09/29/lyrical-delicacy-and-political-toughness/

 

 

The RCN discussed the forthcoming Scottish Independence Referendum at its Dundee aggregate on March 25^th. Papers were presented by Allan Armstrong, Eric Chester and Susan Dorazio. Allan and Susan presented general papers covering the principles behind any campaign for Scottish self-determination. Allan and Eric also provided papers with more immediate proposals.

The RCN also noted that other Socialists had already made contributions to this debate. Two articles in particular, by George Mackin and Gregor Gall, have been published on the new Frontline website.

We are publishing the papers presented to the RCN aggregate on this website, and also providing links to those on the Frontline website.

It was agreed that an independent Socialist campaign (e.g. Socialists for a Scottish Republic) needed to be launched, but that the question of how to vote in the referendum could be taken nearer to the event, when the balance of class forces involved became clearer.

 

_______________________________

 1. Thinking Through a Socialist Campaign

for Scottish Independence

All sides are bringing a sense of urgency to the task of organizing a campaign for a referendum on Scottish independence.  This is totally understandable for historical, political, and personal reasons.

However, I believe that it is in the best interest of the revolutionary Left to take time to consider a range of perspectives and strategies rather than getting caught up in the agenda, and the methods, of the corporate politicians in Westminster and Holyrood.  According to them, the terms of the debate are obvious and pretty much set.  Now it’s just up to the rest of us to find our place in it.

Fortunately, it’s not too late for the Scottish Left to seriously consider, debate, and eventually formulate our own position– one that enables us to engage in the independence campaign now, as well as to pave the way for what will undoubtedly be a long and intense struggle for a Socialist Scotland within a Socialist Europe.  To my mind, this would be a strategy that challenges an “up or down” vote,  and that sets in motion the principle of internationalism from below by viewing a movement for national self-determination as essentially a deep-seated drive for justice, democracy, and collective and individual liberation. Identification with other social movements also helps curtail political opportunism, whereby electoral activity becomes an end in itself.

The point of this strategy is to put a clear and direct light on what it should and could mean for Scotland to achieve independence in the 21^st Century.  Thus, a socialist referendum campaign would call for separate referenda on issues that are critical for the Scottish working class.  These include the monarchy, NATO, the EU, and the pound sterling.  At the same time, and just as important, is the task of working to create internationalism from below by honoring and acting on the deep connections– past and present– between the Scottish working class and that of England, Wales, and Ireland.

That is, our programme and tactics need to develop simultaneously from the collective processes of democracy and from the passion and idealism of a social movement.  This would be an electoral campaign based on a revolutionary analysis of capitalism, our socialist/communist principles, the history of social movements,  and the belief that a global democratic socialist society is possible.

We know that the question “Do you want an independent republican socialist Scotland?” will not be on the ballot in 2014.  For this very reason, an explicitly socialist position on the terms of independence that will be of long-term benefit to the Scottish working class should be the center-piece of  our programme and maintained throughout the campaign.  It may even necessitate a “no” vote if we get stuck with only an up-or-down option.  But how else can we keep alive our vision of socialism as an alternative to the failed economic and political system that  is bringing misery to so many lives world-wide and will continue to do so until we organize to replace it?

Lessons on the interplay between tactics for immediate gains and the yearning for freedom can be learned from such social movements as those for woman’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery, the formation of trade unions, civil rights, gay rights, women’s liberation, and abortion rights.  In all these cases, human rights and liberation from oppression propelled the development of these movements, in spite of the conflicts and divisions that occurred within them.  Indeed, their strength lay in opening the terrain for discussion and debate. Such needs to be the case with Scottish independence as we find ways to be a strong voice for revolutionary socialism within the array of positions and proposals.

In short, I think that the essence of this short- and long-term project for national self-determination is the necessity for linking up democratic electoral processes with liberation consciousness.

 

Susan Dorazio, 15.3.12

 ___________________________________

2.    A Socialist Strategy for the Scottish Democratic Movement

The historical background

1.            The UK was formed as, and remains, an imperial and unionist state with substantial anti-democratic Crown Powers. One feature of these is the constitutional denial of the right of self-determination to the UK’s constituent nations – partitioned Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England. These powers give the British ruing class and its supporters considerable leeway to resort to extra-constitutional methods to suppress any national democratic movements.

2.             Since the decline of the UK as an independent imperialist power after World War 2, the British ruling class has sought to maintain its position in the world as a junior partner to US imperialism. The UK state is NATO’s most reliable member. As a result of this commitment, the UK has a particularly bloated military budget, a continued commitment to nuclear weapons, and has been involved in almost continuous imperial wars.

3.            The period of British imperial decline began after the First World War, became more apparent after the Second World War, and accelerated from the late 1950’s. With British imperialism acting as the ‘glue’ which held the British state together, this decline has led to the rise of national democratic movements seeking self-determination for each of the UK’s constituent nations. These movements combine politics, economics and culture. They enjoy a support wider than any one particular party.

4.            In Scotland, the struggle to lead the national democratic movement has largely been fought for between the social democratic Labour Party and the populist  SNP. Socialists have only played an episodic role, more often confining themselves to cheering on either the liberal unionists or constitutional nationalists, i.e. acting as Left unionists or Left nationalists.

5.            In the mid-1970’s, old Labour, with STUC prompting, moved to adopt a liberal unionist policy of Scottish devolution within the UK. Labour claimed that Scottish self-determination could be exercised within the Union. Labour’s policy was then linked to a defence or an extension of the welfare state, in order to retain working class support.

6.            However, Labour’s first attempt to lead the Scottish democratic movement was seen off when a decisive majority of the British ruling class moved sharply against their earlier tentative support for political devolution (recommended by the Kilbrandon Commission) in the late 1970’s. They successfully split the Labour Government and Party, and defeated the move to limited self-determination represented by the 1979 Scottish devolution proposals. This ushered in a period of conservative unionist reaction, linked to a greatly stepped up offensive against the working class under Thatcher.

7.            It was only with the resurgence of national movements in the 1980’s (beginning in partitioned Ireland during the Hunger Strikes, and extending to Scotland after the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign), and the renewed national democratic challenges faced by the UK state, that the majority of the British ruling class moved to supporting political devolution (liberal unionism) once more. This process was begun under the Tories with the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, but they refused to extend this to Scotland or Wales (confining themselves here to administrative and cultural devolutionary measures).

8.            Blair’s New Labour Party produced the successful liberal unionist political formula for UK constitutional reform with ‘devolution-all-round’. With ruling class backing and the trade union leaders securely subordinated to the government and employers under ‘social partnerships’, New Labour was able to deliver in the 1998 devolution referenda in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In Scotland, Labour leader, Donald Dewar came up with ‘Independence within the UK’ to counter the SNP’s policy of  ‘Independence in Europe’. However, this was no longer tied to any traditional social democratic vision of a strengthened welfare state (old Labour), but to ‘neo-liberalism with a human face’, i.e. promises of less brutal ‘modernisation’ (counter-reforms) than the Tories. This was coupled to a few isolated reforms, e.g. abolition of Section 28 and Highland land reform.

9.            Between 1997 and 2010, New Labour presided over a neo-liberal offensive of accelerating counter-reforms and increased resort to imperial wars. This undermined Labour’s traditional social democratic, working class electoral base. By 2007, New Labour had lost its position at the head of the Scottish democratic movement.

10.            At the time of  its limited resurgence in the late 1960’s, the old SNP advocated political independence in a form that would be recognised by the UN. They were opposed to rule from either Westminster or Brussels. This was linked to their pro-small business economic policies. They also advocated some social democratic-style policies, albeit more limited than those of old Labour, who termed the SNP ‘Tartan Tories’ and anti-Catholic. This meant that the SNP only developed a weak presence in most traditional working class areas, especially in Glasgow. They found their main support in small town Scotland outside the Central Belt.

11.            A more social democratic Left emerged (the 79 Group) within the SNP, which tried to build the party’s support in Labour’s traditional heartlands. They switched the SNP to a support for  ‘Independence in Europe’, and raised clearer social democratic demands. The SNP began to make some advances at the cost of Labour (particularly during the Anti-Poll Tax campaign, marked by Jim Sillars’ by-election win in Govan in 1988).

12.            The SNP tried to compete with Labour for leadership of the Scottish democratic movement. After failing to get the Scottish Constitutional Convention to adopt the SNP’s independence proposal as an additional option in a future referendum, they eventually ended up as pressure group for New Labour’s proposals. They supported a ‘Yes’ vote in the 1997 Scottish devolution referendum. (In this respect they acted a bit like the Broad Lefts pressuring trade union bureaucracies to beef up, implement, or not retreat from their official policies).

13.            From the late 1980’s, and particularly under Salmond’s (ex-79 Group) leadership, as New Labour increasingly ditched what remained of its social democratic, welfare state commitments, the SNP was able to move on to the electoral terrain they had abandoned. Like New Labour, the SNP’s main commitment is to ‘modernisation’ (counter-reforms in the interest of big business). Their prime orientation is to win over key elements of the Scottish establishment, and hopefully global corporate backers. However, the SNP has also selected a few social democratic economic policies, e.g. free prescriptions, opposition to university fees, which has enabled them to position themselves (through the process of triangulation) to win over ex-Labour voters.

14.            In order to win over Scottish establishment and corporate business backing, the SNP began to redefine Scottish self-determination as ‘Independence-Lite’. This meant the acceptance of the Crown Powers (supporting the monarchy) the power of the City of London (keeping the pound) and the British High Command (Scottish regiments to remain part of a shared British Army). In effect, the SNP had moved to Scottish Labour’s old (but now rejected) ‘Independence in the UK’ stance. This accommodation may be further accentuated by the SNP leaders’ links with Scottish bankers from British banks with HQs located in Scotland (RBoS, BoS), and the current crisis facing the euro. The SNP has also promoted policies to attract the global corporations (e.g. cuts in corporate taxation) and appeals to ‘maverick’ businessmen, e.g. Brian Souter, Donald Trump and now Rupert Murdoch.  They have also taken social positions to the right (triangulation once more) of New Labour on abortion and gay rights, hoping to win over the support of the influential Catholic hierarchy (who earlier had been decidedly hostile), whilst making similar overtures towards socially conservative Muslim bodies (amongst whose older representatives, Labour had once enjoyed much support before the Iraq War.)

15.            The SNP leadership has indicated its willingness to accept ‘Devolution-Max’ as a ‘down payment’. The SNP’s wannabe Scottish ruling class backers recognise the declining power of the UK and British imperialism. They are prepared to bide their time to inherit ‘their just desserts’. The last thing they want though is any mass action. This would upset their cosy relationship with elements of big business and the Scottish establishment. The SNP leadership fully accepts the current global economic order, i.e. corporate capitalism, and the necessity for austerity measures to prop it up.  They want the continuation of most of the features of the UK state, only with ‘a good lick of tartan paint’, i.e. a ‘Scottish Free State’ in a similar position to the post-Civil War, Irish Free State (but without the preceding republican phase!)

16.             With the current decline of US and British imperial power, these states’ respective ruling classes do not want any of the uncertainties opened up by a wider Scottish democratic movement making its’ voice heard (e.g. challenges to continued imperial wars, NATO and nuclear bases, the UK’s status on the UN Security Council, or to the ‘necessity’ for the sternest austerity measures). Therefore, as in 1979 (but only more so), the British ruling class currently opposes the limited self-determination proposals on offer – Devolution then, ‘Independence-Lite’ now. It will use all the required constitutional and extra-constitutional methods at its disposal under the Crown Powers to ensure that the SNP’s proposals are blocked. The current ineptitude of the unionists parties’ public counter attacks on the SNP will only ensure that the British ruling class is more likely to resort to the hidden measures at its disposal under the Crown Powers to get its way. They will also find allies in the governments (and states) of the US, and probably the EU (although this could change if divisions between British and European finance capital open up further).

17.            The first time that Socialists were visibly competing to lead the Scottish democratic movement was after 1919, during the 1916-21 International Revolutionary Wave. John Maclean went on to champion a Scottish Workers Republican ‘break up the UK and British Empire’ strategy as part of the wider international communist challenge. He took his inspiration from the wider Irish democratic movement’s challenge to the UK state, and the political legacy of James Connolly. The defeat of the International Revolutionary Wave after Kronstadt in 1921, the Anglo-Irish Treaty (with its acceptance of Partition) of 1922, and the Irish Civil War (1922-3), coupled to Maclean’s own death in 1923, ended this Socialist challenge for leadership of the Scottish democratic movement.

18.            The marginalisation of this Socialist challenge led to the British Left (both official CPGB and the social democratic ILP), including its Scottish, Welsh (and for some, its Northern Irish) components, championing a ‘British road to socialism’. They largely accepted the existing unionist state as the framework for implementing their socio-economic strategy. Thus, whenever national democratic movements arose, the British Left tail-ended others’ constitutional proposals. Some supported liberal unionist measures (devolution); whilst others supported the constitutional status quo, i.e. they acted as conservative unionists. Both wings of the British Left sought to maintain a British state.

19.            The next time Socialists began to compete for the leadership of the Scottish democratic movement was between 1998-2004, with the rise of the SSP. The SSP took substantial support away from the SNP at this time. An internal debate occurred in the SSP over whether to tail-end the SNP (Left nationalism), or to mount an independent campaign (Socialist republicanism).  The highpoint  of this challenge occurred in 2004 with the Declaration of Calton Hill and its associated demonstration.

20.            The split in, and the decline of, the SSP has had the effect of fully handing over the leadership of the Scottish democratic movement to the SNP. This is also             accentuated, at present, by New Labour’s refusal to advocate meaningful liberal unionist reform – ‘Devolution-Max’. They prefer to get into bed with the Tories in a conservative unionist anti-SNP alliance. As a result of the parliamentary majority gained in the 2011 Holyrood election, the SNP leadership is now in the position of being able to put forward its version of Scottish self-determination for the 2014 ‘Independence’ Referendum (‘Independence Lite’ – with or without the additional option of either ‘Devo-Max’, or the even more limited ‘Devo-Plus’).

21.            At present, Socialists, and a still relatively quiescent working class, are not in a position to determine or significantly influence the course of events. This means that we are unable, with the present balance of class forces, to amend the terms of the forthcoming ‘Independence’ referendum.  Therefore the  battle is currently confined to whether the referendum offers only an ‘Independence-Lite’ option, or whether this is supplemented by either a ‘Devo-Max’ or a ‘Devo-Plus’ option. The option of a genuinely politically independent Scotland, i.e. a Republic (i.e. no Crown Powers), is not one of the referendum choices.

22.            As long as the unionists maintain their united conservative approach, the greater their opposition (Tory, Lib-Dem, Labour, Ulster Unionists, BNP), the more the SNP’s own ‘independence’ proposals will be associated with the desire for greater self-determination in the eyes of the wider Scottish democratic movement. We are currently in a 1979 (strong British ruling class opposition), not a 1997 referendum (strong British ruling class support) situation.  A defeat inflicted by the unionists, even for these very mild proposals would, as in 1979, produce a further rightward shift in politics in Scotland and the rest of the UK. One effect of this would be a further ratcheting up of the anti-working class austerity offensive, and an even greater willingness to get involved in imperial wars. Any Socialist group that was seen to have contributed to this situation by recommending either a ‘No’ vote or abstention, would likely become even more marginalised.

23.             A useful analogy would be the 2011 November 30^th strike. Any genuine Socialist could see that the prime reason why the public sector trade union bureaucracies organised this strike was- a) to provide some immediate pressure to be readmitted to the ‘corridors of power’ to negotiate another shabby deal (e.g. TUC, UNISON leaderships), or b) to make fighting talk to jockey for position (e.g. the PCS) and increased membership (e.g. the EIS), by holding out until others capitulated, but then climbing down saying they have been let down by others. Logically, if Socialists had adopted such a narrow political focus, their pre-strike ballot recommendation would have either to vote ‘No’ or to abstain, rather than be led into action (then inaction) by this  group of ‘posers’. However, this would be to ignore the prior widespread demand and support amongst trade unionists for a real fight back on pensions. It was therefore important to relate to this by recommending a massive ‘Yes’ vote to make this politically visible. Three million strikers showed there was a potential movement to take on the politicians’ (of all parties) and bosses’ austerity offensive.

24.            However, there were then two additional options – a) the Broad Left (machine constitutional) approach of pressuring the same bureaucrats to take more action, i.e. ‘push them Left’, or b) the Rank and File (‘industrial republican’) approach of trying to develop independent action and take the leadership out of the hands of these bureaucrats.

25.            By analogy, there is also a wider Scottish democratic movement pressing for greater self-determination. It is opposed to the British ruling class and UK state’s current clampdown. Not to become engaged in such a campaign would reflect a position of irrelevance, and would amount to abstention from the wider Scottish democratic movement in its struggle for greater self-determination.

 

Allan Armstrong, 17.3.12

 ________________________________________

 

 3.    Outline of a Policy on the

Scottish Independence Referendum

 

1.   Neither option that is likely to be available on the 2014 referendum is one that we as socialists can vote for as a meaningful step toward a genuinely independent Scottish republic. Devo-max would still leave critical decisions in the hands of Westminster. The limited form of “independence” being proposed by the SNP would still leave Scotland tied to the UK, in terms of the monarchy and, at least immediately, in terms of the currency, while also leaving Scotland tied to U.S. imperialism through NATO and the military bases. It will leave Scotland tied to the EU, in terms of budget decisions and, in the long-run, currency.

2.   We can not urge others to vote for either option. This means that we will not participate in coalitions and organizations that seek to mobilize people to vote for the independence option on the referendum, even if the coalition is critical of the SNP’s perspective.

3.   Given these unacceptable options, we will spoil our ballots, perhaps writing “Yes to an Independent Scottish Socialist Republic.”

4.   If the Left were stronger, we would urge voters to boycott the referendum. Instead, we will emphasize the total inadequacy of the options being offered and organize pressure for further referendums on the monarchy, NATO and military bases, the EU and the currency.

5.  We will also present our vision of an independent Scotland, presenting a positive vision to the pro-business tax haven perspective of the SNP.

 

Eric Chester, March, 2012

 

__________________________________

 4.  Some Proposals for Socialists working in

the Scottish Democratic movement.

 

A.            The first requirement is for Socialists to create a united front organisation of  Socialists, independent of the SNP and the Scottish Independence Convention (the scope and timing of its activities are determined by the SNP leadership) -  e.g. Socialists for a Scottish Republic. This can raise the voice of Socialists and the working class in the wider Scottish democratic movement, and make a  bid to take the lead. This would mean a campaign to demonstrate the limitations of the SNP’s constitutional nationalist, ‘Independence-Lite’  proposals, and any liberal unionist (Labour Party, STUC) ‘Devolution-Max’ or ‘Devolution-Plus’ proposals (if these ever emerge as a serious option).  Furthermore, if things start to get nasty and the UK state resorts to the  repressive measures at its disposal under the Crown Powers, it will need committed republicans to lead the type of defiance the SNP leadership will shy away from.

B.            Such a campaign should be linked with, and brought into those struggles being fought against exploitation (e.g. against the current austerity drive) and             oppression (e.g. women and gays fighting against discrimination; and the ending of religious interference in state bodies such as education and health). Salmond’s big business backers do not shy away from class conflict (Sir Tom Farmer’s support for the Con-Dems’ imposed austerity drive) or from reactionary measures (Brian Souter’s homophobic campaigns),  since they want to shape a future Scotland in their interests now – and  possession is nine parts of the law. If we want to see a very different Scotland, then we must be involved in class struggles during the independence campaign against the SNP’s big business and other reactionary backers.

C.            Socialists should also actively seek support from those involved in the Scottish  cultural arena. The rhythms of cultural contestation are not so directly tied to those of the socio-economic struggle, and often anticipate later political upturns (e.g. the post-1979 referendum upsurge in radical Scottish cultural activity, which preceded the support for greater Scottish self-determination from the late 1980’s). The cultural arena currently forms the most vibrant section of the wider Scottish democratic movement.

D.            Socialists should fight on an ‘internationalism from below’ basis, by taking the campaign into England, Ireland and Wales. The SNP leadership has its own ‘internationalism from above’ links. They support the British Crown, British bankers, and global corporate executives – to name but a few. The  break-up of the UK and the US/British imperialist alliance is in the interests, not only of the working class across these islands, but across the world.

E.            Furthermore, the Euro-banker-dominated Council of Ministers and European Central Bank are taking on an increasingly imperial role, most obviously in Greece.  Attempts are being made to blackmail nationally based working class resistance and threaten workers with complete economic marginalisation, if they do not bow to the Euro-bankers’ demands. Therefore, the aim of any successful ‘break-up of the UK state’ campaign is not to fall in behind the current EU leadership (or to become cannon-fodder in a fight between the British bankers of the City and those of the EU, especially Frankfurt), but to link up with Socialists in the other European countries, to offer an ‘internationalism from  below’ European-wide Socialist perspective.

F.            How we vote on the day of the Scottish ‘independence’ referendum will be determined by the political weight Socialists and the wider working class can bring to bear in the Scottish democratic movement. The aim would be to take the lead in the struggle for greater self-determination from the SNP, particularly in a situation when its leadership falters in the face of a British ruling class resort to its Crown Powers. This would then mean by-passing the existing Holyrood parliament (which under the Crown Powers has its sovereignty lying in Westminster, and is effectively controlled by the UK state) and pushing for a Constitutional Convention, independent of such direct political constraints. However, to arrive at this situation there would need to be large scale independent working class action, prepared to defy the current British ruing class’s austerity drive and its other reactionary policies (e.g. continued participation in imperial wars), and hence confident about being able to force its own proposals for the exercise of Scottish self-determination on to the political agenda.

G.            If, however, the effective leadership of the Scottish democratic movement remains in SNP leadership hands, then a tactical ‘Yes’ vote would likely be needed in the 2014 ‘Independence’ referendum. This would be the only form of greater self-determination on offer (as in 1979) to head off a stepped up British unionist/imperialist and employer offensive. (To use an analogy from the field of trade union struggle -  if you are unable to win the £20 pay rise you originally demanded and fought for, then you might have to settle for a £2 pay rise, especially if the alternative is either nothing or a pay cut!) This is an important argument against adopting an abstentionist position as a principle.

H.            There will be a division amongst others on the Left in Scotland between those arguing for a Left nationalist political strategy of pressuring the SNP (political ‘Broad Left strategy) and those arguing for a Socialist republican (political Rank and File) strategy to take the Scottish democratic movement out of the hands of the SNP (a political ‘Rank and File’ strategy). Given the currently low state of working  class opposition, this latter strategy may appear very ambitious.  However, we  saw the collapse and despair of those in the Scottish democratic movement,  who staked all on backing Labour’s 1979 devolution referendum proposals for the exercise of Scottish self-determination, after they failed. The current SNP proposals are also doomed to disappoint, whether before or after the first hurdle of the 2014 ‘Independence’ referendum. To avoid a repeat of the wider political demoralisation in Scotland after 1979, it is vital that an organisation like Socialists for a Scottish Republic has developed a big enough presence that the more conscious can turn to it when the SNP falters and fails to deliver.

Socialists need to become active contenders for the leadership of the Scottish democratic movement.

 

Allan Armstrong, 17.3.12

 _________________________________

 

From Frontline

 

14 points to consider for the 2014 referendum

 George Mackin considers the approach the left should take to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence.

http://redflag.org.uk/wp/?p=99

 

For a socially just Scotland

Gregor Gall looks at what a socially just Scotland would look like and how that differs from the vision of the Scottish National Party.

http://redflag.org.uk/wp/?p=51

_________________________________

 

Other articles, which have already been published on this website and are relevant to the wider debate can be found at:-

 

http://republicancommunist.org/blog/2012/01/11/internationalism-from-below-2/

 

http://republicancommunist.org/blog/2011/05/27/after-may-5th-a-looming-constitutional-crisis/

 

 

 

Emancipation & Liberation is cited a few times in Gregor Gall’s new book Tommy Sheridan: From Hero to Zero? A political biography..

We have pulled together these cited articles in links here for anyone who is using the book for such purposes.

Page and note numbers refer to the first edition hardback edition (these may change in future printings).

P144, note 76

Meantime, the SSP Republican Communist Network platform also deduced Tommy was beginning to become a ‘celebrity populist politician’ with rightward moving tendencies.

A. Armstrong, The Sheridan Perjury Trial (article not yet online)

A. Armstrong A critique and exposure of Tommy Sheridan’s Daily Record and The SSP has reached the crossroad ‘manifestoes’

P174, note 92
[McCombes said the minute was a concoction] as did elsewhere the SSP Republican Communist Network platform

A. Armstrong, The Sheridan Perjury Trial (article not yet online)

P336, note 56

Mary McGregor’s review of DTTSS in Emancipation & Liberation.. also raises some issues concerning the SSP leadership’s culpability in developing the Tommy persona.

M. McGregor Mary McGregor reviews ‘Downfall: The Tommy Sheridan Story’, by Alan McCombes

The following review of From Davitt to Connolly: ‘Internationalism from Below’ and the Challenge to the U.K. State and British Empire 1879 – 1895 appears in Issue 20 of Permanent Revolution

Allan Armstrong, From Davitt to Connolly: ‘Internationalism from Below’ and the Challenge to the U.K. State and British Empire 1879 – 1895 (Intfrobel Publications 2010). Paperback. 205pp. £7.99

This book is a valuable addition to the literature on the history of the labour movement in the UK in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century. It focusses on the political career of Michael Davitt, sometime Fenian and subsequently independent radical, who, as the author explains, constitutes a bridge between that earlier Irish movement, which was, as Marx and Engels observed, a lower orders one, and James Connolly’s Irish Socialist Republican Party, founded in 1896.

In passing the book has some interesting reflexions on Charles Stewart Parnell, Keir Hardie and David Lloyd George, among others. It also situates the whole march of events in the context of British imperialism’s politics moving from the advocacy of free trade to what the author calls high imperialism —Rudyard Kipling could be taken as a representative spokesman of the latter, but one could also instance Cecil Rhodes, Joseph Chamberlain and a number of other prominent personalities.

Allan Armstrong appears to be a member of the Scottish Socialist Party. This impression derives from his attacks on, inter alia, the Left unionist tradition. The comrade writes, In particular, the SWP, Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and the CPGB – Weekly Worker brought this tradition into the SSP. Those remaining in the CWI, forming the International Socialists, adopted a Left nationalist approach on paper towards Scotland, but remained essentially left unionists in practice. …Today, after a major internal crisis [l’Affaire Tommy Sheridan], both the SSP and the breakaway Solidarity face strong pulls in the form of Left nationalism and Left unionism, accompanied by tendencies to populism. Socialist Republicanism remains a significant force only in the SSP. (pp. 18-19).

Perhaps because the work is a historical one, we are not given a characterization of what Allan Armstrong understands by socialist republicanism. However, reading between the lines, it would appear to consist in a political project aiming at the destruction of the British state and its replacement by socialist republics in Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales.

Far more important than what the book doesn’t say, however, is what it says. Particularly valuable is the picture of Michael Davitt which emerges. It is easy to dismiss Davitt as a political operator active on the Irish stage only. Such an evaluation is miles away from the truth. The Irish Free State in its early years was keen to promote this travesty: it issued a commemorative stamp honouring Davitt as one of the national heroes but was silent about his radicalism.

Likewise the standard left-wing work in English on Irish nationalism, Erich Strauss’s Irish Nationalism and British Democracy, leads the reader to see Davitt as an Irish political figure pure and simple. What Armstrong documents in considerable detail is Davitt’s role as a radical operating not only in Ireland but also in England, Scotland and Wales, in pursuit of internationalism from below. In part this was forced on him by the pro-bourgeois influence exercised by Charles Stewart Parnell, who was anxious to distance himself from the aspirations of poorer tenant farmers, landless labourers and industrial workers in Ireland.

Parnell’s politics were tailored to the aims and objects of the strong farmers and the emergent Catholic Irish bourgeoisie (see pp. 31-2). Davitt’s strategy was, in principle, different, being a development from physical force Fenianism, expressed in the so-called New Departure, which took its inspiration from an earlier politician, James Fintan Lawlor (see p. 30 and Connolly’s Labour in Irish History). This involved militant action in support of tenant right in order to break the power of the landlords, a political campaign for Irish home rule and the clandestine importation of arms from America. Unfortunately Davitt was unable to bring this strategy to fruition—for an interesting criticism of his tactics see p. 42.

Parnell gained the upper hand, only to see his power destroyed by the revelations in the O’Shea divorce case (pp. 128-9). Davitt soldiered on, but he showed a propensity to ally with Lib-Lab politicians—e.g. by appearing on the same platform as the Welsh miners’ leader William Abraham (“Mabon”) (p. 82). The baton passed to James Connolly—see the final chapter of the book, which details the activities of the newly-formed Irish Socialist Republican Party.

This chapter, like the rest of the book, is excellent: it is marred only by an uncritical reference to Connolly outlining the role of primitive communism in Ireland up to the seventeenth century (p. 161). Alas, this view of Connolly’s finds no support at all in the Irish law tracts. The subject is ably discussed in Andy Johnston, James Larragy and Edward McWilliams, Connolly: A Marxist Analysis (Irish Workers’ Group, 1990).

The book contains a useful bibliography, an index and a fine selection of pictures, including one of the Liberal Irish Secretary William Buckshot Forster — so called because he advocated the use of buckshot rather than cartridges against those resisting eviction, on the grounds that it was more humanitarian (p. 50). There is even a picture of the notorious Captain Boycott—assuming one wants one.

This book is evidently part of a larger historical research project. The publishers advertise four volumes (available on line at http://www.internationalismfrombelow.com) for 2011:

1. The Historical Development of Nation-States and Nationalism up to 1848.
2. The World of Nation-States and Nationalism between the Communist League and the early Second International (1845 – 1895).
3. Revolutionary Social-Democracy, Nation-States and Nationalism in the Age of the Second International (1889 – 1916).
4. Communists, Nation-States and Nationalism during the International Revolutionary Wave of 1916-21.

If the quality of scholarship in these works turns out to be of the same high order as that in From Davitt to Connolly, then we are in for a treat.

Chris Gray

The RCN have set up an account on Twitter.

To follow us visit @RCNScotland

Around the Time of Aitken

Andy McPake reviews the latest book of poetry, Around the Time of Michael from Jim Aitken. Jim has become a regular contributor to Emancipation & Liberation, and he credits us in his preface.

Around the Time of Michael is Jim’s ninth published volume of poetry and, as the quote above suggests, a continuation of his exposé on the great injustices of our times. Throughout this collection, we sense Jim’s estrangement with a political consensus that he regards as perverse and inhumane. His inability to reconcile this with the beauty of the birth of his grandson and the natural & human worlds is the dichotomy that drives Aitken’s work. This dichotomy encapsulates The Time of Michael. Aitken gives this contradiction many forms: new life and old, the humane against the inhumane and the ignorant against the searching. All of these he perceives in our times.

Fear is the new industry
the base of our prosperity
where we manufacture consent
for all the new profits we make

Crusading against capitalism is nothing new to Aitken’s poetry, but in the past his work has mostly concerned the ravages of that economic system on the peoples of other shores. While Jim’s passion for the Palestinian cause can still be seen in poems such as White Pete, Aitken’s ire is now aimed towards immorality at home. The economic slump is being used as a smokescreen by right-wing politicians who are now implementing an ideological wish list that they have been fomenting for decades; all of which amounts to the dismantling of the welfare state. Caught in the midst of a clamour to return to Dickensian levels of inequality, Aitken castigates those who would create human waste.

There is a lot that Jim Aitken does not like about the modern world. However, anyone used to using the term modern in the academic sense knows that there are few more modern than Aitken. The influences of Yeats and MacDiarmid can be seen not only in the content of his poetry, but in the form, especially Krakow, Auschwitz and After. But Aitken is a modernist poet and thinker living in a post-modern world. His convictions are dismissed as ‘grand-narratives’ by a world that has become atomised and unsearching. Throughout much of the collection, we are given the sense that Jim feels that the good and decent values are dying. We see this in Mrs Lindley and Benny, a moving reminder of how dependent we are on one another.

This collection of contradictions deals not only with inhumanity, but with humanity. The only thing that can parallel Jim’s anger is the tenderness with which he describes those dear to him. Newly Arrived & Expectancy should appeal to anyone who has had the good fortune to have been a parent or grandparent. In Another Coredila, Aitken is forced to confront the fact that he is no longer the most important person in his daughter’s life. The poet’s awareness of his advancing age is most moving in Four Months On when a musing Aitken takes a moment to contrast the youth of Michael with his own image:

I have observed him observing
as current talk goes from teething
soon, crawling after, as I stare
into my own mirror shaving
and wishing to hold back the years

Perhaps Jim should remember that with age comes wisdom. The unjust world that Aitken despises is also an ignorant one. Nowhere is he more explicit about this than in The Return of Apasmara Purusha. Hindus believe that Apasmara represents ignorance; for Jim his return is heralded by a world that is cutting education for the sake of bankers’ bonuses.

Aitken searches for wisdom in many places and the collection draws on Buddhist as well as Hindu thinking. That search is undertaken by a dwindling few living in our convenience culture, a culture that disgusts Jim, moving him to parody it in The History of Searching. In this poem, he contrasts the philosophical endeavours of bygone ages with my own generation’s dependency on Google. Btw, if you do find any yourself unaware of a person or concept mention in Jim’s poetry I have one solution for you…

The Time of Michael is a contradictory one. What is consistent is the presence of hope. Aitken believes that the vicious world into which Michael is born is not the End of History, it is not natural. The collection is a balanced one and for every uncompromising exposition of injustice is a glimmer of hope for the world. When discussing the horrors of war and poverty he is neither morbid nor voyeuristic. Instead, every line implores us to fight back, to remember that another world is possible. The poet asks us to keep our focus on Michael because he represents the future; potentially a better one. Despite its attempts to pit us against each other, the capitalist system has yet to eviscerate all that is decent within people. Perhaps the better part of our nature might win out. Here’s to Michael.

Around the Time of Michael is published by Scottish CND and is available, price £5, from Wordpower Books (books@word-power.co.uk)

In Search Of Middle England

The political commentator said:
The new leader of New Labour
will just have to make himself
more acceptable to Middle England.’

Being a traveller, a geographer even,
I searched my atlas for Middle England.
I could find no such place so I wandered
around the post-industrial Midlands instead.

Without luck I wondered if my Scots ‘Hullo’
would be better if I tried the English ‘Hill-low’,
I tried it out. Got nowhere. Silence and laughter
met me in equal measure. Was there such a place ?

I thought maybe it all harked back to Tolkien
and his Middle Earth with all that business
about the Shires. I tried them out. Got nowhere
until some bloke whispered candidly in my ear :

‘Look Jock, there’s no such bleeding place.
Never was. It’s a huge con trick by the Beeb.
The perpetuation of a myth, that’s what it is.
It panders to an imperial past with all that stuff
about Rule Britannia and Johnny Foreigner.
You’ve got it up in Scotland too, mate.
It is designed to hold back real change to keep
all these creeps in power. Brainwashing clap-trap.
Yes, there’s toffs, but they’re few and we’re many.
Just get a load of it here. What’s great about this?
Reality is tough for people these days they believe it.
Need something to hold on to. Love the accent.’

Jim Aitken

Now I been lookin’ for a job but it’s hard to find
Down here there’s just winners and losers
And don’t get caught on the wrong side of that line

—Atlantic City, Bruce Springsteen

It was nearly three decades ago, in May 1981, that I first saw Bruce Springsteen (aka The Boss) in concert at the Playhouse in Edinburgh. Prior to the gig I had heard much about the energy of the performances that he created with the help of his backing group, the now legendary E Street Band.

I’d bought the records and I’d liked what I’d heard. Indeed, I had bought my first Springsteen records in 1973, when most of America didn’t know who he was. But could he truly replicate the energy of those pieces of vinyl live in concert and live up to the reputation for live performance that followed him around?

Back in the early ’80’s the music industry was, and let’s be honest, it still is an entity which thrives on a staple diet of hype, distortion and downright lies. Was the fuss surrounding Bruce Springsteen just one more piece of record industry bullshit, I wondered?

Thinking thus, it was with no small degree of trepidation that I approached the concert at the Playhouse. In the end I really shouldn’t have worried. Three-and-a-half hours after Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band took to the stage on that far-off evening they left it, cheered to the rafters. Hype this was not.

The man rocked!

And for the next three decades he has continued to rock.

Springsteen was born in New Jersey in 1949. After leaving school he played in various bands before being signed to CBS records by John Hammond, a music industry legend, having signed such talents as Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan to the label..

Springsteen’s first two albums, Greetings From Asbury Park and The Wild, The Innocent And The E-Street Shuffle were both critically acclaimed but they did not sell well, a situation which led to Springsteen becoming known as Hammond’s Folly at CBS.

The snipers at CBS had to bite on their own bullets, however, in 1975, with the release of his third album, Born To Run. It is one of the all-time classic rock albums. With its release, a critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful rock ‘n’ roll singer called Bruce Springsteen was catapulted into the big time. Such was the furore surrounding the release of Born To Run that he even appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek simultaneously.

However, just as it seemed he had made it all the way to rock super-stardom his career stalled as he became embroiled in a lengthy lawsuit with his former manager.

It would be 1978 before he would release his fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town. To promote his fifth album, The River, he undertook his first world tour in 1980/81.

By the end of that tour, including the aforementioned Edinburgh gig which I witnessed, he was being hailed as the new king of rock ‘n’ roll. But Bruce Springsteen was about to prove in a most remarkable way that there was more to him than just a good rock ‘n’ roll show and songs about fast cars.

Just as the rock world was proclaiming him the next big thing he seemed to turn his back on it all. Though he had been out on tour in the real world for a year and more, or maybe even because of it, when he returned to the United States he looked inwards at what was happening where he lived.

In 1982 he released Nebraska. It was the bravest artistic decision that Springsteen ever took. There was no band backing him, instead he presented to the world a largely solo acoustic album which took everyone by surprise.

On Nebraska the Spector-like wall of sound production, the sweeping cityscapes and wild romanticism in the music and lyrics of Born To Run are all gone, replaced by dark tales of characters sidelined by the USA of the early 1980’s and Reaganomics.

The record is populated by the misfits, the rejects and the unwanted of American society; they are characters who, sentenced by the system that they lived under and being possessed of no special talent were born to fail, excluded by birth from the American dream.

There’s a place out on the edge of town, sir,
Risin’ above the factories and the fields.
Now ever since I was a child I can remember
That mansion on the hill.

In the day you can see the children playing
On the road that leads to those gates of hardened steel,
Steel gates that completely surround, sir,
That mansion on the hill.

In many of Springsteen’s songs from the early to mid-1980’s the lyrics reflect the economic times that he lived in, and listening to the older recordings provides an insight into those times, allowing reflection on the ways in which the world has changed (or not, as the case may be) since those songs were originally written.

In 1980 Springsteen released his fifth album, The River. The title song opens thus,

I come from down in the valley where, mister, when you’re young,
They bring you up to do just like your daddy done.

OK, English teachers and grammatical perfectionists out there, take a minute to get over the verbal mangling at the end of that one. Then everyone take another minute to mull over what life was like in 1980 and compare it to what it is like now.

When The River was written back in 1979, many young people leaving school actually did follow in the footsteps of their fathers. If you were poor and working class being born in a mining community meant that being a miner was your likely fate.

Then there were the shipyards, the steel towns and in Dundee, my adopted home-town, generation after generation worked in the city’s jute mills, till after the second world war when some diversity of occupation was possible as many foreign companies located in the city.

But Dundee and many other cities throughout Scotland were about to find out that multinational companies and corporations investing in them was not done through any sense of altruism.

If you drive into Dundee from the north on the A92 and turn right at the Scott Fyfe circle on to Dundee’s inner ring road, the Kingsway, and proceed to drive its length to the other end at the Swallow circle, you will drive through an industrial graveyard.

Dotted along the five-and-a-half miles of the Kingsway are the sites of the post-war sunrise industries which located in Dundee — Timex Milton, ABB Nitran, Valentine’s, NCR, Timex Camperdown, Levis — each factory at one time a beacon of hope for a brighter future, but now all either vacant sites or shopping centres, each one now nothing more than a tombstone along the side of the road of Dundee’s forced march into globalisation.

A forced march into a world where capitalist multinationals in thrall to globalisation shipped jobs abroad to where the goods that they produced could be manufactured cheaper, a world where loyalty from international corporations to loyal work forces had no place as shareholders had to be satisfied and profits maximised.

Nitran, Valentine’s, NCR, Timex, Levis.

Some went easy.

Some went hard.

But in the end . . .

. . . they all went.

To this mix, add Dundee’s jute industry, fast approaching its death throes. By the time that Dundee’s industrial holocaust had burnt itself out swathes of its post-war housing schemes had become like ghettoes in some places as those who would once have found employment in those industries self-medicated themselves to temporary and repetitive oblivion with the drink or narcotic of their choice in order to escape the empty awfulness and lack of hope in their lives.

Maybe those jobs hadn’t been great, especially in the jute mills, but they had provided expectations among the young of Dundee of at least some kind of employment when they left school.

With that certainty gone they would no longer follow in the footsteps of their fathers, and their fathers before them. They would no longer be brought up to “do just like your daddy done.”

In the song My Hometown Springsteen observed,

Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more.
They’re closing down the textile mill
Across the railroad tracks,
Foreman says, “These jobs are going, boys,
And they ain’t coming back
To your hometown . . .

Springsteen may have been making observations about life in the United States, but the song found a sympathetic echo on the streets of Dundee.

Bruce Springsteen’s seventh album, Born In The USA was released in June 1984, a few months into the miners’ strike, Britain’s most bitter post-war industrial dispute, during which Thatcher unleashed the full force of the state to crush the miners.

Across the Atlantic her ideological soul mate, Ronald Reagan, was decimating American industry, and both had set the (wrecking) ball rolling on a course which would see car plants, steel mills and much of the manufacturing base destroyed.

Born In The USA was Springsteen’s most commercially successful record and all sorts of craziness followed its release as everyone jumped on the bandwagon, including Ronald Reagan, who was campaigning for re-election as president in 1984.

On a stop at Hammonton, New Jersey, he hijacked Springsteen for his own political ends as he told an invited audience, “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in the songs so many young Americans admire, New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”

It was several days before Springsteen responded to Reagan’s adoption of him. On stage on September 22, he told the audience, The president was mentioning my name the other day, and I kinda got to wondering what his favourite album musta been. I don’t think it was the Nebraska album. I don’t think he’s been listening to this one.

He launched into a song from the Nebraska album, Johnny 99, the protagonist of the song having lost his job when the local car plant had been shut down. In desperation he had been arrested for trying to commit a robbery. At his trial he tells the judge from the dock,

Now, judge, judge, I had debts
No honest man could pay.
The bank was holding my mortgage,
They were gonna take my house away.

Springsteen was to revisit the theme of de-industrialisation in his 1995 solo album, The Ghost Of Tom Joad, in particular on the song, Youngstown. It tells the tale of a young man who returns from war in Vietnam to a job in the steel industry in the town of Youngstown, Ohio.

Well, my daddy worked the furnaces,
Kept ’em hotter than hell,
I came home from ’Nam, worked my way to scarfer,
A job that’d suit the devil as well.
Taconite, coke and limestone
Fed my children and made my pay.
Them smokestacks reaching like the arms of God
Into a beautiful sky of soot and clay.

Someone worshipping a beautiful sky of soot and clay makes for an interesting situation for eco-socialists. Knowing as we do the effect of pumping vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, would we ourselves be forced to close down the coal mines and steel mills, even though they provided the very means of existence to many?

Surely the difference would be that we would handle any closures and subsequent redundancies made to protect the planet in a humane manner by creating jobs in renewable technologies for the out of work miners and steel workers.

For the record, I nearly wrote in a more humane manner in the previous paragraph, but stuck with humane manner instead. The word more is comparative and its use would have implied that there was some degree of humanity about Thatcher and her attitude to the miners and, indeed, the whole working class.

There wasn’t!

The central character of the song is another who went on to become someone who ended up going down the road of doing just like your daddy done. Like his father before him he has returned from war to a job in a vital industry.

But he will be the last of his family to do this. His children will not do just like your daddy done. The third verse of Youngstown is a mournful requiem for the steel mills of that Ohio town.

Well my daddy come on the Ohio works
When he came home from World War Two.
Now the yard’s just scrap and rubble.
He said, ‘Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do’.

Both he and his father had unquestioningly served the state well in time of war, but his father’s life and his own were worth nothing to American based multinational corporations in time of peace when they found somewhere that steel could be made cheaper.

With the release of Born In The USA in 1984 and the world tour which followed it, Springsteen became one of the biggest rock stars on the planet, but celebrity and fame posed for him the question that all international rock stars face with their vast wealth and jet set lifestyles. How do you stay in touch with where you came from?

Some don’t even try. Others preach about saving the world from the stage during their concerts, all the while moving their tax affairs offshore only to end up wondering why they still haven‘t found what they‘re looking for. It seems that Springsteen is at least aware of the dichotomy that exists in his situation.

Following a three-month world tour with Peter Gabriel, Sting, Tracy Chapman and Youssou N’door, sponsored by Amnesty International and promoting the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Springsteen split from the E-Street Band. It would be eleven years before they played together again in public.

Springsteen simply told the band that he would not be requiring their services for the foreseeable future, that he wanted time to pursue other ideas. He did, in fact, tour in 1992 with a new group of musicians, and in the song Better Days he bemoans the fact that

I took a piss at fortune’s sweet kiss,
It’s like eating caviar and dirt,
It’s a sad, funny ending to find yourself pretending,
A rich man in a poor man’s shirt.

Perhaps it is a dilemma with no resolution.

Twenty-nine-and-a-bit years on from that far-off night at the Playhouse in Edinburgh when I first saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert, so much has changed. The big industries in Scotland—the coal mines, the shipyards, the car plant, the steel mill—all now gone. Methil no more. Linwood no more. Ravenscraig no more. Ghosts that now only inhabit and haunt the memories of those of a certain age.

But yet, so much remains the same. Unemployment, war and poverty have not died. They are every bit as real now and every bit as awful as they were nearly three decades ago, the stench that follows capitalism around like some unshakeable bloodhound.

Regarding war, it must be said that Springsteen’s attitude towards his country’s foreign adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan could have been better. He toured Europe in the spring and summer of 2003 round about the time of the US (sorry, coalition) invasion of Iraq.

When he toured in 1988 he closed the first half of his shows with the Edwin Starr classic War flowing into Born In The USA. What a message he could have sent out with that ending to his 2003 shows. But it was absent. He did not come out against the war till much later. Neil Young, Steve Earle and the Dixie Chicks did it so much better.

Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?

— The River, Bruce Springsteen

Like a remake of a classic movie once more we are told that we are all in this together, as times of austerity forced upon us by a failed ideology threaten to engulf us in a tsunami of redundancies and cuts to vital services.

Once again the rich elite who took the profits in the good times tell us that we must pay for their greed and folly in the bad times. And, as in any movie remake, only the actors have changed. The plot remains the same.

Those who would have had us believe that it was the end of boom and bust have been proved laughably wrong. Neither has the end of history arrived, for history is still being written, and though the hand that writes the story of our current times has previously written it on more than one occasion it seems never to tire of recording the same tale.

If ever there was a need for a new hand on the pen which writes the story it is now—and it is a need for a kinder, fairer hand, a hand that would write a happier ending for those who lack the naked greed and blind ambition which has brought us to our present pass.

Badlands, you’ve got to live them every day,
Let the broken hearts stand, that’s the price you’ve got to pay.
Keep pushing till it’s understood
And these badlands start treating us good.

Badlands, Bruce Springsteen.

Anyway, enough. On July 14 last year, I and 50,000 others turned up at the National Stadium in Glasgow to see Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band in concert. The question I asked myself prior to him hitting the stage was this. Here was a man just a few months short of his sixtieth birthday. Could he still hack it?

Thinking thus, it was with no small degree of trepidation that I approached the concert at Hampden Park. In the end I really shouldn’t have worried. Three hours after Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band took to the stage on that summer evening they left it, cheered to the rafters. The man still rocks!

I’m just a prisoner of rock ‘n’ roll.

—Bruce Springsteen.

‘Internationalism from Below’ and the challenge to the UK state and British Empire from 1879 – 1895

Launch on 19th November

Venue:

Word Power Books

43-45 West Nicolson Street
Edinburgh
EH8 9DB

For More details see Internationalism From Below

When I left school in 1975, Edwin Morgan had not yet pushed his way on to the syllabus for Higher or sixth year English. When I returned to school 4 years later as a student teacher, he was taught to all years and has stayed there for the best part of 30 years. When he died, it was the death of a man who had risen far beyond the crass commodification of mere celebrity; he was someone who had entered our cultural psyche and whose end left us feeling that an old friend had deserted us.

I know there are those who say that as communists we don’t have souls but he is part of whatever you want to call that bit deep inside me that represents my deepest expression of humanity, for shorthand’s sake my spirit. He got in there a number of years ago and won’t leave.

Poets don’t get to be celebrities – they are far too serious, pompous and self important for that. Except Edwin Morgan was none of these things. He was a man who could make you laugh out loud as well as weep for the plight of humanity. He had a notorious twinkle in his eye and well he should. His poetry was something of a trick played on the establishment. This is especially true in his earlier and I believe best and most powerful work. He wove a magic of language, which allowed poems of homosexual love to be taught in schools across Scotland. He took on the religious sectarianism of the central belt and pulled out of it a strange beauty, which left us perplexed at our sympathies. He produced work, which challenged our view of what poetry is, and he metaphysically linked the mundane and the divine.

His all-pervading sense of being a Scot did not limit his vision. He was so comfortable in that identity, it allowed him to be not just an internationalist but inter-galacticist in his sensibilities. Always willing to take on the perceived wisdom of the day, this became even more obvious when he came out about his sexuality and challenged the establishment head on with the twinkle in his eye gleaming ever brighter.

I have read, taught and loved his poetry for most of my adult life. I have included words from his poems as part of messages to those I have loved. I have quoted on numerous occasions lines which reveal the truth far more succinctly than my own words have power to show.

So where did it start for me? Well, I think I was handed a book and told to teach In the Snack-bar to a group of S4, O Grade pupils. At the same time, the book we used for S2 poetry contained The Computer’s First Christmas Card and I was supposed to help them to appreciate Morgan’s craft via concrete poetry. It was my first year as a teacher.

I must admit the Snack-bar was far more successful as I had no idea what to say about,

j o l l y b e r r y
m e r r y h o l l y

However, I knew what to say with the hunchback born, half paralysed. I was on firm ground about human indefatigability – until of course Morgan twists in the knife and condemns us all,

Dear Christ to be born for this!

Morgan continued to pull my crutches from me as I grew to know him more.
Glasgow Green with its moral ambiguities and shockingly explicit rape threw me into a spin until I felt something close to despair and then Trio fuelled me with the optimism that human beings can be divine in a way any made up deity is a mere shadow of,

(Yet not vanished, for in their arms they wind
the life of men and beasts, and music,
laughter ringing them round like a guard)

I love the fact that loads of Catholic or Calvinist teachers suddenly had a problem when they realised Strawberries or One Cigarette was written to a male lover!

No smoke without you, my fire.

Still today, I have heard The Apple’s Song taught to a class as if it is a poem about APPLES!

hold me, sniff me, peel me

I had thought that kind of dishonesty in teaching was a thing of the past but no, stupidity reigns in the classroom, not amongst the pupils but amongst the teachers. King Billy for me is a highly political poem about how poverty and sectarianism divides the Scottish working class. It reveals an understanding of how we can do terrible things to each other as we have been brutalised by capitalism. But still beneath the brutalisation, there is an expression of the overpowering desire for a better life. Morgan understands the meaning of non-judgemental. He does not glorify violence but he understands that just tutting at it will not bring about its end. Causes have to be addressed,

Deplore what is to be deplored,
and then find out the rest.

He pleads with us to get off our moral high horses and understand why people behave the way they do.

In recent years, it could be argued that Morgan has become more political in his work. I would argue that he has always been so but clearly he is more explicit in his later poems.

Who could fail to love his polemic against Cardinal Winning over Section 28? The audacity to address the old bigot in the voice of God: it’s fabulous,

God said to Winning: “You are not.
Winning, I mean.

He goes on to say that Winning and his lot would be excluded from a place in heaven due to more worthwhile contenders like Alan Turing. Turing was a famous mathematician, and code cracker during World War Two. The state however decided in 1952 that his homosexuality was a crime and chemically castrated him. He committed suicide 2 years later. To suggest that Turing would be more fitted to heaven than members of the Catholic establishment presses so many taboo buttons – it is pure genius.
By the time the Scottish Parliament was opened, Morgan was the Scottish Poet Laureate or Makar (not a term Morgan liked as he felt it was too set in the past). His poem for the Queen’s opening of the Scottish parliament characteristically pulls no punches. He is firmly a democrat and believes parliament should be for the people,

And when you are there, down there, in the midst of things,
not set upon a hill with your nose in the air,
This is where you know your parliament should be

Rather than fawning on the politicians who were self satisfied with the limited parliament it is, he warns them against a lack of honesty and a lack of courage,

We give you our consent to govern, don’t pocket it and ride away.
We give you our deepest dearest wish to govern well, don’t say we
Have no mandate to be so bold.

Sadly and predictably, since the loss of the 6 SSP MSPs, we have seen no boldness in the parliament and no signs that it a place of illumination and inspiration where,

…Light of the day shine in; light of the mind shine out!

In an act of solidarity with all true democrats, while his poem was being read out before the Queen, he publicly signed and backed The Declaration of Calton Hill. The 450-word declaration was the brainchild of the Scottish Socialist Party and calls unequivocally for an independent Scottish republic built on the principles of liberty, equality, diversity and solidarity.

Right to the end, Morgan knew which side he was on. A Scottish republican and a poetic genius – what’s not to love?

And love him I do as will generations of young people who struggle to find meaning in poetry but find an echo in Morgan’s work that they can relate to. As will generations of lovers who will find his breathless poetry captures their passion and desires. As will generations of socialists and communists who will recognise a rebel when they hear one.