CRY “GOD FOR HARRY, ENGLAND AND ST GEORGE”
A lecture delivered by Rt. Hon. John Denham MP
Tonight I want to discuss England and Englishness.
And how we develop and celebrate a modern English identity.
And I want to do this from a particular point of view: from a political centre-left perspective.
It’s quite a long time, thank goodness, since it was the discussion of identity was outside polite political debate on the left.
But still important to set the context in which we look at identity.
Because I do think that the centre left should have a particular view on the nature and importance of identity; and I do think there are particular reasons why the centre left should take the issue seriously.
Politics is very much about who we are – as individuals, families and a society.
For all the effort poured into dividing lines about this or that piece of detailed or technical policy, the next election will be determined by which party has the most convincing story about our society and our country.
Who has the most convincing tale about where we have come from: and the most positive and optimistic story about where we go next.
These stories work because we have a sense of who we are; what our society represents.
Put a different way, people ask politicians to pass the ‘people like us’ test. Would this person, in power, and faced with an unexpected decision do what I would want them to do.
Again, in part the answer will be determined by voter’s sense of their character, and their policy instincts. But in part by their sense of identity. Is this someone I can identify with?
So the politics of identity is central to politics itself.
Any politics which does not concern itself with who we think we are is not likely to be as successful as it could be.
At its worst, though, the politics of identity can be collapsed into crude flag wrapping. Politician cloaking themselves in a national banner. Or to identify themselves as representing the national interest. We saw a particularly uncomfortable and unsettling version of that in Brighton on Sunday,
For the left, this can never do. A deep sense of patriotism and national allegiance does not and cannot blind us to the ambiguities we find in many national stories. A sense of Britishness derived solely from attitudes which were widely held in the British past would make uncomfortable reading today. National pride was intertwined with a sense of racial superiority which no decent person would contemplate today.
This recognition tends to divide left from right. The right tends to see national identity as a historical given; something to be discovered in our history.
The left, by contrast, prefers a sense of national identity which is constantly being told and re-told for changing times. One in which each generation can make its own new contribution.
That process, for us, is not only inevitable; it is desirable and necessary.
It does not reject history, Indeed it draws heavily on it. But it is inclusive, bringing in the history of all of those who now wish to share this identity. It understand that common identity is best developed through shared experience. It strengthens and brings cohesion to our society. Allowing us to enjoy the strength which comes from sharing a common story.
Two of the most potent stories in our history are of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. They speak deeply of two traits in both the British and the English national stories – the heroic national defeat; and standing alone against the world.
They are not, in my view, undermined by the more recent recognition that 2 and half million volunteers from the Indian Sub-Continent fought and were prepared to die in the Imperial armed forces in the Second World War. Rather, they are a new addition to the story of how our current freedom was won. It makes the family history many of today’s British Asian population a personal part of the national history in a new and richer way that many had realised before.
So for the left, the process of developing and celebrating a national identity is not passive; it is not one of research and discovery. But a living process; one which can be consciously shaped. One in which there are choices to be made.
As I shall argue a little later, the English national identity is the most neglected of the national identities of these islands. Less developed, and having had less effort invested in it, not only that of the national stories – most recently of Wales and Scotland – but also in the nationally focussed or nationally derived identities many of Britain’s newer communities.
This neglect is increasingly becoming a point of contention. One which we need to address.
But before developing that point, there are a couple of other diversions I want to make on this rather discursive preamble to Englishness itself.
You may have noticed that in the last few paragraphs I have referred both to British and English stories, and to nationally focused stories – like say British Bangladeshis – enjoyed by newer minority communities.
What this emphasises, of course, is that most of us are comfortable with multiple identities. It is quite possible to be English and British, to be a British Bangladeshi, or, as with my colleague Shahid Malik, a British Pakistani whose primary identity is English.
For the centre-left, identity is not about forcing a choice between competing identities, but enabling and encouraging people to be comfortable with a number of different identities if that’s how we chose to identify ourselves.
Of equal importance for the centre-left is our insistence on recognising people’s right to enjoy the identity people chose for themselves. We do not impose a ‘cricket test’.
Is there a contradiction here? Between recognising, encouraging and allowing multiple identities and the idea of a conscious, activist programme of developing a national identity – whether English or British?
Some would argue that once you recognise multiple identities, you enter a world of identity relativism – where because all identities are allowed, none should in any way be promoted or implicitly or explicitly favoured.
I don’t agree. That identity relativism turned out to the Achilles heel of one of Britain’s great social innovations, a real achievement – multiculturalism - which we, nonetheless, now have to re-assess. The problem of multi-culturalism was not its insistence on respect for those of different cultures, or of their freedoms to express themselves as they wish: it was the neglect of the glue that binds us together; it was the failure to recognise a multi-cultural society can only work if there is equal engagement and activity in building and developing shared values and the framework of a shared identity which enables us to be multicultural within a cohesive society.
So being relaxed about multiple identities, and multiple national identities, does not mean that it is not important to invest energy in developing a shared story of Britishness; and for those within England, a shared English identity. Not required, not compulsory, but shared as widely as possible.
My final diversion is to consider the role that national identities play in progressive politics.
As Gordon Brown has frequently said ‘This is a progressive era’.
Not that our era is automatically progressive; that people will unquestionably turn to progressive politics.
But that the challenges we face today, with global economic instability, climate change, the impact on personal risk and insecurity, the need for personal opportunity – all these factors require the a progressive philosophy an progressive policies.
In particular recognition that pursing the common good, working with active government is the only was to achieve what we need.
The art of turning the need for progressive politics into popular politics depends in embedding the progressive case in a particular time and case.
In other words, the case for progressive politics means very little as an abstract argument about values. It takes roots- indeed it only comes to life – if rooted in a story about how people with a common identity understand their history and their future.
Labour’s case for progressive politics must be more than simply saying – we are progressive, we have the right answers, choose us.
Labour’s case for progressive politics must be a way of saying that we are a vehicle through which the people of this country choose to take their country in a progressive direction.
Seen like this the 1997 election victory was not about Labour winning but about the people of Britain choosing to put behind them the selfishness, the neglect of the public realm, the abandonment of the public good which had characterised the Tories: and the people of Britain choosing to prioritise public services, the common good, the idea that we and our families would all do better in a society in which we all looked out for each other.
Seen like this, the choice for the next election is not about choosing Labour against the Tories, but about whether the people of this country choose to again to defend and recreate the public realm.
Whether we the people choose to put our national effort into re-shaping our economy. To rebuild consciously and deliberately an economy for the 21st century that is better balanced than in the past.
Whether we the people want to ensure that fairness will govern hard choices.
And whether we the people want to be confident that the internationalisms which is essential in the modern world is rooted in our national interest.
Labour’s message will work to the extent to which it is seen as the expression of a progressive politics, yes. But of a progressive politics which is at the same time, national, progressive and patriotic. About us and about the sort of country we want to be.
So identity politics will be one part of that national progressive and patriotic message for the coming general election.
But if it is, who is the ‘we’ that is the focus of a national progressive and patriotic politics.
At the most obvious, it is the people of Britain, the British people.
That umbrella identity is key to Labour’s view of Britain’s future. And there are many ways in which Britain, the Britishness, British values, British history and Britain’s future are the best way of expressing a national, progressive and patriotic message.
But it is not enough.
Labour introduced the devolution settlement because we recognised that within our commitment to the union and our commitment to Britain, it was right, desirable and necessary, to give real constitutional expression to the people of Wales and Scotland. Not because we wanted to undermine the union but because we believed that the union would be strengthened if national identity and national autonomy were recognised within the union.
That has been shown to be the right judgement.
But it leaves the question of where England and Englishness sits within any progressive, national and patriotic politics.
The case for Scottish and Welsh devolution recognised the positing of smaller nations within a political system which through sheer size England dominates within the overall politics of an unresolved union. That size means that there is no constitutional imperative for similar constitutional change.
But it does leave unresolved whether and how Englishness can and should be expressed within our national politics
The 2008 British Social Attitudes report found that people in England are substantially less likely to define themselves as British and more likely to assert an English identity than 15 years ago.
The British Social Attitudes survey has also asked people how they feel about the cross of St George.
Four out of five of the English population say that they feel a strong sense of belonging to England.
A wide range of surveys have found that people in England are more likely to see themselves as English than British – with many identifying as both.
Indeed, in recent years, I think we can point to three main trends in the development of interest in – and in the meaning of – Englishness.
First, there has been the rise in interest in Englishness itself.
I think there are two drivers of this.
The first is undoubtedly the success of the devolution settlement. Having spent almost my entire live living within a mile or two of the south coast of England I have never sought to pontificate on matters Scottish – though I do welcome the signs of the powerful support in Scotland for Labour’s belief that the best settlement is strong devolution within a strong union, and a rejection of separatism.
But I do know how things seem south of the border, or east of Wales. There is, beyond doubt, some envy for those who are able to express both their British identity and their Welsh or Scottish identity. Those who feel English ask increasingly whether their dual identity has a similar legitimacy.
The second driver is the recognition that some members of ethnic minority communities also express confidence in their dual identity, British and an identity of their community, related to the country of origin of them or increasingly their parents and grandparents. Where they ask, does this leave those who want to say we are English?
But if these have been the drivers of interest in Englishness, there have also been other significant changes. Not least in the idea – politically and culturally – of what it means to be English.
This summer during the World Cup, many English people of all ethnic origins will fly the St George’s Cross with pride. It was not always the case.
As Morrissey sang in Irish Blood, English heart ‘I’ve been dreaming of a time when to be English is not to be baneful: to be standing by the flag not feeling shameful, racist or partial’.
In the 1970s and 1980s many English people did not want to fly the flag for fear of being identified as a white nationalist racist. It is generally agreed that it was during the Euro 96 football tournament that this changed. That the flag was regained for everyone. This did not just happen, there was a concerted effort to regain our national flag for all our support and value our nation.
Today, few people who support our national teams in football, rugby, cricket, hockey or numerous other sports either expect or want to support an all white team. Today, Englishness is no longer a statement of ethnic identity but a shared identity of all those who feel English, whatever their identity and want to express their support for it.
In truth, of course, this change in public attitude is no more than bringing sentiment into line with history. Throughout the centuries, the English have been a polyglot nation, forever refreshed and developed through new people and new influences. We love our history, but we know it is not pure. Of the millions in the West Midlands who proudly want the Mercian treasure hoard to stay there, how many could honestly claim a pure Mercian ancestry. It doesn’t really matter.
This is all good news for those who want Englishness to be a progressive national identity.
But there is a discernable third trend which we cannot dismiss or ignore. As Britishness has become established as a genuinely multi-ethnic identity, there are some who now seen an ethnic Englishness as the best way of resisting our diverse modern society.
In the last year we have seen the viciously anti Islamic English Defence League play to that idea. No one who has read my public statements about the EDL will be in any doubt about my rejection of their politics. It is though interesting that in their public statements – albeit entirely denied by their public actions – that they claim to represent a non-racist view of Englishness. A forced concession to the wider changes that have taken place.
The fear must be, however, that without positive action designed to promote a positive, modern and inclusive notion of Englishness, the idea of Englishness could once again slip back into a racist and ethnically defined view of what it is to be English.
Pride in Englishness is shared widely across English society, in all social classes. The story of English identity over the past 20 years has been predominantly positive and forward looking.
But in my work at CLG I have highlighted in the past year the position of some of the established white working class communities who have seen great social and economic change, including in some areas the impact of significant migration, who do ask who speaks for us. Despite the demonstrable investment in public services, housing and neighbourhood improvement in ‘those areas, there is a still disconnect between what those of us in government believe we have delivered and the extent to which they feel they have a voice, or that their concerns are being addressed. The £20m a year connecting communities initiative is working with local authorities to ensure that these communities do not remain feeling that there are not listened to. But this is not a short term fix but something that needs to be sustained for years to come.
One thing that could undermine this work is a retreat into a narrow and defensive view of ‘the rights of the English.’
I said earlier, that the notion of Englishness is the least well-developed of our national identities. I think the pressing challenge is to promote actively a positive English cultural identity.
As Bill Bragg has written ‘what we lack is a confidence, not so much about who we are, more about whether it’s OK to celebrate being English. We need to stop being embarrassed about our home and find a way to celebrate the things about it we love – both to respect the locals and to build bridges with newcomers’.
To do this, we need to generate powerful new ways of bringing people together to celebrate their Englishness.
Ways which go beyond the purely historical. Too often, celebrations of Englishness are entirely rooted in history and focus wholly on the past.
This isn’t true of celebrations of St Andrew or St Patrick’s Day – they are about what it means to be Irish or Scottish in today’s world – and are celebrations that people around the world want to join in with.
I would suggest that the starting point should be to develop the festival of St Georges Day itself.
Actually bit by bit, this has been developing in cities, towns and villages across the country.
And nothing I’m saying today means that I think people need to be told to celebrate Englishness, let alone been given permission to do so. Patently y they don’t.
But there are ways in which government could work with the grain of what English people are already doing. Helping give a shape and focus to a national day of celebrations.
It would St George’s Day a celebration of a modern inclusive Englishness within the wider Britain.
This would give us an opportunity to mark key developments in our culture as well as our history and heritage, and to promote its international identity and contribution.
But more importantly it would give us the opportunity to promote a sense of unity and belonging – a sense of English identity which can be claimed by the majority who want to be welcoming, neighbourly and friendly.
A chance to celebrate what we can be proud of and what we have in common, enriched by our differences as well as shared values and shared experiences.
There are many aspects of Englishness which we should be proud of. The English language and our great writers. Our tradition of philanthropy and past and present campaigners for social change. Our role in inventing or codifying much of modern sport and our national sporting heroes who come from all communities and all parts of the world.
And the strand of radicalism in English thought – I will return to this later.
Above all, these celebrations will need to be inclusive. Inclusive in terms of age, interests and accessibility of course. But also inclusive in terms of ethnicity.
Take the Out of Many – One England Festival in Sparkbrook Birmingham, held to celebrate St Georges Day and which brought together people from across of minority ethnic and white British communities and from rural and urban England.
Leicester plans to run a three day festival over St Georges Day weekend which looks at England’s contribution to literature: in later years they may look at sport, science of politics.
I have not been able to identify another country in the world which does not have a day to celebrate its national identity. Some have a national holiday, others a body to run a national festival or celebration.
Some countries encourage schools to participate, or recognise the achievements of its citizens. All encourage the use of symbols – flag flying, the use of national colours or the wearing of national emblems.
Many have parades, national sporting or musical events, celebrations of national writers and literature and other cultural events.
I believe it is time to looks seriously at what we in England can learn and take from these international examples. Not all will be appropriate for our particular context, and local areas should be the ones to take decisions about how St George’s Day is celebrated.
I think we have the model. Last year we supported a highly successful Inter-Faith Week. Again, people of faith don’t need government to tell them to be faithful, nor to work together. But by supporting a national steering group and a couple of major national events, and by supporting similar approaches at regional level, we provided the framework for an astonishing and diverse range of local and national activities.
We could do the same for St George’s Day.
And we probably should not stop there. Ben Bradshaw and I have been talking about the World Cup and the possibility of a wider cultural festival celebrating Englishness at a time when the nation will focus on our football team. And perhaps we should look ahead – to other sporting events – like the Rugby World cup – and coming cultural events to se the opportunities to celebrate a diminish of Englishness.
And let me end on one last thought about why this should be a project for the centre-left.
Our English history is not all maypoles and Morris dancers. Nor is it simply the somewhat Eeyoorish observation of George Orwell that it is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays.
It is the history of English radicalism too. The Making of the English Working Class shaped many a student radical of my generation. My part of the country gave birth to the Tolpuddle Martyrs and Captain Swing. It is the history of the cooperative movement. Our English history is the history of a people who embraced and defended and married migrants as often as we resisted them.
If we need a national progressive and patriotic politics today, we should not be shy of making our history an ally.
New Labour have helped the BNP massively by adandoning their working class supporters. Denham and the rest of them should reflect on this when the EDL are demonstrating outside parliament today. More than any other policy, the fact that Britain has been at war continuously for the past 10 years - in former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan - have made racism and xenophobia acceptable.
From “They work for You”, John Denham:
Voted very strongly for introducing ID cards.
Voted very strongly for introducing foundation hospitals.
Voted strongly for introducing student top-up fees.
Voted very strongly for Labour’s anti-terrorism laws.
Voted strongly against an investigation into the Iraq war.
Voted very strongly for replacing Trident.
Hope you lose your seat Denham
Voted moderately against laws to stop climate change. votes
Comment by John E — 5 March, 2010 @ 9:37 am
Patriotism is a disease that kills millions
Comment by Mike Martin — 5 March, 2010 @ 9:57 am
“Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.” Oscar Wilde
Comment by ted — 5 March, 2010 @ 10:17 am
“As Bill Bragg has written ‘what we lack is a confidence, not so much about who we are, more about whether it’s OK to celebrate being English. We need to stop being embarrassed about our home and find a way to celebrate the things about it we love – both to respect the locals and to build bridges with newcomers’.”
It’s a shame that Bragg is being used as left cover for this crap. Much as I like him and a lot of what he stands for Bragg is playing a very dangerous game by trying to reclaim the flag. As for Denham, when has it not been, “shameful, racist or partial” to stand by the flag? Has Denham forgotten Britain’s history of colonialism?
The fact is that when Labour succumb to racism by promoting some mythical sense of Englishness they do not benefit from it. It’s the likes of the BNP who grow out of this rhetoric. The evidence for this is plain to see in the rise of the BNP at a time when Labour are promoting Islamophobia twined with jingoism.
The left MUST oppose all concessions to racism and that includes attempts to promote nationalism and jingoism. Otherwise it will be barely indistinguishable from the racists who are confident enough to protest outside parliament today.
Comment by Ray — 5 March, 2010 @ 10:25 am
labour identity class anyone?
Comment by non-partisan — 5 March, 2010 @ 10:45 am
The left MUST oppose all concessions to the idiotic idea that anyone who identifes with the St George Cross flag is a racist, a nazi, a BNPer or all three. If they were then the BNP wouldn’t be in with a chance of getting a couple of MPs they’d be on the verge of state power.
Grow up, the real world left this one-dimensional version of Marxism behind a long time ago.
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 5 March, 2010 @ 11:06 am
I don’t think that anyone who identifes with the St George Cross flag is a racist, a nazi, a BNPer or all three. That doesn’t mean we have to encourage their soft racism or nationalism, but pandering to those sentiments won’t help our cause, and indeed encourages the rise of the Nazis, as is shown by the BNP’s current success.
Comment by John E — 5 March, 2010 @ 11:18 am
Celebrating St George’s Day more actively is already happening and will continue to grow, whatever the left does. Therefore it is better to work to ensure that it is an inclusive and forward-looking as well as backward-looking event, than to condemn it from the sidelines.
Not that looking backwards is a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with morris dancing, and springtime is a good time for it. I don’t see that the maypole and the morrismen are a separate tradition from English radicalism, I think they are from the same fountain.
Comment by Strategist — 5 March, 2010 @ 11:40 am
Labour, old and new have been pushing identity politics for years. This has helped to undermine any sense of class solidarity. It reached a peak with Gordon Brown reviving the old fascist slogan of “British jobs for British workers”
Some “marxists” have grown up so fast that they have forgotten that the working class has no country.
Comment by Mike Martin — 5 March, 2010 @ 11:42 am
Bollocks to “a modern English identity”. I despair that politics should be based on such vapid concepts. Nationality is an accident of birth, nothing else.
Comment by Charles Dexter Ward — 5 March, 2010 @ 11:47 am
Good and interesting information. Thanks for share…
Comment by Rock — 5 March, 2010 @ 11:49 am
There’s a rise of nationalism going on across the world.
The task of socialists is to emphasise what unites working class people, not what divides them.
We argue for the right of nations to self-determination, because where one nation is oppressed by another, it makes unity between the ordinary peoples of these nations much more difficult, socialists have always made clear under such circumstances that they campaign for national liberation in order to strengthen the struggle for working class unity.
This does not mean we pander to the romantic and emotional myths that are associated with every form of nationalism, or that we should paint ourselves in national colours to win the approval of people who feel drawn toward the patriotic narrative.
In the final analysis, every national flag is designed to include some, and to exclude. others. Socialists do not exclude on the grounds of nation, race, gender, sexuality, religion or the other myriad of narratives designed to divide and rule our class.
Marx suggested that the workers of the world should unite - nationalism is one of the chains we need to lose.
Comment by River — 5 March, 2010 @ 11:56 am
Englishness offers an alternative, marxism offers another.
Probably best to abandon these fairy stories and root ourselves in a less fanciful understanding of everyday experience.
Comment by daveyboy — 5 March, 2010 @ 12:08 pm
“Celebrating St George’s Day more actively is already happening and will continue to grow, whatever the left does.”
Is that really inevitable? I don’t see anyone celebrating it where I live.
great comments so far with the exception of Mark P
Comment by SteveH — 5 March, 2010 @ 12:46 pm
Has it come to this?
“Last year we supported a highly successful Inter-Faith Week. Again, people of faith don’t need government to tell them to be faithful, nor to work together. But by supporting a national steering group and a couple of major national events, and by supporting similar approaches at regional level, we provided the framework for an astonishing and diverse range of local and national activities.
We could do the same for St George’s Day.”
Faith in Saint George?
This reminds me of the kind of callow stuff the French Communist Party reeled out during the Front Populaire: celebrations of Frenchness complete with Pyrigian bonnets and Marianne. Which they still do from time to time.
Still, at least they had a Revolution to draw on.
Rather better than a fictitious Saint, and the whiff of the Church of England around a few pints of Buldog Bitter.
On the Making of the English Working Class. This is rather a false-route for nationalists: leading Chartists were Irish, and the contribution of Welsh and Scottish trade unionists and socialists to the ‘English’ left - just to begin with - to cite a few ‘nations’, is considerable. Furthermroe is this bloke seriously saying that the present British state, which rests on the defeat of the labour movement in the 1980s, is part of Englishness, or is the left that stands outside it, the main part?
Maybe he thinks we should all join hands together and celebrate our English radical partiotism!
Comment by Andrew Coates — 5 March, 2010 @ 1:10 pm
All hail the coming English Workers Republic.
Comment by eamonn wright — 5 March, 2010 @ 1:14 pm
What will John and co do when ‘at a celebration of St George’ a gang of EDL and BNP turn up and attack ‘non - English’ people?
This is already the reality.
Englishness is defined by what is not English. And that definition is, as many comments here show, shaped in the period of ten years of the war on terror
In Greece the PM is calling for ’sacrifices’ in order to ’save Greece’ I remember the calls on us to protect the National Interest by making sacrifices.
Decent, revolt, rebellion, riot, are English traditions championed in The Making of the English Working Class
At root Denham’s drivel flows from this -
‘Politics is very much about who we are – as individuals, families and a society.’
That is Thatcher’s philosophy - which new Labour is built upon.
We need a return to class conciousness as the basis for a revolt against the ruling class that want our class to pay for the economic mess they have made
Comment by Anonymous — 5 March, 2010 @ 1:25 pm
my post above
Comment by Mark Krantz — 5 March, 2010 @ 1:26 pm
“I don’t think that anyone who identifes with the St George Cross flag is a racist, a nazi, a BNPer or all three. That doesn’t mean we have to encourage their soft racism or nationalism, but pandering to those sentiments won’t help our cause, and indeed encourages the rise of the Nazis, as is shown by the BNP’s current success.”
Just re-read your first and second sentence. You start off by saying not everyone who identifies with St George is a racist, nazi or BNP. Cheers for that.
But the you say you do;t want to encourage our ’soft racism’ So everyone who waves St George come the World Cup is a soft racist? And ‘pandering’ to the flag wavers encourages the BNP.
Absolute rubbish. A key factor in encouraging the BNP has been the near total inability of the Left to offer any kind of alternative identification with Englishness. Every time it does this it delivers votes to the BNP by the bucketful.
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 5 March, 2010 @ 1:34 pm
Mark Krantz, you completely misunderstood me. I was responding to Mark P who asserted that identification with the St George flag could be positive, that the left should embrace that. I was saying that the soft racists can be won away from their racism - but it is much harder in the context of mainsteam politics which encourages people to blame “foreigners” for the ills of society.
Comment by John E — 5 March, 2010 @ 1:43 pm
‘Soft racists’ will never be won away from their racism by those who reject any identifcation with St George.
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 5 March, 2010 @ 2:03 pm
a good yin andy
eccept for the banner head line
GOD HARRY ST GEORGE
These three satements sum up the broadstream veiw as through the eliteism of the votes cast in england.
LOOK AT THE WAY THE PRESS VEIW POLITICTS IN THE UK ENGLISH FOOTBALLS PLAYERS SEX BEFORE REAL NEWS.
the rise of the edl which has NOT been curtailed in england
till ENGLAND forgets it colonial past which includes the lands within the british islands
alas where i suppot a free stare of ENGERLAND it would illadvised
due to their colnial history
how does that quaint football song go again two world wars and one world cup
Comment by rikki — 5 March, 2010 @ 2:05 pm
“Celebrating St George’s Day more actively is already happening and will continue to grow, whatever the left does.”
#13 “Is that really inevitable? I don’t see anyone celebrating it where I live.”
Well, it is happening in places like Preston & Blackburn and there is a real battle on to determine whose celebration this celebration is. Either inclusive of everyone in the community or exclusive.
It’s would be fine to stand aside and grumble that the working class knows no nationality etc, but without some outreach on this the risk is the festival is handed to the BNP etc.
Obviously no English person gives a monkeys for St George per se, but there’s a case for celebrating the return of spring. How about a week-long festival of everything to enjoy about spring in England starting on 23 April and running to May Day? (No doubt it would piss down.)
Comment by Strategist — 5 March, 2010 @ 2:07 pm
#25 Why not just organise inclusive May Day rallies/marches?
Comment by anticapitalista — 5 March, 2010 @ 2:15 pm
#26 The left does, and nobody shows up.
Obviously I’m not that serious about the idea of a week’s holiday - but I am serious about reaching out to people where they are, rather than grumbling that they are not where we would like them to be.
Comment by Strategist — 5 March, 2010 @ 2:24 pm
Actually instead of St George’s Day, how about celebrating 30 January? Now that really is a day to celebrate ‘our’ English tradition.
Comment by anticapitalista — 5 March, 2010 @ 2:29 pm
I’m English. I have two flags. My internationalist flag which is red, and the flag of my country which is the St George’s Cross.
I support the England team because I was born there. I don’t stand for the national anthem because it says nothing about my people, my country or my aspirations.
I don’t boo other people’s flags or national anthems.
I am English, which is a country, not one colour or one race or one religion.
Comment by Red Flag — 5 March, 2010 @ 2:31 pm
30th January…
Would that be the execution of Charles or the ritual beheading of Cromwell’s corpse?
Comment by Boab — 5 March, 2010 @ 2:37 pm
#30 The former.
Maybe though we could celebrate beheading as part of ‘our’ heritage.
Comment by anticapitalista — 5 March, 2010 @ 2:41 pm
A few years ago I was on a site where the riggers who were mainly Scottish (both Celtic and Rangers)were fond of using colourful language. Unfortunately, the scaffolders who were Turkish spoke no English but knew what the F word was about and thought it was directed at them.
They eventually took offence and chased the riggers away. The riggers were enraged and were threatening to turn up the next day suitably equipped and with their faces painted blue a la braveheart. We eventually calmed them down and nothing more came of it. I suggested they take little more care when effing and blinding and was accused by one of trying to deny their national heritage (political correctness gone mad etc). The point about it was that there seemed to be a definite political consciousness forming around what in normal times might have been dismissed as match day enthusiasm.
Now I dont mind someone getting misty-eyed about a football match or indulging in morris dancing, but what Denham and his ilk are trying to do is turn it into a political platform. The next thing is that a threat is perceived to this heritage/identity and you are well on the way to creating an angry mob.
I think we should credit Denham with the intelligence to know what he is doing, just as Mosley knew when he deliberately set out to exploit anti jewish sentiment. I dont think he is setting out to revive the militant traditions of chartism. It is a variant of Browns “Britishness” agenda.
Comment by Mike Martin — 5 March, 2010 @ 3:06 pm
#13 “Is that really inevitable? I don’t see anyone celebrating it where I live.”
It’s possibly because you’re not invited.
It happens where I live, but it’s understated, mostly confined to pubs, restaurants and peoples’ homes. There’s a big growth in St George’s Day feasts, which is the more traditional way of celebrating St George. It used to be confined to the brass-buttoned blazer brigade of the Royal Society of St George, but these days a lot of people are doing it.
Comment by Gareth — 5 March, 2010 @ 3:13 pm
‘Cry “God for Harry, England and Saint George”‘ is, of course, a line from Shakespeare’s Henry V. Henry utters the line before the walls of Harfleur - which happens to be in France.
When we are asked to identify with Henry, we are being asked to identify with an act of aggression.
This absolute monarch, whom we are supposed to admire, cut his military teeth in Wales, crushing the revolt of Owen Glendower, and then went on to invade France. Had any of us, the readers and writers of this blog, been alive in the 15th century, I suspect we would have supported the Welsh and the French, and not the armies of Henry V.
As for St. George’s Day, I haven’t the faintest idea when it is. There is no firm evidence that St George ever existed. Legend, however, has it that he was a soldier of the Roman empire born in what is now Palestine. So, if he existed, he certainly wasn’t English. He is best known for killing something that certainly didn’t exist, a dragon.
These are absurd foundations for an English national saint and national day.
I find myself in agreement with anti-capitalista. 30 January would be an excellent national day. It’s the nearest thing England has to the storming of the Bastille, or the American Declaration of Independence.
The people who chopped off the head of a king were a lot more radical than the Tolpuddle martyrs. Denham has a sanitised version of English radicalism, which includes only the people who won’t cause our rulers too much loss of sleep.
But my version would include Cromwell, John Cooke (the man who prosecuted Charles I, and was then hung, drawn and quartered by the vindictive Restoration), the great poet of the revolution, John Milton, and later on, Tom Paine and the English Jacobins of the 1790s. I can’t imagine any of them fitting easily into John Denham’s version of history.
Comment by paul fauvet — 5 March, 2010 @ 3:17 pm
I’m told the English Defence League has just held a march through Westminster. Why are several hundred fascists allowed to rally outside Parliament waving racist banners?
Apparently the counter-protest organised by UAF was smalland consisted mainly of students.
Message to anti-fascists: the EDL is getting more and more cocky. If we don’t stop them now, where will it end?
Comment by Steven — 5 March, 2010 @ 3:21 pm
If you have strong feelings about englishness and the flag etc your welcome to them. But if we don’t what are we supposed to do? Pretend that we have them? Feel guilty? See it as a dark stain on our charecter?
Comment by johng — 5 March, 2010 @ 3:23 pm
Relevant to this debate: what did the EDL thugs chant at the UAF? “You’re not English anymore”
That’s a potent cry, Johng - and you’re making it credible. The left needs a progressive patriotism.
Comment by Steven — 5 March, 2010 @ 3:27 pm
comment 33 -
I don’t think St George’s day is growing that much and I don’t see it as inevitable. It passes by where I work without anyone even mentioning it. The attempt to promote it is probably done by a mixture of right wing nationalism and commercial advertising. Get your St George’s day pub meal etc. Thankfully the gold old English public seem pretty disinterested in all this.
Comment by SteveH — 5 March, 2010 @ 3:27 pm
John E
I was replying to John Denham not you !
I agree with what you are saying !
Sorry should have said Denham not John
(a popular English name)
Mark
Comment by Mark Krantz — 5 March, 2010 @ 3:46 pm
While I reject the left taking up the Cross of St George, I’m not particularly for tearing it town, burning it or stomping it into the ground either. (Though the US left has in the past burned the stars and stripes to dramatic effect in protests against the Vietnam and Iraq wars).
I’m arguing for a position of neutrality on the issue - I’m not going to lose sleep over people wearing England shirts on matchdays, and I even enjoy watching Morris Dancing.
I have however seen British and English emblems used by fascists to intimidate people from ethnic minorities, and this needs to be resisted decisively.
I also remember going to visit a strike meeting by hospital workers in a small Cumbrian town. They had a great meeting, at the end, the meeting spontaneously burst into a chorus of ‘Rule Britannia’.
This wasn’t a sudden outburst of British pride, but the fact that the workers wanted a decent song to sing together to express the confident mood and the unity they felt at that moment.
All the left could have offered to those workers at that moment are those rather depressing dirges by ‘left-patriot’ Billy Bragg, not particularly useful when you want something unifying and upbeat to round off your meeting.
The ‘Internationale’ would have been good, but it’s so 150 years ago…
Comment by River — 5 March, 2010 @ 3:55 pm
“The ‘Internationale’ would have been good, but it’s so 150 years ago…”
What and Rule Britannia isn’t!!
Comment by SteveH — 5 March, 2010 @ 4:06 pm
Good point Steve, but everyone knew the words to Rule Britannia.
Comment by River — 5 March, 2010 @ 4:16 pm
When you say the left ‘needs’ patriotism Steve is it because you think the virtues of patriotism should be cultivated in everyone or are you suggesting that partriotism represents an expediant set of ideas to put before the electorate? In the latter case of course it makes little difference whether you really believe in it or not, mouthing off about it enough will achieve the requisate goods. In the former case I would need to work consiously to nurture and develop certain feelings and attitudes I do not at present hold in order to become a better person. In such a case those of us who do not at present have these feelings and attitudes are not only poor utility maximisers we’re also bad people. Not just because of the harm we do to ourselves but also because of the way in which we’re allowing vice to flourish by not encouraging patriotism and discouraging other kinds of human attachment. I’d really like to know which on these things is the case in order that I can better contribute to the good of human kind.
Comment by johng — 5 March, 2010 @ 4:21 pm
Englishness can be used as a weapon against the EDL etc by promoting the civic aspects of being English, I will be looking forward to seeing English sports men and women off all colours and backgrounds carry the English flag in the Glasgow Commonwealth Games in 2014.
Ps I dont know the words of Rule Britania and wish I didnt know the words to Flower of Scotland.
Comment by Jim McLean — 5 March, 2010 @ 4:29 pm
#41
I always think this is a suitably ecumenical song for such occasions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT6JkceQ9FU
Comment by anon — 5 March, 2010 @ 4:29 pm
In order to complete the English National Democratic Revolution it will be necessary to confront the British Norman Imperial State and its British strap-on parliament; the stunted English capitalist class who failed to carry through the revolution because they got scared by the Levellers and Diggers and couldn’t wait to reinstate the monarchy and defer back to the aristocracy when Cromwell died, the chauvinist Labour and Trade Union bureaucrats who have thrived on the crumbs of Empire and imperialism, the ingrained sense of entitlement that Empire has inculled in the more priveleged layers of English workers and the reactionary capitalist property relations that prevent workers in England from improving their lot and opening the way to the future. I think I can see why abstract, sectarian, propagandists are ag’in it.
Comment by Harold — 5 March, 2010 @ 4:36 pm
p.s. the EDL talk of `British Values’ not English values and we all know what British Values are.
Comment by Harold — 5 March, 2010 @ 4:38 pm
Very concrete Harold (can the name be a co-incidence he asks?). Harold, that one with the arrow in his nose, has nothing in common with anybody in the world today. He would not have been able to concieve of any shared identity with you.
Comment by johng — 5 March, 2010 @ 4:47 pm
Number 49, no, I was named after the character in Steptoe and Son. It was popular on the telly when my mum and dad were courting.
Comment by Harold — 5 March, 2010 @ 4:49 pm
Cromwell was the first to concieve of an Empire based on trade, invasion and subjucation of native people. He is no hero to the Irish which even the likes of Robin Cook forgot. Robin had a large picture of the Dictator over his desk when he had a meeting with SF I believe.
Comment by Jim McLean — 5 March, 2010 @ 5:07 pm
Mark P is capitulating to the nationalistic and jingoistic rhetoric of New Labour. The only people this benefits are the BNP. It follows from his confused thinking that he blames the left for the rise of the BNP because we aren’t nationalistic enough.
There is no desire amongst workers to celebrate St Georges day except in the mind of Mark and other Eurocoms. The left isn’t obliged to encourage nationalism, in fact quite the opposite. It’s a shame that Denham’s nationalism is given space on a left blog. Especially considering it gives confidence to the racist EDL
Comment by Ray — 5 March, 2010 @ 5:09 pm
“I’m told the English Defence League has just held a march through Westminster. Why are several hundred fascists allowed to rally outside Parliament waving racist banners?”
Not according to reports. The EDL were corralled in by the police and confronted by anti-nazis. The EDL have apparently now dispersed.
“…what did the EDL thugs chant at the UAF? “You’re not English anymore””
What a bunch of racist hooligans chant has no relevance to anything. It reflects nothing other than their extreme irrational hatred which is not shared by the vast majority of people in the UK.
“EDL go to hell! Take your fascist mates as well!”
Now this is much more like it and a far more widely held view than the racist crap from the EDL. The left should not take its cue from the nationalists and racists. Unless we offer an alternative in the form of internationalism against the bosses then nationalism and racism will grow.
Comment by Ray — 5 March, 2010 @ 5:24 pm
What is clear is that, as predicted, New Labour are capitulating to the BNP’s racist and nationalistic rhetoric. The BNP are trying to build a street fighting force in the form of the EDL as predicted by socialists. We are witnessing how cultivating nationalism and jingoism encourages support for the BNP and pushes Labour to take up this rhetoric yet some on the left seek to blame the left. No more evidence is needed that anti-nazis who predicted this are right to oppose nationalism. Why waste time arguing with people who are in denial when we need to get on building opposition to nationalism and racism, two heads of the hydra.
Comment by Ray — 5 March, 2010 @ 5:37 pm
#29
Well put, that’s the same position I find myself in.
Plus, you don’t have to be a nationalist or a jingoistic flag-waver to express your identity. Something that needs to be considered very carefully before replying about succumbing to the BNP’s and EDL’s line.
It look like Denham is trying to rectify a problem that has been created by New Labour when they supported devolution and freedom of expression of identity for Scotland and Wales, but avoided the English question and suppressed any notion of an English identity. A position supported by all the establishment parties.
The issue does need addressing and resolving. Trying to ignore it won’t make it go away…
Comment by England Left Forward — 5 March, 2010 @ 6:10 pm
Whatever happened to ‘Workers of all nations unite’ ?
Denham sucks.
Comment by Anonymous — 5 March, 2010 @ 6:13 pm
Ray you really should get out more.
For the last 14 years every summer all of England has been decked out in the St George Cross Flag. You might not like it, you plainly don’t, but to blame all this on new Labour, or even more bizarrely eurocommunism reveals a stunning lack of knowledge of working class culture.
If you don’t like the growing affinity with English identity you can either ignore this, or you can actively oppose it . I’d have respect for socialists who did the latter but outside their own meetings none do, they just keep mum and hope it will go away.
The alternative is to actively engage with the shaping of an English identity. You and your ilk suggest that this means jettisoning such values as anti-racism. Again a stunning lack of imaginaton, why can’t you be anti-racist and English?
Your strategy amounts to a saturday afternoon punch up with the EDL. All well, and good but when you get on your coaches home you leave the entire field free for the EDL and the racial-nationalist right to seek to define Englishness. Every time the left refuses to engage in this debate it gifts support to the far right.
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 5 March, 2010 @ 6:27 pm
Looks like the message shifted from #29 to #30.
Red Flag, I liked your reply, it sums up my stance as well.
The EDL hit Dudley on 4th April. At the local university, where I lecture, UAF have already put notices up asking students to show up in Dudley and stand against the EDL. Sadly, having been brought up between Dudley and Wolverhampton, I can envisage the outcome, and I wonder, when the students return after the Easter break, how many of them will have been on the end of a punch…
Yes, the BNP and EDL need to be stopped, but there are two ways to approahc this. One is to engage in debate and defeat their arguments. The other is for active engagement in shaping a modern, dynamic English identity that is all-inclusive.
Comment by England Left Forward — 5 March, 2010 @ 6:59 pm
“For the last 14 years every summer all of England has been decked out in the St George Cross Flag. You might not like it, you plainly don’t, but to blame all this on new Labour, or even more bizarrely eurocommunism reveals a stunning lack of knowledge of working class culture.”
Yes, the Tories laid the groundwork and your point is? I’m referring to your politics, you remember the Eurocoms ditching socialism in one country Stalinism for little Englander nationalism. Different master same conclusion.
“If you don’t like the growing affinity with English identity you can either ignore this, or you can actively oppose it . I’d have respect for socialists who did the latter but outside their own meetings none do, they just keep mum and hope it will go away.”
Two opinions stated as fact. Firstly growing nationalism does not mean an affinity with so-called “English identity”. The only English identity that has any ideological influence is the one promoted by the BNP. You and New Labour are a pale imitation. Why choose the copy when the original is being legitimised by you and Denham?
Your second point about the left shows a cynical disdain for the impressive achievements of anti-nazis across the UK. According to you the magnificent protests in Scotland are “keeping mum and hoping it will go away.” Rather than opposing nationalism and its progeny, racism, you appear to prefer to join in the flag waving. Shame on you.
But what’s worse is your cliqued characterisation of the working class as lumpen idiots who are only interested in what the England team are wearing. Your dreadful patronising assessment offers a false picture and leads to a hopeless capitulation to nationalist rhetoric. Workers will see straight through the left if it tries to steal the clothes of the BNP.
Marx argued for internationalism and the left must offer this alternative otherwise the barbarism of capitalism in the form of wars between nations and fascism will be unleashed on all of us.
Comment by Ray — 5 March, 2010 @ 7:29 pm
#52 “Cromwell was the first to concieve of an Empire based on trade, invasion and subjugation of native people.”
hmm. I’m sure Hernan Cortes would have the prior claim… Or indeed Julius Caesar.
It’s mad either to idolise or demonise Cromwell, those were different times. Even more so, Henri Plantagenet.
Marxists only ever say that Cromwell led a bourgeois revolution, so from a Marxist perspective, you can only expect out of him what you would expect out of him.
What is being proposed is an English national day not that celebrates Cromwell in particular, but the act of trying & executing a would-be absolute monarch. It’s quite a good idea, but I think we could do better. I’ll see what I can think of.
Comment by Strategist — 5 March, 2010 @ 7:45 pm
61# ach yae ken whit a meant, basically that Cromwell “led a bourgeois revolution” degenerating into a Bonapartist regime, or did Bonaparte participate in a bourgeois revolution that degenerated into a Cromwellian style counter revolution, only on my second Bud, I’ll be back later to solve all the problems, Midsummers Day would be as good a day as any to be celebrating Englishness, IO’ll think of a reason why later.
mean while here are some words of wisdom from north of the imaginary line drawn from Berwick to Gretna.
Or are you sittin in your Council house, dreamin o your clan?
Waiting for the Jacobites to come and free the land?
Try going down the broo with your claymore in your hand
And count all the Princes in the queue!
full words below
http://www.dickgaughan.co.uk/songs/texts/nogods.html
Comment by Jim McLean — 5 March, 2010 @ 8:03 pm
The left need to reclaim an England and English identity that is as it is a people of all colours, races, and religions and of none. A democratic socialist republican vision of England based on the rich traditions of the Levellers, Diggers, Chartists, Trades Unions, working class community and solidarity. The left needs to break with the imperialism and chauvinism of the artificial political construct and identity that is the British state.
Reclaim the flag of St George from the right and jingoists and royalist sheeple. Proclaim militantly for the English Workers Republic.
Comment by eamonn wright — 5 March, 2010 @ 8:07 pm
Cromwell massacred more Scots at Dundee than he massacred Irish at Drogheda. Gaughan is out for the Scottish Workers Republic and the first step is the independence of Scotland and the break up of the imperialist Brutish state.
Comment by eamonn wright — 5 March, 2010 @ 8:10 pm
64# not to mention his dealings in selling both Scots and Irish as slaves to the Indies, their descendants still living in poverty today, and the death of many in prison awaiting transportation. But this is digressing from the question of identity politics which is more a sociological question than political science.
http://cuthulan.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/barbadoed-scotlands-sugar-slaves-redlegs-and-other-white-slaves/
Comment by Jim McLean — 5 March, 2010 @ 8:17 pm
#62 Fair enough Jim, I’m with you. (Bloody hell though, Bud?)
“Midsummers Day would be as good a day as any to be celebrating Englishness, IO’ll think of a reason why later.”
Got the reason - it’s day 1 of Glastonbury Festival.
#63 “Reclaim the flag of St George from the right and jingoists and royalist sheeple. Proclaim militantly for the English Workers Republic.”
A nice first step would be a campaign to have Jerusalem rather than GSTQ played before England’s World Cup matches. I’m guessing Mark P has already thought of this one - is that a live campaign? Is it too late to start one? Has it flopped already?
Comment by Strategist — 5 March, 2010 @ 8:25 pm
66# ok its Lidl’s own brand Nobelaner, £3.69 for 10
Comment by Jim McLean — 5 March, 2010 @ 8:32 pm
Agree Jerusalem is the national anthem of England - GSTQ should be booed by England fans.
Comment by eamonn wright — 5 March, 2010 @ 8:43 pm
#67 “its Lidl’s own brand Nobelaner, £3.69 for 10″
Classy! Goes beautifully with a Buckie chaser.
#69 “Singing GSTQ, Rule Britannia and No Surrender to the IRA is what these bigoted neanderthals usually prefer. No amount of well meaning pandering to their backwardness is going to change that.”
I think I can hear Mark P banging his head on his desk. There can be no doubt that there’s still a big neanderthal element in the England support. But the whole Mark P etc project of reclaiming England football for the rest of us was fought and won years ago - probably when New Order did the song for Italia 90.
There’s a clear alternative pole of attraction for the mainstream fans now.
Comment by Strategist — 5 March, 2010 @ 9:12 pm
My last comment that Strategist quoted from seems to have been deleted. Why? I was only stating the truth. There was nothing rude or personal about it.
Comment by red snapper — 5 March, 2010 @ 9:21 pm
It must be an anti-Uruguay thing!
Comment by Luke — 5 March, 2010 @ 9:26 pm
#70 Yes. I disagreed with what you said, but I didn’t think you were trolling as such.
Comment by Strategist — 5 March, 2010 @ 9:29 pm
“For the last 14 years every summer all of England has been decked out in the St George Cross Flag” Mark P
I believe that’s what they call hyperbole Mark. I live on an impoverished Council estate and whilst I have seen some flags on various occasions, it has to be said that it has been a very small minority of people.
Comment by Martin Wicks — 5 March, 2010 @ 9:33 pm
Disagreeing is one thing deletions quite another. Amazingly out of all the contentious and controversial things that I have said on this blog, this is the first time that my comment has been deleted!
Comment by red snapper — 5 March, 2010 @ 9:34 pm
#74
Red snapper
you made inflamatory remarks that described ordinary working class people as neanderthals, which i thought was beyond the pale.
That is why i deleted it, if you want to make the same points using more measured language then they will be welcome
Comment by Andy Newman — 5 March, 2010 @ 9:35 pm
I think the power is going to your head Andy. Saying people on the far-right behave like neanderthals is more insulting to neanderthals than the working class. Unless of course red was meaning ‘all’ engerland fans, but we all know it’s only a slight majority.
Comment by Luke — 5 March, 2010 @ 9:42 pm
#75 Andy, I said “There can be no doubt that there’s still a big neanderthal element in the England support.” And I stand by that.
Comment by Strategist — 5 March, 2010 @ 9:47 pm
Andy, while you’re on line, and talking about the state of the nation, Jerusalem, St George’s Day and all that, have you blogged yet on the Jez Butterworth play “Jerusalem”?
It’s set in Wilts on St George’s Day, and I’m assuming it’s a fairly straightforward depiction of a typical day in the life of your good self…?
Comment by Strategist — 5 March, 2010 @ 9:50 pm
I meant those who sing God SaveThe Queen, Rule Britannia and No Surrender to the IRA, which unfortunately seem to be the majority at football matches. Just because rampant racist abuse is more or less a thing of the past (possibly because it would usually result in them being thrown out of the ground and sometimes prosecuted) it doesn’t mean that they are any less bigoted does it? My point is that despite good intentions not a lot has really changed and we on the left shouldn’t be pandering to and “reclaim” something (the St.Georges flag) that never belonged to the working class anyway. It is usually racists and other bigot who really care about all this English identity nonsense anyway. Why invent something that doesn’t really exist and most people don’t give a toss about? Will this pass your censorship bureau cde (icepick) Newman?
Comment by red snapper — 5 March, 2010 @ 9:52 pm
#66 I agree
Comment by steelcityred — 5 March, 2010 @ 9:52 pm
red snapper
move along
I thought the tone of your comment was inappropriately abusive, it was not clear that you were refferring to a minority of fans, it read like a broad brush insult to all the millions of working people who support England.
Comment by Andy Newman — 5 March, 2010 @ 10:06 pm
#78
“Jez Butterworth play “Jerusalem”?
i will look that up
Comment by Andy Newman — 5 March, 2010 @ 10:07 pm
You tell me if they are the minority or majority? Since I don’t personally know any England fans, and I have no desire to start associating with them now. I cannot possibly comment. Im basing my opinion on what I have seen on the streets and on the TV. If you dont like it, thats tough mate.
Comment by red snapper — 5 March, 2010 @ 10:26 pm
#83
“I don’t personally know any England fans”
yes I can see that you have a very relevant engagement with the working class!!!
Comment by Andy Newman — 5 March, 2010 @ 10:33 pm
#83 “Since I don’t personally know any England fans”.
Which confirms pretty much all the conclusions drawn by most of those who know who you are.
Either a liar, someone totally removed from reality or a poseur.
Comment by Eddie Truman — 5 March, 2010 @ 10:36 pm
Thats bollocks. Unlike others here I just don’t do nationalism and imperialism.
Comment by red snapper — 5 March, 2010 @ 10:36 pm
I know a fair few England fans, of course. Most of the ones I know are lovely, when they aren’t supporting England, and unbearable when they are.
Comment by KrisS — 5 March, 2010 @ 10:37 pm
“Unlike others here I just don’t do nationalism and imperialism.”
How about football?
Comment by tony collins — 5 March, 2010 @ 10:38 pm
All three Eddie. Feeling better now? Actually am very much engaged to a working class woman and guess what she’s English too!
Comment by red snapper — 5 March, 2010 @ 10:39 pm
EDL won today at the House of Horrors. UAF losing what could be seen as a home game and getting the sharper end of police tactics this time. EDL outnumbered the UAF and they have got a lot better organised since they implemented self stewarding.
Comment by eamonn wright — 5 March, 2010 @ 11:05 pm
Any chance of a full report on today’s EDL activity? seems like an appropriate time to revisit the tactical questions.
Comment by non-partisan — 5 March, 2010 @ 11:17 pm
“How about football?”
Don’t like it really. Does this make me a bad person?
Comment by johng — 5 March, 2010 @ 11:28 pm
“Again a stunning lack of imaginaton”
I must say I very much like the dialectical verve of this phrase.
Comment by johng — 5 March, 2010 @ 11:31 pm
It does, I’m afraid, johng. But not irredeemable.
The Guardian has this video:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2010/mar/05/english-defence-league-london
The threat from these people needs taking very seriously. But there are some comedy gold moments in there.
Comment by KrisS — 5 March, 2010 @ 11:32 pm
“For the last 14 years every summer all of England has been decked out in the St George Cross Flag.”
A bit of an exaggeration. During the last World Cup I made a point of counting, in various parts of London, the proportion of cars showing the England flag. It was never more than one in twenty.
Comment by Grim and Dim — 5 March, 2010 @ 11:51 pm
EDL = a new kind of threat. Why were reactionaries, racists and chauvinists shouting hate-filled chants and carrying racist placards allowed to march to Parliament and rally outside in full view of everyone?
The left needs to ask itself some hard questions.
Comment by Jo — 5 March, 2010 @ 11:57 pm
UAF are inadequate and have no appeal to the working class.
Comment by eamonn wright — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:03 am
96. They were allowed because
1. They had mobilised the numbers. They have support and are clearly able to mobilise it.
2. The trade unions have so far played very little part in mobilising against them.
3. Large parts of the left, believe the job of containing the EDL can be left to the police.
4. Large parts of the left, give ground politically to ‘nationalism’ by
supporting lefty variants of ‘english nationalism’ civic/inclusive etc
5. The Labour Party and media have prepared the ground for these thugs, actually so have all those who line up with the UK military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
some ideas to be going on with……
Comment by non-partisan — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:07 am
Radical photo reportage on today’s demo:
http://www.photoshelter.com/c/hoffman/gallery/100305-EDL-Westminster-Wilders-demo/G00007JB9mSeGvJs
http://jwarren.co.uk/photos/protest/edl-geert-wilders-london
Comment by Jo — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:08 am
I think there IS enourmous complacency in sections of the left and that we are going to have to spend a good deal of our time as permenant persuaders in terms of winning the argument that the EDL and their like HAVE to be confronted whenever they appear. It was’nt at all a bad mobilisation given the very short notice and it being a weekday but the truth is that if these arguments are won there could have been many more.This was particularly true of most of the colleges. The arguments are gradually being won, but there needs to be a big shift in gears around the mobilisation for bolton. Right across the board from all of us.
Comment by johng — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:12 am
I suspect the average person, upon seeing the Guardian video, may well conclude ‘a pox on both their houses’. I do get fed up with the left’s pouty politics, whereas the EDL looked like the lagered-up peabrains we’ve come to expect. But it equally wouldn’t surprise me if some concluded that it was still OK to vote for the BNP, because at least they’re ‘respectable’. I don’t see the BNP losing votes over this sort of stunt. But lefties laying down in the street is too old hat for words.
Comment by Another Dave — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:24 am
96#
Why were reactionaries, racists and chauvinists shouting hate-filled chants and carrying racist placards allowed to march to Parliament and rally outside in full view of everyone?
1. its a relatively free country
2. why not
3. we were allowed a counter protest.
4. we are not winning the arguement with the lost, excluded and disenfranchised if we are even engaging with them at all.
Comment by jim mclean — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:33 am
“old hat”
How terrible.
What would you suggest people do when they are outnumbered but feel a responsibility not to allow fascists and racists to parade through central London and outside parliament?
Comment by johng — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:34 am
It’s a tragedy to see so many young working class men, probably unemployed given that this was a weekday, mobilised in support of a reactionary movement like the EDL.
The left must reach out to them.
Comment by Jo — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:39 am
Actually the priority is to mobilise the much larger numbers of people who find everything the EDL stand for disgusting. Its by doing this that you provide an alternative for those soft supporters who are not hardened and murderous racists.
Comment by johng — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:47 am
Or as a superior piece of syncretic culture had it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gULhV8urjWM
Comment by johng — 6 March, 2010 @ 1:14 am
What makes me laugh about people like Red Snapper is that they would rather wave any other flag than the English one.
An inability to even engage with the notion that people live in a country they like, are proud of etc, etc is why the left has really failed to rally the working class.
Englishness is what you make it. Red Snaper would prefer it to be racist because from his ivory tower, that’s how he obviously views the English working class.
May I suggest he finds a country to live in without either a) Flags or b) working class people?
Comment by Red Flag — 6 March, 2010 @ 1:26 am
What I find very odd about Red Flag is his notion that the reason the left has failed is that they don’t wave the English flag about. Presumably then if the Labour Party dropped the union jack and everyone took out the flag of st george we’d all be in clover? Is there the tiniest amount of evidence (anywhere?) that the left is small because it does’nt shout loudly enough about its loyalty to the nation? For christs sake stop this self-indulgent passive crap.
Comment by johng — 6 March, 2010 @ 1:35 am
#82 “Jez Butterworth play “Jerusalem”? i will look that up
Here you are, Andy:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/78227
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/london-shows/7205537/Jerusalem-at-the-Apollo-Theatre-review.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/feb/10/jerusalem-review
http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/event/161658/jerusalem
Comment by Strategist — 6 March, 2010 @ 1:52 am
‘The left needs to reclaim English identity’, ‘we need to re-define patriotism’ etc. These arguments really make me cringe. And the logical next question - what precisely is this ‘reclaimed’ English identity, how does such an ideology include rather than exclude people, how does it move us from the superficiality of what flag you’re wearing on your boxer shorts to what really unites and divides people - is not suprisingly never really answered.
Sections of the left may like to pretend that it can all be about the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Chartists but they are deluding themselves. English radicalism was always heavily influenced by Irish radicalism, and most of the Chartist leaders, both local and national, were Irish. The last Chartist upsurge in 1848 was inspired by the continental revolutions and the anti-colonial movement in Ireland, and many Chartists carried the French flag on demonstrations.
Nationalism always weakens us and internationalism always makes us stronger, and I couldn’t give a rat’s arse if some pea brained racist thinks I’m ‘not English anymore.’
Comment by dennis — 6 March, 2010 @ 2:06 am
“Englishness is what you make it. Red Snaper would prefer it to be racist because from his ivory tower, that’s how he obviously views the English working class.”
You and your flag waving idiots don’t speak for the working class who have been needlessly slaughtered in some of the bloodiest wars in the name of your flag. Your flag of Britishness represents the millions murdered by imperial Britain. There is workers blood dripping from the union jack and it’s despicable of you to wrap yourself in it and then claim you are on the left.
Try telling the thousands of striking miners who fought Thatcher that they did it for England. Your flag divides workers and lays the seeds for the nationalists and racists who, at this very moment, are plotting to terrorise workers and make them pay for the recession.
Shove the union jack where the sun don’t shine at least then none of us will have to look at it and you can have as much patriotism as you like welling up inside of you.
Comment by Ray — 6 March, 2010 @ 2:50 am
Betray your country, serve your class. All the Englishness I’ve ever needed.
Comment by Jim — 6 March, 2010 @ 3:11 am
Ray you are right about the Butchers Apron, but we are talking here about a progressive English working class identity and that would be the Flag of St George. Twin it with the red flag. Cannon was spot on when he complained about the US lefts inability to Americanise itself and relate to the US working class.
The English/Brit left are so marooned now from the English working class, particularly the white working class that its difficult to see how they could connect with English workers of all colours and creeds. The left look middle class and weird, they talk middle class and preach a sort of concerned liberal social worker/ middle management language and indeed some of the leading lights are like Callinicos, Foot, Benn etc etc - upper middle class and totally bourgeois in their ways etc
We need a left that is rooted in the manual, semi skilled, skilled and unemployed working class communities- making Palestine the fight in the areas over local community and class issues. We need to be armed and disciplined and creating dual power and liberated or semi liberated areas of England, we need to frighten away the middle class blow ins who come to direct us and lead us in their phony electoralism and issue chasing bum of the week causes.
In short we need a militant working class revolutionary organisation both legal where we can and underground where we must or the whole thing is a middle class posteur and parlour game to get a few careerists elected to reform for us ha fuckin ha.
Comment by eamonn wright — 6 March, 2010 @ 4:19 am
Ray, I suggest you steer clear of subjects you clearly no nothing about.
The idea that England fans want to wave the Union Jack betrays a stunning level of ignorance of shifts in popular culture. The whole point is the near universal shift to St George since Euro 96. You clearly have zero engagement with working class communities, its St George everyone waves, wears and flies every summer England qualify not the Union Jack. The difference as presumably even you might recognise is significant.
Opposing the EDL is clearly vital, Ilm not for a moment denying that. But to seriously suggest that a protest of a few hundred waving placards, shouting slogans and physically stopping the EDL is making any kind of meaningful contribution to challenging ideas that seek to define Englishness through a racialised version of nationalism, you’re not serious are you? I know the SWP have a reputation for reducing politics to slogans but things haven’t got this bad, surely?
As for these suggestions that its hardly anyone who gets wrapped up in St George during a World Cup or Euro summer. Well I suggest its considerably more than a single campaign or issue proferred by the Far Left. Viewing figures reaching 50% of the population means 50% aren’t watching thats true, but if you really think this is a marginal pursuit maybe thats a consequence of not thinking that the SWP is an organisation without any kind of base of support in a single working class commnity isn’t a problem.
Oh and I see that the massive diversification of support for England is now down to new Labour, Eurocommunism, Margaert Thatcher and Joe Stalin. An interesting back four, I assume devolution and football just slipped out in your team selection of influences or are you really as one-dimensional in your thinking as you appear .
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 6 March, 2010 @ 4:50 am
“The idea that England fans want to wave the Union Jack betrays a stunning level of ignorance of shifts in popular culture.”
Oh really, is that why New Labour and the Tories can’t wait to wave the union jack at every sporting occasion? You seem to have missed the red, white and blue being waved by purveyors of English nationalism when they include the rest of the United Kingdom on their nationalist bandwagon.
Don’t let me stop you jumping on the nationalist bandwagon. After all, your Eurocom mates have never been shy of jumping on bandwagons. But don’t believe for one minute that your vision of St George is shared by the majority of workers. It might be trendy flogging patriotism as a fashion accessory to the middle classes but dilettantes like you can’t compete with the likes of the BNP.
Why not try a socialist approach and embrace internationalism? Remember the internationalism of the working class? Marx wrote about it but perhaps he’s out of fashion amongst your set these days.
Comment by Ray — 6 March, 2010 @ 5:43 am
“We need a left that is rooted in the manual, semi skilled, skilled and unemployed working class communities- making Palestine the fight in the areas over local community and class issues.”
This is exactly what many on the left are doing which is why we don’t agree with the hackney stereotypes of workers portrayed by Mark P and his ilk.
The fact is that the BNP did not win Labour voters and receive the majority of their votes from the traditional fascist base of the petit bourgeoisie.
The mistake being made by those on the left who are tempted to jump on the nationalist bandwagon is believing the nationalist rhetoric of New Labour and ultimately the BNP. Just as New Labour attempts to accommodate to the racism of the BNP so are certain people on the left trying to make the case for promoting nationalism in the hope that some of the BNP’s success will rub of on them. It won’t and will just fuel the BNP.
This is not a new phenomenon, the Second International collapsed in 1916 after it voted for war credits in Germany to their shame. This split the left which is why, right now, it’s completely counter-productive for anyone on the left to be contemplating social patriotism as a way of rebuilding the workers movement and generating class struggle.
Comment by Ray — 6 March, 2010 @ 6:00 am
What people are saying is that the left is weak, small, fragmented, lacking in working class composition, lacking in meaningful connection to wc communities and the issues of relevance to them. What we appear to be getting is a left that patronises the white working class, that has pandered to ruling class multiculturalism and is currently reinforcing its uselessness by calling for people to follow cretinous bourgeois electoralism either by backing the Labour party or by voting for candidates that have a light connection to class politics and socialism.
The right are in the ascendency and the ruling class have never felt so secure. This left is like something dreamed up by Stella Rimington. Just how many mixers, brussel sprouts, midnight masses and cranks can a small left millieu hold?
I dont trust any organisation of the brit left on anything, thank fuck my only interaction with it is on blogs like Newmans.
Comment by eamonn wright — 6 March, 2010 @ 6:21 am
Who are we.We are the free holes in the ground for the uniform,who are we, the drug of the pin number,who are we, the slaves to the cuture that exploits and riddicules,who are we.Human and capitalist tools.
Comment by howard — 6 March, 2010 @ 6:49 am
Ray. You really should learn to have at least some basic knowledge of a subject before you commence your lectures.
Since Euro 96 the union jack has all but disappeared at England football matches, its nort worn, waved or flown by hardly any fans wherever they are. Of course new Labour and the Tories raise the Union Jack at every possible occasion, the favour the union, doh!
Now you don’t approve of any of this, Fine thats your choice but you immerse your disapproval in quite bewildering ignorance of even the most basic facts, you seem entirely ignorant of a rather obvious cultural phenomenon.
As for it being treny, and majorities of workers. It is you who is patronising of the working class. It is you who assumes that everybody who waves, wears and flies St George is a racist. Of corse by your outright rejection of any progressive potential in an identification with Englishness you divorce yourself from any kind of engagement, thars why you have this one-dimensional of a working class you purport to represent.
Stopping the EDL matters but a left that refuses to engage at all with popular expressions of Englishness is fatally weakened. Its refusal leaves it irrelevant to a much bigger picture, what the growing identification with Englishness will come to represent. Its your choice, you’ve made it, goodbye.
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 6 March, 2010 @ 6:57 am
Ray is hopeless.
The 50% that doesn’t watch England games on tv includes a substantial portion of Tory- voting middle classes who regard soccer as an oiks game. Rugger, cricket and golf rule supreme in the Conservative heartlands.
Perhaps Ray should move there. Certainly his disdain for working class football support would go down well at the 19th hole.
Comment by Steven — 6 March, 2010 @ 7:24 am
Had I not been on the UAF demonstration yesterday I had planned on attending the solidarity demo for Alberto Durango a victimised migrant worker. According to some here I ought to have urged Albertos supporters to celebrate their ‘Englishness’!
Are the ‘left nationalists’ here aware of how stupid it is to make such concessions to the bosses? And how insulting it is to many of us to have an identity foisted on us that does not relate to who we are and where we are from?
Comment by neprimerimye — 6 March, 2010 @ 7:43 am
johng @ 103 - not lie down in the street, bleating out some tired slogan like an incoherent drunk. This is more pouty politics. It looks stupid.
Comment by Another Dave — 6 March, 2010 @ 7:51 am
Leaving aside the suggestion that St. George’s Day should become a major celebration - pandering to a right wing agenda, typical New Labour - we should strive to re-establish May Day as the great celebration of working class life and struggle here and elsewhere. A great of example of where this has been done, with increasing success, year on year, is the event organised by Wolverhampton Trades Council. Unions, old Labour, progressive organisations, the Indian Workers’ Association, breakdancers, morris dancers (I kid you not), and hundreds of local people, kids and pensioners gathered together for a great night in the concert hall of a pub in Whitmore Reans.It should be a model for events elsewhere.
Comment by Chris — 6 March, 2010 @ 8:24 am
The fact that a lot of working class people do something does not, in and of itself, make it a great thing.
There are, also, a lot of working class people who have not the slightest interest in football.
There are, also, a lot of football fans in England who have little interest in following England.
Now, can we stop being silly, please?
Comment by KrisS — 6 March, 2010 @ 8:35 am
#123 Exactly right, Chris - you beat me to it. So can we stop all this piffle about “re-claiming” St George’s Day now please? It was never ours in the first place.
Comment by Stockwell Pete — 6 March, 2010 @ 8:53 am
Ray, you talk some bollocks. You must be one of those “loony” lefties. You saying that about the Cross of St George is like when the Sun says the red flag is covered in workers blood. Oh, hang on……
Comment by Red Flag — 6 March, 2010 @ 9:19 am
Dialectics,why does humans need a flag.
Comment by howard — 6 March, 2010 @ 9:29 am
#124 “There are, also, a lot of football fans in England who have little interest in following England.”
Yes, that’s right too. I go and watch non-league football now - and I still follow the Premiership and FA Cup etc, but I rarely watch an England game unless it is in the World Cup or something. And then I hope they lose!
Comment by Stockwell Pete — 6 March, 2010 @ 9:54 am
The mportant thing is that the left needs to be rooted in working class communities and have an understanding of the culture of those communities.
The St George Cross makes me uncomfortable still, but I have my eyes and ears open sufficiently to realise that it does not, for masses of people (including large numbers of people from ethnic minorities) have the same conotations that it once seemed to have.
The problem is that so many on the left seem to feel that the only way to immunise yourselves from reactionary ideas is to develop a patronising distance and disinterest, making you just the left wing of the Guardian-reading middle classes.
That’s why some people on the left failed (either initially or at all) to support the oil refinery workers.
On the other hand I think what Mark P is trying to do is interesting, and at least he is trying to engage the issue and shows an understanding of where we are. I’m not entirely happy that he may not sometimes be bending the stick too far the other way however.
As far as what you do on a demonstration in support of victimised immigrant trade unionists, I think you ask said trade unionists how you can help them and you ask people not on the demo to join it and tell them why you are demonstrating.
I don’t think it would be appropriate to try and pursuade any of them to support England in the World Cup (assuming they weren’t already doing that).
If a number of the demonstrators were wearing England shirts I would be more than happy, and for a number of separerate reasons.
Comment by Armchair — 6 March, 2010 @ 10:03 am
I don’t understand at all what is meant by ‘re-claiming’ and ‘engaging’ with the flag of st george, practically, concretely and politically, or how this relates in the slightest to the problems and challenges faced by the left today. Other then perhaps creating absurd stereotypes suggesting that the left hate people who like football etc, something that sounds like it was written in the Sun. And yes Mark P, I think it is of tremendous importance that the left does not allow a situation to develop where the far right can out-mobilise the left and the labour movement. It should be an extremely high priority for anyone who thinks of themselves as concerned with practical, meaningful and serious politics. Not the only priority, but certainly one of the most serious.
Comment by johng — 6 March, 2010 @ 10:11 am
I do think this debate needs to be taken up, but it is partly the prominence it is given and the level of priority that causes some of the bitterness on display here.
Especially at a time when we see far right forces mobilised under the banner of defending ‘england’, and I hope everyone would accept they are far right even if some doubt they are fasists, then it sounds odd to hear people describing themselves as sociaslists talk about the need to defend our conception of ‘englisness’.
It was said the EDL chanted at UAF ‘you are not english anymore’, and this much to Mark P’s annyance is actually true. Once you become a socialist your first self identity is as a worker, part of an international class, that has more in common with workers from abroad than with bosses here.
We can’t take back, or reclaim englishness or national identity, because we (meaning our class) only have it to the extent that we accept the nostrums and propaganda of ‘our’ ruling class into our lives and consciousness. So ‘we’ by refusing to identify with nation, do not give ground or space or anything else to the right, they have it to begin with, it is thier identity, thier collective, thier slogan, conscious workers have to break from it in order to develop an independent consciousness.
this does not mean every one who supports england is a racist and no one on here has said that, or that we cut ourselves off from other workers by somehow not waving the flag ourselves. But the ruling class, brown, cameron et al DO use nationalism to support thier strategy, they use support for England as a way of identifyng thier imperialist projects with working people as a way of including our class. This is a constant debate and will be, but adapting to this national consciousness, trying to pretend it exists independently of the ruling class is a self defeatring strategy for any socialist.
Mark P and Andy have moved away from class as a starting point for political activity, so be it. but you play a very dangerouse game when you turn attention away from the need to confron nationalism within the workers movement, never more so when we are competing for that space with far right nationailsts.
Comment by non-partisan — 6 March, 2010 @ 11:53 am
The real purpose of the national flag is to make people forget about their low pay, bad housing, poor education, failing NHS, lack of representation and voice in todays culture.
It’s a trick. How willing some people, who should know better, are to queue up to be duped, over and over again.
Comment by River — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:04 pm
In Jack Dash’s autobiography he recalls militant London dockers occupying the offices of the National Docks Labour Board singing Rule Britannia. I think there is no implication other than that it was a rousing tune that everybody knew.
Comment by lone nut — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:09 pm
While Denham is desperately trying to shut the stable door long after the horse has fled, what really gets me about these ‘the working class have no country’ commenters is their hypocrisy.
No one on this site raises an eyebrow at a statement like ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’, with its implication that there is such a thing as an Irish nation who share common interests. No one raises an eyebrow at ‘Irish nationalists’ who can put a gun to a disarmed man’s head and pull the trigger. No one is at all worried about a Scots nationalism whose USP is to be anti-England.
Further afield, no one seems worried about any of the other nationalisms in the world, from Chinese to Argentinian, as long as they’re anti-US and anti-British.
Most peoples have a need to be proud of their nation, to feel that they belong, have a culture, a history and a homeland.
Unexceptional for Iraqis, Palestinians, Irish (’Ourselves Alone’), Scots (’Whae’s Like Us ?’) or Zimbabweans - but not, apparently, for those who identify as British or English.
Comment by Laban — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:19 pm
Non-partisan says “We can’t take back, or reclaim englishness or national identity, because we (meaning our class) only have it to the extent that we accept the nostrums and propaganda of ‘our’ ruling class into our lives and consciousness.”
Theoretically, this position has some merit but in practical terms it’s a disaster.
At yesterday’s confrontation, the EDL demo was composed overwhelmingly of young working class men. The UAF demo consisted mainly of palpably middle class students.
Which group is “our class”?
I’m sorry, but most of the students are liberal poseurs who are weally weally angry about injustice (until they go back to mummy and daddy in Guildford for the hols). What the hell do they know about the realities of working class life?
It’s the guys with the England flags who the left has to reach. Shitting on that flag seems like a curious way to engage with them.
Comment by Frank — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:23 pm
White fright, or any other, is a control thought.The game is progressing our well being and winning some where to plant our arsess and have something to say.Socialists who the fuck are they, them old bald head fucks keep talking shit,them communists flag fells,yeh man what the fuck do they know.
Comment by howard — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:24 pm
The problem of multi-culturalism was not its insistence on respect for those of different cultures, or of their freedoms to express themselves as they wish: it was the neglect of the glue that binds us together; it was the failure to recognise a multi-cultural society can only work if there is equal engagement and activity in building and developing shared values and the framework of a shared identity which enables us to be multicultural within a cohesive society.
Or to put it another way, the problem of multi-culturalism comes when people don’t have shared values and identity. In other words, one common culture.
What does ‘multi-’ mean again ?
Comment by Laban — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:30 pm
Laban 134* the difference is that England/Britain is/was an imperialist nation, and before Irish workers could even theoretically try to reach socialism, they had the immiediate problem of a divided nation and imperialist soldiers on thier streets. Socialists in ireland from Connolly on have always recognised the limitations of irish nationalism, and seen the struggle against british occupation as part of the sruggle for socialism in all of reland. this remains rue today.
Frank 135* you are actually right. it is the flag waving EDL who are working class in origin, esp compared to those currently mobilised by UAF (and it would do UAF supporters no harm to admit this)
but, although predominantly workig class, they are actually poltically serving the interests of those that want to see us blame Muslims and Islam for current problems in Britain, rather than identifying the capitalist system as the problem. so although working class they are representing the interests of the ruling class.
but…this situation is not stable, there are many things that can happen, one of which we have seen a taste of in Harrow and birmingham- that is that the EDL are met by w/c ressistance- led by young asians, when asain youth, black and white youth, and trade unionists are mobilised the EDL will scatter to the four winds.
we are not shitting on the flag, just say clearly its not our flag, we rally under symbols that express our struggle.
Comment by non-partisan — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:49 pm
137 laban - the main problem in building a ‘cohesive society’ is that one part of it (the ruling class) excpects the other ( the working class) to pay for its rotten system. The continued attacks on w/c organisation and rights, the launching of wars in its (ruling class interest) and then using racism to deflect the anger of working people is the problem.
The problem is that the ‘glue’ as you put it in society, was an expansion based on credit, that could never last, once the bubble has burst, a scapegoat is needed. How long have EDL been around? when was the banking crisis? what period represents the biggest growth of the BNP? when did Brown use the British jobs for british workers slogan? any of these things tie in?
It is not necessary for thier to be a ruling class (that meet secretly in a members club) they react to protect thier interests, they make policy to protect thier system, in this way they act as a class, whether united or not.
Comment by non-partisan — 6 March, 2010 @ 12:58 pm
I would just like to point out that whilst its certainly not true that all the demonstraters were students, a demo on a weekday called at very short notice, is likely to pose problems for workers. There were nevertheless some trade union banners. There will be many, many more at Bolton.
I don’t know about the exact social composition of the EDL demonstration. Whilst its certainly true that many will have been working class, its also true that many will be self-employed, and many will be at least wealthy enough to purchase themselves a season ticket. Narrower studies of the composition of football gangs might help here.
On the wider debates here I think this latest piece over at the Tomb represents a serious attempt to grapple with the issues. The EDL are a political phenomenan related to wider political changes going on. We ignore these changes at our peril. In many ways the (to abbreviate) SUN frame for issues of nation and identity seems to me to ignore those social and political changes:
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/03/police-fascists-and-antifascists.html
Comment by johng — 6 March, 2010 @ 1:02 pm
In 1990 I had the pleasure of inhabiting a cardboard box in the Strand, as I took my early morning stroll I noticed quite a few Skinheads, also many Asians, coming to speakers corner there were a large number of young white people. Talking to them it seems they were there to disrupt a Skrewdiver gig and the meeting point for the Skinheads was speakers corner. As soon as a Skinhead turned up they were attacked violently by a mob of what I now knew to be midleclass students. There was no attempt at discourse, to parphrase Che, it was the pedagogy of the brick. When the first bus arrived bricks went through the window, why, this was not a protest against an illegal march as took place in Edinburgh against the SDL, it was a concious decision to ensure that a bunch of working class kids couldn’t have a party, no matter how repulsive we find the lyrics etc. How many of these kids came to Londond as Oi punks and left as BNP fodder. As for the many Asians who were standing round watching the procedings, well you saw them on the news, they were there for the Rushdie protest, using their right to free assembly, a right the left denied the young Skins on that day. Dont attack the young so easily, we all went through the Chauvinist period, and dont Kowtow to any religeon, they are all wrong. We should be engaging with these kids on the street, we should be oposing all faith schools, they are a curse and the only exclusion I want to see from the classroom is God. Religous schools have maintained the false divide in Scotland and Northern Ireland for a century. As for celebrating Englishness, why not at least England exists unlike God.
Comment by jim mclean — 6 March, 2010 @ 1:18 pm
And on “you’re not English any more”. Some of us never were - two of my grandparents were born in Scotland, and I’ve also got Huguenot and Welsh ancestors. One of the things that makes me angriest about the ‘reclaiming Englishness’ theme is the assumption that anyone who lives in England must be English.
Comment by chjh — 6 March, 2010 @ 1:21 pm
No. It’s anyone can be English. We’re a two flag nation. My parents are Irish. I have the benefirt of following two shit football teams.
Comment by Red Flag — 6 March, 2010 @ 1:22 pm
Two responses.
Firstly as I have written elsewhere I entirely reject the idea of ‘reclaiming’ the flag. No national flag except under a totalitarian regime will be the property of a single ideology. The issue is contesting the symbolism of the flag. The St George Cross as a popular symbol is a relatively new phenomenon. It should not be beyond the wit of progressives to project it as a symbol of a multicultural nation. Unfortunately this is precisely the kind of project the likes of the UAF entirely reject gifting a huge space to the far right, uncontested.
Secondly, in what ay is recognising a popular identification with Englishness a turn away from Englishness. Those who live a life outside the world of stident union politics might notice the mass working class support for England around World Cups, though a few on this site seem strangely unaware that this is of any significance. And in what way do you contest far right ideas by an outright refusal to recognise any progressive potential in this identification with England? None, you vacate that struggle with your unwillingness to get your hands dirty. This is do-nothing politics.
And this video report reveals the real uselessness of the left on this issue >
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2010/mar/05/english-defence-league-london
The EDL muster a few hundred at most. Opposed by a couple of hundred students. The EDl wave their St George Cross flags. The UAF chant ‘Nazi scum’. The EDL are seeking to offer a racialised version of national identity, stopping them is important but in the outright refusal to offer any kind of alternative version of national identity the far left are losing a far more important battle. And until the left recognises this we will keep losing it by not even bothering to fight. The street battle may be won, or lost, the battle of ideas UAF have apparently decided is not worth bothering with, they are gifting Englishness to the BNP, this is the most bankrupt form of anti-fascism.
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 6 March, 2010 @ 1:52 pm
The lyrics at Skrewdriver gigs were not simply ‘distasteful’ or ‘chauvinist’. They were murderous and Nazi.
Students are not ‘mainly middle class’. And if you tried to engage with a mob of racists you would be beaten up.
The only way to engage with those drawn to the EDL is to demonstrate that there are more anti-racists then racists and that racism is no fun.
The kick you get out of an EDL march is that you can intimidate and frighten minorities, gays and socialists and this makes you feel powerful.
That kick needs to be denied.
Comment by johng — 6 March, 2010 @ 1:53 pm
johng 140* In accepting that the UAF demo on Friday was largely middle class, I wasn’t having a go. Hats off to those who had the balls to turn up and demonstrate,but not withstanding a few union banners. (and I have carried them myself,when only two of us were present!) What is obvious is that the working class movement, of all shades, has not been mobilised against the EDL…yet.
And i hope it is, but this means, unions, LP, and youth have to see the EDL as a threat, at the moment they don’t, that is the problem that needs addressing. I think the debate about how to deal with the EDL needs to continue, partly so we can draw a balance sheet, and try to win over people like Andy N who think that the police are the best method of containing the EDL. Well we had an example of that Friday, and it appoears it was the UASF that were contained while the EDL managed to continue thier protest. We need people like Andy to get behind the mobilisations against the EDL, we need the RMT, PCS, POA those who claim to have socialist leadership to show it now.
Comment by non-partisan — 6 March, 2010 @ 1:54 pm
Mark P,
On the contrary I think the video demonstrates the uselessness of those who think one can ignore the far right gaining momentum on the streets and the need to break from that uselessness. Very quickly.
Comment by johng — 6 March, 2010 @ 1:55 pm
And to break from vicious right wing stereotypes about students, the left and trade unionists. I know many trade unionists on that demo as well as some who have recently been made redundent because of the recesssion. If your stereotyping of those actually doing something here is anything to go by, I really wouldn’t like to see the result of your contestation of national symbolism. We need to face hard facts about the need to rebuild the lefts capacity for mobilisation. No amount of text books or radio programs (welcome as these can be) is a substitute for recognising that in the end the world is not changed by commenting on it. We can only move foward on the basis of mobilisation, organisation and mass political work.
Comment by johng — 6 March, 2010 @ 2:00 pm
Non-Partisan-I agree.
Comment by johng — 6 March, 2010 @ 2:02 pm
Mark P
“The St George Cross as a popular symbol is a relatively new phenomenon. It should not be beyond the wit of progressives to project it as a symbol of a multicultural nation. Unfortunately this is precisely the kind of project the likes of the UAF entirely reject gifting a huge space to the far right, uncontested.”
The problem here Mark is that All the nationalism that was attached to the union jack (decades of it) has been transferred to the george cross, so its not ‘new’ it didn’t come out of nowhere, its part of the narrative of national identity that the ruling class, through the SUN/ Star /Mail/Express are happy to
propogate. And you ask that we try to attach a different meaning to the symbols chosen by the mass media to represent that national narrative, this is pissing in the wind. You can wave your George Cross as inclusively as you like, but you are simply giving the EDL a sign of your inclusiveness in the ‘national’ project.
again you say:
Secondly, in what ay is recognising a popular identification with Englishness a turn away from Englishness. Those who live a life outside the world of stident union politics might notice the mass working class support for England around World Cups, though a few on this site seem strangely unaware that this is of any significance. And in what way do you contest far right ideas by an outright refusal to recognise any progressive potential in this identification with England? None, you vacate that struggle with your unwillingness to get your hands dirty. This is do-nothing politics.
Actually Mark, those of us who are a part of the working class don’t need you to tell us that there is support for England in major competitions, what is different is the political conclusions drawn from that. While for a game of football millions of people cheer the team and wear the colours, millions don’t.
It is extremely good that todays England footie team includes many black players, this is really usefull in popularising opposition to racism. But where have you shown a proggressive element to the identification of Englishness? The problem is Mark niether you nor I control how Englishness is represented by the ruling class through its media. (did you see the gilligan show?)And the goerge flag is central to that narrative.
Its not do nothing politics to disagree with you, you might be a radical football supporter, but many working class socialists would recognise your
adaption to nationalism for what it is. Political cowardice.
Comment by non-partisan — 6 March, 2010 @ 2:17 pm
Gordon Bennett!Still doing this old bollox.Poor old England,born 959AD died 1066AD RIP FFS
Comment by ScotinLondon — 6 March, 2010 @ 2:26 pm
John G
Why don’t you actually read what others write before you start typing?
I specifically stated that the EDL need to be stopped. But if you seriously think one of these demos will have any impact on the hundreds of thousands thinking of voting BNP you are dangerously mistaken. And even more dangerously the outright refusal of groups like UAF, heavily influenced by the politics of the SWP, to promote any kind of alternative identification with England to the EDL doesn’t just fail to contest their ideas, it gifts all that space to the racist right. This is an entirely bankrupt strategy.
And ‘vicious right wing stereotypes’. Why don’t you grow up? The EDL mustered a couple of hundred at most, thankfully - and this in itself says something - the have entirely failed to relate to the millions who identify with Englishness. This has next to nothing to the couple of hundred, mainly students, who turned out to jeer ‘nazi scum’ at the EDL, and everything to do with their lack of appeal.
As for non-partisan. Of course you are right if you adopt a one-dimensional marxism which believes that it is impossible to contest ruling class ideas. This is the politics of do-nothings.
As for political cowardice, the cowards are those who proffer a so-called internationalism that they never have the guts to parade in public, hoping all summer long that those flags will stop being waved. I’d at least have some respect for your politics if you and your like actually stood up for them, but mostly you don’t. I make absolutely no apology for my identification with England, it has nothing whatsoever with pandering to racism, and I get my hands dirty too as an activist contributing to an England fan culture that has moved massively away from the stereotypes you are still clearly hung up.
This is an important, yet futile debate. The Far Left who run campaigns like UAF as their own dominion would like to claim they represent broad anti-fascist and anti-racist opinion and activism. They don’t. There is a growing constituency who are actively seeking to shape an inclusive, non-racial Englishness, and many would see also see this as central too to challenging the Far Right. The fact that the Far Left isn’t part of this is your problem not ours. Goodbye.
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 6 March, 2010 @ 4:02 pm
I think George Galloway raised the possibility of tearing down the British parliament and its medieval appendages and moving it to modern accommodation on the Olympic site. I would like to see George and Respect go further and take up the campaign for a sovereign English parliament and a federal British Isles as part of a Socialist United States of Europe in place of the union for cut throat competition that currently orchestrates bankrupt European capitalism.
Comment by David Ellis — 6 March, 2010 @ 4:14 pm
“There is a growing constituency who are actively seeking to shape an inclusive, non-racial Englishness, and many would see also see this as central too to challenging the Far Right.”
Mark when did you hold your last “reclaim the flag” meeting? You complain that the UAF is irrelevant but 2,000 on the streets in Scotland contradicts your comment. Meanwhile I know a phone box you and your chum(s?) can hire. You can deck it out in William Morris designs and Lowry paintings, sing Jeruselum and kid yourself you are the new “Engerland.” Meanwhile the BNP will be holding the real event at a pub down the road.
The majority of the left will be organising in their workplaces and colleges on the basis of uniting workers around class rather than dividing them on the basis of nationality. You’re always welcome to join us when you get tired of the pomp and circumstance.
Comment by Ray — 6 March, 2010 @ 4:22 pm
An excellent analysis of the situation from Lenin’s Tomb:
“The EDL are a political problem, and they can’t be opposed in an apolitical, technocratic way. That is a way of ducking the issue. And nor can they be dealt with by meeting them half-way, or trying to steal their ‘patriotic’ clothes. That is a futile attempt to find a short-cut, which doesn’t exist. The overwhelming burden of evidence is that the more the left validates the politics of nationalism, and concedes territory on ‘multiculturalism’, the more it feeds into the right’s agenda. The agenda of the right on race relations has to be confronted, not accomodated, just as its beneficiaries in the far right must be opposed, not ignored.”
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/03/police-fascists-and-antifascists.html
Comment by Ray — 6 March, 2010 @ 4:31 pm
Mark - there were a hell of a lot more than 200 EDL yesterday.
Look at the videos on YouTube.
BTW - the route of the EDL march took them right past MI5 HQ!
Comment by Steven — 6 March, 2010 @ 4:33 pm
#144 - at the last World Cup, I did see one house on a nearby estate flying the tricolour and the St George Cross, but I think it’s fairly unusual. I know what you mean about ‘anyone can be English’ in the sense of supporting the football team, but I think a lot of identification with ‘Englishness’ (outside football) is actually about a dislike of the multicultural aspects of ‘Britishness’.
Another way of thinking about it is as a question: what is there that’s good or progressive about ‘Englishness’ that isn’t in ‘Britishness’?
Comment by chjh — 6 March, 2010 @ 4:50 pm
Ray. Try checking out the facts before you post.
Perhaps you’d even care to apologise after a quick google search reveals my more than 14 years of involvement wit England fan activism but I won;t hold my breath.
As for phone boxes, if you seriously believe that UAF amounts to more than the hundreds of thousands who identify with England yet reject the racism of the BNP and EDL then too long in a self-centred organisation like the SWP has left you delusional I’m afraid.
It is the UAF’s absolute refusal to countenance anything remotely progressive in English identity that leaves it marginal to the battle to define Englishness in a manner totally opposed to a racialised version of nationalism, Stopping the EDL is vital, bit cannot be divorced from this contest of ideas too. The UAF, under the influence of the SWP has chosen to ignore that battle, more fool them.
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 6 March, 2010 @ 5:04 pm
It is the UAF’s absolute refusal to countenance anything remotely progressive in English identity that leaves it marginal to the battle to define Englishness in a manner totally opposed to a racialised version of nationalism,
so where is this battle Mark P? How are you engaging with the EDL/BNP?
claiming thousands, millions on your side because you support england is little less than wishful thinking.
Comment by non-partisan — 6 March, 2010 @ 5:19 pm
btw apologies Mark , for the political cowardice remark. I don’t think thats what motivates you. But i do profoundly disagree with you, and your patronising tone does annoy.
Comment by non-partisan — 6 March, 2010 @ 5:56 pm
Just thinking, what about the Rangers fans who wear English tops, dont actually know what I’m thinkin, just thinking.
(Glasgow Rangers of coorse)
Comment by jim mclean — 6 March, 2010 @ 5:58 pm
Non-partisan
Another one who types a response actually before reading what they are responding to.
Of course there is a battle to define English identity, just because you’ve chosen not to take part in it because you disavow any progressive potential in Englishness doesn’t mean its not taking place. The left has a horrible habit of assuming the entire world revolves around itself, it doesn’t.
And I didn’t claim that millions were ‘on my side’, whatever that might mean. What I pointed out was that the overwhelming majority of those who identify with England want nothing to do with the BNP or EDL, yet the far left in the shape of UAF have chosen to entirely disavow this in marginaising the EDL because they don;t want anything to do with Englishness.
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 6 March, 2010 @ 7:23 pm
Frank is wrong when he says that on ‘yesterday’s confrontation, the EDL demo was composed overwhelmingly of young working class men. The UAF demo consisted mainly of palpably middle class students.’
The last time I can recall when hundreds of workers did march to parliament behind racist demands was after Enoch Powell’s famous ‘rivers of blood’ speech. Dockers and workers from Smithfields Market walked out of work (a racist stike) and marched to Parliament for Powell.
The EDL demo was full of Nazis and racists. None came from the organised working class. Frank describes the EDL as ‘young working class men’ but most were clearly unemployed or self employed.
The EDL leadership is middle class (petit bourgeois) with businessman Alan Lake the EDL’s founder, and financier. Those who joined this march on parliament were cleary mainly from the ‘lumpen proletariat’. This is a marxist class description of their place in society, not a term of abuse.
Marx and Engels, desrcibe how the lumpen proletariat’s ‘conditions of life’ prepare them to be ‘a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”
Not all unemployed people are ‘lumpen proletariat’. Organised workers are losing their jobs, unemployed workers are involved in, and can be won to collective class struggles.
The people Frank describes as ‘young workers’ of the EDL can not be won to class concious struggles. They are hardened racists, the EDL stewards could not hide this fact.
The mainly student UAF mobilisation had trades union banners, and a left Labour MP speaking. This was a working class anti Nazi protest - not a middle class protest. The middle class have never led mobilisations against the fascists.
UAF is funded by the unions - workers organisations. The EDL is funded by rich business people.
Who paid for these poor, unemployed EDL to travel from all over Britain, get tanked up, and march on Parliament to support the big business backed UKIP? A genuine question?
The UAF mobilisation to Bolton is financed by unions and collections from workers.
Frankhas got his political knickers in a twist, and appears to be seeking excuses to avoid building a mass movement beat the EDL and their BNP ring masters
Comment by Mark Krantz — 6 March, 2010 @ 8:12 pm
A main problem in Scotland has been an over emphasis on the “Scottishiness” of the left which has given the impression that the national question must take priority over the class struggle and any one who questions the role of the SSP and Solidarity in legitimising the policies of the SNP is ridiculed. As Labour have legitimised the policies of the BNP we have legitimised Salmond and his massive swing to the right which has abandonded any pretense of maintaining his “79″ Social Democrat stance. Labour must wait I assume in Alex’s new Scotland.Another problem is a refusal of the left in Scotland to accept that their support is not working class but Lumpen and the collapse in the vote for the left due to the split is measured by the increased support for the BNP in the most socialiy excluded areas of Scotland. We have to be careful when flying the Flag, enjoy it at the right time but deal with what attracts the young to the BNP, jobs, housing and a future.
Comment by jim mclean — 6 March, 2010 @ 8:59 pm
The problem with much of this debate is the fact that nationalism takes so many different forms. But the most significant fact is that nation states exist. They are real tangible statements of fact - whereas ‘workers of the world unite’ is an aspiration (however well meaning). So it is entirely natural that people identify with their nation, as they do their city, or school, or football team, or religion. Of course it can be used for ill - but so can many things. ‘Democracy’ is used to justify the invasion of Iraq, ‘women’s liberation’ to excuse the slaughter in Afghanistan.
I’ve was politically educated in the SWP tradition and feel no sense of loyalty to England. When they play in the World Cup I’m pleased when they loose (but feel gutted for the players). Now I’m prepared to admit that is may be because I’m Manchester City fan that I like the chance to cheer when I’m losing. But what is obvious to me is that many of my friends - anti-racist to the core - just don’t get it. They can’t get their heads around my position on a football match. Revolutionary defeatism may weaken Imperialist states in times of war but when it comes to football, losing has no impact on the power of the British state to impose itself on the world stage.
So in the end - this kind of anti-Englishness just does the left no favours. Worse, it blurs the boundaries between the far right enemy and those in a broad spectrum to the left of them. I believe that there is no surprise that some EDL events have been on England Match days - their hope is that England Fans get attacked by anti-fascists as EDL members which will then give them more support.
Ultimately, however, the main far right threat is not the EDL but the growing voting base of the BNP - in the cities and suburbs of Britain’s cities. And that can’t be tackled be street fights or wishing England do badly in South Africa (they’re more than capable of doing that without any help from the far Left) but by an electoral strategy that goes toe-to-toe with them on the doorsteps and proves that the left have the better strategy and tactics for defending services and jobs than the BNP.
Worrying whether someone has a St George’s flag in the window before you knock on the door becomes a reason for failing to engage at exactly the point and place that engagement is needed most.
Comment by TLC — 6 March, 2010 @ 11:51 pm
” so it is entirely natural that people identify with their nation”
First question here: what’s ‘natural’ about it? If you mean, that people have been taught it, or learned it through images, slogans, newspaper articles, conversations etc, then it’s not ‘natural’ as say, hunger, might be described as ‘natural’. If you mean ‘hardly surprising’ then that’s not ‘natural’ either.
Then you say ‘identify with’. What does this mean exactly? That on occasions people say eg ‘they support England’ - you seem to give great weight to football, which for purely historical reasons does indeed have an ‘English’ team but plenty of sports don’t and people who like sport don’t seem to have any problems about switching between ‘England’ and ‘Great Britain’ - which is a very different concept. So ‘identifying’ is much more fluid than you suggest. If you are talking about how people describe themselves then again, people describe themselves in many different ways, of which being ‘English’ may or may not be one of them. People also describe themselves by the colour of their hair, their role within families, the town they come from, the county they come from, the one or more places their parents and grandparents come from, the language they speak, the religion they have (or not), and so on. Before deciding that a) it’s ‘natural’ and b) that people ‘identify’ with being English, why not see what evidence you’ve got that the majority of people in England think and act in ways that tell you that this process is more important than all the other things they ‘identify with.
Then you talk about ‘nation’. It’s not pedantic to point out that England isn’t a nation. It’s a province without representation. It’s just an area within a nation state called the UK of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I’ve yet to hear or read anything that tells me that one part of England has anything more in common with another part of England, than that same part of England has in common with a part of Wales or Scotland. So, to be precise, does Northumberland have more in common with Cornwall or London than it has with, say, Ayrshire or Cardiff If so, what?
I’m bemused why people who seem so sure that there is some kind of left nationalism that can be spoken of in relation to England muddle up these ideas of ‘nation’, ‘natural’, ‘identity’ and the rest.
As a footnote - some people (millions of them) really don’t give a stuff about football. Some people care much more about their local team than the national team. Some people only care about the national team at World Cup time. Nothing whatsoever can be drawn from the fact that x million watch an England team playing. Please remember that the managing coach of the ‘England’ team is an Italian - and not an Italian Englishman but someone who we can be pretty sure will not choose to live in England when this present job is over. In other words, the term ‘England team’ is itself being modified even as people write about how natural it is to identify with the nation of England!
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 1:59 am
“Ray. Try checking out the facts before you post.”
When you start posting actual facts instead of cynical opinions based of stereotypes I’ll certainly check them out.
“Perhaps you’d even care to apologise after a quick google search reveals my more than 14 years of involvement wit England fan activism but I won;t hold my breath.”
Please hold your breath because at least you won’t be spouting nonsense. I don’t advise holding it for too long though.
“Stopping the EDL is vital, bit cannot be divorced from this contest of ideas too.”
Yes, your solution of outdoing the nationalism of the EDL really distinguishes you from them. It beggars belief why UAF haven’t given you a call.
Comment by Ray — 7 March, 2010 @ 5:49 am
“Nothing whatsoever can be drawn from the fact that x million watch an England team playing.”
I seem to remember a lot of people cheering on Torvill and Dean and the womens curling team. Perhaps we should all wear ice costumes and curling gear so we can be down with the “English”. But workers don’t like ice skating and curling do they? It’s all so confusing! I shall just have to make sure that when I’m next on a demo I have a variety of costume changes just in cast the England football strip just isn’t relating. It’s so difficult being a socialist these days.
Comment by Ray — 7 March, 2010 @ 5:58 am
“And I didn’t claim that millions were ‘on my side’, whatever that might mean.”
Yes you did.
“What I pointed out was that the overwhelming majority of those who identify with England want nothing to do with the BNP or EDL,”
Exactly, and that’s why we’re not going to encourage nationalism by becoming a pale imitation of the EDL.
“…yet the far left in the shape of UAF have chosen to entirely disavow this in marginaising the EDL because they don;t want anything to do with Englishness.”
Contradiction alert! You claim that the majority of England football supporters want nothing to do with the EDL and then you go on to say that marginalising the EDL is attacking England fans. This does not compute. Your claim that campaigning against the EDL is the same as attacking England fans means you’ve lost the plot. If that’s the sum total of your analysis then you seriously need to step back and see how ridiculous that is.
You don’t decide what “Englishness ” is the BNP do. You’re playing in their territory and they are much more experienced than you. If I argued that the left needs to reclaim colonialism no one would accept this and no one should accept nationalism either.
Comment by Ray — 7 March, 2010 @ 6:20 am
Ray. You stick to your do-nothingness around Englishness and you’ll keep gifting that identity to the EDL and the BNP.If you;re happy with that fine, I’m not.
What you seem incapable of recognising here is any progressive potential whatsoever in an English national identity. I don’t accommodate to a racialised version of nationalism, I campaign for an alternative, civic and inclusive version. You and the UAF don;t and won’t, which means you might win the odd punch up with the EDL but in the battle of ideas you lose. Thankfully there are plenty of other anti-fascists and anti-racists who recognise the disastrous futility of your strategy, goodbye.
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 7 March, 2010 @ 7:15 am
If I argued that the left needs to reclaim colonialism no one would accept this and no one should accept nationalism either.
Actually Ray people did argue that there could be a progressive colonialism, with the same logic that Mark P uses about nationalism; its already happening, its do nothing politics to ignore it, or just call for its end, we have to engage with it, and not leave the ground to the right, we have to find the progressive elements within it.
Comment by non-partisan — 7 March, 2010 @ 7:19 am
166 Actually, I think that the work people from all kinds of backgrounds do to challenge racist assumptions and prejedices are valuable, including among football supporters. So I am not saying that mobilising with the UAF is the only way to oppose facism. But Mark P you insist on trying to insult, denigrate,and abuse those who do organise through the UAF, maybe you should get on with what you do, by all means debate strategy, but have a bit more respect for those student or not who are willing to get out on the streets in oppositrion to the BNP and EDL.
I can’t resist this…..goodbye (does doing that make you think you have just dismissed us?)
Comment by non-partisan — 7 March, 2010 @ 7:42 am
Non-partisan
Read what I wrote. I sspdecifically said it was important to stop the EDL. But what I added that to do this while entirely ignoring the necessity to contributing to a progressive English identity renders the strategy bordering on the worthless I am afraid and it does nobody any favour pretending otherwise. In the late 1970 the NF could be more or less defeated by means of a street battle and sticking the label nazi on them. It no longer works, the BNP are building a significant electoral base, most of their support while racist is not identifiably neo-nazi in inclination, and theres a real contest of ideas about Englishness. On all three fronts UAF are palpably failing.
Oh and I dismissed the Far Left as an utter irrelevance to real world politics a long time ago . Goodbye.
Mark P
Comment by Mark P — 7 March, 2010 @ 9:54 am
Good points from TLC (pity you’re a blue but nobody’s perfect!)
Michael Rosen, if Scotland isn’t a separate nation from England, why does it have a different legal and education system? And if Wales isn’t a separate nation from both, why does it have a legally recognised (and in some cases enforced) separate language. Pretty simple really.
As for this idea suggested by some commentators that defining people as English excludes people decended from parents from other (particularly non-white) countries, this is completely arse about face. It is the racists and neo-nazis who want to define people on that basis, and by going along with that idea you are playing right into their hands.
The lead post on this thread mentions The Making of the English Working Class by Thompson. I bought and read that book at the age of 16 because I read an interview in the NME where a guy called Linton Kwesi Johnson was saying it was one of the best books he ever read. I still totally concur with him.
LKJ was responsible for such great works as “All wi doin is defendin’” and “Englan is a bitch”.
Comment by Armchair — 7 March, 2010 @ 10:51 am
Armchair, I didn’t say anything about Scotland and Wales. I was talking about the space called England. If it’s defined by ‘not being Scotland or Wales’ then that seems a tough proposition for talking about identity! Have a look back. I said that England is not a nation, at best it’s a province without representation (as the province that de facto, it is). I think Thompson’s view of the ‘English’ working class was circumscribed by the time he had to do the work. I can’t believe that he really thought that the miners of south wales or the shipbuilders of the Clyde were in some fundamental way distinct from miners in England or shipbuilders on the Tyne. As for Linton, I don’t think he was talking about ‘Englan” as something distinct from the rest of the UK. It’s just that he had arrived in the part of England called London.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 11:03 am
Looking over some of these blogs recently I’ve noticed an irritating tendency on the part of some people to hurl the word ’student’ about as some sort of automatic insult. Its usual collocate is ‘middle class’, as though it’s still 1926 and all students hail from the bourgeoisie or the landed gentry. How long has this nonsense been outdated? I was a student about twenty years ago. No one in m,y family had ever been to university and it was a bit of an alien concept to my parents, but even then many of my fellow students were from working class backgrounds - their parents being low grade white collar workers,public sector workers, London Underground tube drivers etc. My own parents were both from very traditional working class backgrounds, doing traditional working class jobs.
One problem with the anti EDL demo in London was that there weren’t enough students on it, not too many. It’s vital to get more trade unionists there, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with students who have enough guts and principle to come out on a demo that, after all, may well end in violence or arrest or both.
There seems to be an awful, superficial and tedious stereotype at play here about what constitutes ‘working class.’ Apparently not being a student, and getting all emotional about a bloody football team seems to be a key component of it.
Comment by dennis — 7 March, 2010 @ 12:13 pm
Its usual collocate is ‘middle class’, as though it’s still 1926 and all students hail from the bourgeoisie or the landed gentry.
Good point, well made.
Comment by KrisS — 7 March, 2010 @ 12:18 pm
To which, you could add, dennis, that plenty of ’students’ go off to do working class jobs! That is, they go to do work where their only means of income is through selling their labour power - no fees from consultancies, no dividends from shares, no rent from tenants, no vast interest payments from capital etc etc. One of my MA students works in Waterstones. She has just been made some kind of departmental head. Oh, she must be middle class - really? She’s on about 6 quid an hour. Then factor in the debts - usually between 5 and 8 grand a year of study, the ‘middle class’ student leaving university could be 20 grand in debt, earning about 6 quid an hour.
One of the great penalties payed by crap descriptions of class, is that we think that anyone who doesn’t speak with a distinct regional or local accent and anyone who does an office job and anyone who has taken their education beyond 16 is ‘middle class’ and is therefore not entitled to speak about ‘what working class people really think’ etc etc. This is phoney workerism and what’s more plays neatly into the hands of those who want to minimise the potential of working people to fight back. Thus, if you tell shop-workers in Waterstones that they’re ‘middle class’ there is always the hope (irony check) that they won’t organise themselves (as beastly horny handed sons of toil do) into unions and fight for better wages and conditions, or even, in union branches, have a sense that they have more in common with eg oil refinery workers, than you do with the MD of a publisher.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 12:42 pm
There is another underlying assumption floating about here and elsewhere that racism s confined to the ‘working class’. Somewhere in there is a hint that there’s the ‘working class’ and there are ‘immigrants’ who…what?…aren’t working class? Alongside which we are supposed to believe that ‘middle class’ people aren’t racist? Instead, we watch someone like Anthony Green (?) from ‘Immigration Watch, come on TV and talk in silken tones about changes in the character of Britain and the like and because he keeps insisting he isn’t being racist, then…what?…he isn’t? No one challenges him on what he means by ‘immigration’. Is he including the largely white immigration from Europe? (if so, is part of IW’s programme to rewrite the EU rules on labour mobility?) Is he including the largely white immigration from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand? (He’s never mentioned it when I’ve been watching). So what is he talking about - but is never mentioned? Black immigration? Then why doesn’t he say so? Because his agenda is to hint, but not state, that he is opposed to diversity, and thinks that it’s ‘normal’ or ‘legitimate’ to hint that ‘there are too many black people living in ‘his’ country’. But this is unstated. Is it middle class racism? I would say so.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 12:49 pm
Apols it’s ‘Migration Watch’ and it’s Andrew Green.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 12:51 pm
Every shred of evidence points to the simple fact that the majority of students are white middle class. The children of those of us that live in the crap Council or Association houses are screwed in the main.
Read Universities Dont like common people although Bowles and Gintis are as relevant in th eUK as the US>
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/feb/03/university-access-social-exclusion
Children from the most affluent quarter of families - characterised by researchers as owning two cars and a home with four bedrooms - account for 55% of students at prestigious universities.
By contrast, children from the poorest 25% of households, typically living in terrace homes or flats, make up less than 6.3% of the student population of these universities.
Comment by Jim McLean — 7 March, 2010 @ 12:51 pm
If you spend a bit of time on their site ‘Migration Watch UK’ you’ll see some nice fudging - sliding around of a use of ‘England’ (when talking about ‘overcrowding’) and UK as if these are synonymous entities. And note also how they throw away the aside that, according to them, a ‘third’ of inward migration is from the EU. So in their programme to ‘reduce’ immigration, does this include a reduction in EU migration or not? Or is EU inward migration less of a ‘problem’ for them? If so, why?
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 12:58 pm
Jim, your stats also tell you therefore that a sizeable proportion of students do not come from two car four bedroom houses! 55 per cent is a low majority not a high one! Yes, the poorest households only provide that low percentage…but we’re not only talking about the poorest? You still haven’t accounted for the 45 per cent minus the 6.3 per cent! ie the 38.7 per cent! And it’s a lazy assumption to make to assume that every student who comes from a homeowning household is ‘middle class’ or even that their parents will or can share out some of their ‘middle class’ wealth with their student offspring. Wakey wakey, the non-rich middle class are panicking that their pensions are worthless, that the price of their houses are coming down and so are not dishing out tens of thousands to their ex-student offspring. In short, there is a new working class emerging of educated people doing badly paid jobs and yet which require an education, they are loaded with debt, they have no other means of income (ie they are not earning from dividends, rents or interest). If this new layer in society is not working class what is it?
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 1:05 pm
I look around my contemporaries from university and school. Most of them have been in professional ‘middle class jobs’. If their offspring have gone to university and are not trying to be freelancers, they are in various kinds of administration jobs in eg the NHS, or in ‘retail’ or on a low grade in local government, or classroom teachers. The parents do not have the resources to pay off their offspring’s debts (can be as high as 25 grand), do not have the resources to offer help with housing and there are no other sources of income available ie no share portfolios, no second homes to use as sources of income etc. I would say that rather than trying to divide them off from ‘the working class’ (with what objective, we might ask?) shouldn’t we be trying to say that this is part of a new worldwide working class that has asked of people to do university in order to make their labour power worth exploiting just as working class people were asked many years ago to do seven year apprenticeships.
The idea that we should say that such students are somehow without the right to shout at EDLers is divisive and counterproductive.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 1:18 pm
Michael-the idea that a group of people more than 50 million strong, who speak a common language, live in the same relatively small area, have a football team, a cricket team, 2 rugby teams etc that compete internationally and most importantly, recognise themselves as a nation are not in fact a nation is utter nonesense.
Historically people who try to play down the existence of nations as nations tend to do so because they want to denigrate them (German chauvinists used to say this sort of thing about the Poles and the Czechs for example, or try Turkey and the Kurds).
Btw my mention of EP Thompson and LKJ was in response to others, not you. Sorry for the confusion.
Also for the avoidance of doubt, I do not favour a break of England Scotland and Wales into 3 separate countries, but a federal (socialist) republic of equal nations. The right of the Scots or Welsh to do that is a different thing if that’s what they want.
On the subject of students, as someone who went from uni to a semi-skilled manual job (15 years) and then into a middle class profession, my view is that it is about attitude. Nothing used to rile (and embarass) me more than being lectured at by lefty paper sellers outside work by students who clearly thought that the only people they had anything to learn from were their lecturers. I used to think, “I hope to fuck I wasn’t like that”. Thankfully most of them aren’t, but Lenin’s “What is to be Done” never helped.
Comment by Armchair — 7 March, 2010 @ 1:43 pm
One problem,Armchair, the common language that the people of England speak is also spoken by the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The cricket team? Please, I should keep quiet about that one. Its nationality criteria are splendidly internationalist, aren’t they? Meanwhile, at other sporting occasions, England is forgotten eg Olympics, tennis, World Championships etc.
You might want England to be a nation, but wishing it into existence doesn’t make it exist. England is not a nation state, is what I said. If you want it to be, then you should say so. It’s a space, a territory, with very, very few traditions that are both common to it but exclusively so. As I said, is there some bond between Cornwall and Northumberland that is greater than the bond between Northumberland and, say, Ayrshire? Or greater than the one between Cornwall and South Wales? Is there a bond between London and Newcastle that is greater than the bond between, say, Newcastle and Glasgow? I’m asking, not telling.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 1:58 pm
Michael Rosen
“the common language that the people of England speak is also spoken by the people of Scotland, ”
Nawitzfukin naw, ya choob. Wur lingo’z mair bonny.
Comment by Boab — 7 March, 2010 @ 2:02 pm
And drawing lines round a group of people and saying that there are fifty million of them does not a nation make. There is a sea round the territories of England, Wales and Scotland. Some people think that kind of geography is important. I don’t give a stuff either way, but to simply state ‘fifty million strong’ as a politically significant fact is absurd. There are all sorts of territories all over the globe that are ‘fifty million strong’. So what?
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 2:02 pm
Hi Boab, and you could say there aint nuffin common abaht the language of Lunnon and what us spake in pahts o Yorkshire.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 2:04 pm
The UK has a spectrum of dialects and there are differences and similarities across the whole area. Of course, in Scotland, Wales and Ireland there are other languages too…Gaelic, Welsh and Irish for example.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 2:05 pm
“Is there a bond between London and Newcastle that is greater than the bond between, say, Newcastle and Glasgow?” In one sense very much so. (Why didnt the people of the North East vote for a Regional Assembly?). THe fact btw that there may be a sense of common British nationality does not preclude there being specific nations within that ( which is why the SNP would probably lose a referendum).
“the common language that the people of England speak is also spoken by the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.” and most people in the Irish Republic and the USA. Common language is one possible but not essential factor in identifying the existence of a nation, the most important thing is whether people recognise themselves as such.
I agree that England is not a nation state, but neither are Scotland and Wales. I have said what my ideal set-up would be and I refer you to my earlier comment.
Comment by Armchair — 7 March, 2010 @ 2:08 pm
Oh, and I can also see an argument for suggesting that Cornwall has a separate national identity, so I wouldnt factor it into this particular argument.
Comment by Armchair — 7 March, 2010 @ 2:10 pm
The “England” cricket team is the national cricket team for Welsh cricketers as well.
Comment by KrisS — 7 March, 2010 @ 2:19 pm
The first left political party in Britain to take up the case for a sovereign (not a stunted abortion subordinated to the `British’ joke parliament which is itself a play thing to the all-powerful British state executive) English parliament will make extensive and rapid headway.
Really strange to see the `left’ defending the anti-democratic British state on here. Leave that to the anachronistic fascists of the BNP and their pathetic militarist ideology so fundamental a part of so-called `British Values’.
Comment by Harold — 7 March, 2010 @ 2:34 pm
Harold how right you are.
Comment by eamonn wright — 7 March, 2010 @ 2:59 pm
Ah, yes, that’s what English workers have spontaneously been calling out for an English Workers Party. I’ve seen the demonstrations, the facebook groups, the carnivals and the concerts. I was wondering what it was all about. “English Jobs For English Workers” can be its slogan. After all, England is definitely an oppressed nation, crushed under the boot of those Norman bastards.
Comment by redbedhead — 7 March, 2010 @ 3:14 pm
Michael,
are you saying that there is no Welsh or scottish nation? For if there is Scottishness, then there is Englishness.
The parts of Britain that are not Wales and Scotland have a distinct exerience of Britishness, that draws upon specific national history and character, not least of which has been the distinct expereince of England in the last fifty years of having become much more multicultural, and comfortable with multiculturalism.
Now it is also characteristic to blur the distniction betwen britishness and Englishness, but this is often the chavinism of the English assuming that the distinct features of wales or Scotland are somehow unimportant.
There is also a metropolitan conceit that because historically britisness has had a civic rather than ethnic identity, historcially bound up with protestant expansionist version of Anglicanism, then the British have always felt that its empire was a civilising mission, and that the nationalism of others (including the Cetls) is rather vulger and below stairs.
It is ironic to see this mistake of assuming that the particularism of British nationalism is a form of universalism parroted by the left.
Comment by Andy Newman — 7 March, 2010 @ 3:19 pm
Break up the undemocratic imperialist British state. The left in England should be involved in so called high constitutional politics- demanding an English Workers Republic, not propping up the British state.
Comment by eamonn wright — 7 March, 2010 @ 3:20 pm
Here is a little something to cheer us all up:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8552705.stm
Comment by David Ellis — 7 March, 2010 @ 3:24 pm
Good stuff. Would love to get some Palestinian pipers over to Ireland and Scotland for republican events. Braveheart is one of the most popular films in Palestine, they understand the struggle for Irish and Scottish freedom deeply.
Comment by eamonn wright — 7 March, 2010 @ 3:38 pm
“The left in England should be involved in so called high constitutional politics- demanding an English Workers Republic, not propping up the British state.”
This is just silly and dangerous at a time of rising nationalism and racism. Who is advocating propping up the British state. But that’s hardly the same as calling for an English state, like the English are oppressed. Or that there is some kind of cross-class “Englishness”. There is the hegemony of an English and British ruling class that have stomped on all of the attempts at subaltern culture of both a local and larger character. And the idea of “Englishness”, like “Britishness” is a creation of a ruling class attempting to create its own capitalist nation-state, including the creation of a common language, religion, civic institutions, rituals. This is entirely different than celebrating the traditions of resistance within England or Scotland or Wales.
Comment by redbedhead — 7 March, 2010 @ 3:48 pm
192# Well done the Normans putting those Saxons in their place after they stole the land from the poor Britons. Now Britonic law stated I believe that all immigrants had to learn the language and find a job within 6 months or become a serf to a Briton, now as the vast majority of us have failed to uphold this law are we legally bound to offer our services to the nearest Britonic speaking landowner and has Griffin become a traitor to his “race” by crawling to the illegal saxon immigrants. I often talk shite on a hungover Sunday so please go on to the next post.
Comment by Jim McLean — 7 March, 2010 @ 3:54 pm
I tend to agree that calling for an English state would be counter-productive.
But in both Scotland and wales there are moves towards independence or strengthen devolution, and that does mean a definition of Britishness, both at the terms of national consciousnes, and political ideology.
That redefinition happens whether the left wills it or not; but my view is that we have a responsibility to argue for civic, multi-racial, multi-cultural definitions of Englishness, and celeberations of working class history within narratives of Englishness, rather than conceding the whole fireld to the right.
Comment by Andy Newman — 7 March, 2010 @ 3:59 pm
Redbedhead- If the British state breaks up into its contituent parts, one of those parts will be a large area of territory inahbited primarally by English people. Are you suggesting that they will have no state?
Even the Anarchists in Barcelona didn’t manage to achieve that!
Comment by Armchair — 7 March, 2010 @ 4:04 pm
If you come down to it the working classes originated in England and spread out with the expansion of industrialisation, so if we cant glorify the role of the English working class in the formation of the trade union movement and socialism why should we glorify the Red Clyde or the Soviets or whoever, its a matter of approach.
Comment by Jim McLean — 7 March, 2010 @ 4:09 pm
Who are these “English people” that need their constituent state? The Cornish or Kentish? The immigrants or their children? Those of descent from the Celts, Picts, Normans, Britons, Romans, et al? The “English” is as mythical a construct as a “Canadian”.
Andy: “civic, multi-racial, multi-cultural definitions of Englishness, and celeberations of working class history within narratives of Englishness, rather than conceding the whole fireld to the right.”
The first principle, which is important, doesn’t seem to me to have much to do with some mythical “narrative of Englishness”. What does this abstraction even mean? Valorizing cricket - in which the English team are generally of a lower quality than the residents of former British colonies, with the best book about the sport having been written by a Caribbean-born American? Certainly, there’s nothing worth protecting in the British state but the left shouldn’t draw the conclusion from its slow disintegration that they should find new nationalisms to replace it. Our job is to promote new forms of solidarity not based upon race, nation, or ethnicity and to celebrate examples of resistance that we can draw upon to further the struggle of our class. When we celebrate Red Clyde, we don’t celebrate its Scottishness - we celebrate the key contribution it made to the struggle of the class, the ideas of rank and file unionism and its contribution to the creation of the communist movement. Similar points apply to the struggles of the “English” working class such as the Irish led Chartists.
Comment by redbedhead — 7 March, 2010 @ 4:24 pm
Redbedhead- the logic of your argument is that nations don’t exist full stop.
Interesting.
Comment by Armchair — 7 March, 2010 @ 4:36 pm
It seesm utterly ridiculous - as Redbedhead does - to claim that there is no such thing as the English nation, or that narratives of Englishness are “mythical”
there is nothing “new” about the national consciousness of the English, it is both the form of Britishness unique to the non-Celtic part of Britain, and also a distinct national culture in its own right.
it seems hughly odd to claim that the nation of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Kipling, Aldous Huxley, William Blake, Sir Joshua reynolds, Gainsborough, Constable, Edward Elgar, W H Auden et al has only a “mythical” national culture
Or that the national myths of Robin Hood are irrelvent.
Or that the legal establishment of English common law with its distinct traditions is not a national tradition.
Or that Cromwell and the execution of the King and the establishment of the primacy of parliament in our constitution is insignificant.
Not to mention the essential englishness of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones or the Sex pistols.
It is incredible to me that anyone could suggest that England is not a nation, and that the people who live in England do not share a national consciousness, including those welcome newer arivals.
Comment by Andy Newman — 7 March, 2010 @ 4:41 pm
If you think that socialists in England (or anywhere else) should tell the people that the national identity they consider themselves to have doesnt actually exist then we may as well give up now.
“When we celebrate Red Clyde, we don’t celebrate its Scottishness…” who’s this WE? I think you may find a different point of view among a lot of Scottish socialists.
Comment by Armchair — 7 March, 2010 @ 4:42 pm
what is also funny is that those who deny an English culture are not very well armed for recognising the regretable traditions of anti-catholic bigotry that are part of that culture.
hence the popularity of bash-the-pope “secularism” among some on the left.
Comment by Andy Newman — 7 March, 2010 @ 4:46 pm
it seems hughly odd to claim that the nation of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Kipling, Aldous Huxley, William Blake, Sir Joshua reynolds, Gainsborough, Constable, Edward Elgar, W H Auden et al has only a “mythical” national culture
Some people wrote some things, nothing much like each other, and therefore…
What?
Comment by KrisS — 7 March, 2010 @ 4:53 pm
but Andy you are conflating two lots of people, the anticatholic bigotry comes from the same place as anti-islam bigotry, echoes of ruling class propaganda.
Comment by non-partisan — 7 March, 2010 @ 4:54 pm
#207
“Some people wrote some things, nothing much like each other, and therefore…”
no actually, there is a discernible aesthetic tradition in English literatire, and especially in English visual arts, quite unlike other national traditions.
Comment by Andy Newman — 7 March, 2010 @ 5:00 pm
Oh my, you really did mean that. Fantastic.
Comment by KrisS — 7 March, 2010 @ 5:04 pm
Redbedhead is right, there is no such thing as the so-called “English” nation. Instead of attacking him why don’t you spell out for us what being “English” is.
Do you mean folk music for example? Hopefully you’re not going to try to claim that like the BNP. Folk music is a mix of a variety of different cultures and 99% of Folk musicians are organising against the BNP to stop them trying to co-opt it.
What bits of ruling class pomp and circumstance are you left little Englanders trying to co-opt for yourselves?
You’ve tried football which was an epic fail because 99% of football fans see it as just a game and not some patriotic badge of honour like the EDL and BNP try to promote.
“what is also funny is that those who deny an English culture are not very well armed for recognising the regretable traditions of anti-catholic bigotry that are part of that culture.”
That has nothing to do with “Englishness” and everything to do with class. Anti-catholic bigotry is used to divide workers. It’s origins grew out of battles within the ruling class. The English Civil War was a battle between classes even though it was shaped by religious ideology. Protestantism was not just and English phenomenon either so claiming that anti-Catholicism is peculiar to or a trait of so-called “Englishness” is historically incorrect.
“hence the popularity of bash-the-pope “secularism” among some on the left.”
Since when have the left in the UK campaigned against the pope? If you’re trying to say that campaigning for a womens right to choose for example is anti-papist then you’re really grasping at straws. It might be more convincing if you tried to claim that the UK lefts support for Catholics in Northern Ireland makes us papist but then you’d sound like a Loyalist bigot. See how easy it is to step over into reaction when trying to reclaim the flag?
Comment by Ray — 7 March, 2010 @ 5:21 pm
What I find depressing about comments from Kriss, RBH and Micheal Rosen is that this ludicrous anti-materialist inverted chauvinism which passes for marxism is associated with anyone who calls themselves a socialist in the eyes of so many people.
At least I get the impression RBH isn’t picking on the English as he doesn’t seem to think nations exist at all.
Comment by Armchair — 7 March, 2010 @ 5:21 pm
andy - It could get rather tedious to pick apart each detail of your claim to demonstrate Englishness but just to make a couple of points. The “Englishness” of rock n roll bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones is, of course, a pretty hilarious invention since the greater part their influence was derived from African-American musical forms and had very little to do with indigenous musical traditions. In fact, the Beatles name was, in fact, a tribute to Buddy Holly and the Crickets.
As for Shakespeare, many of his plays, besides being set in international settings were, in fact, often taken directly from stories written by writers from other places, with Romeo & Juliet being derived from a traditional story of Italian origin. And, of course, many of the other writers you refer to are heavily influenced not only by specific international writers but also by that foreign tradition you may be familiar with: Christianity. As for Robin Hood, one of the earliest references to him was by a Scottish writer, named Andrew of Wyntoun.
In other words, as much as any notion of “indigeneity”, there is a constant cultural, economic and political interaction between the English (et al) and the rest of the world. The decision to create a canon of “Englishness” - ie. a narrative - is precisely a political decision as part of creating an English nation-state. The idea of some sort of authentic “English” culture, on an island invaded, conquered and re-conquered more times than one could probably count - and made up of a wide array of local folk cultures prior to this mythical imagining of Englishness, is just that, a myth.
Comment by redbedhead — 7 March, 2010 @ 5:24 pm
“At least I get the impression RBH isn’t picking on the English as he doesn’t seem to think nations exist at all.”
Nation-states exist. Part of their creation requires the invention of a national culture - that means creating an arbitrary and artificial boundary - with everything inside of it qualifying as a “national” culture and everything outside of it, not. I assume Rudyard Kipling gets to be part of the pantheon of Englishness. How about the colonial subjects who had to be subjugated by the English/British in order to provide his muse with the inspiration to write? How about the inhabitants of Jerusalem, who had to be occupied and slaughtered by Richard the Lionheart to generate the cleansed version of Robin Hood or create the cultural impact that made a Shakespeare or Chaucer possible?
Comment by redbedhead — 7 March, 2010 @ 5:29 pm
Could you give me an example of my “ludicrous anti-materialist inverted chauvinism”?
Ta.
Comment by KrisS — 7 March, 2010 @ 5:29 pm
#211
“Since when have the left in the UK campaigned against the pope? “
err. like within the last few days when peter tatchell protested outside Westminster cathedral, and the National Secular society are trying to prevent a state visit by Pope Benny.
Comment by Andy Newman — 7 March, 2010 @ 5:33 pm
As I have written before
A particular problem for much of what passes for Marxism is accounting for what nations are. Do national differencnes have a material basis, or are they ideological constructions?
The problem partly comes with taking Lenin to be an authoritative source, without understanding the specific historical context of Lenin’s political involvement. Lenin was debating “the national question” at a time when the Romanov dynastic Empire was still in the process of transforming itself into a Russian national state; and it was a generalised characteristic of absolutist late-feudal societies to create the conditions of national awakening; as middle classes were created, and high cultures initiated, for ethno-linguistic groups that had previously only comprised the labouring classes. For these reasons Ukrainian and Finnish nationalism were actually more politically and socially developed than Russian nationalism; and Polish nationalism was transforming itself from a reactionary movement of only the feudal nobility to take on a national-popular character.
So Lenin had little relevant experience of living or working politically in a developed and stable modern nation-state; and his outlook was very much coloured by the fact that nation and class were both nascent and emerging forms of consciousness in the late Romanov dynastic state. He was particularly interested in the phenomenon of movements of the nationally oppressed minorities towards creating modern nation-states, as these were counter-hegemoic projects against the process of the Romanovs and their aristocratic state machine seeking to create and consolidate a Russian national state. The highly contingent and historically specific nature of Lenin’s observations means that his writings on this topic should be treated with caution, and his limitations should be recognised.
For some reason, the left are somewhat resistant to draw upon the heritage of a more successful and complete Marxist theorization of nations; that of Otto Bauer, in his 1913 book “The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy”. This work started life as a series of educational lectures for the socialist Gesamtpartei in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and was inspired by the question of several national groups co-inhabiting the same physical space. Naturally, it is an hundred years old, and both contains concepts that have been superseded; and in areas would not pass muster by the standards of modern scholarship; nevertheless, it is an extremely useful analytical framework for discussing the material basis of nations and nationality.
Bauer argues that historically, a shared community of experience, leads to a shared community of character, and he also uses the then fashionable concept of “apperception” to argue that two bodies of people who have distinct heritages will mediate new stimuli in different ways as they incorporate new experience into their existing framework of consciousness. He further nuances this theoretical framework by taking it from the abstract to the concrete, and discusses the actual historical processes that had led to modern nations, using the examples of German, Czech and Austrian history. In particular he discusses how in the middle ages, the nation became effectively a class phenomenon owned by the feudal military nobility, and the development of capitalism democratizes national consciousness by pulling the labouring classes into national cultural life. This process could overwhelm elite cultures, for example the Latin speaking Hungarian nobility adopted the Magyar language in the mid-nineteenth century; and the Swedish speaking Finnish nobility also adopted the language of the peasantry.
In this argument Bauer anticipates the work of Ernst Gellner and Benedict Anderson who have argued that the particular demands of industrial society generally and capitalism particularly have required universal education and literacy; and have required depersonalized loyalty to conceptual communities wider than the circles of face to face acquaintanceship.
We may also nuance Bauer’s concepts of national character, by considering how collective consciousness develops as a collection of signifiers, expected shared behaviours and learned social interactions. Individual character exists in the interstices of collective consciousness; and while different collective identities can co-exist in the same individual, they are not arbitrary – forms of consciousness are societally developed, and individuals can only inhabit the forms of consciousness socially available to them. Bauer was adamant that nations, and the national characters and consciousness that define them are derived from what he called national materialism.
Bauer also discusses how some nations develop high literary culture, and some have been historically linked to states. These are not necessarily connected, for example, Yiddish was one of the great European literary languages, but never had state patronage. But where language, the institutions of state, and high culture reinforce a collective feeling of shared community, then the developing form of consciousness is very strong, particularly where that collective sense of identity is then linked to a political project of state nationalism – whether to an existing state or the aspiration for a state. However, we should also note as both Eric Hobsbawm and Ernst Gelner have argued, that there are more potential nations than national political projects, and there has been a process of cultural homogenisation and assimilation in the creation of modern nation states; and often the minorities assimilated have benefited from that process. (Arguably the traditional republican and left positions over the six counties imply that the unionist working class would benefit from cultural assimilation with the nationalist Irish)
The obvious comparison is with class consciousness, where both shared material common interest, and a commonality of experience leads people to identify with others with the same economic and social relationships. Notwithstanding a greater cultural heterogeneity in the working class in recent decades, there is still a strong sense of class consciousness in Britain, and this is reinforced by the trade unions, and to a much lesser extent nowadays, the Labour Party.
We can see that such class consciousness can coexist with national consciousness, as both derive from real, lived communities of shared experience, and both are reinforced institutionally and ideologically. (However, we should note that internationalism is an ideological construction that has to be consciously argued for, rather than being based upon commonality of experience – as such it is a political achievement of the workers movement, not automatically deriving from material conditions).
Comment by Andy Newman — 7 March, 2010 @ 5:37 pm
It also has t be said that if your cannot develop a theoretical account of national consciousness, that recognises the distinctive nature of, for example, nglishness; then you cannoy construct a convincing theorisation and defence of multi-culturalism.
This is preciesly the point that otto bauer was establishing, that mutli-culturalism requires the mutual recognition and equality of esteem between differing varieties of national conscousness
Comment by Andy Newman — 7 March, 2010 @ 5:40 pm
Kriss- To me, it shines through what you write that you don’t like English identity, not that you don’t think it exists. That’s not materialist. If you are English then that’s inverted chauvinism. If you aren’t English it’s just plain chauvinism.
“Some people wrote some things, nothing much like each other, and therefore…” In fact I should have added philistine.
RBH- being a nation doesn’t make you nice or mean that you can’t be an oppressing force, it’s a material reality.
And am I to understand that you DON’T think nations exist, or is it just the English? How can you have nation states without nations? It’s a bit like having a capitalist economy without private ownership…oh sorry, silly me!
Comment by Armchair — 7 March, 2010 @ 5:52 pm
Thanks for the explanation.
Comment by KrisS — 7 March, 2010 @ 5:56 pm
No problem Kriss.
Unlike some people who contribute to the blog regularly, I believe that if you say something critical about someone and they ask for justification you should try to give it.
Comment by Armchair — 7 March, 2010 @ 6:07 pm
“no actually, there is a discernible aesthetic tradition in English literatire, and especially in English visual arts, quite unlike other national traditions.”
What period in art are you referring to Andy? If you mean pre-Modernist art then you are completely wrong about a so-called “English” style. Even going back to the Renaissance the ruling class in this country employed jobbing painters from all over Europe. There’s a rather famous painting of Henry VIII painted by a foreigner who became the court painter to the Tudors.
Did you know that William Morris took a lot of his design inspiration from the far East? And Turner spent a lot of his time in Europe being influenced by Italian art.
If you are referring to Modernism then your comment really exposes your lack of knowledge about art. If there is any period in art where artists were primarily influenced by diverse cultures from around the world then Modernism is it.
Please stop trying to co-opt cultural achievements which have developed out of the rich diversity of different cultures influencing one another. Nationalist has never produced anything of cultural significance. They co-opt the ideas of great artists, writers and others of cultural significance and strips them of innovation turning them into sterile and reactionary propaganda. The Social Realism of Stalinism and the art of the Nazis is the logical conclusion of this process.
Comment by Ray — 7 March, 2010 @ 6:23 pm
Aye English culture stole a lot from the world in a similar way to how they acquired the wealth stolen from the colonies. Simple question to the Brit left on here, do you fully support the independence struggles of Ireland, Scotland and Wales?
Comment by eamonn wright — 7 March, 2010 @ 7:04 pm
#223 I think putting Ireland on a par with Scotland and Wales is ludicrous.
As I assume you include people like me in your definition of Brit left (which I find offensive, but then that’s possibly the intention), I’ll answer your question.
Personally I think all nations have the right to self determination, so the Irish people who have demonstrated that they want unity and independence should have it. The Welsh and Scots too if they want it, but I don’t in fact believe that they do.
In other words I don’t believe there is an independence struggle of either Scotland or Wales. There are people in both countries who support it, and in my belief a majority who don’t
Personally as I’ve said before, I think the best arrangement would be a federal republic.
As for pinning the blame for British colonialism and imperialism on the English alone, can I just point out that the reason for the Act of Union was that the Scottish ruling class failed in a colonial adventure of it’s own, and then participated willingly in a joint enterprise with the English. And just as sections of the working class in England and Wales were party to it, the same goes for Scotland.
Glasgow was widely known as the second city of the British Empire for a good reason.
Comment by Armchair — 7 March, 2010 @ 7:39 pm
ray
you philistinism only matches your ignorance I have discussed the Englishness of English art before in the context of L s lowry:
http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=2810
The regional specificity and provincialism of Lowry’s work is part of the reason why he is misunderstood as being middle brow. In particular, he is considered to be an accessible artist by many people who do not generally appreciate modern painting because he typically painted urban, industrial landscapes populated by working class figures, and (like many major twentieth century English artists – for example, Bacon, Wyndham Lewis, Nevinson, Spencer or Hockney) he eschewed the abstract painting of the modern international school.
Art vindicates experience and it is no surprise that he is popular (and misunderstood) as celebrating working class life; indeed he was at one time appropriated by John Berger as a sort of domestic “socialist realist” painter.
I would argue Lowry is better understood as a painter rooted in the English tradition. Nikolaus Pevsner’s 1955 book “The Englishness of English Art” is now unfashionable. …
Nevertheless, Pevsner’s book (based upon BBC lectures – some of which are available on You Tube) has some merit. National cultural and aesthetic sensibilities derive from shared climate, landscape, language, iconography, history and tradition. Indeed, as the Austrian Marxist Otto Bauer observed, the creation of national character is also connected with the history of class struggle. Bauer contrasted certain characteristics of English and French culture based upon the different hegemonic economic and social classes that influenced the nation in its formative period. In England the dominant class was the pragmatic and inscrutable merchant; in France the flamboyant courtier and rigorous palace intellectual.
In Howard Jacobson’s 2007 lecture on L S Lowry, he makes two excellent points.
Firstly, with regard to Lowry’s geographical specificity: “Perhaps the melancholy of the man, his sense of drifting, of not belonging to life, his not really knowing why he did what he did but going on doing it anyway - perhaps such things are familiar to all of us. Maybe we all don’t belong. But I suspect that we don’t belong to where we don’t belong - that not belonging to Manchester is different to not belonging to Tunbridge Wells. In other words that there is a way of not belonging to Manchester that makes you belong to Manchester.”
And secondly, the understated nature of Lowry’s artistic vision.
“It is in this spirit of absurdist modernism, anyway, that I believe we should understand Lowry’s more avowedly grotesque paintings. When that critic complained of Lowry’s “paltry derogatory caricatures” [this is referring to the picture shown above] he missed what Lowry was about entirely. If those paintings are derogatory, they are not derogatory of the cripples or the mourners; they are derogatory, as so much 20th century literature was derogatory, of the business of making art in an incomprehensible universe, derogatory of the futility of attempting to communicate the incommunicable, derogatory of the expectations and assumptions under which he laboured, and, at last, derogatory of himself.”
Lowry was an intellectually rather than sensually inspired painter, which Pevsner observes has been characteristic of English painters from Joshua Reynolds, through William Blake, John Constable, and later artists. Indeed, the non-corporeality and ethereality of most English figurative painting is very much characteristic of Lowry’s work: even such a chronicler of the physical and the bawdy as Hogarth was more joyless than raucous. Joshua Reynolds once famously criticised Gainsborough for painting landscapes as a painter and not as an poet, which was a specific critique of Gainsborough’s physicality.
And like so many others, Lowry’s life was shaped by the absence from English life of a respected, serious intelligentsia, itself a specific historical result of the particularity of English history – the “missing centre” described by Perry Anderson in his famous 1968 essay, “Components of the National Culture”, whereby England has no native tradition of self-reflection or theorising our society. This affected Lowry in his own attitudes, his deep hatred for pretentiousness, and unwillingness to explain his work; but also created embarrassment for him that he had to work as a clerk in a property company, that made him an outsider from the art world.
As Howard Jacobson observes: “If you do not attach an unambiguously, not to say transparently high value to yourself and to your work, others will have difficulty locating it. It is a sad fact about readers and lookers that they need to be told what a thing is worth and will often take art at the artist’s own valuation. Lowry did not hold his work in disesteem, but in its presentation, in its apparent subject matter, in the titles he gave it, in the contrary and sometimes dismissive narratives in which he obscured both his ambitions and his achievements, he not only refused all suggestions of the highest seriousness, not to say grandeur, but made it difficult for others to see or describe that grandeur for themselves.”
This is true, but it is not the whole story. In English culture artists who do hold their art to have unambiguously high value, and advertise it as such, (Wyndham Lewis springs to mind) are distrusted. While confident mediocrity can be lavishly over-praised.
Lowry is an important though uncomfortable artist, and to a certain degree the fact that he has been pidgeon-holed as a provincial chronicler of urban nostalgia is the result of the discomfort that England has with serious and challenging art.
Comment by Andy Newman — 7 March, 2010 @ 7:45 pm
#222
“Nationalist has never produced anything of cultural significance. “
Do you realy think that Verdi’s Pilgrim’s chorus, or Sibelius’s Finlandia are of no cultural significance?
Comment by Andy Newman — 7 March, 2010 @ 7:51 pm
# 224, Armchair;
“In other words I don’t believe there is an independence struggle of either Scotland or Wales.”
What an absolutely extraordinary thing to say.
Why on earth do you think that the first thing Labour did on coming to power in 1997 was to hold referendums and then establish a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh assembly ?
You think these two historic changes to the governance of the UK was because there is no struggle over the national question in Scotland and Wales ?
Yes of course devolution is a different proposition to independence but your continual deriding of the independence movements in Scotland and Wales is a really poor reflection on your political judgement.
Comment by Eddie Truman — 7 March, 2010 @ 7:57 pm
Just as hybridity is becoming more and more evident in everything we do, we have some socialists clinging to spurious ideas of nation. People have already talked about Andy’s Englishmen: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Kipling, Aldous Huxley, William Blake, Sir Joshua reynolds, Gainsborough, Constable, Edward Elgar, W H Auden - I’ll add a bit of mine:
Chaucer: he is inseparable from at least two literary traditions - the Italian one of Boccaccio and the French one of the fabliaux. So, for example, The Knight’s Tale is lifted from Bocc., and the Miller’s Tale from the French fabliaux. However, both these traditions are derived from the short, comical ‘exemplar’ tale which is in fact Arabic in orgin. They came into Europe care of a converted Jew, Petrus Alphonsus, and his book ‘Disciplina Clericalis’,which became the preachers’ text book for several hundred years. Our job as socialists should be to do exactly what I’ve just done, explore the hybridity of literature and art. That is, if we’re serious about being internationalists.
As others have shown, Shakespeare is inseparable from many literary traditions - Italian being the most prominent. Sonnets, for example, originated in Italy. Verse itself is not an ‘English’ invention but seems to have emerged out of late Latin verse throughout Europe. The ‘indigenous’ poetical form is Anglo-Saxon or Old English alliterative verse, which saw its biggest revival in the hands of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was also influenced by Welsh verse. Other plots that Shakespeare drew on include Roman histories by eg Plutarch,and in the case of the Taming of the Shrew, an Arab story…and the frame device seems to have been invented by Italians.
Milton appears at first glance to be ‘English’ but his greatest source book is of course the Bible whose origins are of course Hebraic.
How ironic to claim Byron for Englishness! Here was a classicist and an internationalist if ever there was one, who turned his back on England. Kipling, irony of ironies, may well have been an English chauvinist but he was also a classic low-level employee of the Raj and his literature for children is infused with a Raj view of nature and the native. He is a perfect example of colonial hybridity, not of Englishness!
Leaping forward to Auden, here was someone who deliberately and consciously made himself in the first sector of his creative adulthood, an internationalist. It’s possible to trace many international influences in his poetry during the 30s including and he would have been the first to claim these as part of his politics at that stage. Then this ‘englishman’ migrated to America where he did quite a lot of work in turning himself into an American.
The attempt to claim all these writers is to say something profoundly unimportant and misleading. The totality of their writing is much more than ‘English’.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 8:01 pm
The failure of the attempted Scottish colony was a lot to do with England and its military strategy of stopping Scotlands colonial ambition. The struggle for Irish freedom has always been conducted by a principled minority, the same goes for Scotland and Wales.
In reply to Armchair-
The act of union was extremely unpopular in Scotland, with riots and burnings of the copies at market crosses across the land. The bribed traitors of the Scottish nobility had to convene their meeting to sign it in an Edinburgh cellar such was their fear of the Scottish people. The English had a fleet on standby off the east coast and an army prepared for war at the border, such was Englands design on Scotland - all part of the rough wooing.
Glasgow also had the most extreme poverty and had districts which were the most cramped on the planet well into the 20th century. Funny we still have sub Saharan mortality rates in the Calton and Shettleston.
Comment by eamonn wright — 7 March, 2010 @ 8:02 pm
Oh and I forgot, Kipling was actually born in India!
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 8:06 pm
His cakes and his jingoism are shite, although when i was a wean i liked the almond slices.
Comment by eamonn wright — 7 March, 2010 @ 8:10 pm
Almond slices are actually from Bulgaria.
Comment by KrisS — 7 March, 2010 @ 8:13 pm
See they steal everything the cunts- McGlashan.
Comment by eamonn wright — 7 March, 2010 @ 8:18 pm
I really don’t think Andy is claiming that the English cultural tradition is pure, derived from the blood and soil of old Albion. In reality, it incorporates many elements from elsewhere but, crucially, has refined, reinterpreted and reimagined these to create something distinctly English.
It is valid to see Shakespeare as the apotheosis of the dramatic art and English Gothic revival architecture as the finest expression of the Medieval aesthetic anywhere in the world in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Too many people on the left, even cultured ones, have a problem with the past, viewing too positive an engagement with it as a sign of incipient Toryism.
Comment by Frank — 7 March, 2010 @ 8:37 pm
“The regional specificity and provincialism of Lowry’s work is part of the reason why he is misunderstood as being middle brow. In particular, he is considered to be an accessible artist by many people who do not generally appreciate modern painting because he typically painted urban, industrial landscapes populated by working class figures, and (like many major twentieth century English artists – for example, Bacon, Wyndham Lewis, Nevinson, Spencer or Hockney) he eschewed the abstract painting of the modern international school.”
Andy you sound like Brian Sewell but not even he would make such misinformed generalisations about art and artists.
I’ll leave Lowery for the moment and focus on your lumping together of artist such as Bacon and Hockney. For a start, in what way is the art of Hockney like that of Bacon apart from the fact that both were initially painters? You seem to be unaware that Bacon was Irish and was influenced significantly by Picasso and Velázquez. Hockney had a totally different style to Bacon which was heavily influenced by UK and US pop artists. It’s amusing to see you claiming Hockney for “Engerland” when early on in his career he moved over to the US and drew his inspiration from their culture.
If this is the level of knowledge about art that you left nationalists have then it’s best to keep quiet about it and focus on something you actually know about. But it’s not surprising that those who focus on nationalism make such misinformed generalistions about culture. Ignorance is at the core of nationalist sentiments.
“I wanted to paint myself into what absorbed me […] Natural figures would have broken the spell of it, so I made my figures half unreal. Some critics have said that I turned my figures into puppets, as if my aim were to hint at the hard economic nescessities that drove them. To say the truth, I was not thinking very much about the people. I did not care for them in the way a social reformer does. They are part of a private beauty that haunted me. I loved them and the houses in the same way: as part of a vision.”
Lowery on his painting. If you had done your research Andy you would realise that Lowrey was influenced by his tutor Pierre Adolphe Valette, a French Impressionist painter. Lowery was an accomplished artist and hardly the naive Sunday painter. His style is not uniquely English. It has its precedents in the folk painting of other cultures including Russian peasant artists. You appear to be championing Lowery on the basis that he painted factory workers. But the danger in this is equating art with class. The logical conclusion of this type of argument can be found in the Proletcult and the social nationalism of Socialist Realism.
Comment by Ray — 7 March, 2010 @ 8:45 pm
Ray ive got you down as one of them concerned trolls. Your arty farty bourgeois slip is showing kidder.
Comment by eamonn wright — 7 March, 2010 @ 8:50 pm
So Byron and Blake make us proud to be English?
Well Byron identified himself at with the freedom of Greece, Blake at different times with America or France. Neither of them ever identified with the ruling class of England, rather with the Luddites, craftsmen, chimney sweeps and prostitutes.
If you must use these writers to justify Englishness, at least read what they had to say
Byron Don Juan canto the 11th
LXXXVII
But how shall I relate in other cantos
Of what befell our hero in the land,
Which ‘t is the common cry and lie to vaunt as
A moral country? But I hold my hand —
For I disdain to write an Atalantis;
But ‘t is as well at once to understand,
You are not a moral people, and you know it
Without the aid of too sincere a poet.
Blake Why should I care for the men of thames
Or the cheating waves of charter’d streams
Or shrink at the little blasts of fear
That the hireling blows into my ear
Or
I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.
When I see British athletes,black or white, winning medals, rewarding them for their skill and hard work, I take only pleasure in seeing them wrap themselves in the Union Jack. They are saying where they come from. And it was moving to see the convoy to Gaza from England, many of the drivers Muslims, being cheered on the route over North Africa, their vans showing our flag too. And I’d take the same pleasure in seeing Turks, Poles Cubans achieving the same.
Where I come from matters because of the friends I know and the comrades I have. But this is not my identity. Like many (most?) people I have a choice of ethnicities. I refuse to choose any.
I find football boring and no one is going to hear any lies from me that I don’t. Its my German, Albanian, and Mexican in-laws who identify with an English team.
The idea of a leftist English identity politics is oxymoronic. The liveliest conversations we have are with people with different roots and hobbyhorses than our own but united in wanting a better society.
Am I beginning to ramble. I was hoping somehow to get in a knock at that squeaky voiced Zionist who disgraces the Bristol accent who thinks she’s proletarian cos she aint got no culture. See how that fits in?
Comment by David Hillman — 7 March, 2010 @ 8:51 pm
Eammon- yes the Scots colony failed largely because the English sabotaged it.
So what? Is that another crime? Would it have been better for the poor benighted heathen to be ruled over by the nation that gave the world the Black Watch and the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders.
What do you mean “principled minority”? If it’s only a minority in Ireland who want Irish independence and unity (and I don’t believe it is ) then I’m not in favour of it- shock horror! The fact that only a minority are prepared to act is not the issue, it’s whether their actions have legitimacy in terms of the goal and the methods in the eyes of he people.
What I mean Eddie and Eammon when I say there isn’t a struggle of Scotland for independence is that Scotand (ie a majority of its people) don’t appear to want it. Some people are sruggling for independence, others aren’t.
And yes, the Act of Union was forced by a majority of the Scottish ruling class on a large unwilling section of the Scottish population, but that was then. We nearly had a minority of the Scottish ruling class forcibly uniting England/Wales and Scotland under the Stewart dynasty 40 years later, such was the unpopularity in England of the German Hanoverian monarchy. And that was then.
Comment by Armchair — 7 March, 2010 @ 8:56 pm
Frank, if we describe that list of writers as English, we reduce, simplify, mislead and cast a political complexion on writing that is plain inaccurate, particularly in the context of an agenda (as here) that there is a significant and necessary entity called England. I don’t really care if Andy is claiming some kind of analysis that says ‘many elements from elsewhere’. This is really insufficient. Very nearly all art of the modern world is hybrid whether in form, content, style, language or whatever criterion you might want to use. Artists themselves, no matter how chauvinist they state themselves to be (eg Percy Grainger), inevitably produce art that is international in its roots. The ‘intertext’ is international. This is something we as international socialists can and should celebrate. It proves the lie that we are somehow defined by the land we happen to find ourselves living in.
I’m actually slightly uneasy even as I argue all this, that I’m arguing it because I’m a jew, and that part of the Englishness that Andy and others is celebrating actually excludes me. How interesting that Andy’s list is exclusively a set of writers and painters who he thinks have truly English biographies. No Jews or Irish or Americans or blacks or browns eh? Why not? If he was being truly and honestly welcoming he’d be saying that ‘England’ also provided a home for great Irish writers like Swift, Goldsmith, Wilde, Shaw, Americans like Pound (for a short but important while) and Eliot, a Russian like Conrad, etc etc. So he doesn’t even do the nod to England being some kind of important ‘host’ nation to world culture. Of course, now that i’ve mentioned it, I’m sure he’ll colour up and explain that of course he didn’t mean to exclude these or Rosenberg, or Gertler or Jean Rhys etc etc.
In short, I think the more we scrape the surface of claiming Englishness as significant and important, the more I think it stinks. I think it stinks for very good theoretical reasons. I also think it stinks for my personal/cultural reasons. I live and work here and produce literature here for historical reasons which aren’t some kind of execrescence on some pure true Englishness. I’m part of the hybrid picture. Do we document that or do we keep on pretending that there’s Englishness and ‘influences’?
(ps on romantic writers like Byron - if you seriously think that any of the romantics can be separated out in some important or significant way on the basis of nationality then we miss out on appreciating and enjoying a truly international artistic movement that rushed to and fro across the European scene to and fro across artistic forms.)
Comment by Michael Rosen — 7 March, 2010 @ 8:57 pm
Got to laugh about English people uncomfortable with their own identity !
The problem is that the British identity is melting away, large numbers of people, overwhelmingly working class and leftist in orientation, are rejecting British as an identity.
For SWP inclined folks, it would be worthwhile taking sometime to gen up on what the likes of Neil Davidson is saying now.
I can’t quote anything but I understand there has been a significant change in the outlook of many of their comrades in Scotland.
Comment by Eddie Truman — 7 March, 2010 @ 9:24 pm
Armchair The Black Watch and other regiments were recruited by the Brits off the back of a near genocide and through literal starvation of the Gaels as a force for policing the rebellious Jacobite clans- they were an early Scottish form, akin to the UDR and RUC in occupied Ireland in their role.
Comment by eamonn wright — 7 March, 2010 @ 9:32 pm
#240 Eddie - that’s part of the the problem. One of the reasons why some people are rejecting the notion of ‘Britishness’ for ‘Englishness’ (and Andy and his supporters over-state the extent of it) is because ‘Britishness’ has come to mean multi-cultural, and they are reacting against this.
Oh, and I don’t know why this goes unheard, but lots of us ARE NOT ENGLISH. Living in London makes me a Londoner; having a passport paying taxes and voting here make me British; having Scottish, Huguenot and Welsh ancestors makes me NOT ENGLISH.
Comment by chjh — 7 March, 2010 @ 9:47 pm
#241, the first thing the Romans did was recruit subjugated natives to police their empire.
The Brits were only following the text books.
Comment by Eddie Truman — 7 March, 2010 @ 9:48 pm
#242, so you’re concept of identity is based on blood lines then ?
I can’t agree with that, nationality is about where you live, your community.
For me, everyone living is Scotland is Scottish, regardless of their parentage, ‘race’ or whatever else.
I don’t understand why so many on the English left are so scared of their own national identity.
It is an inspirational one.
The Diggers, Levellers, Chartism, the first trade unions.
Not to mention the execution of a monarch and the the overthrow of feudalism.
The peasants revolt.
In reality it is the identity of ‘British’ that is the recent imposter, a false identity going back only to Victorian times.
Anyways, I hope all the British lefts manage to come to terms with the national question as soon as possible because it’s coming your way, again, fairly soon.
You may not recognise the national question but it sure as hell recognises you.
Specifically, what will the English left have to say about a referendum in Scotland on a further extension of devolution, to the point of separation ?
For or against ?
Comment by Eddie Truman — 7 March, 2010 @ 10:03 pm
Eammon who were the “Brits” that recruited the Black Watch? Were they English, Scottish or both? I find your use of the term a bit confusing.
Eddie, do you think the English left have to take a position one way or another how the Scots should vote in a referendum?
I’m sure their opinion will be divided, a bit like the Scottish left. I’ve already said what I think about my prefered outcome.
What I am in favour of however is the matter being put to the vote.
I do think you’re right about chjh’s comments however, and I feel Michael Rosen makes the same error.
Comment by Armchair — 7 March, 2010 @ 11:05 pm
‘245, Armchair, “Eddie, do you think the English left have to take a position one way or another how the Scots should vote in a referendum?”
Yes I do.
It is a basic question of democratic principle in front of every leftist in the UK.
Should Scotland (and Wales and Ireland) be given the right to self determination or remain within the rule of the Westminster Parliament?
The English left, the SWP, the Socialist Party and the other micro Russian Revolution re-enactment societies, have got thousands of words to say about what should happen on other continents, I would expect them to support the democratic demands of Scottish, Irish and Welsh republicans for the right to be free from Imperialist rule.
Comment by Eddie Truman — 7 March, 2010 @ 11:23 pm
Very well put Eddie. Its that straightforward folks. Support the independence of all three countries and do the cause of genuine internationalism a great service and end the undemocratic and imperialist union.
Armchair the Brits would have been the English ruling class and their placemen alongside the traitorous wing of the Scottish ruling class and their placemen. Many a clan chiefs son was educated in England to make them the perfect Anglophile and therefore good Brits, all the better for giving credibility to the recruitment of the dispossesed clansmen for British service at home intimidating any rebellious Scots and for service building the empire by subjugating the natives overseas.
Comment by eamonn wright — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:28 am
So many misapprehensions.
Michael - Conrad was not Russian.
Eammon - The Black Watch did not recruit many Gaels.
Eddie - Britishness certainly predates the Victorian era.
Comment by Frank — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:41 am
Eddie- I hope you have your referendum, I’m all in favour of it. And if the Scots vote for independence then I will be the first to wish you all the best in your independent nation, whether I think it’s a mistake or not.
However I don’t think the majority WILL vote for it.
Eammon the Scots ruling class was a junior party to the English in the empire. Are you suggesting that there was a progressive (non-traitorous) wing who opposed not only “English rule” but also British imperialism abroad?
Comment by Armchair — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:52 am
Frank the Black Watch Am Freiceadan Dubh were recruited from the Pitlochry area of Perthshire, well above the so called Highland line, initially in 1715. I wonder what happened in 1715 that merited the creation of these traitors scum? So the Fraers, Grants, Munros and Campbells werent Gaels then? These were the clans that gave them their first soldiers.
Comment by eamonn wright — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:58 am
I think if someone wants to call themselves British rather the English (for the reasons Chjh outlines) thats a matter for them. Similarly if someone wants to call themselves English. I would also support Scottish Indepenence if there was a referendum (although I would, quite rightly, not have a vote). But none of this has anything to do with whether or not there are neatly seperate Scottish and English cultures. I don’t happen to believe that there are. The values of the Scottish Enlightenment (to take just one small example) have probably been every bit as influential on contemporary modern English culture as the proponents of the Scottish Enlightenment were influenced by what they took to be English culture (what could be more ‘English’ then empiricism: the founders being an Irish Bishop and a Scottish sceptic). Socialists support national self determination in certain conditions. Those conditions have nothing whatsoever to do with whether there are really existing strictly seperate national cultures.
Comment by johng — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:03 am
That wing was smashed by the Brits and the scum in Scotland who supported the union. These fhior Ghaels were scattered to the four winds by the sassenach scum and their clans chieftans were imposed to a great degree by the sassenach and their quislings, usually educated amongst the sassenach in their privileged schools and then becoming absent landlords driving their own clanspeople off the clan land for sheep. Marx himself commented on this injustice in Capital.
Comment by eamonn wright — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:06 am
Eamonn - I’d say that genetically most of the recruits would have been of Pictish ancestry, not Gaelic.
You’ll find some interesting material here:
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/library/psas/index.cfm?CFID=3887062&CFTOKEN=87706832
Comment by Frank — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:20 am
Frank, Conrad was of course a ‘Pole’ but I said ‘Russian’ because he was born in what my relatives and the authorities called ‘Russified Poland’ or indeed just ‘Russia’. When I go through the birth certs, death certs, army registration cards of my relatives who came from the same region of ‘Poland’, it’s clear that none of them can quite make up their minds (that’s the relatives and the authorities) whether they came from ‘Russia, Poland’ from ‘Russia’ from ‘Russian Poland’, from ‘Russified Poland’ but, as it happens, never ‘Poland’ on its own.
However, as neither my saying that Conrad was Russian nor that you’re saying he was not has any bearing on my argument, (I might just well have said that he came from Ruritania), I’m not sure why you’ve made the point. The key thing here is that Andy didn’t include Conrad in his list of writers.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:30 am
Frank they spoke Gaelic and were in a Gaelic culture, whither their DNA was more Pict than Gael is not an issue. Do you think there is a Pictish language in Alba?
Comment by eamonn wright — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:43 am
The Pict and the Gael in Scotland became one people.
Comment by eamonn wright — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:45 am
johng, I think we should be defending interculturalism and hybridity. The state of being for human beings is that we share cultures. This defies national borders. More importantly, it defies racist attempts to corall and ghettoize us. Yes, there are moments and eras when constructing and fighting for a national identity has had the effect of galvanising people against an invader, a foreign dominating force and the like. The reason why the BNP, EDL and Melanie Philips are so keen on national identity is precisely because they want to typify immigration as an invading, foreign, alien force which is dominating English or (in this case) British culture. Their ability to succeed turns in part on false constructions of what this English or British culture is. They rely again and again on denying interculturalism of the past, of the objects and processes and artefacts they live with and through, and of course denying the intercultural processes that happen with the immigrant groups who are arriving now. Look again at Andy’s list of English writers and painters. Look at who he just so happens to have excluded. Look at the way in which he denies interculturalism while he tries to claim something ‘distinctive’ about his highly selective list. If a significant section of the left go down the path of trying to fight fascism by claiming some kind of ‘other’ core Englishness, I think we’re in serious trouble. In purely ideological terms, the fight is against phoney nationalisms, and from a left progressive point of view it should be on the basis of what humane people do - which is share cultures across space, across time, across borders, across ‘human types’, across supposed ‘races’.
That said, this doesn’t involve denying that people are made and make their art in the places and times they live in. But those places and times are themselves hybrid. ‘Roman’ culture was in fact inseparably infused with the Etruscan substrate and the Greek intellectual traditions - and no doubt other traditions I wot not of.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:46 am
Frank the fact that Am Freiceadan Dubh were raised in the Pitlochry area is interesting in line with your strange argument in that the very name Pitlochry is derived from both the Pictish and the Gaelic, though it is very much formed in the Gaidhlig.
Comment by eamonn wright — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:49 am
Michael in other words the question of national identiry isn’t straightforward. Obviously there are hybrid situations and you can bring out its complexities as much as you like but that doesn’t mean that given nations don’t actually exist.
Anyway, that’s me for now so internationalist greetings to you all.
Comment by Armchair — 8 March, 2010 @ 2:01 am
armchair, you bet questions of national identity aren’t straightforward. The ‘identity’ in question will not be as the ruling class of that country would like to frame it. In other words it will be fluid, intercultural and involve major divisions along lines of class and almost certainly region and locality. Part of that nation’s history will include struggle (which may or not be incorporated in the ‘myth’ of nationhood peddled by that nation state see the Marseillaise for an example of incorporation of revolutionary sentiments)
Yes, nations exist, but I’d rather stick with an idea of nation state as a constitutional entity. After that, there are various desires for nationhood expressed through organisations etc.
England is not a constitutional entity. The desire for nationhood seems at the very most stuttering and faltering. Note, the BNP use ‘Engerland’ as a useful bit of rallying but they are the ‘British’ ‘National’ party not the English, Welsh, Scots national parties. The EDL is a different matter and we don’t yet know which way this is going to turn out.
As I’ve said, progressive nationalism is the desire to free oneself from the foreign oppressor. I don’t see the foreign oppressor oppressing England.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 2:29 am
Michael R - I think you’ve made a lot of very good points and done it well without cant or abstraction. Thanks.
I will say that while obviously nation-states exist, nationalism/nation is the myth that is created to justify and explain the nation-state. That involves drawing arbitrary and patently phoney divisions that locate certain cultural traditions and expressions as being of the nation because they fall within the arbitrarily drawn borders. To suggest that someone who lives on the border of Wales has more in common with someone who lives on the English side of the border with Scotland is patently silly. And to suggest that any artistic or literary movement was “English” in some essentialist way - as opposed to being the complex product of a particular time and place, and influenced by a whole series of other traditions and ideas - some of which are from the same time and place and many more that are not - is just anti-intellectual and reductionist. It is also dangerous in the present climate. The job of socialists is to do as Michael and others have done - to point to the many varied influences that have shaped culture on your little island. And to try now to create some phony national culture - which can only be defined against other national cultures - is wholly the wrong way to go. England, after all, could use a little bit more Greek and a lot less of St. George’s cross these days.
Comment by redbedhead — 8 March, 2010 @ 3:01 am
I agree Michael. My only point was that when socialists discuss self determination it has nothing whatsoever to do with taking part in inventing spurious myths of homegenity. I could support a yes vote in a referendum for Scottish independence without believing that there is a homogenous Scottish culture absolutely distinct from a homogenous English culture.
For the good reason that such homogenous national cultures don’t exist: anywhere.
Comment by johng — 8 March, 2010 @ 3:53 am
Or to cut to the chase: socialists who support self determination are not for that reason obliged to make the slightest concession to nationalist ideologies.
Comment by johng — 8 March, 2010 @ 3:54 am
One of the great moments of modern scottish culture is the Scottish Enlightenment. Of course you have to forget that almost all the leading figures in it had more or less severe anglophilia. If your English your encouraged to forget that they were Scottish. Largely because they invented modern english intellectual culture. Along with, for better or worse,that of much of the rest of the world in succeding centuries. Adam Smith. Bloody hell.
Comment by johng — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:01 am
re ‘the Picts’. Last time I looked, no one had any idea who they were, what language they spoke or indeed very much at all about them.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:26 am
You are right Michael. They left us little other than some standing stones and some placenames. They may have been the people in Ireland before the Gaels arrived. I think its fair to say they merged with the Gael and became Gaelicised, i have seen no evidence that they were oppressed - mostly that they intermarried with the Gaels from Dal Riada.
Comment by eamonn wright — 8 March, 2010 @ 5:26 am
So much for dilectics.So then by all of that,i see that we are socialist, bar some, in thought, and accept the right to culture.The obvious is how do we unify.
Comment by howard — 8 March, 2010 @ 8:48 am
#242
It is striking the lack of a theory of national consciousness from these SWP inspired deniers of national identity. It is as if Benedict Anderson, Hans KOhn, Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm had never existed in developing theories of how national consciousness arose; and it is as if the lived expereince of the majority f the world’s population can be put aside just becasue it is inconventient for their brittle understanding of the world.
The mistake you make here is to assume that feelings of national self-identity are a form of ideology, as opposed to a form of collective consciousness. NOw it is possible that some people may feel that Englishness is more ethnicaly defined than Britihsness, others may feel that England has less legacy of colonial and imperial hubris than Britshness, that is hardly the point. National consciousness is not a political ideology that can be chosen on such narrow grounds
The real issue is why there has been a shift in national consciousness at a collective mass level, which is an undeniable fact, even if the extent of it can be debated, and it ebbs and flows due to the duality of Britishness/Englishness.
Eddie is correct that you would benefit from reading Neil Davidsn’s much more considered refelctions on the way that national identity is a form of collective consciousness.
Neil Davidson argues that “Identities are the ensemble of all the external signs through which people show to themselves and to other people that they have chosen to be identified in that particular way” . Davison clearly, and helpfully accepts that national identity exits as a collection of shared ideas, behaviours, myths and attitudes
Davidson has of course still undertheorised this, by implying that national consciousness can simply be “chosen” as is the product of individual decisions. We can improve on Davidson’s insights by looking at the Marxist tradition of psychology.
Shared consciousness of membership of a collective community is not specific to nationality. Davidson approves the contribution of psychologist Valentin Voloshinov, whose work took place during the creative early years of the Russian revolution, and who argued that “consciousness is not an individual but a collective attribute. It is produced by people internalising the meaning of the ideological signs that their social group has used over a time in the process of interaction” . The important point that Voloshinov contributes is that although consciousness is an ideological construction, the forms of consciousness available to individuals are those that have been collectively developed, and with which they interact.
(see Neil Davidson, The Origins of Scottish Nationhood, (Pluto, London, 2000), pp7-46.)
That is indivduals can only choose among forms of consciousness available to them through theior relationships wth a wider collective society.
Now as such, there has grown a collective awareness that the particular form of Brtishness that is not Welsh nor Scotish nor Irish is a distinct collective experence, and that it some prefer to call it Englishness, rather than assume that this English frm of Britishness is normative, which is a bit f an insult to the Cetic nations of Britain.
To a degree there are elements of conscious choice, as Charlie Hore outlines here, but this is marginal, as forms of conscuiousness cannot be individualy created, they can only be participated in as art of collective and socially constructed empathy. That is, you can only choose among participatory forms of empathetic collective identity that exist in your relationships with those around you, and in the broader culture that you particpiate within.
What this means is, a I have written else where:
the nation is a piece of history frozen in collective consciousness, but secondly I would argue it also means that the nation does not exist as a set of identifiers and a consciousness that its members simply accept, but rather the nation is always in the process of discovery. Therefore the ideological content of the nation is always part of a contested process, reflecting the different class interests of those who identify with it. Bauer’s approach of seeing the nation as a process of constant reinvention also has the advantage of explaining how nations can embrace new cultural influences through immigration, and how new immigrants can both be part of their new nation, while retaining identification with their original culture and nation. This is particularly important for understanding England, a nation built on successive waves of immigration.
So we need to look elsewhere other than conscious choice for political and ideological reasons for the receding of Brtishness, and the growth of Scottishness, Welshness and Englishness.
There are a large number of social factors explaining the receding of Britain. The loss of the shared inperial project, the Thatcherite abolition of many of the British national institutiuns like British Steel, National Coal Board, British Rail; the abolition of the football home internationals, EU membership, devolution, the growth of more assertive Weslsh and Scottish identities, etc, etc.
The process cntinues, and there will be a debate about what it means to be English, whether or not the left chooses to participate in it.
Charlie aso writes:
What is striking is the amazingly low leve of theorisation here of how national consciousness exists, and how individuals interact with it.
You may make a conscious choice not to self identify as English, and you personally may feel that in the English/British duality, then you feel more British than English. There is also the question that the particular shared collective expereince of London as a world city is sightly unique and forms a deflected form of national “consciousness” in its own right
But what you cannot do is individually decide to absent yourself from the collective forms of consciousness that you participate within; and more than a fish can decide not to swim in the sea. That is, there is a conscious ideological and social choice here not to feel, or self identify with England. Fine that is your choice. But there is a particyularity in your social interactions that make your conscious rejection of Enhlishness be defined by Englishness, and a unique expereince to England. In the same way that there is a unique expereince to belonging to a Bengali community in England that is dfferent from being a Bengali in Bangladesh, or in France.
What
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 8:48 am
Incidently, the “nations don’t exst” crowd claim t stand in the tradition of Lenin, nothing could be further from the truth:
Lenin gave us an example of the correct approach to the problem of national sentiments in his article “On the National Pride of the Great Russians” written in 1914. He wrote:
[V. I. Lenin, Collected Works 21:103-4]
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 8:51 am
#261
Redbedhead sums up perfectly the idiocy f the SW argument:
This is a massive non-sequiter.
OF COURSE Englich literature and culture has arisen “complex product of a particular time and place, and influenced by a whole series of other traditions and ideas - some of which are from the same time and place and many more that are not”
But the particularity of that complexity is one that is unique, and that is what makes it English. No-one is arguing that this is due to some “essentilism”, national identity hs arisen in specifc material crcumstances, and has been a contested process.
There is a huge problem with arguing that oppressed ntions have a right t sef determination, and yet simultaneoulsy arguing that nations don’t exist! Or that national traditions are just the “complex product of a particular time and place, and influenced by a whole series of other traditions and ideas - some of which are from the same time and place and many more that are not”
This indeed is precisely the argument used by British imperialism in its more sophisticated variant for regarding the nationalist anti-colonialist movments as rather vulgar and reactionary, compared to the enlightened civilising mission of the Empire
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 9:05 am
#235
“If you had done your research Andy you would realise that Lowrey was influenced by his tutor Pierre Adolphe Valette,”
Ahh the regurgitated truisms of GCSE art-history always fall back on the network of “inflences”, yes you can get extra points in your essay.
The point however that there is a process of “apreception” where novel influences have to be incorporated into the existing body of knowledge and aesthetic awarness. That is, the way in which Lowry was “influenced” by Pierre Adolphe Valette was one that was simulataneoulsy unique to Lowry as an individual but also inseperable from the broader social environment that Lowry participated in, which was particular to Northern England
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 9:11 am
#228
The same point can be made of Michal Rosen’s mischevious and disingenuos piece of coat-trailing.
The fact that writers and other artists working within the tradition of English culture have interacted wth ther nations and cultures does not negate the fact that they have done so in a particular way.
Michael always tries to racialise this argument, in rather an unpleasant and unneccessary way. Englihsness is not about “race” it is about there being a particular strand of cultural expereince that has developed here and no where else. that doesn’t make it any better than the expereicnes of the other high litererary cultures, nor does it make it any worse.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 9:18 am
#263
“socialists who support self determination are not for that reason obliged to make the slightest concession to nationalist ideologies.”
but you are obliged to acknoweldge that nations and national consciousness exists, otherwise what are you supporting?
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 9:19 am
#262
” could support a yes vote in a referendum for Scottish independence without believing that there is a homogenous Scottish culture absolutely distinct from a homogenous English culture. ”
STRAW MAN ALERT !!!!
At what point did “homogenous” did get introduced?
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 9:34 am
“The point however that there is a process of “apreception” where novel influences have to be incorporated into the existing body of knowledge and aesthetic awarness”
Why are you making the assumption that this existing ‘body of knowledge and aesthetic awareness’ is ‘national’ in charecter? This is historically a quite incredible idea (especially when discussing literature in the medieval period when bodies of knowledge and aesthetic awareness were built up in particular institutions and castes of the population who often did not even share a common language with those inhabiting the same geographical space).
And as for straw men, the belief that nationalism depends on mythology and is in some essential respects imaginary in no way implies the claim that ‘there are no such things as nations’ just the claim that nations don’t exist in the same way as tables and chairs which continue to exist whether we believe in them or not. Self determination recognises the right to political independence. It does not require supporting nationalism or developing nationalist mythologies of our own. Lenin was quite clear on this in his theoretical work on national self determination (and his polemic against Bauer).
Its also a little disturbing that you attack so vehmanantly people who are not nationalists, accusing them of dishonesty and the like. What next? Traitors?
Comment by johng — 8 March, 2010 @ 9:59 am
The paricularity of any national identity, Andy, I don’t think can be divorced from the history of said nation. This holds true of its culture, social development, and political life.
English history, since the Act of Union, has absorbed Britishness to the point where both have become almost interchangeable in the consciousness of many English people and just as crucially people around the world when regarding Britain.
It is a history of empire, colonialism, war and mercantilism that has succeeded in attaching a negative connotation to an English national identity in ways that aren’t attached to a corresponding Scottish, Welsh or Irish one.
I think Michael Rosen has a point in equating English national identity to race. For all the attempts to forge a progressive English national identity, it remains tied to a white, militaristic consciousness, the result of the efforts of succeeding generations of British ruling class to instil their values of empire and mercantilism into the consciousness of society at large.
It has left us with two choices - either embrace this universal conception of Englishness/Britishness, or else reject any such national identity in solidarity with those left out of its narrow parameters.
Britain, its development and place in the world, is unique in historical role it has played, and continues to play, as an oppressor nation. This role undoubtedly has branded itself into the consciousness of its citizens, where you have people struggling to maintain a roof over their heads gleefully waving the flag in support of the royal family and all the regressive institutions that define the nation’s sense of self.
Any analysis vis-a-vis national identity must surely flow from an understanding of the unique role that Britain/England has and continues to play in the world.
Comment by John — 8 March, 2010 @ 10:00 am
Myth is certainly taking precedence over fact in the histories of Scotland that are appearing here with every shred of historical evidence relating to the origins of Scotland being ignored, without doubt the Lothians and surrounding areas have been English, or “Inglis” for a millenium with the withdrawal of the Picts or Romano Britons who retreated to the “Welsh” Kingdom of Strathclyde, I think William Wallace means William the Welshman or Stranger. The Scots of Dalriada probably never left Argyl, the Islanders are Viking and during the General Stike working class men were awarded medals by the tories for violently breaking up the strike in Glasgow. The racialisation of the Gael by the lowlander is matched by the Highland contempt for the Albanach. Scotland was invented by Sir Walter Scot, we dont exist. Sorry.
Comment by doom n' gloom — 8 March, 2010 @ 10:37 am
#276
“Any analysis vis-a-vis national identity must surely flow from an understanding of the unique role that Britain/England has and continues to play in the world.”
JOhn
I don’t think that British/English/Scottish/Welsh nation identity is different in this regard from French, Spanish, German or Russian national identity, to take a few examples.
But there is a different question what attitude socialists shou take to national consciousness, from the question of whether national consciousness even exists.
It seems that the SWP persist in arguing that nations don’t even exist, becase they think that the fact that they are socialy constructed means that they are in some way “not real”;
but nations simply do exist as colletive forms of human consciousness that have derived from a particular historical interaction wth nature, other nations, and class struggle within the nation, as well as intelectual cultural endeavour.
there is a continual straw man argumet that those arguing that nations exst are somehow arguing a racial or esentiallist case; whereas it is actualy a historical materialist arguement that the SWP are rejecting.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 10:45 am
I think Andy has been upset by the clear repudiation of his ‘left nationalist’ position, which is why he is everting back to his insulting and caricaturing posture-
not everyone that disagrees with you here is SwP inspired, and your attempts to force this allusion, show in reality you are trying not to clarify but to badger and insult and bully.
Whenever the debate gets clear and sharp, you are always one of the first to get abusive……
Comment by non-partisan, — 8 March, 2010 @ 10:51 am
re 278 What you are refusing to accept is the difference between ‘nation state’ and nationality and ‘nation’ as some kind of collective cultural experience.
I don’t know why you keep ignoring this distiction.
Comment by non-partisan, — 8 March, 2010 @ 10:55 am
#275
*sigh*
But if you gave it any thought whatsoever, you would realise that in the mediaeval period there was considerable variance within the chivalric model; and indeed in the charActer of feudalism, which reflected the particularlity of national development that had preceded the development of feudalism.
In particular, some feudal states developed into historic nations in the late mediaeval period Scotland, England, France, for example.
Some did not. There was no historical Czech nation in the same way, there was no historic Finnish nation; nor Magyar nor Ruthenian nations. These stayed as low cultures in the mediaeval period - for example the Hungaran nobility spoke Latin as their first oral language, andf used German in writing untl the 1840s, and the Magyar tongue was only used by peasants, and had no literary imprint at that stage.
In the case of the Czechs for example, their origination as a nation came in the late period of the Reich, when Kaiserin Maria-Theresa encouraged a Czech speaking middle class to develop, that ad different interests from the German burghers of Bohemia and Moravia.
this does not mean that the Czechs are any less a nation than the English, but we can see how a nation was born; whereas some other nations have a longer pedigree back into the earier mediaval period.
this simply does mean that there are differing cultral and social traditions that surround people, and therefore which we have to participate within, not through choice, but becasue we are social animals who have to live within the specifc and particular environment we find our selves located within.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 10:59 am
‘ don’t think that British/English/Scottish/Welsh nation identity is different in this regard from French, Spanish, German or Russian national identity, to take a few examples.’
This is correct, which is where progressives in those places come in with regard to dealing with a national identity which empirically has most often been employed as a source of separation, division, and racism within and without said societies of former and existing colonial nations.
I do feel there is traction in the view than nationalism, when employed in resistance to oppression - i.e., Palestinian or Arab nationalism - is a positive force, whereas when used to solidify and cement the role of an oppressor or colonial nation then it is the opposite.
Nations do exist, of course they do, regardless of how they came into being. For socialists to attempt to deny this is to place them well outside the parameters of mainstream thought and consciousness. The point is how much any national identity is the product of the ideas, values, and interests of the ruling class or some organic process of cultural and social development outside of those dominant ideas.
There is also the disjunction between class identity and national identity to consider. Between the mid 19th and early 20th century a working class consciousness and identity emerged throughout England and the rest of the UK in line with the rise of the trade union movement. The extent to which this has shaped or been shaped by a particular national identity, and led to the emergence of a definitive culture and values, is of course crucial to any such analysis.
The Falklands factor illustrates the relative ease with which the ruling class has been able to harness notions of patriotism and nationhood in order to serve its interests.
Comment by John — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:00 am
#279
“I think Andy has been upset by the clear repudiation of his ‘left nationalist’ position, which is why he is everting back to his insulting and caricaturing posture-”
no - I find stupidity exasperating, which is why I am sharp in response.
There has been a “clear” refutation of my arguments only in the sense that you have clearly disagreed with them.
What you have not done is produce a convincing alternative theory of national consciousness.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:01 am
#280
“What you are refusing to accept is the difference between ‘nation state’ and nationality and ‘nation’ as some kind of collective cultural experience.”
I have bno ideas what you mean here.
I am quite precise about what I am talking about, the existence of nationality as a form of collective shared consciousness.
Now that can sometimes lead to political expression, sometimes not; it can sometimes lead to a nation stae, most times not.
But clearly, using the example of ray and Michael Rosen above, some here deny that nations even exist, or if they concede that nations exist, then they argue that England is uniquely not a nation.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:04 am
I really don’t understand what you are sighing about Andy. Nobody suggested that different patterns of feudalism did not shape the later development of nationalism. What they are suggesting is that the assumption that (for instance) literature on chivalry was shaped by national traditions (as opposed to, for example, chivalric traditions shaping later nationalism) is a bit of an apriori assumption: or rather it proceeds by treating nationalism as an endless apriori. Much of the literature which was to shape modern nationalism did not embody national traditions. The other feature that you ignore is the way in which ideas about a ‘national’ literature are retrospectively constructed. And no, it is you who seems to confuse the imaginary and mythical dimension of nationalism with the proposition that they do not exist. Imagination and Myth are at the heart of nationalism and these are powerful things. But without the development of a world of nation-states and its structural supports, such creative efforts would have yielded nothing like present day nationalism. Politically though the most important point has been made when it comes to the neccessity to look at how our nation states actually behave and what role they play in the world.
Comment by johng — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:07 am
#282
“I do feel there is traction in the view than nationalism, when employed in resistance to oppression - i.e., Palestinian or Arab nationalism - is a positive force, whereas when used to solidify and cement the role of an oppressor or colonial nation then it is the opposite.”
But you wll note that in this argument I have not particularlyu engaged wth whether or not there can be a progressive identification with national identity.
What I am arguing is simply ther case that nations exist, and that nationa consciousness is a mlleable and socially cnditioned frm of collective consciousness, and therefore capable of multiple outcomes.
Those arguing against me are arguing that there is no English cultural traition, and that England does not exist.
They are blissfully unconcerned that this diffidence about national identity is in fact a particularly English characteristic, based upon imperialist conceit that the unique attributes of English culture are in fact universal human attributes, and that te degree to which other nations deviate from them is a mark of their backwardness.
If England desn’t exist, then sure as hell Afghanistan doesn’t exist, so the universal civilising mission of NATO in the “articifial” state of Afghanistan can be justified by its civilising nature.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:09 am
I find Atsuko Ichijo so interesting and informative when it comes to ideas about nationalism.
If you can get a hold of it, try his easy to read -
Scottish Nationalism and the Idea of Europe (2004)
Here is his academic wepage -
Dr Atsuko Ichijo
Kingston University, London
I haven’t read Dr Ichijo’s other works but I’m going to put that right very shortly.
Roughly, Dr Ichijo says that because the nation of Scotland is so old (the oldest in the world probably), its people have a huge reservoir of ideas and concepts from their history about who they are and what it means to be Scottish.
Scots, today, can pick and choose from this reservoir of historical facts and characteristics and put them to use, for present purposes, to not only define themselves, but also to help give direction, and even justification, for their politics and policies as a nation.
So when the likes of Hugh Trevor-Roper says stuff like Scots have invented their own history and its all myth, its all true, but not in the sense he means it. He means its just all just a pack of nationalist lies.
Hugh Trevor-Roper - The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History (2009)
I can’t think of one human culture that hasn’t invented itelf. They’re all artifical and quite rightly so. There’s nothing natural or god-given about human communities, cultures and identities.
I hope that makes sense.
all the best
Comment by joe90 kane — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:15 am
There is of course a progressive way of relating to national identity in Britain. Its called liberalism. No great mystery here. Socialists are however not liberals. No great mystery here either.
The notion that ‘diffidence’ about national identity stems from an ‘Imperialist’ attitude is both odd, and, complete rubbish. You couldn’t make it up.
Comment by johng — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:15 am
#285
“What they are suggesting is that the assumption that (for instance) literature on chivalry was shaped by national traditions (as opposed to, for example, chivalric traditions shaping later nationalism) is a bit of an apriori assumption: or rather it proceeds by treating nationalism as an endless apriori. Much ”
That s why I am sighing, becase you have completely misuderstood my argument.
Nations arise out of particularity, and where you are having s much difficulty is your imprecise and ambiguou use of the term “nationalism”
“nationalism” is a modern historical and political concet perhaps just 200 years old. Nation states are modern concepts, dating back no further than - at most - sixteenth century England and Holland; and not self-conscious of their role until the first unambiguoulsy modern nation states, the USA and venezuela, were founded.
nations however predate nationalism, and national consciousness is a collective human attribute reflecting the peculiarity of specfic historical exeriences.
The denial that there is a particular historical expereince in England, and that this has given arise to a complex dual British/English frm of collective sef-identity, with particulariries of culture and acharcter is simply idealist, and you are not basing your self on histrical materialism.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:16 am
#288
“The notion that ‘diffidence’ about national identity stems from an ‘Imperialist’ attitude is both odd, and, complete rubbish. ”
It is a well obsereved phenemenon, hardly a novel invention of mine. tghe mistaking of British articularity for universalism was a common theme of Empire, the mistaking of the particularlity of Englishness for all Britishness will come as no suprise to the Scots and Welsh.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:18 am
On Joe’s point there is a difference between imaginary and fictional. Benedict Anderson’s use of the term implies the former. The series of articles contained in ‘the invention of tradition’ occassionally slide into the latter. However there remains the question of the attitude of socialists to the results.
Comment by johng — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:19 am
#275
Oh this is rich
“Self determination recognises the right to political independence. It does not require supporting nationalism or developing nationalist mythologies of our own. Lenin was quite clear on this in his theoretical work on national self determination (and his polemic against Bauer). “
Lenin never read bauer, he delegated the task to Stalin; whose pamphlet on nationalities informed the Bolshevik position, of having a tick box approach t what is and what is not a nation. In the tradition os marxist polemics, not having read baeur dd not prevent Lenin having strong opinins, but those opinions were second hand based upon Stalin
What is completely missing from Lenin is any theory of nations at all, except in the narrow political field. He concrened himself only with the political question of what attitudes sciaists should take where pre-existing national movements had developed within the Tsarist empire - particurly the Finns and Ukranians. the Blsheviks supported national determination for these nations, they dd not suport independence for the Baltic states becasue there was no developed national movement there.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:24 am
#285
Much of the literature which was to shape modern nationalism did not embody national traditions.
- I hope you don’t mind johng
but just to give an illustration from the Scottish tradition.
The Declaration of Arbroath 1320 informed George Buchanan who, in turn, informed the Scottish elites involved in deliberations and negotiations over the Treaty of Union 1707.
I’m sure I don’t need to illustrate how all this ongoing traditon feeds into the current Scottish political scene, what with Mel Gibson’s Braveheart movie, or the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament again in the Scottish capital etc etc
all the best
Comment by joe90 kane — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:29 am
Clearly Andy enjoys telling people they lack theory as if theory always solved things. So let’s look at the example of practice (presumably arising out of his ‘theory’) that Andy gave us:
” It seems hughly odd to claim that the nation of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Kipling, Aldous Huxley, William Blake, Sir Joshua reynolds, Gainsborough, Constable, Edward Elgar, W H Auden et al has only a “mythical” national culture ”
Clearly, this list of writers and artists has been selected for an agenda. They aren’t random, no Irish born writers are here, no Jews, no Scots, no black writers. So, Andy’s theory has led him to suggest that this set of artists, plucked first from the world of writers and artists who have lived in Britain or passed through here, are in some way specially significant and relevant to his argument about their being a ‘real’ (or non-mythic) ‘national culture’.
Well, I’d extrapolate backwards from this list and the claim(without engaging directly with the ‘theory’) that any theory that produced that list and with that claim is nationalist, essentialist, chauvinist tosh. If Andy thinks that it’s me that’s unpleasantly ‘racialised’ the argument, he should look at himself and the ideas that helped him produce that list of writers and artists with the claim that he made about them.
Fairly carefully, several posters and myself have gone through that list of writers and artists and re-characterised them, not as props to his national project, but even as English men (no women, of course), they are bearers of a hybrid cultures in interesting, and progressive ways - ways which we as internationalists can and should celebrate, from a humanistic perspective, from an anti-racist perspective, from forward-looking perspective, thinking about the intercultural diverse nation state (yes) that we live in.
I then raised the question as to why certain representatives of other traditions weren’t present on Andy’s list (because the excluded are just as significant as the included) and cited such people as Wilde, Shaw, Conrad, Jean Rhys, Rosenberg, Gertler. Why are such people missing from his ‘national’ cultural picture he dashed off? What’s the matter with them? Why don’t they contribute to his non-mythic national culture? Why are they excluded?
This question has already been put to him. He has chosen to deflect answering it by accusing me of ‘racialising’ the argument. This is nasty. It’s his list that is racialised (and genderised) (quite literally the dead white englishmen thesis!) and so and when I have objected, it’s me that’s accused of racialising the argument. Why does this kind of deflecting sound familiar?
As a footnote, the argument here is mostly about ‘England’ not about ‘Britain’ or the ‘UK’. I sense some sliding about with the word ‘nation’ and ‘national’ that is either deliberately or unknowingly blurring the distinction. Nothing I have said applies directly to an argument we might be having about ‘Britain’ or the ‘UK’. They all refer to an argument about England - a place that is not a nation state, has no passport, has a tiny slender amount of activity common and exclusive to it.
Wherever I go (and I travel a great deal around England - and to a lesser extent Scotland, Wales and Ireland) I don’t ever hear people talking about England. They often talk about being in Yorkshire, or Liverpool, or Cornwall and the like. People seem to have a sense of themselves in localities and frequently this is seen by them in a diverse way - ‘we’ have this or that people living here. When it comes to things like literature (which I’m involved in) I see people operating in what I would call an anglophone way, moving between British (not English) and American literature with ease. I don’t think I ever see or hear people either in casual conversation or academic ones trying to secure some kind of English tradition or English culture. And for the life of me, I cannot see any political purpose in trying to do so, if for no other reason that it is clearly not based on any evidence.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:37 am
One pit-fall in national history writing should be noted though. Each generation of course draws from past traditions. But in doing so they re-invent them. In England we are told that the beginning of our freedoms lie in the Magna Carta. Anyone reading that curious document in any depth would rapidly realise that it refers to social realities quite different (obviously) from those of the present. Is Boudecia part of the English tradition? Well generations of school kids were taught about her heroic resistance to the Romans. There was however no such thing as England OR Britain at the time. And despite her real existence in history a case could be made that insofar as she is treated as part of national history she’s entirely fictional. A historical treatment would not treat her as part of national history.
Comment by johng — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:38 am
In terms of how traditions stay alive: they stay alive by being picked up and developed by new social forces in new circumstances. It is those social forces and circumstances that are the real subject matter of histories of the development of nationalism.
Comment by johng — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:39 am
On Andy’s tetchiness (and no doubt this will make him more tetchy so apologies in advance) I’m reminded of the reaction to Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism where he pointed out the relevence of Imperialism to understanding and appreciating Jane Austin’s novel. Absolute outrage from a range of literary critics. Michael’s point about the selection of the canon (highly politicised excercises in the 19th century about which there is a vast literature) is important. It is a great flaw in Andy’s argument that he does not engage in the debates about this.
Comment by johng — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:43 am
#293
Sorry, I missed out the date for George Buchanan who, incidently, is reckoned to be the best poet in Latin outside of Antiquity -
Here is that Scottish literary pedigree again -
The Declaration of Arbroath 1320 - George Buchanan (1506-1582) - Treaty of Union 1707.
Just to say that, as I have heard British historians deny continuity in the Scottish literary traditions, that the likes of the Declaration of ARbroath was forgotten about and only resurrected for latter-day Scottish nationalist purpuses -
- so I have heard scholars on BBC Radio 3 claim that the there is no continuity in the radical tradition of English politics ie The Peasants Revolt 1381, the Putney Debates under Cromwell and the Round-heads, the Diggers, the Levellers etc.
The history of left-wing politics is just a series of discontinuous largely meaningless events it seems - unlike the recording and chronicling the glorious pedigree and divine rights of kings and queens and the aristocracy.
Comment by joe90 kane — 8 March, 2010 @ 11:48 am
*sigh*
Obviously, there is an English/British duality; and British national consciousness and British experience have developed in parallel with Englishness, and Englishness has drawn both upon its pre-British heritage as well as being informed by the fact that Engishness has been the dominant form of Britishness.
Now you can argue about whether or not there is a a particular aesthetic sensibility in English culture, but if we are to discuss whether or not there is a distinct English strand to British culture, then it is not unreasonable to focus on those who are not Scots and Irish. Particularly as I dd not want to start the hare running that Ray alluded to above, for example that david Hockney is Irish..
now clearly we could list some Irish writers, Lord Dunsany and C S Lewis spring to mind, that are very much in the English tradition.
Yeats - not so English; Likewise, Dylan Thomas - not so English. Walter Scott - distinctly Scottish; Conrad, to me is a writer rather more intellectual slightly out of the mainstream of Englsh literture.
You could argue that Kazuo Ishiguro is a writer informed by a particularly English sensibility in literature, but I think in a sense that his perceptiveness of the emotional constipation of the English middle and upper classes is a particular insight he has gained from his British-Japanese heritage; combined with a profound understanding of the conventions of English literature (he is after all a very academically inspired writer)
It seems absurd to me to make no distinctin between English and American novels. Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy, Ralph Ellison, Gore Vidal even, simply couldn’t be English.
Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, simply couldn’t be American, as is most obvious when they locate their fiction in America
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:05 pm
#297
“I’m reminded of the reaction to Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism where he pointed out the relevence of Imperialism to understanding and appreciating Jane Austin’s novel. Absolute outrage from a range of literary critics. Michael’s point about the selection of the canon (highly politicised excercises in the 19th century about which there is a vast literature) is important. ”
errr, so what??
Clearly British and English cultural tradition are both the conscious and unconscious creation of imperial heritage.
This could not be more clear that with the example of Kipling; but also Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, et al.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:09 pm
johng, the novel that Said refers to is ‘Mansfield Park’ and I always enjoy this point because I thought I had studied the book for A-level! I had of course not noticed in the sixth form that the wealth in the family is stated quite clearly as coming from Antigua ie through slavery. The relationships between a country house and the ‘West Indies’ was so ‘normal’ that we didn’t notice it, in a north London grammar school of the sixties. And Said is so right to point out that the wealth and leisure of the people in Mansfield Park was predicated on this international (please note, andy) trade.
A similar or parallel point can be made about The Merchant of Venice, where Shakespeare is precise to a t about where the relevant characters wealth comes from. He makes quite clear that Antonio is not just any old rich merchant, but that he is gambling on a boat coming into Venice with goods that will make a profit. He is a member of the rising class of gamblers who were financing ships to go ‘out there’ and come back with something that they could sell in the marketplaces of Europe at a profit.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:14 pm
Michael - I wonder who you are meeting on your travels.
Englishness runs very deep. We can either engage with it and try to shape its contemporary expression or we can deny its significance or even its very existence. The EDL, BNP, Tories, etc will be delighted if the left chooses the latter course.
Can you imagine the left in France or China or Venezuela doing something so stupid?
Comment by Frank — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:17 pm
Andy, you’re now talking about ’strands’ of Englishness within something else, (without telling us how ’strands’ present themselves within literature) But no matter at the fuzziness of that characterisation other than that your ’stranding’ seems mysteriously to stop at the borders of ‘Britain’.
You don’t seem to want to come to terms with what hybridity is about. Perhaps you don’t meet writers like, let’s say John Agard. John was brought up in Guyana. His secondary education was at a Catholic boys school in Guyana. He’s lived in Britain for over thirty years. It’s not that there are ’strands’ within his writing, everything he writes and says and performs is hybrid, mixtures of Guyanese landscape and ways of talking, formal English literature (which he got a lot of but which is itself much more diverse than the word ‘English’ ever suggests) and elements of his life in Britain with his kids going to British schools. To tie him to being Guyanese, or British or English (and he is all these three and more)is to misrepresent what he is. The advantage of the term ‘black’ is that it’s internationalist and in a world presently constituted he’s black wherever he goes, but then his work draws on many non-black elements. This said, I wouldn’t want to tie him to the term ‘English’ either and, quite clearly from your dead white Englishmen list, neither would you, no matter how hard you try to backtrack from it now.
We can celebrate John’s work as part of the international world of literature of which he represents some traditions in a very fluid way.
As for your drawing lines between eg Gore Vidal and Aldous Huxley - to what purpose? What possibly can be gained by readers, writers, critics, political activists, young people, old people - anyone - from you sitting there ticking nationality boxes next to authors who have delighted people (in this case) in the mostly anglophone world and who have travelled (in this case) between the US and Britain?! You’ve turned yourself into the immigration official of literature! And the joke is you think this way of going on has some kind of progressive or leftwing content!
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:31 pm
#301
“And Said is so right to point out that the wealth and leisure of the people in Mansfield Park was predicated on this international (please note, andy) trade. ”
It was not “international” trade, it was much worse, it was intra-imperial trade.
That is, the specific expereince of colonial slavery was a British one; and notwithstanding the participation of Glasgow, the slave trade itself was a particularly English one. Of curse it is the ABC of Marxism that a nationa culture would be shaped by its interactios nwth other cultures, and by the contending interests within the national culture, especialy different class expereinces.
I don’t understand why you think you are making some sort of killer point against me.
Never have I argued that English or British culture is inherently virtuous, nor that it is better than other cultures. It is however the culture that we have no choice but to participate within, and seek to shape, becasue we were born and raised in it.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:33 pm
#303
“Perhaps you don’t meet writers like, let’s say John Agard. ”
no - never heard of him
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:35 pm
Marx poured scorn on representatives of the ‘Young France’ movement who delivered speeches (in French, of course) denying the existence of nations and nationalities. By that, he charged, they understood the absorption of other nations by their own.
I love reading all these socialists and ‘Marxists’ living in England who furiously dispute the existence of English nationality, flinging around accusations of (left) nationalism, etc. etc. It’s all so very … English.
Comment by Gwladgarwr rhyngwladol — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:35 pm
Why mention the slave trade and Mansfield Park? Because Mansfield Park was and is characterised as ‘English’ set in an ‘English’ countryside. (You can very easily show how this countryside is itself not ‘English’ in that it was shaped in large houses according to French and Italian principles - but we’ll leave that to one side). Why mention slavery. Well, slavery is not English (as you state) and not even Anglo-scottish. It is, as I stated, ‘international’, involving many localities in terms of the slaves, and many nations in terms of the slavers, and many end-points in terms of the plantations. So Mansfield Park is itself locked into internationalism. It represents a fragment of the consequences of the international trade - or to be precise, one woman’s view of that fragment, not the fragment itself. We can save Austin from the narrowness of the typification English, English Literature, English book and the like because she was sufficiently socially and politically aware to give us the material base of the wealth and leisure enjoyed by her characters. If for nothing else, this means that someone like Said could himself enjoy the book for giving him that kind of reading. He participated in that text as a non-English person and could give us that kind of international reading.
re John Agard, he’s one of the Caribbean poets who have helped transform the face of modern poetry being written and performed all over the British Isles and beyond.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:45 pm
Sorry: Austen
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:45 pm
#303
“As for your drawing lines between eg Gore Vidal and Aldous Huxley - to what purpose? What possibly can be gained by readers, writers, critics, political activists, young people, old people - anyone - from you sitting there ticking nationality boxes next to authors who have delighted people (in this case) in the mostly anglophone world and who have travelled (in this case) between the US and Britain?! ”
Well, American culture and British culture are VERY different, as anyone who has worked for an American company, as I have for the last ten years, will attest.
In so far as people have insight into their societies, it is superior when it is particular. Gore Vidal writes about America, and Americans. He is very good at it. It would be absurd to decontextualise Vidal’s work as somehow culturaly universal, when his main preoccupations are about the particularlity of America.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:46 pm
No killer points here, Andy, but you still haven’t explained why and how you arrived at that particular list of ‘English’ writers as expressing the national culture. Why are they all dead white English men? (pace Kipling who was born in India)Presumably, you think dead white English men best represent what you want to say about ‘England’? Is that it? Or what? Or that there is a ‘core’ or ‘main’ Englishness thread, and everyone else is an adjunct or an ‘influence’ to it? Or indeed, ‘influenced’ by it?
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:50 pm
#307
Well Michael, you have successfully demonstrated that England, and Britain, were involved in an international Empire; and therefore English and British culture were moulded by that expansionist interaction with others.
And what exactly was your point?
the relevence of slavery to the construction of our culture is very relevent, what I dn’t understand is why you think it shows we don’t have a distinct culture. British/English culture grew up in the context of building a blood soiled Empire; and the cynicism and hypocrasy of the English is legendary.
Incidently, I think that if you study - for example - the Bristol slave trade, you will see that the trade was in parallel with other European nations, but not interconnected. The English had their own triangle, and plundered British East Africa and visited English, and English speaking American, destinations. Their expereince of the trade was therefore particular as well as shared.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:54 pm
re Gore Vidal - of course Vidal is one kind of very special and particular kind of ‘American’ other than that speciality is utterly infused with the old anglo elite from the eighteenth century. And what’s more Vidal is particularly readable for an English audience because of a particular kind of inflection and outlook that is, yes, a form of bourgeois internationalism, which is itself just as significant a point about him as saying that he is distinctly American. Boxes, Andy, boxes. You think you’re saying something significant and important by confining this stuff to national boxes. But, in the case of Vidal, no one reads him in boxes. Some of his books flow to and fro across the Atlantic as part of the discourse about the US empire, US upper class life etc. In some ways, he’s less ‘American’ than many other writers, writing from within US vernaculars, or US localities. Vidal writes a lot about the US elite and bourgeois elites are of course international!
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:55 pm
#310
They were just English writers or artists that I like, and whose work I am fmailiar with. There is no greater significance
If we take it into the twentieth century, I am much more partial to American and German writers, and so I listed less writers from that period.
As most of the ones I listed were prior to the twentieth century then the compsition inevitably tilted towards the make up of England at that time. In terms of women, I culd have of course included Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes, etc. But they are not so much my personal cup of tea.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 12:59 pm
What is distinctive about the localities of England is that each locality has its own forms of hybridity. The literature and art of England I would suggest is absolutely impossible to disentangle from the rest of the ‘British’ Isles and I am of course including Ireland. Again, there are localities within England that have some distinctive qualities, but they don’t have more in common with other English localities than they do with say Dublin, and areas of Scotland and Wales. This whole argument would be fundamentally different if we had been talking about Britain, Great Britain or the UK. But we’re not. We’re talking about England. You’re being ahistorical about the slave trade. The slave trade in Africa was international. It was engendered by Europeans interacting with many different kinds of peoples in Africa. Slavers from many nations made it profitable for slave-traders in Africa to collect slaves and bring them to the coast for sale. I love the idea that you’re even making slavery English!
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:01 pm
“the specific expereince of colonial slavery was a British one” - that’s an interesting claim to read from North America, a few hours drive from one of the final destination points of the Underground Railroad.
But here is the rub. Andy, for his bluster and calling people “stupid” and “idiots” and “anti-theoretical”, etc. is really just constantly shifting the terms of debate. Nationhood and nationalism obviously have material force - as the people of Iraq have discovered when faced with the volunteer army of the US military, peopled in many cases by US patriots. But that doesn’t make American nationalism any less of a myth and it doesn’t make Andy’s use of the nebulous term “collective consciousness” any more useful to understand how a “national consciousness” is created.
The USA has a rather more developed sense of “national identity” than the rather pathetic vestigial artefact that is Englishness whose only public advocates are far-right wingnuts. In the USA, a very large geographic nation, one can see the same flag waving from New York to LA to Alaska. Everybody shares some variation of the same mythic story that starts with the pilgrims on the Mayflower, through to George Washington, the Alamo, Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, the Depression and FDR, WWII and the fight against the Nazis, etc. etc. And, of course, history continues to be made in America and people continue to identify with that process, as part of a collectivity. But saying that doesn’t actually tell us very much.
There is, for instance, pretty much the same amount of common experience between trailer trash in rural Alabama as there is with the rural poor in the UK as there is between those same trailer trash and someone living in a Manhattan highrise - particularly if they are wealthy and of a different race.
The myth of community disguises - and is meant to disguise - the real divisions that are the actual experience of life in America. And that’s where this whole “collective consciousness” theoretical category falls down - because it implies that “national consciousness” is the result of a neutral shared experience when, in fact, it is an externally imposed, largely arbitrary, narrative about origins and meanings and goals (American Exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, etc.). It can only be sustained through the use of coercive force precisely because the real experience of people doesn’t fit into that nice, neat package. And that coercive force stretches all the way from creating a canon of American writers (much like Andy’s list of white, dead, “English” writers) to crushing movements like the Black Panthers or the Knights of Labor, who seek, as part of their project, to generate an alternative narrative based upon the experiences of the subaltern who are written out of “Americanness”.
And so when Michael R. and others emphasize the intercultural, international character of cultural production - as well as its regional, race and gender specific character - it is because first of all socialists seek to valorize those who are made invisible and those traditions that emanate from struggle and which bring us together. And because, unlike Andy’s claim that internationalism is merely ideological, socialists seek to unearth the actual international character of all of social life - from artistic production to political forms to everyday culture. There is indeed a reason why the far-right attempt to connect with this nonsense of “Englishness” - because it is small and pathetic and suitable to the worldview of lumpenproletarians and petite bourgeoises. It is shopkeeper’s nationalism and harkens back to a mythical time in which the English were supposedly great and can fantasize about being so again. The left doesn’t need such myths, especially not when the tasks at hand are rather more important than putting on bells and sticks and doing a Morris dance.
Comment by redbedhead — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:05 pm
No, Andy, you weren’t just selecting your faves. You made that list your list that proved I and others here were palpably wrong about denying the existence of a distinct English culture. And whatever rose in your mind so happens to be a list of dead white English men. That’s the problem. 1.Even those dead white Englishmen represent many more cultures and embody many more cultures than the term ‘English’ can ever signify. 2. They aren’t anymore typically English artists than Conrad, Wilde, Shaw, Swift and yet it just so happens they didn’t make the Englishness grade. 3. This means that in order to create your Englishness - which you claim is inclusive - guess what you surface an essentialist list of true-born Englishmen (pace Kipling). 4. That’s where the term ‘English’ will take you…heading back for some core - whether you do it knowingly or as you claim, just running with your faves.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:06 pm
And, as for this: “Gore Vidal writes about America, and Americans. He is very good at it. It would be absurd to decontextualise Vidal’s work as somehow culturaly universal, when his main preoccupations are about the particularlity of America.”
Well, de Tocqueville also wrote about America and is considered rather important in this regard but he wasn’t American. And Vidal, while a great writer, is of a rather particular time and location. You certainly can’t put him in the same category as Ralph Ellison or the other writers of the Harlem Rennaissance, or the writers of the Beat Generation, or Bukowski or the masters of genre fiction like Philip K Dick, Robert Heinlein or Dashiell Hamett, or of more contemporary African-American fiction like Alice Walker and Maya Angelou, etc. etc.
Comment by redbedhead — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:20 pm
Interesting that Joe should mention George Buchanan because he’s a prime example of hybrid thought.
Half of his life, including the time when he was developing his key ideas, were spent at Universities and colleges in France and Portugal and he owes far more to the humanism, Lutheranism and Calvinism he encountered there than any native unbroken Scottish tradition. Even the likes of John Mair who he admired in Scotland had also developed their own humanist ideas in Paris a couple of generations earlier.
De Jure Regni Apud Scotos (which doesn’t even mention Arbroath) drew from many influences - classicism, the renaissance, the reformation - of which Scottish history is just one. Arbroath may have prefigured some of his ideas on the divine right of Kings (or rather the lack thereof) but the idea that it led directly to them is tenuous to say the least.
Comment by Mike — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:24 pm
…redbedhead, as I said above, a very Anglo-American…so much for being ‘distinctively American!
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:24 pm
Seeing as it is International Women’s Day and if we are thinking about literary history then I’ll put foward Mary Seacole as an international traveller who also had a sharp influence on mid-Victorian discussions about nation, race and cultural production (vis a vis her autobiography).
The Brontes became part of a constucted Englishness due to biography and literary tourism. Indeed, 19thC female writers so often could not be established as part of the developing, via critics, via the professionalisation of letters, because they did not fit into any core idea of Englishness. What is kept out of the canon speaks volumes about how exclusivity operates to construct a set of national borders (in terms of literary culture). George Eliot was included primarily because she was more anthologised than any other 19thC writer; bracked with Shakespeare again and again to confer upon her a ‘national’ value.
Comment by sue manchester — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:27 pm
michael
Is rimbaud French?
Is Goethe German?
Is Dostoyevsky Russian?
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:27 pm
#316
“No, Andy, you weren’t just selecting your faves. ”
I was selecting writers who I am familiar with, and who are within a tradition of English culture.
there is nothing odd about that, and it makes my point that there is a distinct national-historical traidtion in England.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:30 pm
#314
“This whole argument would be fundamentally different if we had been talking about Britain, Great Britain or the UK. But we’re not. We’re talking about England. ”
Well this is an interesting point, because up until now i tnhough Miacherl was arguing that there was no souch thing as national cuoltural traditions, now it seems he is simply arguing there is no distinct Englishn tradition.
So this realy needs to be torrned around the other way, as I have pointed out that due t the duaity of British/English identity, and the tendency fr English people t assume that Britishness and Englishness is the same thing, then wha Michael is actually doing is arguing that there is no such thing as a Scottish or Welsh nation.
i.e. If Englishness and Britishness are the same thing, then it is not possible to have a national consciousness within Britishness that is not English.
Michael is explicit in his rejection of the existance of Scottishness and Weslhness here: “there are localities within England that have some distinctive qualities, but they don’t have more in common with other English localities than they do with say Dublin, and areas of Scotland and Wales. “
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:36 pm
#320
“The Brontes became part of a constucted Englishness due to biography and literary tourism. ”
well indeed, but the fact that something has been constructed rather establishes the fact that it exists.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:37 pm
Goethe to Luden (1813): ” A comparison of German people to other people awakens a feeling…for they [like Art and Science] belong in and to the world at large, and before them vanish all the limits of nationality”
Well, the idea of nationhood was certainly on Goethe’s mind; and no wonder in 1813.
Comment by sue manchester — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:40 pm
Andy: yes, but as a strand of cultural production - with all its powerful mythologising.
Comment by sue manchester — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:42 pm
Some of the socialists here seem determined to make real the taunt from the EDL: “You’re not English any more!”
How to lose the battle for hearts and minds in one easy lesson: “That’s right - we’re internationalists. Englishness doesn’t exist.”
Comment by Frank — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:44 pm
#315
“The USA has a rather more developed sense of “national identity” than the rather pathetic vestigial artefact that is Englishness whose only public advocates are far-right wingnuts. ”
Yes of curse the USA has a national identity, and there is a ofrm of natinal consciousness that exists for Americans
But Brtishness aso exists n just as strong a way; and the nature of Britishness is its duality, whereby people can be English/British, or Welsh/British, etc.
Now Englishness is the dominant form of Brtishness, and so seems to be subsumed in Britishness. BUt the seperate existance of Englishness is atestwed to by the Weslsh and Scots.
The fact that most English people call theirr culture and national identity British does not mean that that culture and expereince are the same as the culture and expereince of the Scots and Welsh.
Hence the way that the balance between Britishness and Scotishness ebbs and flows; and Welsh people have a string sence f national distinctness from the English, but a greater support for staying within the UK than the Scots.
To miss the dual nature of Britishness/Engishness, and to overlook how Englishness is articulated as a specific form of Britishness is to downgrade the particularity of the Welsh, Scots and unionist Irish. Who are British and not English.
If you can be British but not English, then you must be able to be British and not not English, i.e t be English and British.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:45 pm
Michael - indeed, re: Vidal. In fact, even his style of speech sounds more English than typically American, coming as he does from a patrician north-east family.
“Is Goethe German?”
Well, there was no “Germany” when Goethe was writing and one of his most famous works was Faust, undoubtedly influenced by Marlowe’s Faust as well as the earlier versions - and of course, the Bible.
Comment by redbedhead — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:48 pm
#326
“yes, but as a strand of cultural production - with all its powerful mythologising.”
mythologisation is indeed central to the creation of modern nationalism, that is not under dispute.
But firstly the mythologised stroies surrunding the projects of nation building have taken on a life of their own; and secondly national traditions can exi st even where there is no nation building political project (for example Scottishness within Britishness prior to very modern manifestations of seperatism)
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:48 pm
#329
“Well, there was no “Germany” when Goethe was writing ”
There was no unified German state, there was certainly a Germany.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:49 pm
#331 Don’t you mean that there was a German language?
Where was Germany exactly?
Comment by anticapitalista — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:51 pm
I alway like Rayomnd Williams on the links betwen Englishness and culture (here literature) as food for thought:
I am saying that there’s a real problem about that 600 years of English literature when it is regarded as the creation and expression of the whole people. After all, that is what the claim to Englishness, essential Englishness, is: that in learning this you learnt the real fibre of your people…. And yet, we must then insist, not until the last 100 years or so could the great majority of the people of these islands have been in any significant sense contributors to that literature, or readers of it, responding in the way in which readers do, helping both to constitute it and in some sense to shape it, giving certain shapes, affecting certain tones which involve the historical transacation of writers and readers.
One doesn’t raise the only as a ‘political’ issue, as people say, fighting an old cause, fighting the cause of a people consciously kept illiterate — though of course that’s what it was. The struggle for literacy was a real a social struggle as any struggle for subsistence or food or shelter. It was at several points viciously beaten back, and then in a sense only admitted on terms which are again becoming highly fashionable and contemporary; because people would need to read instructions and even to write down certain things in the way of record to be able to work….Is not that deep substratum of the language-situation, not in a technical sense of language but in a social sense, a major issue in itself?”
Comment by sue manchester — 8 March, 2010 @ 1:56 pm
#328 The nature of Britishness is its duality Arguably, the more important characteristic of Britishness is its hybridity, rather than simply duality.
And of course the English language itself is far more hybrid than, say, French or Spanish.
So much of this discussion seems to be built on an abstract, timeless, theory of what constitutes nations, rather than on the actual historical record.
#327 Some of us aren’t English, of course.
Comment by chjh — 8 March, 2010 @ 2:03 pm
I love Andy’s method of argument: he names an author, appends the supposed nationality of said author and says, is that author of that nationality? Thereby, he misses the whole point of the preceding discussion - which explores ideas of hybridity, ideas of how nationality is constructed, and the purpose of it being constructed, how Andy’s own list of writers indicates his own prejudices etc etc.
He then attempts to deduce my positions on Britishness, Welshness and Scottishness purely by dint of my having mentioned them. That’s a first.
1. Great Britain and then the UK were and are nation states, with governments and (apols for being althusserian here) ideological state apparatuses of immense power. As redbedhead alluded to, there have been immense efforts put in to claiming certain kinds of national unity to the forerunners and the present constituted nation state. I would be crazy to deny the existence and power of these. However, I wouldn’t concede so much to it, as to also deny that many of the elements of culture in this nation state are indeed hybrid, that some people or art cannot be claimed for it, even though it is and so on. However, England is not the UK, the same effort (apart from Andy and one or two others)has never been put into claiming that there is some kind of ‘true’ (not mythic) ‘national’ culture for England to which all English people should or do subscribe. One of the main reasons for that is that so much effort has been put into claiming the necessity and indivisibility of the union.
2. Re welshness and scottishness…Most old nation states have their Wales and Scotland - that is areas of territory, inhabited by people who claim (it’s not always certain) that they were either ‘pushed’ into them by the dominant power of that state, or that the land they live in was (and insome cases still is) ‘colonised’ by the powerful section of that nation state, usually occupying the capital. My argument about people sensing that they are part of a locality or region is then magnified if there are grounds for such people to believe that they were collectively colonised or oppressed either in the past and only in the past or collectively still to this day. A distinct language aids and magnifies this.
However, that said, the unity of such areas is sometimes false, misleading or downright exploitative - there was more unity of interest between a Welsh, Scottish and English miner than there was between a Welsh miner and a Welsh mine-owner.
Again, even where the flag is raised (eg of Scotland) it blurs very clear distinct traditions: rural/urban; lowland/highland; gaelic/English; island/mainland; etc…
Again, the history of say, Scotland, is full of fascinating and important relationships with continental Europe, Canada and New Zealand while certain powerful religious traditions take no notice of national borders.
Again, hybridity rules.
Andy doesn’t seem to understand that I and others who talk of hybridity don’t thereby mean that all hybridities are the same! We mean that they are different, fluid, ever-changing and therefore to name them (arbitrarily giving in to ruling class ideology) with the names of the nation state (or putative nation state) is misleading and unhelpful to progressive humanistic politics - and to internationalist politics too.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 2:21 pm
re ‘Germany’ there are two broad answers to this question. 1. Germany has existed since 1871 ie it was then the territories of middle Europe were unified into a nation state called Germany (er Deutschland).
2. Germany of German-speaking peoples living in a wide variety of states, statelets, principalities etc, goes back at least two thousand years.
Take your pick.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 2:29 pm
Frank, the leader of the French Communist Party in 1968, tried to drive a wedge between the revolutionary students and the Communist/Socialist/organised French working class by dubbing one of the leaders of the students a German Jew - ‘un allemand juif’.
Now, according to you, the way to reply to this kind of chauvinist, racist utterance is to say, no he’s French, we’re all French. Luckily the students knew better, to not cave in to this shit, and instead, all went out on the streets the next day and chanted ‘Nous sommes tous, les allemands juifs’ ‘We’re all German Jews’.
the idea that just because the EDL shout, you’re not English! we should shout, oh yes we are, is tragic. For starters, many people on anti-EDL marchers may not actually be English (er they might be Scots!), or they/we might not see ourselves as English but British, or neither. I’d be inclined to sing ironically, ‘maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner’ as it happens.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 2:35 pm
“Germany” existed as a rather vague term for German-speaking territory in Europe, even though it lacked political unity. So for example, a pamphlet describing Thirty Year’s War atrocities (a war mostly fought in German lands) was published in London in 1638, entitled “The Lamentations of Germany”.
Comment by Mark Victorystooge — 8 March, 2010 @ 2:39 pm
# 335
The history of Welsh colonization is imprinted in the Westminster statute book.
Comment by Hendre — 8 March, 2010 @ 2:45 pm
By the way, to lighten the atmosphere a moment: if ever you want to get a handle on the ephemeral nature of subjectivist views of Englishness, you should spend some time with some ex-pat English people - not all, I hasten to add. 1. Some I’ve met, love to slag off England and Britain, largely for racist reasons (full of foreigners) but also because it’s run by socialists. 2. It got so intolerable, they had to move to eg France ie where they are surrounded by ‘foreigners’. 3. France is wonderful apart from the bureaucracy and it’s a bloody nuisance that the TV signal breaks down so you can’t get EastEnders. 4. Up until recently, ‘my sister’ brought out the marmite but now you can get it in the supermarket. 5. We’ll never go back. 6. We don’t understand what the children are on about half the time. 7. The only thing I really miss is Cadbury’s milk chocolate. etc etc etc…
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 2:54 pm
#340 Hey, steady on! Many of the ex-Pats I know here in Thessaloniki Greece left England ‘cos of Thatcher and have been involved in the anti-war movement, attempts to unionise, anti-racist demos and now building for the General Strike for 11 March.
Comment by anticapitalista — 8 March, 2010 @ 2:59 pm
Well it seems that:
(a)There is no such nation as the English,
(b)If such a nation does exist it only consists of white decendents of people who have lived in England for hundreds of years,
(3)There aren’t actually any such things as nations anyway, even though there are nation states,
(4)We should only be interested in the existence of nations if they are oppressed.
I’m glad it’s clear then. How grateful I am for those who use Marxism as a scientific method.
Comment by Armchair — 8 March, 2010 @ 3:00 pm
hey anticap - don’t hit me with that one, I did say ‘not all I hasten to add’! (I think you know that anyway lol)
Armchair, nice try at ironical summing up, but you’ve distorted what I, redbedhead and others are saying for effect. Which is good for a laugh but isn’t what we’re saying.
England is a special case in that it is not a nation state but its capital is and has been the main provider of central government and dominant ideology for the nation state of UK and what came before it.
I, for one, have tried to describe some of the distinctive (and not so distinctive qualities of Wales and Scotland).
No one here has been able to explain what binds England into anything resembling a nation other than Andy’s absurd little list of dead white English-born (apart from Kipling) writers and artists. Oh yes, and Andy’s nutty little syllogism about people in Newcastle not voting for regional government!
Your little ironic para of course doesn’t take on what we are suggesting is going on in England re culture,(ie specific hybridities) nor have you offered characteristics or components of this English culture which I and others suggest need to be common to England but also exclusive to it.
On the other hand you keep insisting that England is a nation, so it must be. I think that this is called ‘idealism’. I understand Marxism to combine theory and practice basing the arguments on empirical enquiry. People here of a marxist inclination seem to be the ones giving evidence for eg hybridity of eg Chaucer, eg evidence of how ‘nation’ has been used, of eg how lists of dead white English men do not constitute ‘the culture’ or ‘the nation’ just because a socialist says that they do, and indeed the marxists here, seem to be the ones posing a development of marxis t thinking by considering the nature of hybridity with close reference to eg Mansfield Park, John Agard.
Cleary, none of this counts.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 3:15 pm
Armchair - sarcasm isn’t an argument, whether you’re a marxist or not.
Comment by redbedhead — 8 March, 2010 @ 3:15 pm
London is the capital of the UK (not of England and I didn’t mean to imply that it was)but the fact that it is situated in England has had an important impact on how England has been viewed, framed and is understood (often misleadingly) by people outside of England (as in: all English people are rich)…
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 3:17 pm
Perhaps Armchair has his copy of The Making of the English Working Class to hand. I seem to remember that Thompson did clarify the point that he meant the English, as opposed to the British, working class.
Comment by Hendre — 8 March, 2010 @ 3:26 pm
And interestingly, London is and has been one of the most diverse cities in the world for an extremely long time. The Englishness lobby has often viewed this diversity with horror and by racists still does. However, quite how arbitrarily redefining it as ‘English really’ is going to help isn’t clear to me. Saying it’s part of the British or European or worldwide experience, seems to me much more helpful. Apart from anything else, it’s either distinctively (relatively) London-ish, or similar-ish to Rome, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Melbourne etc etc but not ‘English’ because, apart from anything, it’s not much like the North York Moors, which are much more like upland midWales!
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 3:28 pm
Go, Armchair, find a para where Thompson talked of something common to the English and exclusively so about the English (but not Welsh, Scots or Irish) working class…what can it be, we wonder….mines? nope, mills? nope, agricultural enclosure releasing labour to the factories…perhaps…as it was clearances in Scotland and impoverishment in Wales, I think…
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 3:30 pm
Michael, yeah, just kidding you and I really wanted to plug the GREEK General Strike on 11 March.
Comment by anticapitalista — 8 March, 2010 @ 3:31 pm
#332.
the more interesting question is who was Germany.
There was a distinct german culture across much of middle and eastern Europe, with town dwellers and barons in the Baltic states, Bohemia and Moravia.
Of course in the pre-modern period most people were excluded from national cultural life, and so the fact that large parts of the peasantry of this historical germany were non-German speakers is unremarkable.
it is not true of course that there was no German state, as the Holy Roman Empire founded in 801 AD was both the aspiration and semi-reality of such a state, and it was the long term goal of the hapsburg princes to unite the whole of germany into their rule
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:07 pm
#334
“Arguably, the more important characteristic of Britishness is its hybridity, rather than simply duality. ”
Cultural hybridity is indeed a remarkable feature of englishness/Britishness.
However, when people are asked what nationality they are they will not reply “hybrid”
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:08 pm
#343
“Oh yes, and Andy’s nutty little syllogism about people in Newcastle not voting for regional government!”
when did I make that point?
try not to put words into my mouth.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:09 pm
All this nationalism stuff is fascinating and important from the perspective of Canada. We really do have multiple oppressed nations within the Canadian Federation (the aboriginal peoples, with multiple nations and linguistic groupings, and the French of Quebec). Each has their own specificity and particular question - the French nation of Quebec being a relatively modern construction arising from French colonialism (which was then defeated by the British) and pre-modern aboriginals that didn’t primarily identify as nations at the time of their conquest (perhaps other than the Six Nation Confederacy of the Iroquois - and I’m no expert so there may be more).
In English Canada there is much hand-wringing about our “national culture” and what it is (primarily defined as “not American). In Quebec there is a very strong sense of national history, based in resistance to British conquest and at attempts at assimilation (there is a language law in Quebec that mandates that all official business, including business signs, must be in French - prior to that many things, including labour contracts and the courts, were in English.) There is also strong support for local artists, with their own film industry and star system (which doesn’t exist in the rest of Canada, which has a weak film industry). And there is a complex debate about pure laine (dyed-in-the-wool) Quebecoises and more recent waves of immigration, in particular from French-speaking parts of the third world and the middle east. Just last year there was a state-organized debate on “reasonable accommodation” to new Quebecoises, in particular in relationship to Muslims. The contradictions of nationalism, even the relatively progressive “social democratic” nationalism of Quebec become apparent in these debates - immigrants were blamed by the leader of the Parti Quebecois for the failure of the referendum on sovereignty in the 90s, for instance. But the tradition of struggle for national liberation also has created a more or less “social democratic” consensus and a more left/progressive culture in Quebec. They have, for instance, $7/day state run daycare centres. In Toronto, where I live, it’s about $30-$60/day. They were the first province to decriminalize abortion, etc.
Comment by redbedhead — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:17 pm
333
Sue makes a very interesting point here, echoing the marxist theorist Otto bauer:
the creation of a national high culture is the product of intellectual and leisured classes; and the majority of the people have historically “had no country in the sense that their experience was particularised to limited, local and face to face transactions.
However, as has been pointed out by Benedict Anderson, or Ernext gellner, the creation of modern nationalisms has incorporated the entire populations into national life; both through extension of printing and other mass cultural media (Anderson) or through the creation of national qualification systems and professional qualifications that do not rely upon personal acquaintanceship and recommendation (Gellner).
bauer’s point was therefore that bringing the mass of the population into national life through education and access to mass culture, has increased the differentiation between nations, not lessened it.
Now of course there are certain aspects of universailism in our global capitalist culture, by the universalism of english pop music, or American popular film making is always mediated by the interaction (hybridity if you will) of the dominat national cultures which are reinforced not only by shared colletcive experence,. but also by a shared eductaional system shared frameowrk of professional qualifications, etc, etc.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:18 pm
MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS possibly my all-time favourite political book!!
Fanstastic that someone has put episode one of the groundbreaking welsh history documentary ‘The Dragon has Two Tongues’ with another great socialist historian, the late gwyn alf williams online:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai7rPNZiIHk
Comment by Adamski — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:20 pm
#343 No that was me about Newcastle. Not nutty, the point is that geordies, however much they tend to despise cockneys (ie anyone born south of Middlesborough) see themselves as English. Clearly the Marxists in the house will be able to disabuse them of this bit false consciousness and I’m sure they’ll be really interested in what you have to say.
Comment by Armchair — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:22 pm
#340
this is uncomfortably close to the way the anti-Semitic Gilad Atzmon mocks ideas of Jewish identity as consisting of nothing more than chicken soup and gefilte fish.
Atzmon of course continually mocks the ephemerall nature of jewishness in exactly the same way michael rosen questions what Englishness means.
indeed, if Englishness is such an ephemeral concept, by analogy how could someone be a secular Jew?
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:23 pm
#344 Yes it’s the lowest form of wit but then I laugh at Carry on Films.
Comment by Armchair — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:24 pm
#344 Yes it’s the lowest form of wit but then I laugh at Carry on Films.
Comment by Armchair — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:24 pm
351 is perhaps unintentionally funny. You have reduced the whole argument about hybridity to a hyperthetical conversation in which I (or someone like me) is hoping that people would answer with the word ‘hybrid’. In fact, people in England (as I patiently explained)mostly give strong indications of how or where they seem themselves. In my experience, nearly always local (eg Liverpool - or even more local, eg the name of the tiny locality) and then leap up to the next category in mind which is ‘British’ leaving out England altogether. Of course a good deal of people I meet also say that they are eg Irish eg ‘from India’ or wherever. You can mock the idea that I would expect now or any time in the future that people to say that they are hybrid but in the meantime, a good many people will say after a very short while, things like ‘Oh I’m a bit of mixture’ or ‘We’re all sorts in our family’ Or ‘we’re from all over the place’ or ‘we’ve moved a good deal in our lives…spent a lot of time in ….but now we’re in…..’ and so on. In my experience, many people enjoy redefining themselves as, yes, hybrid, without using that word.
But, Andy, if you want to imagine that mocking the word itself (which of course comes from the world of plant and animal breeding, so is not particularly pleasant), deals with the argument, then you’ve lost your grip on what we’re talking about.
I note that you’re now giving us a new concept ‘english/British’…as I said, we were talking only and specifically about ‘England’ and English’. The argument changes altogether when we talk about ‘Britain’ for the reasons I’ve stated above. For you now to try and elide the two and argue from that basis is either shifty or a joke.
Either way, cultural hybridity is not unique to England or Britain though. It’s part of the human experience, moving at different speeds in different places, in different class milieus throughout history. When a space of territory is not a nation state eg England, then the cultural hybridity going on will be a powerful defining characteristic because the nation state’s ruling class (ie the ruling class that rules over that non-nation-state territory alongside others) is not so intent on defining that specific territory’s essentialist characteristics - even though you and your Elgar are.
The German state began in 1871. Prior to that there was a language, there were aspirations, there were many principalities - at one point there was more unity than at others, the Holy Roman Empire being one of them, but of course that included territories we would not now consider to be ‘Germany’. There were informal bonds and arrangements between the principalities - sometimes through aristocratic birth and marriage etc…We don’t have two separate words (or more)for these different states of being, but that doesn’t mean that these different states of being are therefore the same.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:28 pm
“indeed, if Englishness is such an ephemeral concept, by analogy how could someone be a secular Jew?”
1) The English aren’t oppressed, in some places Jews still are and everywhere (other than Israel) they are an identifiable minority.
2) because being a Jew is more than simply a religion. It is a whole series of cultural practices and shared history, in part defined by resistance to oppression. See Abram Leon on The Jewish Question and Karl Kautsky’s Foundations of Christianity.
Comment by redbedhead — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:31 pm
Ah Atzmon…i think at a certain level, if Atzmon was only having fun, he was entitled to have a bit of a laugh about ’secular Jews’. Of course, he has a much wider agenda about eliminating all Jews, not just secular ones.
I don’t live in a context in which being a secular Jew is very powerful. This means that I have my memories of my parents and relations, I have a few foody things and because I’m a writer, I’ve made efforts, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, to embody and preserve some ways of talking and writing that come from that background.
In one generation (ie re my children) this has almost all but disappeared. It is, in other words, very ephemeral…unsustained by ‘community’ or religion or music…
In other words, my self-definition as Jew or secular jew is largely a political statement.
How interesting that Andy should find my description of expats in eg France should get up his nose. Perhaps he should spend a week or so with them and see where useless nationalism can lead people into cul de sacs. That said, some of the most surprising (my prejudice) people jump headfirst into new hybridities when in eg France, and become involved locally in many different and fulfilling ways.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:35 pm
Michael
I am not mocking the idea of hybridity, I am questioning whether this hybridity is sufficient to replace feelings of national identity.
Now whether you like it or not, national identity is prpbably the second most important form of collective self identity we expereince for most people, after the biolgically reinforced consciousness of gender identity, and its attended expecations.
What I cannot understand is that where your denial of national identity and culture leaves other nations.
If you stress the universalism of the acheivements of WEnglish (and American culture) then how does that look to people from other countries, especially the former colonies, who might like to think that Britsh universalism was previoulsy brought to them at the barrel of a gun.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:42 pm
“Either way, cultural hybridity is not unique to England or Britain though.” - this is an important point in the modern era in European and North American countries in particular, also Australia (and at certain points, South America, Africa, et al).
In Canada, our net immigration is set to bring in about 1% of our population in newcomers each year - about 250,000 - 300,000. It’s the highest rate of immigration in the world, as far as I know. 43% of those newcomers settle in the Greater Toronto Area so that the city now has a majority population of migrants. It’s a bit of a joke in Toronto, where I was born, that almost nobody who lives here was born in the city. But even in the smaller towns and cities, where people are sometimes forced to locate by immigration rules to maintain some semblance of population distribution balance, there are growing numbers of non-white, non-Christian people. It is not a surprise then that almost everybody asks each other’s background when they meet or as part of normal conversation. Hardly anybody - other than the indigenous people - were here more than a few generations ago. Literally everybody is a hybrid.
Comment by redbedhead — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:42 pm
#360
No it is not new. it is something I have been consistently arguing for several years.
The fact that you have been shooting from the hip without bothering to understand what i was arguing is the only explantion for why you think this is new on my part.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:45 pm
Well Andy, I know you’ve been going on about it for years, I was talking about the context and specificities of this discussion. You’ll remember for example your infamous little list is made up of English writers, you were arguing about Englishness.
And I didn’t say ‘national identity’ didn’t exist per se. I didnt deny that for some people in some circumstances defining themselves according to the name of their nation state, the name of their language, is very important. However, the role of the ruling class inthose nations (in relation to rituals, celebrations, anniversaries and education is crucial) However, i don’t think this applies to England. I said English national identity doesn’t exist - or at best is a very very weak marker of identity - except for you, apparently. Doh!
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:54 pm
re ‘other nations’ - are you talking about other ‘nation states’ where the ideology machine has been banging on for centuries. Or are you talking about peoples without a nation state but yearn for it? Or are you talking about spaces and territories that have some local distinctiveness but nothing that distinguishes it any great degree from the territories around it? or what?
Every part of the USA for example has its regional government that explains all the time why that state is the greatest state in the USA and the world etcetc…There is no space in the USA that is like England.
In, say France, there are territories where some people yearn for independence or autonomy but they don’t include the capital and so can claim to some degree of colonisation of the body and/or mind.
Where else in the world have you spotted a territory like England, that would somehow falsify what I’m saying about England (not all nation states). Why are you trying to muddy the waters here?
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 4:59 pm
“Ray ive got you down as one of them concerned trolls. Your arty farty bourgeois slip is showing kidder.”
This says a lot about your prolier than thou attitude towards the working class. Thankfully many of us take an active interest in culture and education.
Comment by Ray — 8 March, 2010 @ 5:03 pm
Andy, there was no Germany in 80i (except in the Histories of Julius Caesar). The Emporer Charlemagne was king of the Franks and the Lombards, the Franks being the former subjects of the Merovingian dynasty who had before thinking themselves as Franks, considered themseves as Romans, Visigoths Burgunds etc. Later they wondered what had happened to the Romans and assumed they’d been wiped out. When the Empire was widened and divided there was no real name for the Diutch speaking part - at first it was often called the kingdom of the East Franks. O I really can’t go on with this, suffice it to say there was nothing inevitible about the coming into being of a country called Germany. There is ethnonemesis as well as ethnogenesis, not usually because a people gets wiped out, but because political organisation and names change.
A nation is never a natural phenomenon, and never based on one culture or one ethnic group.
This starts in earliest times. Penda, ancestor of the kings of Mercia, Cerdic, mythical ancestor of the kings of Wessex, Caedmon, the earlist known Anglo-Saxon poet, Chad,patron saint of bad elections, all have Celtic not Anglo-Saxon names.
The earlist long Anglosaxon poems are not about English heroes, but about Danes or Jewesses.
And Chaucer’s genius was in taking European poetic forms like iambic pentameter with French derived vocabulary and put in in tension with the older English Tradition of an underlying four beat rhythm and alliterative joy.
Its the diversity that makes us who we are. Wherever we are. I don’t suddenly change from Saxon to Celt every time I cross the Tamar.
The question is of course - what is nationalism for. Well it is to assert your rights against oppression.
Now answer me this : what is English nationalism for?
Comment by David Hillman — 8 March, 2010 @ 5:04 pm
“Finally, a note of apology to Scottish and Welsh readers. I have neglected these
histories, not out of chauvinism, but out of respect. It is because class is a
cultural as much as an economic formation that I have been cautious as to
generalising beyond English experience. (I have considered the Irish, not in
Ireland, but as immigrants to England.)”
From the preface to the Making of the English Working Class
Comment by Hendre — 8 March, 2010 @ 5:08 pm
Thank you Hendre, Thompson is indeed just as I characterised him…he did the English stuff because it was near at hand and he just didn’t have time, energy or, perhaps at that stage a little cautious of treading on some toes in Scotland, Ireland and Wales…
In other words, he is making quite clear that he has simply taken the territory of England as territory not as some kind of defining national character.
And indeed if you wanted to be hard on the bloke, it’s a weakness of the book, that it didn’t include say, Belfast, or Glasgow…But hell, it was a great moment when it came out…and not to be sullied by ‘nationalists’ here who want to claim for it that it’s about defining ‘England’.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 5:15 pm
Hey David Hillman, I thought I read allthe anglo-saxon lit at university - either in the original or in translation. Which bit of Anglo-Saxon lit is about ‘jewesses’? I must have missed that one.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 5:16 pm
DAvid H., I don’t think Andy has thought his mention of Chaucer through for a moment. He just put him down because it sounded olde and goode. I think one of the first books I read , in that most chauvinist of English unis, Oxford, was ‘Chaucer and the French Tradition’ ! Bloody good too.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 5:18 pm
redbedhead’s point about non-visible minorities is an important one. Graham Greene makes the point in a preface to one of his novels that one in ten of the British population was Catholic at the time he was writing, but almost all contemporary novels failed to reflect this.
Was Graham Greene an English novelist or a British one, by the way?
Comment by chjh — 8 March, 2010 @ 5:20 pm
#318
You’ve got me all wrong Mike.
I don’t know what you think I’m arguing for, but it certainly isn’t some kind of auto-genesis of culture springing up naturally out of native Scottish soil from which only Scots partake.
I’ve even specifically pointed out human culture, traditions and identities are all artificial.
I have also pointed out George Buchanan is the outstanding poet in latin outside of the Ancient World. Unless you regard latin as a native language of Alba of course.
However you do seem to be making the assumption that Scottish people who talk about their own culture think of themselves as cut off and adrift from the outside world. Nowhere I have I made that claim - that’s just one of the in-built prejudices of Brits who sneer at Scots as parochial, cliquey and insular.
Comment by joe90 kane — 8 March, 2010 @ 5:32 pm
Michael, I mean Judith. http://www.elfinspell.com/JudithMyStart.html
Its also really about Alfred (the Great) ’s sister, the lady of the Marcians.
Comment by David Hillman — 8 March, 2010 @ 5:37 pm
on whether Germany existed prior to 1871, i could refer you to Franz Mehring’s work, written in 1910, “Absolutism and revolution in germany, 1525 to 1948″, which never doubts for a moment the existance of an historic German nation.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1910/absrev/index.htm
Some people think that Franz Megring knew more about german History than even Michael Rosen.
If you read Hans Kohl’s magisterial discussion of the origin of modern antionalism, you will see that there was a significant intellectual movement in the eigtheenth century articulating a consious pan-german german identity (which included Yiddish speakers)
Furthermore, in “The question of nationalities and social democracy” Otto bauer discusses the origin of the historical German nation, and how it evolved and transformed itself into the german nation state and thre Hapsburg multi-national state.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 6:41 pm
The problem with left nationalists is that they want to claim all the cultural achievements in a region or country but they conveniently ignore all the nasty elements of nationalism.
For example a left nationalist in Germany may claim that the artist, Gerhard Richter, is Germanys true national heritage but reject Leni Riefenstahl. The problem is that both are products of the same country/nation but base their art on entirely different ideas. The great weakness of nationalist interpretations of art and culture is that they lack a class analysis and this is crucial to understanding why Reifenstahl filmed the nazis and Ritcher painted Baader Meinhof.
Left nationalism is a mirror of so-called “proletarian culture”. Both seek to claim a specific culture for the left and the working class. It’s a bogus concept and one the left should reject because we live in a capitalist society where culture is shaped by bourgeois hegemony.
While there are progressive artists and writers there is no pure proletarian art or national culture that the left can single out and lay claim to. This ideology paves the way to censorship and ultimately the Socialist Realism of the Stalinists and the official art of the nazis.
Comment by Ray — 8 March, 2010 @ 6:41 pm
#378
“”378.The problem with left nationalists is that they want to claim all the cultural achievements in a region or country but they conveniently ignore all the nasty elements of nationalism.”
well given that i have acknowleged that slavery, militarism, arrogance, hypocricy and cynacism, racism and imperialism are part of the English heritage, which worse aspects of our culture have I conveniently ignored??
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 6:43 pm
Brecht admitted he was moved by Kipling’s Kim, in the way Kipling wanted him to be. I find Leni Riefenstalh’s films powerful. The thing is not to be swallowed up by this, to keep a critical detachment. Same with the poems of T S Eliot (antisemitic and pathetically snobbish), W B Yeats, D H Lawrence which have power and tecnique that are admirable. I think Edward Said got this right.
But the best art does not swallow and drown you anyway.
Comment by David Hillman — 8 March, 2010 @ 6:55 pm
#367
Michael beleives that the lack of a nation state means that there can be no England “Where else in the world have you spotted a territory like England, that would somehow falsify what I’m saying about England”
Historically, the position of modern England is arguably reasonably similar to the German speaking parts of the Hapsburg Empire.
But more pertinenetly it is remarkably similar to the position of Scotland and wales. i.e. The Uk is a multi-national state; and the particular genesis of that state was a marriage of Scotland and England at the state level, and the construction of a british nation followed. cnsequently, both England and Scotland perseevered as distinct different flavours of Britishness.
It is with the social changes related to devolution and the changing role of Britsn in the world, with the expansionist dynamic that glued britain together being removed, that the issue has reasserted itself.
It is worth looking at the MORI poll from October 2008
http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=3038
When asked “How strongly, if at all, do you feel a sense of belonging to Britain?”, 81% of whites and 75% of BMEs pick “strongly”.
In England alone when asked “How strongly, if at all, do you feel a sense of belonging to England?“, 82% of whites and 77% of BMEs pick “strongly”.
Of course it doesn’t necessarily follow that BMEs feel comfortable describing themselves as English, but it does tend to suggest that England is just as plural a nation as the much heralded inclusive Britain.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 6:59 pm
I think I am a British my wife thinks of herself as Scottish, I will probably vote SSP she will probably vote Labour, I get confused sometimes, we both hate the SNP.
Comment by doom n' gloom — 8 March, 2010 @ 7:19 pm
It is interesting to look through this threas and see how a “scientific socialist” like Ichael rosen apparaices the issue.
Instead of starting with the reality of mass popular identification with Englishness, and in a broader sense how the majority of the word’s population identify strongly with their national culture; Michael simply rationalises englishness away, and middies the waters about whether nations even exist, seemingly thinking that only where there is a nation state is there a nation (for example Germany di not exist for Michael Rosen before 1871)
There is a complete confusion on whether he and his mates are disputing whether nations exist at all, or whether it is only England that doesn’t exist; much talk of hybridity, influence of international interaction, and universal human culture.
in particular there is a conflation for Michael between British national consciousness and internationalism; so the fact that Britain is a multi-national state seems to make it superior to what is apparently the more petty nationalsim of England, and what Michael regards as the backward and anachronistic myth making of the Welsh and Scots.
in Michael’s world, hardly anyone is interested in England’s football team, no one he meets considers themselves english, and London is the capital of the Uk but not of England.
Now this is a political perspective that will sustain you if your ambition is to sustain yourself in a smug propaganda circle ; but if you want to relate to mass politics you need to use as your starting point the uncomfortable reality, where nations exist.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 March, 2010 @ 8:03 pm
Instead of starting with the reality of mass popular identification with Englishness, and in a broader sense how the majority of the word’s population identify strongly with their national culture;
Andy, Micheal and others hacve addressed this many times, but it appears you do not want to see.
The point is that nothing ’starts’ from mass popular identification with Englishness. Although it is fluid there is an identification with Englishness (we could dispute the extent, but hey we’ll let that ride, there are more important questions) Like it doesn’t appear out of the blue. Where does this identifaction come from? From where is the national narrative driven? and could there be a reason for this? Is the narrative of nation in the material interest of any class in our society (if you accept classes have different interests?)
What you don’t seem to accept is that the ruling class in England/Britain have a vested interest and allways have, in promoting the idea the myth of a seperate national identity, one that incorporates us workers and them the bosses, (simplistic I know, but you seem not to recognise any of this)and furthermore that this identity means we have more in common with our bosses than we do with other workers who are not British/English.
your idea of nationality is a classles one, that has us all inhabiting a certain geographical area, sharing a language and culture and therefore having an identity in common. Micheal Rosen and others have taken this apart for fallacy it is. I suspect you can’t accept it, because to do so would have political consequences that don’t fit into your schema for ‘left advancement’.
Comment by Anonymous — 8 March, 2010 @ 8:28 pm
sorry the last one was me
Comment by non-partisan — 8 March, 2010 @ 8:28 pm
Michael Rosen makes a serious charge at 337:
“Frank, the leader of the French Communist Party in 1968, tried to drive a wedge between the revolutionary students and the Communist/Socialist/organised French working class by dubbing one of the leaders of the students a German Jew - ‘un allemand juif’”.
Now I understand that anti-Communist ultra-leftists learn to parrot a list of ‘Stalinist betrayals’ with little or no thought or analysis, even sticking to it years after they have abandoned ‘revolutionary’ politics, but could Michael tell us the basis for his assertion?
The leader of the PCF in 1968 was not ‘Frank’ (who he?) but General Secretary Waldeck Rochet.
There were protests from the far left and inside the PCF and CGT when George Marchais (not yet PCF General Secretary) referred to student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit as a ‘German anarchist’ in L’Humanite. Factually true, it was an unhelpful reference when C-B was fighting attempts by the French state to deport him. The PCF had also decided against supporting a demonstration against the move. Perhaps they had allowed C-B’s public attacks on ‘Stalinist scum’ to cloud their judgement.
But anti-Communist reports that Marchais had referred to C-B as a ‘German Jew’ have never been substantiated. The record is there in L’Humanite for all to research and see. It would have been very odd for Marchais - or ‘Frank’ - to have made such a remark and with hostile intent, given the origins of Karl Marx.
Incidentally, Marx had no doubt at all about the existence of nationality and national identity, least of all his own. Reading a poster above quoting ‘The workingman has no country …’ while utterly failing to understand what Marx meant by it indicates the low theoretical level of much of the Marxist left in Britain, especially when it comes to the national question.
Comment by Party hack — 8 March, 2010 @ 8:29 pm
At 162 Michael takes me to task about describing it as ‘natural’ that people identify with their country. I stick with that description for a very simple reason. Human beings are social creatures - what enable us to act as a society is our ability (or the necessity) to act as a collective. Now it’s pretty hard for anyone to know hundreds, let alone thousands of people, so for relationships to work on the level of society - from the workplace, school, community level upwards - we need to be able to put people into groups, to be able to catgeorise them so that our own relationship to them is clear in our own minds.
Now the reality is that, as Andy says, nations, countries, states - the legal definition matters much less than the shared (or percieved shared) identity, history, etc that comes with these entities. The way the world is organised makes the indentification with the nation ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ as this is often the way that people come into contact with people from outwith their nation - via passport control. If I travel abroad, I’m ‘British’ regardless of any personal feelings every time I check into a hotel and hand over my passport.
Now this is not to say that there may not be better ways of organising society - I’m sure there are. I very much hope that one day the nation-state as understood during the last 150 years or so will disappear - but I’m pretty convinced that the idea that people will identify with where they come from, or where they live, or who they worship or what language they speak will exist for a long time to come. Indeed - unless we expect the world to develop into one homogeneous block of humanity (heaven forbid) I hope it does.
Variety is the spice of life, as they say. Surely the task of the left is to steer personal identity with a greater body into a progressive direction. Workers of the World Unite is a great slogan - but its proved itself singularly unsuccessful in undermining the existence of nationalism. Perhaps we just need to accept that people like to be part of a bigger group - and geography is a good a basis to organise that as any other.
Comment by TLC — 8 March, 2010 @ 8:33 pm
#387 What could be a bigger national/religious group than a united world working class?
Comment by anticapitalista — 8 March, 2010 @ 9:26 pm
There are too many people talking to me for me to be able to answer everyone.
1. The reason I addressed the matter to ‘Frank’ was not because I thought Frank was the leader of the French Communist Party but because someone called Frank had made a point that I was replying to.
2. If Andy wants to distort what I’m saying about Germany, then that’s his business and I can hear what jolly fun he’s having inventing what I said and arguing with it. I wouldn’t normally want to spoil his fun as he seems remarkably short of fun, but even so I will try to make clear-er what I said. The nation state of Germany began in 1871. That’s when there was for the first time a united Germany ruled by Germans, elected and/or chosen by Germans etc etc. Prior to that, over several thousand years, there were many shapes and forms of society such as principalities, little kingdoms and of course at one time subsumed with the Holy Roman Empire. The German language was of course evolving throughout this time, and was to some extent a unifying factor, but of course throughout the early modern period the whole area of middle Europe was riven by religious wars. Yes, I’ve always thought it unwise to call things nations until such time as they are nations and rather talk in terms of national aspiration. It’s just a terminological tic I’ve got.
Andy’s attempt to prove the existence of an English nation’s consciousness by resorting to citing opinion polls is really rather forlorn. He must know as well as anyone that if you ask certain kinds of question you get certain kinds of answer. The questions even as he has stated them, are quite likely to end up with anyone (including myself!) getting scooped up into saying that they are English. I’m English, in so far as I was born in England and have lived in England all my life. If someone asks me if I’m English, I’m going to say yes. I’m certainly not going to get into some pedantic stuff about not being English but yes, I am British. So that’ s me scooped up by some arsehole survey. Has it proved that I think there is an English nation with, I repeat a good deal of culture common and exclusive to it. No, not for a moment. And I’ve given reasons (albeit by resorting to a bit of Althusser on ideological state apparatuses) why this should be the case.
re the differences between England, Wales and Scotland, and Britain - there are of course major differences and once again I tried to cover that. To repeat, Wales and Scotland were and are ruled from London. London is in England. When the late Norman kinds decided to subdue Wales, they rode out from London and ruled from London. Even when Scottish King was put on the English throne (James VI of Scotland, James 1 of England) he of course rode south and ruled from London. This and a hundred other similar or related deeds mean that there is no symmetry about Engand, Scotland and Wales.
I note that Andy and others talk as if England and English culture are some kind of self-evident, obvious, natural entity and that there is some kind of wilful head-in-sand, ultra-left quality about refusing it. I’m not sure where your evidence is for people claiming England as their cultural home. I’m not sure where your evidence is for thinking that people like me claiming hybridity as the norm are ultra left. To repeat, I travel all over the England the UK every week. I often get into conversations with people (very few of whom are left of Labour) and very often we talk about cultural questions, particularly in relation to education. Some of the workshops I do are directly concerned with self-definition in relation to language, dialect and culture with a view to thinking how such questions are good for children to have a go at too. In the thirty years I’ve been doing this, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that they’re English. (Yes, if I asked them, ‘are you English?’ like me, I guess people born and brought up in England would say yes! but this proves zilch) MOre importantly, when people are left to self-define they invariably describe themselves by locality - but frequently allude to ‘mixtures’ or ‘origins’ outside of England…eg Ireland or Pakistan. Their nationhood of course is always referred to as British never English particularly newcomers who are of course British citizens now.
Andy can tell me otherwise. He appears to move in circles where people not only talk of themselves as English but also that he thinks that this is important and that this is also a good and necessary point of leverage for the left. Apart from his pissy little list of writers and artists that just exposed him as a worryingly prejudiced and essentialising person, he doesn’t seem willing to give us any clear indication of how, where and why people living in the territory of England are rushing to declare themselves as English, nor why it should be so necessary (for what?) for the left to dive in and claim some kind of progressive Englishness.
Joe90Kane, I think we’re both talking cross purposes at each other. I thought you were citing Buchanan (was it?) as an example of hybridity to support what I was saying. I was acknowledging that and thanking you. You then seem to think I was attacking you and being patronising about it too. Not sure who that bit of misunderstanding came about.
I can see here that the term hybridity has really got up some people’s noses. Why’s that? People have been trying to have a laugh at the idea that lefties are going to go up to people and tell them that they’re hybrids, or shout at fascists that we’re hybrids and we’re going to look silly. While there is a tough, clear progressive way of talking to fascists or rightwing nationalists and that’s to say, yes, we’re English but not the way you are. Our English is….(fill in the gaps).
All I can say, is that people I meet are more than happy to talk with delight about the kinds of ‘mixtures’ they are, full of delighted details about Welsh, Irish, Scots, Jewish, French, German, Dutch, CAribbean etc etc people migrating in eg 1900 in eg 1945 and this was their aunt or grandfather or whatever. Billy Bragg (progressive nationalist that he is) is of course more than happy to talk about his Italian grandfather or great great grandfather (apols I forget which). People don’t seem to have any diffculty in describing their hybridities using words like mish-mash, mixture, all over the place, this or that ’side’ of the family, usually with pride and/or respect towards eg the Irish ‘influence’ or whatever.
None of this makes people less or more than they are. It just tells us that people travel and mix. For the reasons that I’ve stated England has a very weak national ideology. This makes it quite distinct in nature from ‘Britain’ (ie UK) which has a loud, insistent, perpetual national ideology grinding away day in day out through officialdom, national events, and in every corner of life. In my job as Children’s Laureate, I was called upon to do several national things (ie British) but nothing that was purely English. (though I took it upon myself to oppose SATs, which are only statutory in England!)
I’ve seen nothing here that suggests I should want to sign up for Andy’s Englishness. If anything, all I’ve seen is something that excludes me, namely his list of English writers and artists that was constructed around the myth of blood and soil ie true born Englishmen born (whoops not Kipling), and brought up in England born of English parents. And though Andy was talking about art and literature, this list doesn’t appear to give him any cause for embarrassment. It’s the most excluding cultural list I think I’ve ever seen and is of course farcical in its misleading nature and in terms of defining or describing how literary and artistic cultures have been created and tranmsitted over the period of time he has chosen (Chaucer to Auden).
By the way, last time I was in France, there was an oil refineries strike on the coast. I couldn’t help but wonder if any of the ‘British jobs for British workers’ guys had slipped across the channel to support them. After all, the issues in France and the issues in England were the same.
Apols to anyone I haven’t answered or addressed.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 8 March, 2010 @ 10:59 pm
#389
“The nation state of Germany began in 1871. That’s when there was for the first time a united Germany ruled by Germans, elected and/or chosen by Germans etc etc. … Yes, I’ve always thought it unwise to call things nations until such time as they are nations and rather talk in terms of national aspiration.”
*sigh*
no - the first time there was a united Germany was in 1938, and even that did not include the German speaking populations of in Czechoslovakia until 1939; nor the Germans of Alsass and Lothrigen until 1940. Why you think that, for example, the Kingdom of Prussia does not qualify as an actualy existing German state before 1871 I am not sure.
I think it puts you in dangerous company requiring a nation being united in a single state before they “are nations”
your point of course means that the Irish were not a nation until 1921 at the earliest, and is perhaps still not a proper nation as the aspiration to be united has still not been fulfilled, which means it doesn’t satisfy Michael Rosen’s criteria.
You are confusing the existance of a nation-state with the existance of a nation. As you would no doubt know from reading Ernest Gellner, Erik Hobsbawm or Benedict Anderson, most nations never achieve a nation state. you seem very confused over the relationship between national culture, national identity, modern national consiousness (universal education, printing, and standardisation), and political nationalism. all of which are different phenomena.
Germany had a shared high literary culture, a variagated but recognisably broad vernacular culture (distributed via Buehne Deutsche traditions), commonality of history (the paradox is that even the religious wars between Catholic and Protestants were wars within a shared national expeience that fed into national psyche, for example with novels like Simplex Simplicissimus by von Grimmelhausen; and long before the expansion of Prussa into the core of a unified Empire there were distinctive German cultural traditions, for goodness sake, could the painting of Casper David Friedrich be anything but by a German!
Germany simply was a linguistic and cultural nation long before 1871, which Michael Rosen is seemingly incapable of recognising becuase he is fixated upon the formalities of states. We need to distinguish between what Hand Kuhn calls the “idea of nationalism”, the self-conscious political ideal of nationalism; with the mundanity of national cultural and linguistic affinity, and shared consciousness. Nations in the second sense have existed longer than nations in the modern sense of inagined cmmunities including everyone within a state.
I was facetious earlier about the Holy Roman empire, becasue German politics was within that Imperial framework until the sixteenth century, but at least from the poems of Ulrich von Hutten there is a discernable national ideal in German polity, reinforced of course by the translation of the bible into German.
Germany is important as an exemplar because in the Eigtheenth century as modern nationalism was arising as an international phenomenon, the most prominent layer of German intellectuals (Kant, Schiller and Goethe) explicitly opposed the concept of forming a political German nation state, but instead espoused a cultural identity that should aspire to expressing a universality of human spirit; neverthless they did so within a distinct German intellectual class; and the body of cultural work they produced derives from and feeds into German cultural traditions. There is a way of opposing German nationalism that is particular to Germany. The same intelelctual argument against political nationalism would simply not have occred in France or England at the same tinme for contingent historical reasons, and due to the accumulated cultural capital leading in the direction of centralised states. So material differences led to different national outcomes in political ideology and temperamant
So nations simply can exist before they become states.
of course what is most offensive about Michael Rosen is his wilful and deiberate misrepresntation of what I am arguing, for wexample when he says:
“I’ve seen nothing here that suggests I should want to sign up for Andy’s Englishness. If anything, all I’ve seen is something that excludes me, namely his list of English writers and artists that was constructed around the myth of blood and soil ie true born Englishmen born (whoops not Kipling), and brought up in England born of English parents.”
there is nothing in what I have argued here, not now not ever, nor anywhere about blood and soil nationalism. Nor do I have any problem with the hybridity by which nations and individuals are constructed.
Nations exist as a collective, socially constructed cultural and social form of consciousness that we participate in through the interactions we have with other people in the specific and partincular place and time we find ourselves in. There is nothing esssentialist about that; however cultural, linguistic, religious and even physical and climate factors are all part of a heritage that we share more with those in our own nation than we do with others in different nations, notwithstanding the divisions within nation on regionalist, class and sectional lines.
Michael is at his most dishonest in misrepresenting a list of cultural figures that I gave earlier. this list was provided by me in the context of people arguing that English culture did not exist. i produced the list quickly, not as a prescriptive one of figures that define the bundaries of Englishness; but as a list of people who could not be excluded from a discussion of Englishness.
what Michael does, as a cheap debating trick, is take my narrow purpose, and present it as a broad purpose.
Now of course I don’t care whether Michael considers himself English or not, but it is unaccapetable for him to make nudge nudge hints that all identification with Englishness is some sort of dodgy racism.
I happen to think it is true that the idea of a particularly English culture must include some iconic English men and women whose cultural production has informed a broad national cultural tradition. Of course that tradition can go in lots of directions and embrace new influencesm, and merge with other cultures; but there is a distinct English foundation to Shakespeare that was particular to the England that produced him, and which has since informed English literature, in a way that Cervantes or Dante or Grimmelhausen do not inform English literature.
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 12:31 am
“1. The reason I addressed the matter to ‘Frank’ was not because I thought Frank was the leader of the French Communist Party but because someone called Frank had made a point that I was replying to.”
Michael wasn’t that comedy gold? Some fool spent a whole post telling you off for it. Priceless!
Comment by Ray — 9 March, 2010 @ 12:39 am
Yes, Andy, I’ve reached 63 and am unbelievably confused, especially as you try to wriggle around about the status of your pissy little list, and your seriously worrying notions of such categories as ‘particularly English’, ‘iconic English’ ‘a broad national cultural tradition’ and ‘distinct English foundation’. (that little cluster of terms is exactly what I most object to about your theory.) I am now even more convinced that I am not part of your England, I don’t want to be part of your England, I don’t even recognise your England…and please note I was born in England, all four of my grandparents were born in England, I have never lived anywhere else, I studied English Literature and language at university and teach mostly British, mostly English (as it happens) children’s literature at university now. So even with that level of embeddedness and aboriginality about me, I don’t want what your offering me.
I find it beyond belief that you go on trotting out these categories ‘distinct English foundation’ etc down through this thread without being able or willing to show us what these commonalities, exclusive to England are. And, if you are able to find them, (I don’t doubt that there are a few), what the sum total significance of them is in the general run of life for those of us who live in England.
I’ll give you a headstart: I think that there is something exclusive to Britain, and possibly England of the Winnie the Pooh books. However, the moment we look at how and where those books were read, we discover that their distribution and consumption was limited to a tiny section of the population. Prior to the end of the 20th century, there were millions of English people who had never heard of Winnie the Pooh. But not now…why’s that? Disney. Only by destroying its Englishness has Winnie the Pooh reached ‘England’ in the commonality sense. The ‘Englishness’ of Pooh was in fact particular to a layer of English society, which by calling it ‘English’ falsely expands and elevates that layer to the general and yet which wasn’t at all part of an English commonality - that’s a classic case of how ideology works, elevating and expanding the particular (nearly always a middle or upper class particular) to the general and claiming it for all that generality.
So, you do better than that: here’s your great chance to break new ground in progressive nationalist English cultural theory…If your pissy little list was a back of the envelope job and not really an immportant or relevant list, then now’s your chance to stun us all with a new Perry Anderson: ‘Componenents of a National English Culture: a way forward for socialists and progressives’.
re Germany, Ireland or anywhere else. If people want to call themselves a nation, I’m not going to stand in their way, am I? All I meant is that there is juridical definition of nation state which unleashes the full power of the ideological state appartuses of those countries in support of them. Prior to nation state status, of course there are millions of people in hundreds of territories that aspire to nation state status…And? They may or may not be successful. Ireland has a geographical implication to suggest that all the people on the island could create a single nation state, but for all the political reasons we are familiar with, there is a group of people who at present don’t want to be part of that nation…SAying ‘Ireland is a nation’ over and over again, will not make those people become part of that nation. Some kind of political arrangement, including all kinds of opt-outs, guarantees, links to the UK, autonomies, etc etc, might just secure nation state status for the whole island. That’s the unlikely scenario for a bourgeois solution. A revolutionary scenario would require the level of economic struggle to reach such a pitch that the commonalities of class (not nation, note) would achieve co-operation to the point at which the issue of being separate ‘nations’/clans/tribes/cultural traditions, wouldn’t matter anymore. Either way, going on about nation is fine and dandy, but won’t actually secure the whole island as one country. It’s a nice example of how going on about ‘nation’ secures exactly the wrong result in terms of bringing about a nation state.
I’ll stick with hybridity, thanks very much. I enjoy it, I live in it and with it. I love performing with people of a wide range of backgrounds and localities which we can share and swap and find points of contact between them. I love learning new ways of working from people of a wide range of backgrounds. I love the refusal to be essentialised, I love interculturalism, I love seeing that at work in schools, I love the way it defeats supremacism, chauvinism, divisive tendencies of lack of respect, intolerance etc . I’ll also make the claim that a) this is what all humans do even though ideology keeps trying to haul people into false notions of singularity, and false unities of culture, b) this is what the progressive future will look inevitably look like, as racism, sexism, supremacism, inequality and forms of colonialism, and imperialism are broken down and defeated ie we will mix even more freely than we do now. In the meantime, I will make strenuous efforts to avoid the use of the word English whenever I can, as I can see from your list of categories it’s seriously tainted with essentialist crud.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 9 March, 2010 @ 1:20 am
RAy, comedy gold indeed. What that poster ‘party hack’ I think, wouldn’t know is that my parents were also ‘party hacks’ so the name of every French communist who became in any way halfway famous was held as quasi sacred, Georges Marchais, included. I do like the idea I thought he was called Frank, though. Cohn-Bendit and Frank…a play by an unknown situationist from 1970.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 9 March, 2010 @ 1:43 am
TLC, you don’t have to read anything I’ve written here, but if you did, you’ll see that nothing I’ve written would suggest that I was talking about homogeneity, nothing I’ve written would suggest that I think the only way to organise is by saying and only saying workers of the world unite, nothing I’ve written would suggest that I think people don’t think of themselves in terms of larger units. However, nothing I’ve written here would suggest that I think ‘England’ is one of those feasible, actual or realistic larger units.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 9 March, 2010 @ 2:04 am
I want to add my thanks to Micheal Rosen for his contributions to this thread
Comment by non-partisan — 9 March, 2010 @ 6:31 am
I second that comment by non-partisan.
I think it’s unfortunate, if not downright hypocritical, of Andy to start throwing around comments about how MR is being dishonest in his arguments. Andy spent a good number of posts saying in roundabout terms says that people who are opposed to his ‘left nationalism’ didn’t believe nation states existed.
I think it’s been an interesting debate however much I completely disagree on Andys comments, alas he does have an apalling tendancy to become rather childish when people refutes what he says. “*sigh*” is the last bastion for pubescant Internet arguments trying to belittle the other person once they’ve found their argument cornered. It really has no place on an adult political blog.
MRD
Comment by MRD — 9 March, 2010 @ 8:48 am
#392
I’ll stick with hybridity, thanks very much. I enjoy it, I live in it and with it. I love performing with people of a wide range of backgrounds and localities which we can share and swap and find points of contact between them.
- Same with Scotland.
The famous saying by William McIlvanney is that Scotland is a mongrel nation. Quite rightly so. So are most nations of the world.
They take from the world, and their own historical traditions and history, and make of them something peculiar to their own time and place. And so it goes on. What was ‘foreign’ becomes ‘native’ and adds to the historical cultural reservoir.
In a recent opinion poll Scots named the Scottish-Asian accent as their favourite and I agree - and one of my favourite Scots at the moment happens to Chief Osama of the Clan Saeed - and two of the most beuatiful words to enter the Scots lexicon in recent years are ‘Shareen’ and ‘Nanjiani’.
I don’t know where the left-wing get this bizarre notion that just because, for instance, I’m ‘Scottish’ or there is something called a ‘Scottish nation’ that means admixtures of outside cultural influences is some kind of corruption or contamination.
Comment by joe90 kane — 9 March, 2010 @ 9:42 am
I think Andy pays lipservice to hybridity whilst clutching his security blanket of essentialist terms like: ‘particularly English’, ‘iconic English’ ‘a broad national cultural tradition’ and ‘distinct English foundation’.
In other words, can he live with hybridity and just hybridity (or ‘mish-mash’ or ‘mix’ or any other less pompous word than ‘hybridity’) or does it need to have the over-riding name ‘nation’ over it? I think the answer to that lies in the fact that the moment you struggle to squeeze the hybridity into ‘nation’, Andy’s essentialist terms come back to bite you. In other words, if there’s something ‘particularly English’, or a ‘distinct English foundation’ (note the heavy word ‘foundation’!) what about all the things that aren’t ‘particularly English’, that aren’t ‘foundation’? What’s their status? Answer: they are the ‘other’. You can’t call them back in and say, ‘oh I don’t really mean you’re the ‘other’, you’re really jolly nice and we love you ever so much!’ [that ‘you’ is a ‘one’ not you personally]In other words, culture is made into a hierarchy, so if you’re Andy and you think you’re a possessor of the ‘particularly English’ culture, you’re the ‘host’. I suggest, that as socialists we must get beyond this and examine how even the most ‘particularly English’ is hybrid. (as I and others showed with Chaucer, Shakespeare et al above).
Comment by Michael Rosen — 9 March, 2010 @ 10:07 am
#396
MRD: “Andy spent a good number of posts saying in roundabout terms says that people who are opposed to his ‘left nationalism’ didn’t believe nation states existed.”
Well despite lip service t the existence of nations, Michael Rosen for example has explicitly argued that nations only exist as nation-states.
#260
“Yes, nations exist, but I’d rather stick with an idea of nation state as a constitutional entity. After that, there are various desires for nationhood expressed through organisations etc. ”
This is highly problematic at a number of levels. For sure – and we see this especially in the case of Italy in Europe, or with the creation of nationalism around arbitrary state boundaries and multi-national populations in the post-colonial word, then a state can create a nation; and even in the case of France a national culture can be homogenised within the boundaries of a state
But what this view posits is that nations did not exist prior to the ideal of modern nationalism arising with industrial society.
Now we could ask why Michael Rosen fetishises the nation-state, or indeed what he means by it.
England does not have its own army or head of state. But England does have its own unique and independent legal system, its own education system, its own system of qualifications. Indeed, England competes as a nation in most international sporting events , for example, which is not an inconsequential international recognition of its national existence.
So in the most important practical areas for the creation of a national basis of modern industrial society, law, educational curriculum and qualifications, then England is as much a nation as France. Remember that for the most convincing theoretical accounts of the development of modern nations, by Gelner and Anderson, these institutional mechanisms for the development of indusril society are the defining characteristsics of the birth of modern nations.
Some one else argued, for example, that nationalism is some sort of “trick”
#127
“We can’t take back, or reclaim englishness or national identity, because we (meaning our class) only have it to the extent that we accept the nostrums and propaganda of ‘our’ ruling class into our lives and consciousness.”
Now this is foolish because it takes no account of the material basis of national consciousness in the modern industrialised societies, and nationalism arose at the cusp of iindustrialisation; with the advent of printing, state educations systems, state sponsored exams and qualifications; and state driven economic policy (we can see here how modern nationalism is not a product of capitalism as such, given that the origin of all these material bases in France began under the autocratic monarchy)
The instrumental view of nationalism ONLY AS AN IDEOLOGY was expressed here.
261
“”nationalism/nation is the myth that is created to justify and explain the nation-state”
I.e., the belief that nations are formed by nation states. Now it is certainly true that there is a mythologizing of national cultures; but that mythlogising is itself part of a contested process; and the mythologizing desn’t mean that nations of shared language/culture and character did nt exist in the pre-modern period, nor does the myhthologising mean that there is no material basis of the modern nations state, as described above in providing the necessary framework of institutions ad ideological superstructure for industrial society.
JohnG of course further muddies the waters, already muddied by Michael Rosen’s red herring of hybrdity, by introducing “homoegenity”
261
“I could support a yes vote in a referendum for Scottish independence without believing that there is a homogenous Scottish culture absolutely distinct from a homogenous English culture.”
Of course national cultures are porous and contingent; of course they are inter-penetrated and hybrid. How could it be otherwise when nations have defined themselves through interaction with other nations?
However, the claim that England, and therefore by necessary logical extension Wales and Scotland, cannot be nations, because the culture is not homogenious, and because there is no state; then you are in effect denying that nations exist, except as the product of nation states; and as a mythlogising construct.
Now given that Scotland has a distinct legal system, education system, different church, distinct cultural traditions; and a constitutional position where it abrogated the rights of its parliament to the London parliament; then Scotland is as much a nation as any; and indeed is one of the clearer examples of a nation in the pre-modern period.
By simple reciprocity, England therefore also exists at the constitutional, legal and practical level. Indeed when people in England are taught British history, we are taught English history, as Scotland and Wales are swallowed up. British culture is largely assumed to be English culture.
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 10:12 am
Elective devolution in Wales and Scotland has reinforced ‘four nations Britishness’ (an inexact term, granted). Those who deny English nationhood are tilting at windmills.
Comment by Hendre — 9 March, 2010 @ 10:15 am
#398
“Andy’s essentialist terms come back to bite you. In other words, if there’s something ‘particularly English’, or a ‘distinct English foundation’ (note the heavy word ‘foundation’!) what about all the things that aren’t ‘particularly English’, that aren’t ‘foundation’? What’s their status? Answer: they are the ‘other’. “
I have explaimed this before Michael, in terms of the existance of a pre-British England; pre-existing historical nations that developed prior to the modern era of the idea of nationalism and nation-states;and also through the concept of “aperception”, where each particular new influence is absorbed into a re-existing corpus to provide a unique result.
Both France and Britain have been hybridised by non-white immigration, but the results have not been the same. Becasue the result has not only been the product of the new infences, and the hybridsation, but also from the pre-existing culture that is being rediscovred and hybridised.
Nations are collective human constructs and are therefre constantly in a process of reinvention and redscovery, but there is cntinuity and well as chang. You are keen on stressing the change, and downplaying the continuity. I am hapy to desctribe the element of continuity, where it is as culturaly and politicaly robust as national consciousness in a developed industrial society as being foundational; that is not value judgement, just a recognition that the partiularlity of English culture survives in adpated form with each new hybridisation.
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 10:23 am
I don’t fetishise nation-state, I just live with it. I have a passport, I pay taxes, I vote. My material reality is that I don’t fight that, I live with it. I don’t fetishise it, that’s you throwing around a tasty word, because it makes you feel good.
I ‘explicitly argued’that nations don’t exist, says andy and then cites me saying ‘Yes nations exist’. Doh!
Andy’s typification of the education system is much more complicated than that, because in some circumstances and situations there is UK legislation governing education, some is ‘England and Wales’ and some is, yes, England.
Sporting events - sometimes England, often not. (jeez, we’ve been down this one) Plenty of people don’t give a toss about sport. Plenty of people love their local sport activity and don’t give a toss about the national sport. You’re in your totalizing, essentializing mood again.
I put to you some propositions: come up with your components of an English national culture of use to socialists and progressives. I’ve argued with you about your use of ‘particularly English’. Several of us have pointed out the essentialist and (I would say) supremacist ideas lying behind the list of artistic components you’ve come up with so far, your list of ‘iconic’ types, and I’ve challenged you that what you’ve done is turn the particular into the general in a classic gesture of ideology as I’ve seen people do with eg Winnie the Pooh.
Of course, you don’t have to address any of this, and instead invent the idea that I don’t think nations exist.
But, hey, it’s your proposition, not mine, that England exists as a cultural entity that we as socialists and progressives can work with. You haven’t even begun to prove it. You’re still faffing on about footy. I’ve put to you the alternative for socialists and progressives, which is work with and celebrate hybridity and indeed to expose ‘Englishness’ and the English iconic figures either as highly local or class specific (eg Winnie the Pooh) or as major hybrid figures (eg Chaucer).
Comment by Michael Rosen — 9 March, 2010 @ 10:29 am
Water
If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;
My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
From Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings
Comment by bob hope — 9 March, 2010 @ 10:30 am
401, is precisely the kind of patronising afterthought that I hear again and again tagged on after your list of essentialising terms ‘iconic’ ‘particularly English’ etc, and list of English greats Chaucer to Auden, that you began with. What core? Celts? Saxons? Normans? Vikings? Latin and classical influences over high medieval culture; hebraic influences over religion?? Italian and French dominant cultural influences over high culture? German dominant cultural influences over philosophy and linguistics? Jewish cultural influences over music and theatre? Where’s the core, Andy? And if there’s a core, or some pre-existing culture, then there’ll have to be an ‘other’, or a ‘later’ or a ‘new immigration’ model. You’re into hierarchies and elites. And what you won’t accept is that you’re actually talking about yourself! This is the stuff you think you own, and that because you’re a socialist, you then think it must therefore have socialist or progressive content!
Comment by Michael Rosen — 9 March, 2010 @ 10:35 am
Hi Bob, I’ve always liked that poem. The bit you quote (which I don’t remember actually) is very zoroastrian.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 9 March, 2010 @ 10:37 am
I’ve just re-read this:
” Both France and Britain have been hybridised by non-white immigration ”
and that hybridisation is the norm. When I say, ‘the beauty of an egg is how it takes light’ I’m using the hybridisations of at least three language groups from events that took place hundreds of years ago…’egg’ from the ‘Danish’ settlement, ‘Beauty’ from the Norman settlement, ‘light’ from the Saxon settlement, the grammar from the germanic system pre-dating the Saxon and so on…
Comment by Michael Rosen — 9 March, 2010 @ 10:44 am
“Both France and Britain have been hybridised by non-white immigration, but the results have not been the same”
These differences are results of differences in the modern period though: French Revolution, Republicanism, nature of Colonial regimes, nature of the left etc, etc.
They have nothing to do with some medieval essence.
Comment by johng — 9 March, 2010 @ 10:44 am
‘oh and ‘take’ is Danish too.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 9 March, 2010 @ 10:46 am
#402
“come up with your components of an English national culture ”
Yet, no cuture is capable of such reductionism.
Of you were to define German culture it would be as equally susceptble to deconstruction.
“Several of us have pointed out the essentialist and (I would say) supremacist ideas lying behind the list of artistic components you’ve come up with so far”
No, they would only be “supremacs” if I were arguing that they were beter, whereas I have already sad, for example, that I am not particularly interested in modern English novelists, compared to modern American or German literature which I am more interested in.
The novel inflence in the hybrid can indeed be culturally more vigorous and excitiong than what is already here, but the hybrid is typicaly unique to the time, place and cultural milieau in which it is created.
There are of course a number of characteristic features of English art, architecture and literature, but that doesn’t make them better than other national traditions, it doesn’t mean that every one follows them, nor that they are not changed and hybridised with time; nor does it mean that people working in England infrmed by other traditions are not contributing to a new hybridised and betterEnglishness
I don’t have time right now (work to do) to pursue that as I think it will be a long and involving argument, and the complex interaction between Englishness and Britishness complicates the argument, but in painting we certainly see a tendency towards non-corporeality, aversion to allegory, preference for studied ionfrmality in compsition, compared to other European traditions. In architecture there has been the aversion to the baroque, preference for pastoralism rather than rustfication, the development of landscaping, the preferece for the horizontal rather than vertical. Could Voysey for example be anything but an English architect?
tis itself has given rural england a distinct landscape and visual vocabulary whioch of course informs those of us who daily expereince it.
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 10:53 am
Not ‘oh’ but ‘take’…(!) There has to be a joke in here somewhere…ACtually, jokes are very interesting because they are sooooo hybrid. There is virtually no such thing as a national joke. Jokes do not respect nationality, national borders. They travel, they morph, they travel again. And the first person to make a joke book seems to have been Greek and the second was Italian renaissance. So next time you pick up a joke book, you can think of it as a classical Greek invention, hybridised into Europe by an Italian, influenced, I should have said, by the Arab ‘exemplar’ tales brought into Europe by a converted Jew, Petrus Alfonsus, said the actress to the Bishop.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 9 March, 2010 @ 10:54 am
#407
“They have nothing to do with some medieval essence.”
STRAW MAN ALERT.
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 10:55 am
Andy’s para:
” the complex interaction between Englishness and Britishness complicates the argument, but in painting we certainly see a tendency towards non-corporeality, aversion to allegory, preference for studied ionfrmality in compsition, compared to other European traditions. In architecture there has been the aversion to the baroque, preference for pastoralism rather than rustfication, the development of landscaping, the preferece for the horizontal rather than vertical. Could Voysey for example be anything but an English architect? ”
is a perfect example of security blanket talk. It doesn’t take long for anyone interested in hybridity to show that much of this is complete tosh. Take one: ‘the development of landscaping’ - this was an international art and trade, developed out of the European aristocracy’s interest in taming nature and owning it in digested lumps within sight of their windows. Nothing ‘English’ about it.
‘Aversion to the baroque’ isn’t an English phenomenon! This is part of northern Europe’s protestant tradition which decried ornament, decoration, representation of the human form. You can see ‘aversion to the baroque’ across every protestant church of northern Europe.
‘pastoralism’ isn’t English. It first appears in Latin literature (remember the town mouse and the country mouse? first written down by Seneca, I think and Virgil and others are full of pastoralism. It was the art of the new Roman leisured class, fetishising their rural lifestyle away from the stench of the city. In fact, pastoralism in the hands of the classicists of the eighteenth century (eg Pope, ‘Where e’er you walk’ this is utterly infused by Roman and Greek forbears and similar verse can be found all over Europe at the time.) When the romantics turn to ‘nature’ it’s for a different reason, (it’s wild, it’s free and it’s ‘natural’) this is informed above all by German ideas about where the true human spirit lies, and notions of the true ‘echt’ people (ie the simple landed peasant - thus the celebration of the ‘volk’ of the folk tale) and ideas of freedom coming above all from France. Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ are wild, free daffodils and Wordsworth wants that freedom for himself and other humans, an unsullied freedom that will be won in France, he believes at that moment. ‘English’ daffodils, French sentiments (to be crude about it).
Every time Andy looks for the English core, it hybridises in front of his eyes. It’s like trying to hold fire….or nail diarrhoea to the wall…or hold a polecat…or hang on to Tam Lin in the ballad…
Comment by Michael Rosen — 9 March, 2010 @ 11:06 am
Micahel
Can you give an example of a national culture that you do believe exists?
Of course, the ingredients of the mix display commonality. Bread and biscuits are both made of the same ingredients too, but they are unique outcomes.
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 11:15 am
The Royal Commission on the Constitution considered nationhood and came up with this:
“It is possible to argue endlessly about the meaning of the word ‘nation’ and whether a particular group of people do or do not have a separate national identity. The factors which have to be taken into account include geography, history, race, language and culture. But these, whether looked at singly or in combination, do not provide a conclusive answer. Some of our witnesses considered that the best judges were the people themselves; and that if a group of people think of themselves as a separate nation then nothing more is needed to demonstrate the existence of that nation. This claim clearly has greater validity if it secures a measure of recognition by others.”
Comment by Hendre — 9 March, 2010 @ 11:19 am
I’m beginning to think that if Andy finds something in England (eg non-baroque architecture) he goes all misty-eyed, sighs, and says, ah England. Then he looks at himself and says, ‘I’m a socialist. I don’t want John Major and Nick Griffin to claim this as theirs, I want it too.’ Then he constructs a vast abstract umbrella theory to justify it, mixes in sneers to anyone who doesn’t go along with it, comes up against socialists who think it’s tosh, sighs, and keeps coming up with samples of ‘Englishness’ ‘particular’ ‘distinct’ ‘iconic’ Englishness, to be precise, that are in fact superb examples of non-pure-Englishness and even as you try to tie it down as ‘our English hybrid’ it changes again into something else, that may well be very similar in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, the USA or Ghana or Shanghai or Bangladesh or anywhere…
Comment by Michael Rosen — 9 March, 2010 @ 11:20 am
Joe - based on what you’ve written elsewhere in this thread which I agree with I do seem to have misread your comment at #298.
I just don’t understand what point you’re trying to make with this though: “Here is that Scottish literary pedigree again -
The Declaration of Arbroath 1320 - George Buchanan (1506-1582) - Treaty of Union 1707″. The Treaty of Union has a big ‘London’ stamped on the front and was negotiated and written in Westminster. Scottish literary input extended only to a description of the bribes the parcel of rogues wanted.
Comment by Mike — 9 March, 2010 @ 11:22 am
Got to dash, Andy. I’ll just say: people aren’t biscuits. We are not static outcomes, we are in constant interaction. Artefacts embody these interactions but we cannot be reduced to them. So if we talk about culture or nation we are talking about processes in flux. You keep trying to freeze frame people and things in order to label them and essentialise them. I’m not unsympathetic to the process, I do it all the time. Writing poems is in its own way a way of doing it, and many poems are about trying to fight against it…ie they try to capture movement and flux even as they freeze it.
I think our theory about culture and nation should indeed constantly try to grasp it all as process and as dynamics. I’ll think more about answers to your question as I hit the London underground in a minute.
I did point out that the Althusserian model of ideological state apparatuses at least gives us a sense that nation states do an enormous amount of work (much of it successful) in creating ‘national cultures’ through rituals, ceremonies, myths, and artefacts. We can argue about specifics here, and ask ourselves is any of this useful in our fight for a fair society? Or is it all a hindrance? What we do, differently if we could? How can we show that this or that ceremony or myth is loaded with other meanings, or with meanings that subtly or not so subtly oppress and victimise? etc etc
Comment by Michael Rosen — 9 March, 2010 @ 11:29 am
#407
“These differences are results of differences in the modern period though: French Revolution, Republicanism, nature of Colonial regimes, nature of the left etc, etc. ”
To go back to this.
Thre is a definite distinction in English and French culture and manners that has a histrical political origin. For example that iin the period of formation of an English nation in the modern sense the most prestigious social clas was the pragmatic, poker faced merchant; whereas in Farnce it was the courtier and intelectual.
this has a lating impact in arts and sciences where the French are much more intellectually rigorous, and the English much more empiricist.
But climate also influences character. Gianfranco Vialli wrote a very interesting book comparing englsh and Italian football, where he couldn’t understand why the English - whatever their cultural and ethnic heritage - placed such emphasis on hard work, and so litle emphasis on ball skills, until he started playing and coaching here, and took into account how great the wind-chill factor is, so players need to run around more to keep warm. Work-rate then becomes culturaly reinforced as a desirable characteristic.
Arsene Wenger comments on how English players are much more responsive to authority and value phsyial bravery than French or Italian players, but are much less likey to be independently creative.
The birth of the labour movement in England was informed by specific cultural traditions, the myth of the norman yoke, robin hood, protestantism and methodism, and drew also on the corpus of Englsh art and literature, Shakespeare has had a huge infleunce on our language and our vocabulary of metaphor; and therefore the resuly, however hybridised, is a unique outcome.
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 11:31 am
So Michael Rosen does in fact think that natins don’t exst:
#415
“even as you try to tie it down as ‘our English hybrid’ it changes again into something else, that may well be very similar in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, the USA or Ghana or Shanghai or Bangladesh or anywhere”
Perhaps Michael could have told the Ghanians and Bengalis how the British Enmpire was just a process of hybridisation and their nations don’t exist.
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 11:34 am
#417
Michael : “We are not static outcomes, we are in constant interaction. Artefacts embody these interactions but we cannot be reduced to them. So if we talk about culture or nation we are talking about processes in flux.”
#401
me: “Nations are collective human constructs and are therefre constantly in a process of reinvention and rediscovery”
so we agree about that, so why do you make that point as if it were a killer argumet against me? when the process of flux and interaction that is the very starting point of my argument?
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 11:38 am
#416
Thanks Mike.
I’m quite clumsy at explaining myself sometimes and appreciate your patience.
I agree with you that George Buchanan’s influence on the Treaty of Union isn’t much if anything.
I’m just making a few points to some background and the fact he’s a sort of literary, and cultural, bridge between the Declaration of Arbroath 1320 and the Treaty of Union 1707.
all the best
ps
I’m reading Michael Fry’s The Union at the moment and its quite excellent.
Neil Davidson speaks highly of Whatley’s The Scots and the Union which I’ll be reading next and am very much looking forward to.
Comment by joe90 kane — 9 March, 2010 @ 12:16 pm
Andy I’m shocked that you are regurgitating French errors about the impact of climate on human nature. This is a French error first found in Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws and its really most unenglish of you to reproduce it. The nation of shop keepers must mantain higher standards in their historical arguments (although those most associated with the argument you mention were scottish, it should also be said that these same folk were in constant contact with the French. Hume and Rousseau for example. Very unfortunately the Germans then got in the action and bloody Kant was influenced by both of them. He then dares to borrow arguments from both producing an unsavoury Germanic hybred). If this is the case with liberal cosmopolitans the same sorry tale can be told of Conservatives. All of that stuff about tradition which is so very English written by a bloody Irishman!!! Burke!!!!
I think I’ll have to go and have a typically german cucumber sandwich with some tea made in India to cheer myself up.
Comment by johng — 9 March, 2010 @ 12:35 pm
#422
Yes John
England is in Europe, and there has also been a cross fertilisation of European culture, indeed in the middle ages, pan-european culture was much more vigorous than national cultures.
To demonstrate that nation exist it is not necessary to show that they are Uralt , merely that they are current and historically located
Your point is?
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 12:42 pm
You are entirely correct that in the middle ages pan-european culture was much more vigerous then national culture. A recent theses suggests that the term nation was used in the middle ages in relationship to the students at universities who came from different areas of europe. Thus Aquinas hailed from the kingdom of sicilly but wrote in Latin in Paris. As this suggests when we say culture here we are referring to high and literate culture. Most of the populations of this period in most of Europe would have experianced this in very indirect ways which is not to say that they represented an ur nationalism. Their consiousness would have been bounded by locality and often mutually incomprehensible dialects. The co-incidence of nation and peoples with ‘national’ literatures and cultures, and associated ideas of democracy and the ‘national popular’ is much more a feature of the modern age.
Nobody is suggesting that ‘nations don’t exist’ they are simply contesting a view of nations as natural kinds stretching back into the dim and distant past. Of course its possible to collect togeather odds and sods of cultural, political and ideological heritage and then put them all togeather in teleological ways fashioning a myth of continuity. And this is indeed what modern nationalism does. I can’t speak for michael but I suspect, like me, he thinks that you are erring a little in that direction.
Comment by johng — 9 March, 2010 @ 1:03 pm
#424 “Nobody is suggesting that ‘nations don’t exist’ they are simply contesting a view of nations as natural kinds stretching back into the dim and distant past. “
Well it would be nonsensical interpretation of what I have argued, to think that I beleive that “nations as natural kinds stretching back into the dim and distant past. “
since I have clearly argued that modern nations do not have any such essentialist existance; and I have continually referenced back to the theoretical sources of my own position, who do not argue that either. to be explicit, Hans KOhn who I have continualy referrred to here takes a very strong view that modern nations are constructs of the idea of nationalism; I don’t think to is possible to undersand the genesis of modern nationalism as an ideology without engaging with Kohns argument. But KOhn is not sufficient, becasue nationalism is not just an ideology, t is also a collective sense of shared identity, with cultural and historocal roots.
In particular I have stressed the class nature of nations, where by in the pre modern period the majority of the population were not included in national life at all.(However we could observe that in the pre-historical period nations did exist in the terms of relatively homogenous cultures, so the emergence of the nation as a class construct really starts with the beginning of social dfferentiation within the nation - the Austro-Marxists here arguing of course that the abolition of social classes will strengthen not abolish nations; and lead to collaborative multi-culturalism)
What has made this debate to vexing has been Michael Rosen’s reluctance to deal with what I actually argue and instead to argue gainst some reductio ad absurdum of what he thinks I *really” mean. This is further compounded by Michael’s inability to distinguish between the idea of modern nationalism as an ideology; shared participation in national-popular culure as a form of mass socialy constructed consciousness, and the construction of nation states at the military, adminstrative and economic leve.
he argues in an instrumentalist way that nation states are a necessary pre-condition for nations; and therefre diminishes the cultural and social aspects that lead to people forming national consciousness.
Simply dismissing national identity and praising some sort of departure-lounge abstract cosmopoliticaism is a cop out. It is also a cop out particularly associated historicaly with the metropolitan centres of Empire, who have the luxury of mistaking their particuolarism for universalism, and have a vested interest in viewing the national differences of others as rather vulgar obstacles to this progressive hybridity
This is implicit in Michael’s characteristaion of Waes and Scotland as somehow backwards looking anachronisms in Brotoshness, and his ironically Anglo-centric view of Britishness.
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 1:36 pm
I think it’s Andy who is being Anglo-centric in referring to ‘the birth of the Labour movement in England’ at #418.
With the possible exception of the agricultural labourers, the labour movement has been from its inception a British one, not just English, and profoundly multi-cultural.
The Chartists? Organised in England, Scotland and Wales, with black and Irish leaders (who would not have called themselves ‘English’)
The First International? There’s a clue in the name.
The new model unions? Almost all organised UK-wide. The Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners went further, having branches in the USA and Australia.
The great unrest? Irish migrant workers were at the heart of the movement from its inception
And the birth of the Labour movement was indeed informed by a number of specific traditions such as Methodism, Protestantism and Robin Hood – none of them wholly English – but also by the ideals of the French Revolution, Tom Paine, Fenianism and indeed Marxism.
But perhaps Marxism is also a product of Englishness, Karl having written ‘Capital’ in the English Museum?
Comment by chjh — 9 March, 2010 @ 1:59 pm
#426
and as so often wth the SWP, British national consciousness is mistaked for internationalism
For sure, the labour movement arose in Britain, but there were national differences notwithstanding. Captain swing took a distinctly different character from Rebecca;
although I willingly concede that the Bristol riots and the Newport amd Merthyr uprisings were as alike as peas in a pod.
There is no problem with this fr my arguiment, a British national project was cnstructed after the union, and there was commonaity n many asects of life, that interacted sometimes with the national differences.
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 2:11 pm
“However we could observe that in the pre-historical period nations did exist in the terms of relatively homogenous cultures”
Except that the use of the term ‘nation’ in this context is always liable to mislead. Because we carry fairly deeply rooted ideas about the relationship between nation, identity, politics, and their appropriate arrangement, whilst the ‘nations’ of whom we speak would have had absolutely none of this.
Your following sentance:
“beginning of social dfferentiation within the nation”
Is therefore really just absurd. Aside from the fact that the very idea of ‘nations’ probably began with ideas of social differentiation (its been observed that the term used to be used interchangably with particular families, aristocracies etc) rather then the other way about (Sands I think, makes the point that the exile of the Jewish ‘nation’ to Babylon probably meant the royal court and hangers on, a usage which would have been perfectly legitimate at the time). Unless of course, you have a teleological model which see’s nations as emerging out of a linear set of ‘group’ relations: clans, tribes, nations etc. In which case, like the Austro-Marxists, you are indeed naturalising ‘nations’ as reflecting something natural in the sense of human relations as opposed to social relations.
Trouble with this is that there are a broad variety of political forms of social organisation of mass society long before nations. What you think of as Michaels confusions in fact relate to your attempts to seperate out phenomenan whose coming togeather allows for the phenomenan of modern nationalism.
Denunciations of departure lounge cosmopolitanism and the like strike me as being knee jerk reactions to a complicated history. Nation states were deeply instrumentalist projects and without them its very doubtful that nations would have been the focus of mass identification in organised politics that they are today.
Comment by johng — 9 March, 2010 @ 2:17 pm
#428
“What you think of as Michaels confusions in fact relate to your attempts to seperate out phenomenan whose coming togeather allows for the phenomenan of modern nationalism. “
well the fact that things have to combine to create a system does not mean that the system cannot be studied usefully by considering how its components interact; which means recognising the dfferentiation wthin the unity.
Michael simply is confused as he talks about one component, and then draws concusions about something else, and he continualy seeks to impute racialism into my argument.
There is incidently no problem is recognisingcontingent dfferentiators between nations in the pre-historic period; language, systems of social organisation, levels of ecnomic development, etc, etc. However these nations are an almost entirely different thing to what we mean by modern nations. The point made by the Austro-Marxists is of course that those nations were disarticulated by the development of civic slave societies and feudalism; and essentially disapeared.
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 2:26 pm
England could well be described as `the nation that didn’t know it was oppressed’. To complete its national democratic revolution it must throw off the British-Norman yoke. Sovereign parliaments for England, Scotland and Wales with a subordinate federal authority of Britain to take care of defence and other mutual interests that need negotiation, co-operation and agreement. No more economy destroying welfare dependency on the City of London and the unreliable, undemocratic, divide and rule motivated redistributive largesse of the self-serving, remote British executive and its British parliamentary poodles. If Australia, New Zealand and Canada can carve soverign parliaments out of the growing wreckage of the British Empire for themselves then surely England, Scotland and Wales with their far more historical claims to nationhood can too.
Comment by Harold — 9 March, 2010 @ 2:27 pm
#427 Captain Swing was of course a movement of agricultural labourers, which I excepted. There is a distinctly English history of agriculture, which is different from the history of agriculture in Scotland or Wales. But that’s an exception to the general trend.
And of course I’m not confusing British consciousness with internationalism - I’m pointing out that elements of both have contributed to the make-up of the labour movement. Th real reductionism is to call it simply an ‘English’ labour movement, and fail to see all the other contributing streams.
Comment by chjh — 9 March, 2010 @ 2:42 pm
Harold, i hate to tell you but eliminating royal assent and repatriating our constitution hasn’t made Canada any more of a just society. Social struggle against the Canadian government and Canadian employers has. I suspect “sovereign parliaments” will make about as much of a difference in the UK.
Comment by redbedhead — 9 March, 2010 @ 2:44 pm
Incidenty.
I may have been too harse with Michael on occassions here, but as he has described me as a “supremacist” at #412 above it did get my goat a bit.
So where I have been unfairly sharp with him I apologise
I have learned from Michael’s arguments, and considered that it has been a useful debate.
One thing I would ask those who disagree with me to consider is that I as much as anyone seek to defend multi-culturalism in all its messy compromise. So clearly I don’t have an essentialist view of Engishness, otherwise I would not be so keen to defend the rights of Catholics and Muslims within our gloriously muddled and anarchic hybrid culture
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 2:47 pm
#431
“There is a distinctly English history of agriculture, which is different from the history of agriculture in Scotland or Wales. But that’s an exception to the general trend.”
you could say instead
“There is a distinctly English history of agriculture, law, religion, literature, education, historical heritage, art, architecture, which is different from the history of agriculture, law, religion, literature, education, historical heritage, art, architecture in Scotland. But these are exceptions to the general trend.”
Comment by Andy Newman — 9 March, 2010 @ 2:53 pm
432 `Harold, i hate to tell you but eliminating royal assent and repatriating our constitution hasn’t made Canada any more of a just society.’
So you’d have em back then?
Comment by Harold — 9 March, 2010 @ 2:54 pm
There’s no transcendental signifier that can capture ‘englishness’ or any
stick large enough to lever it apart from a discussion of imperialism.
Race,language,place,class,culture,food,dwelling etc,all play their part
but perhaps it’s something that can only be pinned in retrospect,hence the nostalgic
aspect of the discussion, due to the difficulties in containing a definition that
fits multicultural experience.Ironically, the term is often used to describe a period of history when the country was at its most imperial.
Underpinning this notion of ‘englishness’ is a relation to suffering;
the far-right appear to be suffering due to their psychological devastation at an apparent loss
of an imagined and fantasized period when ‘we’ were ‘unified’.
The Left suffer from an understanding of the genocidal imperial wars waged and the identification
with the suffering by people who were to be killed from this enterprise. Hence blood is a potent
symbol of all nationalisms,including ‘englishness’,hence the above poem,Water,a cleansing,less
nationalistic noun,cleansing us from our racist impulse,reminding us that water is what constitutes
Life,all life,regardless of nation,religion,party,species;the well from which language and hence
boundaries emerge.
Comment by bob hope — 9 March, 2010 @ 3:15 pm
The well from which hope springs eternal.
Comment by bob hope — 9 March, 2010 @ 3:16 pm
Harold - I couldn’t care less, to be honest. Nor most other people. Though the people of Quebec might prefer the old set-up since no Quebec government will ever sign the constitution as its presently written because it was negotiated behind their back and specifically excluded them and their concerns as a national minority.
Comment by redbedhead — 9 March, 2010 @ 3:35 pm
#433
These discussion on SU, and the likes of Lenin’s Tomb, are always a learning experience for me.
I appreciate the hard work that people put into trying to figure out how the world works - and care enough about the welfare and well-being of others to provide this entirely free public service of wonderful discussions on important subjects.
It pains me to see decent people not getting on, however, I understand there are important differences being aired and wouldn’t belittle for a moment the seriousness of such divisions.
A big thanks to the main protagonists.
Comment by joe90 kane — 9 March, 2010 @ 5:49 pm
Just wanted to say great discussion folks! A very pertinent issue given the mainstreaming of far-Right politics.
Comment by Omar — 9 March, 2010 @ 6:00 pm
1. I joined this discussion to dispute the claims made about England and only England. I made quite clear several times that I wasn’t talking about Britain, Great Britain or the UK. I made quite clear that claims about England and the English nation are special case, quite unlike any other parts of the UK and possibly unlike many other parts of the world. I made clear why I thought that was the case based on the evidence of a) the lack of juridical status of England b)the very weak ruling class nationalist ideology re England c)and yet, seemingly in conflict with this, the presence of the capital city of the UK in England d) the very different natures and histories of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland both with each other and in relation to England.
2. Views ascribed to me by Andy about nation and nation state are just laughably wrong. I repeat, I live in a nation state and abide by its laws. Therefore, no matter what my politics are, I live with and acknowledge the nation state. I don’t accept for one moment that I live in a ‘nation’ called England. I don’t regard it as a nation, I don’t meet people who think it’s a nation, I don’t see some kind of emergent national consciousness.
3. Andy has tried twice to describe what he means by Englishness. The first time, he produced a list of writers and artists. I repeat, I think this list was highly significant. I don’t give a stuff for whatever abstract theories he constructs around nation, when and as he produces a list like that. What he doesn’t seem to understand or acknowledge is that such a list contains an immanent ideology. It’s not a list that ’so happens’ to be this or that, it is an ideological list. He made a claim for that list of artists that it represented some kind of Englishness. I repeat and will not withdraw that this was essentialist and supremacist bunkum. It was a piece of chauvinist crap and appalling that it was peddled here of all places. Several people, including myself, gave two main reasons, with evidence, for this:
a) that the very specimens of ‘English’ culture he had cited, were in fact hybrids, and that to call them ‘English’ to recruit them for what we might call the English national project was heavily ideological. b)it was highly significant that Andy had left out people who he had deduced were ‘not English’ (and not female - it’s interesting that nationalism is frequently gendered as male) ie not Scots, Welsh or Irish - even though much ‘English Literature’ has been produced by Irish people (Swift, Wilde, Sterne, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett etc etc); nor was anyone ‘immigrant’ eg Conrad nor Jewish.
Andy didn’t handle this criticism except to compound the matter by trotting out a set of essentialist and chauvinist terms such as ‘distinctly’ English and the like. He then added a new ideological list, which was even more laughable than the first one claiming for example that an ‘aversion to the baroque’ was English.
Andy can claim I’m confused for as long as he likes but when it comes down to specifics, all he can produce are utter fallacies (eg the reference to baroque) and indeed makes himself prisoner to a reactionary construction of nation. As I anticipated, Andy then proceeded to say that he is a great defender of multiculturalism etc etc completely missing the point that his construction of Englishness poses the notion that there is a core Englishness which hosts the ‘other’ eg Conrad, eg Scots, Irish, Welsh and of course I take this personally eg the Jew.
None of this is surprising. Andy follows a long established pattern of people who see themselves as leftwing or socialist or liberal or radical but when it comes to culture remain prisoners of the old paradigm. They then dress this up with a load of abstract gunk but the moment they start giving concrete examples, they show their ideology. Take your pick: run with the nice sounding sentiments and abstract theory. Or look closely at the examples and descriptions of Englishness and deduce Andy’s ideology from those. I take the latter and then reject it utterly as worthless for the socialist, radical agenda.
To repeat, this is a discourse about England and only England. It is not a discussion about Britain, Wales, Scotland or the UK.
Comment by Anonymous — 9 March, 2010 @ 11:01 pm
Anonymous is me, apologies I didn’t notice the fields were empty.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 9 March, 2010 @ 11:02 pm
# 441
But your “nation state” is, in part, a colonial construct and has no moral legitimacy.
Comment by Hendre — 10 March, 2010 @ 10:54 am
#441
“this is a discourse about England and only England. It is not a discussion about Britain, Wales, Scotland or the UK.”
that makes no sense.
you simply cannot abstract England from the discussion of the multi-national nature of the UK.
Nor can you use arguments to pooh pooh the exsance of the English nation, which by inference also negate the exustance of all nations, which have similarly arbitrary signifiers, and then say “I am only talking about England”. You have refuted France and Germany, and certainly taly as well by your dismissal of national cultural infleunces, and argument about hybrdity.
Comment by Andy Newman — 10 March, 2010 @ 11:02 am
Andy it might be useful if you came back on the distinct points made: in particular about the ideological significance of canons of “English” Literature (the difficulty is compounded of course by the double meaning of ‘English literature’: Literature written in English, or a national literature of the English). Its always legitimate to point to the consequences of particular arguments, but its sometimes useful to engage with them on their own terms.
I would still like to know whether I should pretend to feel English or whether I should actually learn to feel English. Whilst this point might have been seen as a joke it raises serious issues.
Comment by johng — 10 March, 2010 @ 11:09 am
# 445
With health policies being introduced on an England-only basis, you will have to concede that you are, if nothing else, an English patient.
Comment by Hendre — 10 March, 2010 @ 11:24 am
#445, 446 “I would still like to know whether I should pretend to feel English or whether I should actually learn to feel English. Whilst this point might have been seen as a joke it raises serious issues.”
Hendre’s point is a serious one. The English may have no particular desire to be English rather than British, or to live in a state called England, capital London, rather than in a state called UK, capital London. But if the Welsh and the Scots and the Ulstermen leave, then the English would have no choice. It’s a possibility rather than a probability that this might happen, but it’s good contingency planning to make sure that in that eventuality, “Englishness” is an inclusive, civic identity rather than an exclusive one.
Comment by Strategist — 10 March, 2010 @ 11:32 am
445 Fair point, I second that, but please not by supplying yet further examples of ‘iconic’ ’specific’ etc etc
Comment by non-partisan — 10 March, 2010 @ 11:39 am
Andy, don’t try and pull the ‘you can’t talk about England without talking about the rest of the UK’ argument on me. You can’t talk about England without talking about Europe and the world. So what? We were talking about the possibility of a national progressive project constructed around ‘England’. You responded with essentialist rubbish about ‘distinctly English’ (with no reference to the rest of the UK) processes and artefacts, all of which were completely falsely conceived (by you) as I and others showed. You showed such awful and baffling ignorance and chauvinism, it’s amazing you come back here still clinging to it. To take one example: you cited ‘aversion to the baroque’ as ‘English’. I pointed out to you that this was (and is) a north Europe phenomenon routed in the internationalist ideology of Protestantism, which incidentally is crucial to the framing and construction of European social democracy! Needless to say, you haven’t come back with any comment on this. Presumably, you’re still clinging to your notions of ‘distinct’ and ‘iconic’ Englishness like eg Chaucer, one of the most internationalist of writers!
Hendre, thank you for pointing out that the nation state is a construct. Have you done that because you think I didn’t know this, or because you think you didn’t know this? I have said many times above, that a) the nation state is just simply something that I live with and don’t fight against.I use a passport and I pay my taxes. b) that once a nation state is founded, it wields massive ideological power in propping up that nation state culturally. c)England does not have that massive ideological power to support it as a nation precisely because it is a nation state. d) the thing we call the anglo-centric domination of the UK is in truth not ‘anglo’ but London and capital. It’s not Cornwall or Northumberland that does the dominating, it’s Westminster and the City. By talking of ‘England’ dominating Wales and Scotland we concede much too much to the nationalist argument and shy away from the class processes that do it.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 10 March, 2010 @ 12:44 pm
…and of course it’s not working class London doing the dominating, it is more accurately the ruling class of Westminster and the City.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 10 March, 2010 @ 12:55 pm
Michael, I think that your last point here is, in reality, the rub of the matter. This valorization of the “nation” is, in fact, part of a more general retreat from class-based analysis. A surrender of the ideological field and acceptance of capitalist categories. The idea that culture can be reduced to a static geographic area with a checkbox of static qualities distinct to that area is a uniquely modern, capitalist concept that attempts to create, commodity-like, the “nation” as an end product to be protected and praised (and marketed).
Socialists ought not to be bigging up a formation whose purpose is to suppress class (and ethnic) differences and to universalize the project of the ruling class, which subordinates the majority. That is different than celebrating the contributions to human culture of particular traditions, rituals, artistic movements, specific artists, etc. And the reality, as history tells us, is that those traditions, etc. are only made “national” through the coercive action of states, either by incorporating them (including against their will) or excluding them - whether through expulsion, genocide or simply by pretending they never existed.
Comment by redbedhead — 10 March, 2010 @ 1:32 pm
…all agreed, redbedhead, and your final list I would add to, the key process of taking an artefact that has very clear class- or local-specific origins and/or distribution and claiming it as ‘national’. The example I gave was Winnie the Pooh, highly class specific but described as English. This normalises and naturalises the class-specific as being about ‘everyone’ within the national project but is in fact a distortion or lie.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 10 March, 2010 @ 1:47 pm
Yes, agreed. In relation to ancient Jewish history I think it was johng who made an observation earlier about the Babylonian “exile”, that it was, in fact, the exile of the Jerusalem-based ruling class. This is germane in the sense that the ruling class always perceives of itself and its traditions as being those of the nation or the people and generalizes it as such.
As to Winnie the Pooh: there were a number of articles in the Canadian media a year or two ago about the origins of Winnie the Pooh, that the story idea derived from a Canadian bear cub purchased by a Winnipeg-born veterinarian on his way to fight in WWI, who brought the bear to Britain and donated it to the London zoo. You can even get Winnie the Pooh commemorative stamps from Canada Post.
Comment by redbedhead — 10 March, 2010 @ 2:06 pm
# 449 I would agree with you that it’s more helpful to talk about the domination of the London establishment rather than the domination of England but the colonial ‘anglo’ element cannot be completely dismissed. To give an example, those bilingual road signs in Wales which seem to irritate some (English) people so much were only introduced following the jailing of Welsh activists. So in the ‘nation state’ you can ‘live with’ others have had to go to jail to secure something which you probably haven’t given a second thought, seeing the place names of your country in your own language.
The purity or otherwise of English culture and its claims to being a national culture are interesting topics for discussion but you’re still rather missing the point. You can harrumph all you like at the idea of Winne the Pooh being regarded as English but that will not stop Whitehall departments producing national policies for England. Strategist sums it up well.
Comment by Hendre — 10 March, 2010 @ 2:16 pm
I notice that neither Michael Rosen (389, 393) nor Ray (389) attempt to defend Michael’s earlier anti-Communist slander at post 337. Instead they snigger about Michael’s ambiguity, parents etc.
So I’ll ask Michael again: which French Communist Party leader referred to a student leader in 1968 as a ‘German Jew’? Evidence? Those who make such a charge should substantiate it, not casually drop poison into what has usually been an adult debate. Michael - answer the question. Ray - stop sniggering at the back of the class.
Comment by Party hack — 10 March, 2010 @ 2:22 pm
Hendre - I don’t know where you get the idea that Michael is opposed to the Welsh language being on road signs. Certainly nothing has done as much to wipe out minority indigenous languages as the homogenizing impulses of the nation-state. More indigenous languages and dialects have disappeared in the last hundred years than in all of previous history.
Comment by redbedhead — 10 March, 2010 @ 2:23 pm
Hendre @454—”You can harrumph all you like at the idea of Winne the Pooh being regarded as English but that will not stop Whitehall departments producing national policies for England.”
What are these policies for England? Do you mean policies in areas that do not apply to Wales and Scotland due to devolution? Or do you mean policies which benefit everyone in England and discriminate against people in Wales and Scotland? If so, how do they benefit, say, working class people in Lambeth, where I live now, and not in South Wales, where I was born and lived most of my life before coming to London? In what way do they have distinct interests?
“Strategist sums it up well.”
Where? He’s usually pretty sensible but his contributions on this thread are pretty bonkers.
Comment by The Bunk — 10 March, 2010 @ 2:26 pm
455,
Party Hack you say in your origonal post:
There were protests from the far left and inside the PCF and CGT when George Marchais (not yet PCF General Secretary) referred to student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit as a ‘German anarchist’ in L’Humanite. Factually true, it was an unhelpful reference when C-B was fighting attempts by the French state to deport him.
So a radical student fighting against deportation and a leader of the French CP (even in your words) calls him a ‘German Anarchist’ this is better than calling him
a ‘German Jew’ exactly how?
It seems your name is spot on…. it has been a good debate stop trying to divert it.
Comment by non-partisan — 10 March, 2010 @ 2:32 pm
http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/Paris1968_Tempest/AfficheParis1968_Tempest.html#_edn251
It’s referenced here, from an interview with the artist Gerard Fromanger. There are numerous references online to L’Humanite describing him as a German Jew. I cannot test the veracity of these claims but don’t see them as being outside the realms of the possible. I guess it’s harder for Stalinist hacks to accept than, you know, less stupid people.
Comment by The Bunk — 10 March, 2010 @ 2:35 pm
“Ray - stop sniggering at the back of the class.”
Party hack your misreading of Michael’s post was funny. Go on admit it! If I’d done it I’d laugh about it too. As for your question I can’t answer that as I don’t know about it one way or the other. You and Michael will just have to thrash that one out between you.
Comment by Anonymous — 10 March, 2010 @ 2:39 pm
“Anonymous” was me.
Comment by Ray — 10 March, 2010 @ 2:40 pm
Hendre, I don’t fight the fact that the nation state asks me to carry a passport. I pay my taxes. That was meant to signify that I’m not posturing about nation states. I am in an abstract way ‘against nation states’, whilst acknowledging that I do nothing concretely and specifically promotes that abstract position. Hands up anyone who does and on what basis? More concretely I do plenty that is opposed to the actions of my nation state, war being the most obvious, but also almost every day of my life, its policies on education.
In the meantime, I thought my attitude to languages and dialects was so well known, that it would be tedious for me to repeat it - given the fact that I’ve broadcast on the matter and even done a whole series on radio 3 on the languages of Europe etc etc and was even caught on TV encouraging Welsh children to say something in Welsh even though I wouldn’t understand it, etc etc
I’m all in favour of people having arguments but trying to manoeuvre me into a position I don’t ascribe to is kinda tiresome.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 10 March, 2010 @ 2:59 pm
re Georges Marchais.
Clearly ‘party hack’ didn’t find it funny that he thought I thought that a leader of the French Communists was called ‘Frank’. One reason it’s funny is that party hack couldn’t be bothered to read what was posted and by whom.
Re the actual reference. I lived through that period, I saw Cohn Bendit speak in London. I was in Paris in 68. None of this is evidence. All it is is evidence of the hearsay that circulated at the time. My French friends said that they chanted ‘Nous sommmes tous les allemands juifs’. I understood from that this was their riposte to the way in which Cohn Bendit had been described by representatives of the CP, including Marchais.
If l’huma described him as a German Jew, then the students’ riposte is both accurate and brilliant. If no one called him that, then it’s hard to think why the students would have introduced the ‘Jew’ bit to their chant. If Marchais called Cohn Bendit an anarchist. That’s fine. If he called him a German anarchist, shame, shame, shame on him. It’s inexcusable. It’s a piece of cheap chauvinist nationalist crap, trying to draw on the recent history of the occupation and all the misery that that entailed. However, Cohn Bendit was never a representative of the German state (I seem to remember, he came from the disputed borderlands anyway, I’ll check that), and the students would have been entitled in my book to insult and riposte to Marchais, with slogans and jeers for that. After all, Marchais was a representative of a party that claimed to be internationalist. It’s the fact that the CP’s rhetoric had turned into empty meaningless phrases (eg ‘We’re internationalists’) is revealed by Marchais saying, according to party hack, Cohn Bendit is a German anarchist. This was after all, 1968, not 1944. And let’s remember, some of the bravest members of the French resistance were Germans! They were German Jewish refugees and their names are on the senotaphs in French villages, dying alongside French and Spanish partisans. So fuck off Marchais with your chauvinist crap, and once again, vive les etudiants.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 10 March, 2010 @ 3:09 pm
# 456 In citing that example I had no idea what Michael Rosen’s attitude might be. I did notice that he had ignored my reference to the British state as a ‘colonial construct’.
# 457 I was referring to Strategist’s comment at # 447, and yes, policies in devolved areas. It’s not a matter of ‘distinct interests’, it’s the reality that the formulation and implementation of policy on an England-only basis is now part of our governance arrangements.
Comment by Hendre — 10 March, 2010 @ 3:10 pm
Cohn Bendit - wikipedia
Cohn-Bendit was born in Montauban, France, to German-Jewish parents who had fled Nazism in 1933. He spent his childhood in Montauban. He moved to Germany in 1958, where his father had been a lawyer since the end of the war. He attended the Odenwaldschule in Heppenheim near Frankfurt, a secondary school for children of the upper middle class. Being officially stateless at birth, when he reached the age of 14 he chose German citizenship, in order to avoid conscription.
I seem to have misquoted the slogan. It should be
Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands
Hendre
I think that construction of Britain includes colonialism but is not solely or only a colonial construct. We can go off on talking about Britain, Great Britain and the UK but that’s really Andy’s agenda ie sliding between England and Britain, using arguments relevant to one category against arguments in another.
For the moment, if it’s OK with you, I’m sticking with the ludicrous nature of the claim that England/Englishness (as nation) can be recruited for socialist and progressive causes and, following from that, there are ‘distinct’ and ‘iconic’ examples of Englishness easily and readily to be found in eg writers like Chaucer and sentiments like ‘aversion to the baroque’.
If you want a conversation about what England has done to Wales, or that Britain has done to Wales etc, I have always found the matter fascinating. I work in Wales quite often and the matter is often in the air. However, I find it hard enough to keep up with the central claim of the ‘progressive-Engish-nationalist’ agenda per se.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 10 March, 2010 @ 3:20 pm
re 465, so Marchais describing Cohn Bendit as ‘German’ is, by my reckoning about triply disgusting and anyone coming here and justifying it should go hang.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 10 March, 2010 @ 3:22 pm
# 465 I will have to disagree with you re Andy Newman’s agenda. I think he’s trying to disentangle Englishness from Britishness. As are many other people.
Comment by Hendre — 10 March, 2010 @ 3:36 pm
Hendre, Andy can try and disentangle as much he wants but he hasn’t come up with anything yet, has he? That’s because he’ll have to find artefacts and processes that are common to England and exclusively so.
If you take ‘the English language’. There is absolutely nothing exclusively ‘English’ about the language spoken across the British Isles and beyond. There are many English dialects - true - but then so are there Welsh, Scottish and Irish dialects. There’s nothing exclusively English about it…there is just a spectrum or mosaic of dialects wherever ‘English’ is spoken. That’s it. If English, the language, is to be celebrated, it’s not because it’s exclusively spoken in England. In fact, one would be pretty hard pushed to find a time when English was only spoken in a territory that could be described as being ‘England’, which now I think about it, is quite funny.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 10 March, 2010 @ 3:49 pm
Opening line of wiki’s entry on ‘English Language’:
English is a West Germanic language that developed in England and south-eastern Scotland during the Anglo-Saxon era.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 10 March, 2010 @ 3:54 pm
“I would still like to know whether I should pretend to feel English or whether I should actually learn to feel English. Whilst this point might have been seen as a joke it raises serious issues.”
JohnG at #445
It is entirely up to you, and not germane to this argument what you feel.
But the options available are only those based upon participation. I could not meaningfully choose to feel or French or Tahitian; because French national consciousness exists at the level of a number of collectively developed cultural attributes, tics and mannerisms which act as signifiers for those who self-identify with that nationality; and unless you have some lived participatory experience of them then you cannot feel part of that imagined community.
Now as Michael Rosen has eloquently pointed out, these national signifiers are not homogenous, varying as they do with region, social class, and subculture; and they also subject to modification, hybridity and contention between different interpretations.
It is also easy, as Michael Rosen shows, to mock the specificity of national artistic and cultural traditions, particularly within Europe where there is so much shared culture. It would be a mistake though that to think you can rationalise national consciousness out of existence by pointing out how arbitrary its signifiers and characteristics are; national identity is a very string brew in modern social psychology.
The weakness of Michael Rosen’ argument, and one he does not address, but rather avoids answering, is that in dismissing the cultural attributes, artistic traditions and mannerisms of the English, he is launching a critique that could be applied equally to all nations.
Now we have to understand the specificity of the historical phenomenon under discussion. The unified state of the United Kingdom created a form of British national consciousness, and this cannot be understood without reference to its expansionist imperialist dynamic, which provided the material foundation for the marriage between the English and Scottish states.
For reasons that are well understood the dominant strand of Britishness, within this multinational united kingdom was Englishness; to the degree that many English people believe that Englishness and Britishness are the same thing. It has never looked like that from Wales, Scotland or Ireland. Histories of the British Isles that only discuss the Kings of England; that for example discuss Cromwell but not the Covenanters, present a distorted and Anglo-centric view of a teleological development where England became Britain, as if Wales and Scotland ceased to exist.
So the form of Britishness that is unique to England is peculiar to us in who have that experience of it, whether you chose to recognise it as such or not; in the same way that the form of Britishness unique to Scotland is particular to Scotland – though they are generally more happy with that idea.
So with a more assertive Welsh and Scottish national identity, and more political divergence between the nations developing over specific areas of policy, and their cultural and social ramifications, the material foundation is being undermined for people to continue to maintain that Britishness and Englishness are the same thing; or that the Britishness of the UK is a form of national identity that embraces all the peoples of the island.
It is in this context that a greater interest of Englishness has developed, reflecting the modern civic experience of that part of Great Britain that is not Wales, nor Scotland. It is a modern civic experience that can be defined in a number of ways; we could choose to define the modern experience as being defined by its liberal social attitudes, its cultural diversity and inclusivity; we can point out the degree to which in England class antagonism has been a very strong theme; and indeed where class has been more important than ethnicity. We could stress the way that England has been characterised by a long history of struggle for democracy. We could also acknowledge the scars of racism and chauvinism that the imperial experience has left in our national culture, and the opportunities for multi-culturalism and internationalism that the links with the former colonies allows us.
These are arguments to have, against those who would assert a more racialised narrative for our national identity.
Now personally, I think that notwithstanding the points that Michael makes about the state’s power to construct national identity, the British state has constructed a British identity around mainly Englishness, that has inherently downplayed the influence of Scotland Wales and Ireland; and in so far as those nations are now asserting their distinctness, the with the bounds of continuity there is also change. Michael is quite wrong to think that the duality f Englishness/ Britishness is in the same category as a dualism between Britishness/ Europeanism.
Modern British national consciousness was built as part of an explicitly expansionist imperial project, and was built primarily around English culture, institutions and ideology to bind the other people of these islands into the same shared project, where their own distinct traditions were relegated to provincial curiosities. Pan-European culture simply doesn’t have that same state and imperial project behind it.
It is a fallacy to think that the lack of explicit national self-awareness is being English means that the experience of being British here is the same as being British in Wales or Scotland; it is an even bigger fallacy to mistake this British multi-nationalism for internationalism.
There is a unique and particular experience of living here, and there are unique and particular cultural and linguistic mixes, mannerisms of speech, behaviour and sensibility that make many of us feel more at home here than elsewhere; there are even ways of feeling that you don’t belong or that you don’t want to be part of it, that are unique to the experience of that part f Britain we call England.
Now personally I think that there is a distinct artistic and literary aesthetic and character to cultural production in England, that despite its fluidity, hybridity and interpenetration with other cultures is distinctly English. I am happy with that, you are not, I hardly think that is too important.
Comment by Andy Newman — 10 March, 2010 @ 3:55 pm
#465
“think that construction of Britain includes colonialism but is not solely or only a colonial construct. We can go off on talking about Britain, Great Britain and the UK but that’s really Andy’s agenda ie sliding between England and Britain, using arguments relevant to one category against arguments in another.”
That isn’t an *agenda* michael
What we have is a complex interaction by which Britishness as a national project was constructed following the union at a state level of the English and Scottish ruling elites; and in which a new state, and a new national identity was constructed out of the marriage.
Engishess is indeed inseperable from its British character and context, but so is Scottishness; and so is Welshness. BUt that doesn’t mean that Englishness is not a unique form of Britishness, whether people who experince that unique form acknowledge or not its uniqueness.
Comment by Andy Newman — 10 March, 2010 @ 4:01 pm
“It’s shite being Scottish! We’re the lowest of the low, the scum of the fucking Earth. The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some people hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonised by. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. It’s a shite state of affairs to be in, Tommy, and all the fresh air in the world won’t make any fucking difference.”
Comment by Eddie Truman — 10 March, 2010 @ 4:07 pm
#468
“Andy can try and disentangle as much he wants but he hasn’t come up with anything yet, has he? That’s because he’ll have to find artefacts and processes that are common to England and exclusively so.”
michael
You are setting the bar at a level where no nation would be able to satisfy them which is why in your desire to demobnstarte that England desn’t exist you effetively refute the existance of all nations.
While Englnd desn’y meet your standards to be a nation, then Kenya, Italy or Indonesia would not meet them either.
Comment by Andy Newman — 10 March, 2010 @ 4:11 pm
“The weakness of Michael Rosen’ argument, and one he does not address, but rather avoids answering, is that in dismissing the cultural attributes, artistic traditions and mannerisms of the English, he is launching a critique that could be applied equally to all nations.”
I think I have replied to this at least three times. I have said quite clearly that England hasn’t had the full experience of the ruling class ideology wielded on its behalf as ‘nation’. There has been plenty of stuff about England and the English (by you included) most of which is complete tosh. But the history of England is not imbued with anything like the power of the ideological output that has been expressed for ‘Britain’, ‘Great Britain’ or the ‘UK’ - and, I thought that this was obvious, therefore for other nation states eg France, the USA or Australia, say.
So, no I didn’t ever