Treason and Mutiny with Long John
The Roch Winds is a ‘treacherous guide’ to Scotland by Cailean Gallagher, Rory Scothorne and Amy Westwell (Luath Press).
This trio are ‘revolutionary communists’ and are enthusiastically introduced as ‘three of the most compelling voices to emerge during the Scottish referendum’. They tell us that their radicalism comes from Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg, Jean-Jaques Rouseeau, Simone de Beauvoir, Theodore Adorno, Edmund Palmer Thompson (and more).
The name-checks and endless quotes are relentless. There’s a lot of ‘roch winds’ (a lot) and Gramsci, Marx (Karl), Voltaire, Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Cherneyshevsky, Hannah Arendt, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy (‘something of a communist’), and Walter Benjamin all make an appearance. Even Long John Silver pops up. At times it’s a bit like Slavoj Žižek meets Rick Mayal.
All their references are dead.
For all the Rochin all oer the world and passing mentions of Tom Nairn this seems like a book only passingly aware of 21st C Scotland. At no point in the 177 pages do the authors make any reference to any live current or previous political movement campaign or action. It is as if they have not been in the world. It is a pure abstraction. This is not to deride theory or undermine thinking, it’s just that this is devoid of praxis.
For all that their critique of ‘social nationalism’ and their challenging of the insipid moribund nature of Holyrood and their account of ‘Kirstification’ all hit home.
But the idea that the referendum wasn’t a revolutionary situation or that the SNP aren’t a vanguard workers party or that politicians are captured by compromise aren’t really revelations. Each ‘treacherous’ ‘mutinous’ declaration has the response: ‘uh-huh’?
“The three moments of radical action are therefore treason, interruption, and mutiny” we’re told, without any reference to this actually happening anywhere. Rory is “fiery” and Amy is a “sans-culotte” at heart, but nowhere is this given practical expression. Are our revolutionary communists taking part in direct action against austerity and sanctions, fighting TTIP, battling exploitation in the workplace or on the frontline of solidarity that might be an expression of “treason, mutiny and interruption”? We’re not told.
What then is the answer for revolutionaries? Comrades it is to vote Labour.
“Corbyn’s Scottish allies could revive a tradition that can inject new kind of struggle into a politics stultified by a social nationalism. Labour should not limit itself to acting through parliament but should also cut through the extra-parliamanteary combination of those committed to replace the system with another.”
The idea raises several questions. What tradition is being ‘revived’ here? The authors seem to have a wide and expansive historical reading but they seem to have bypassed the bulk of Labour history including their role in the social struggles of the past thirty years, their capitulation and collusion and their “Kirstification” on a grand scale. This is ahistorical delusional revisionism.
Eight years before the authors were born the Labour Party deserted the striking miners and nothing in the intervening thirty-two years gives any evidence that the party is the suitable vehicle for Cailean, Rory and Amy’s political project, not least of all their role as dutiful allies of the British State in the referendum. And this is where a real weakness lies, not only is there a huge void in this book (from people who had a role in establishing and then rejecting the National Collective, there is very little about the relationship between culture and politics). But so too is there a yawning gap about power and the state. For writers so well versed in Marxist theory there is very little about the state and its role in undermining the movement for democracy in Scotland.
They write: “We are more interested in experience than ideology”. That just doesn’t seem to be true in any way whatsoever.
It’s all very treacherous but I’m not sure it’s coherent.
*** GO HERE TO DONATE TO OUR CROWD FUNDER APPEAL AND SUPPORT US ***
at last someone said it
The book is only 150 pages so think it would be difficult for it to fit in an analysis of every failing of the Labour party/movement over the past 30 years and how this has hindered the class struggle. There is plenty of other commentary around that, after all. The book also does go into the more recent failings of Scottish Labour, Jim Murphy et al, alongside an analysis of the Common Weal, RIC, the SNP etc and some more recent grass roots campaigns (pretty sure these people are all still alive)
That’s what the book does best: a succinct and powerful analysis of where post-indyref Scotland is at – I thought the chapter on the Yes movement very compelling, particularly on how it didn’t have much to counter big business when it finally started pulling its weight for No. The stuff on what the authors call the ‘Scottish ideology’ – that all sections of civic Scotland feed into – is excellent too and certainly reflects my own experience in that superficially devoid of ideology, technocratic grey area between the public, private and third sectors that continues to define policy-making in Scotland.
It does have a tendency for a lot of name-dropping philosophers and cultural references from several decades/centuries ago – something which the Roch Wind blog shares – which are a lot harder to grip if you’re not immediately familiar with the works of the writer/song-writer at hand etc, but I don’t think that really diminishes the value of the book.
I didn’t suggest it should have analysis of every failing of the Labour Party. That would take a much longer book. I suggested it should have some awareness of it. It appears to have none and to have sprung from some other world, one I’ve never been to.
‘Kirstification’ pretty neatly sums up what happened to the Labour Party in Scotland. “I particularly like visiting [Mallorca] in spring and autumn. …We grew so fond of the island that we bought an old house there which dates back to the 11th century, and now use it as often as possible.” quoth the BBC diva.
What is “Kirstification”? I’ve never come across this term before.
Kirsty is the baby that has featured in a couple of SNP broadcasts, and was recently taken up by Holyrood magazine as the #HolyroodBaby.
Roch Winds go into there interpretation of it here: “Baby Kirsty represents everything wrong with Scottish politics.”
https://rochwinds.com/2016/05/23/spicing-the-holyrood-baby/