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Title: Nation or Class Author: #FW Murneau Date: November 30, 2014 Language: en Topics: nationalism, class, Scotland, political parties Source: Retrieved on 21st June 2022 from https://iwwscotland.wordpress.com/2014/11/30/strike-back-issue-3-winter-201415/
There were working class demands from the start of the Scottish
independence referendum and these demands only continued to grow as it
neared to the time of the vote. Many parties of the so-called left began
to appeal to these demands and desires of the working class. But why was
this and why now?
To answer this, we have to look at the wider picture of the current
period of capitalism. At the moment, we are in the death agony of
capitalism as the crisis 2008 continues from it’s source in the 1970s,
when we had our first independence debate. This appeal to the
nation-state is an effect that capitalist crisis generates. A crisis in
capitalism leads to a crisis in the state, and this is what has spurred
on these events.
It was plainly evident that appealing to the fears and dreams of the
working class was one of the main tactics in this whole campaign. The
people most likely to have voted Yes were those of the lower income
brackets, and those who voted No the inverse. Both Glasgow and Dundee
were Yes voters, areas of poverty and traditionally home to the most
militant and class conscious sections of the proletariat.
The problem for these parties is that the time of welfare states has
long since eclipsed in the face of the continuing international
capitalist crisis. Ever since the late 1970s capitalism has been in a
deep decline as the post-war reconstruction period ended, a period when
the rate of profit was high enough to allow for concessions to the
working class in the form of a welfare state. The rate of profit since
the ending of this period has declined, in part due to the increasing
efficiency of production with the resultant increase in costs of
constant capital in the most advanced capitalist states.
This crisis of capitalism in the 1970s resulted in the eventual collapse
of the soviet union because it could not transition quick enough in an
effectual way to the new demands being placed upon the economy, and
started the collapse of traditional welfare states in western Europe.
Capital had to be free to move abroad to find new areas of investment
where the rate of profit was higher. But we have reached a point where
even capital movement and financial concealment is no longer a solution.
The financial crisis of 2008 only revealed that capitalism has been
stuttering along on fictional profits. Everywhere across the board
traditional capitalist welfare states austerity programs are being
enacted, not because of some ideological reason, or because bankers are
greedy, or corporations are bad, or because politicians are corrupt, but
because this is the only way for capital to continue to function.
While these “socialist” parties and groups were already far from the
communist movement and of working class struggle, they more openly
abandoned all pretences of revolution and succumbed out right to
opportunism. For most a slightly better form of capitalism is preferable
than for arguing for the abolition of capital itself and the chance for
a real solution. Some groups, such as the International Socialist
Group’s (ISG) and it’s front organisation, the Radical Independence
Campaign (also the Scottish Left Project) followed this model by
succumbing outright to the SNP and bourgeois democracy. This trend
continues in the wake of the failed Yes campaign, and all those
“socialist” parties who were in tow of the SNP, such as Tommy Sheridan
outright telling people to just vote the SNP over his own party and over
any working class autonomy. Now that the Labour party are predicated to
collapse in Scotland, all of these groups are now be vying for the
lucrative position as the party of the working class, the SNP included.
The subsumption of proletarian struggle to bourgeois parties and
bourgeois political activity will, and has many times in the past, lead
to a negation of any real possibility of revolutionary activity by the
working class for the working class. If the working class wants to have
any changes in it’s own condition then it has to carry these out
themselves. Participation in the bourgeois political system only
legitimatises said system and obscures the real nature of bourgeois
politics.
These parties are the dead weight to any real change and improvement in
the lives of those who demand it. These parties and ideologues seek only
to chain the working class to the same bourgeois political system that
has consistently failed to provide any meaningful change.