Re: DOC's Back to Bob Gould: Notes on Welsh History and Politics

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[These remarks are in response to a post of Domhnall's, which can be
read at
<http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w41/msg00106.htm>.
They are not intended as a criticism of what Domhnall said: his comments
as ever were incisive and well-made. Rather, I have taken the
opportunity - or excuse - to clarify some of my own ideas.

[In fact, it has been on my mind for a while now to write a more
extended piece on Welsh history, simply by virtue of the fact that the
job has yet to be done satisfactorily: the problem of Welsh history is
the same as that of any history, that it has been by and large written
by the bourgeoisie. But in addition to this, where it has been written
by radical historians, they either reflect a British chauvinist
disregard for Welsh specificities, or they reflect a nationalist
disregard for class specificities. This gap has yet to be bridged, and
it is not going to be bridged here either, even though I am going to
offer a few pointers.

[I need to say here that - as is normal - my thinking is the product of
dialogue and collaboration with others. In particular, the person who
had the best grasp of Welsh history and politics that I know of - more
than the rest of the experts put together - was my very close friend and
comrade Ceri Evans. Subscribers to the list may have noticed his
obituary, which I posted last month: my sadness is that he died this
past August. In good part, then, in what follows, I am not only speaking
for myself, but on his behalf too. I hope he would have liked what I am
about to say.]


I think we need to be wary of characterisations of Wales as a 'colonial
nation', or of talk of 'occupation'. If it is fundamental to understand
that Wales is not England, it is also of equal importance to grasp that
it is not Ireland either - the historical experience is in fact
completely different: specifically, the Acts of Union of 1536, which
formalised the incorporation of Wales into England, precisely did *not*
make Wales a formal colony of England:

'If colonialism is understood to be a specific, political relationship
between two states, then quite the opposite [happened] in fact. [...] As
Gwyn Alf Williams has pointed out, it actually *rescued* us from
colonialism. From being a disenfranchised and colonised people, the
Welsh, or at least their ruling class, were made politically equal to
their English counterparts.' [1]

There is nothing in Welsh history that compares with, for example,
Ireland: to take one example, the land question, as in the rest of the
British state was reduced to bringing landlord and gentry under the
control of the bourgeoisie, rather than having to deal with absentee
landlordism, catastrophic famine, massive emigration, foreign
domination, etc.

In fact, prior to the nineteenth century there is an absence of a
nationalist movement of any character. Contrary to nationalist
mythology, the revolt of the Llewellyns of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries and that of Glyndwr in the fifteenth century were internoble
struggles aimed at enlarging feudal territory rather then national
struggles. In the same vein, it is also necessary to reject the
nationalist myth that the Welsh language was suppressed by the English.
The (in-) famous 'Welsh Not' [2] was not administered by the English
against the Welsh, as nationalist mythology would have it, but by the
Welsh speaking intelligentsia on its own children in its own schools,
even though it is true that the then *British* (i.e. English, Scottish
and Welsh) state created the cultural and political climate in which
speaking English was most definitely encouraged. [3] Yet assimilation
was almost entirely voluntary: what killed the Welsh language in many
parts of Wales was the British empire, and its essential fuel - the
crude oil of its day - coal. And fundamental to the south Wales coal
boom was the decision of the Royal Navy in the early 1850s to grant a
monopoly franchise for its coal supplies (an enormous operation at the
time) to south Wales steam anthracite.

The impact of the coal boom on Welsh society, politics and culture
cannot be under-emphasised. In 1851 Wales had a little over a million
inhabitants; in 1914 it had something over two million and a half. In
1851 a third of the male workforce was employed in agriculture and
around 10 per cent in coal; by 1914, the positions had been reversed. In
1850, south Wales exported half a million tons of coal; in 1913 nearly
40 millions. And, highly significantly, from the mid point of the
nineteenth century to the First World War, comparisons of immigration
and emigration patterns not only within the British state but between
European countries shows that Welsh industrial development marched out
of synch with processes underway elsewhere: industrial Wales boomed
while industrial Britain began to stagnate. In short, industrial
capitalism developed later in Wales than in the rest of Britain, but it
developed markedly more rapidly. And it is this process that gave birth
to the specific social formation that today we call Wales.

Clearly, this process was not one of colonisation. In Gwyn Alf Williams'
words, Wales was transformed practically overnight from 'a marginal
province into a sector of an imperial economy.' The title of the book
from which this quotation is taken is _When Was Wales?_: and the answer
to this question seems to me to be that in any meaningful sense Wales
itself was born here, mid nineteenth century. Any account which dates
the birth of this particular foundling any earlier necessarily bases
itself on mythology and whimsy.

How did the explosion of the coal industry kill the Welsh language? For
the bourgeoisie and aspirant bourgeoisie quite simply the clear path for
advancement and enrichment lay through the British Empire rather than an
independent Wales. This meant not only adopting the English language as
their own but also burying forever any thoughts of Welsh nationhood. The
brief fluttering of a Welsh nationalist movement at the end of the
nineteenth century - Cymru Fydd (in English, literally, 'Wales Will Be',
prominent among whose leaders was a young, ambitious Liverpool-born
lawyer by the name of David Lloyd George) - was simultaneously both
birth pang and death agony of authentic bourgeois Welsh nationalism. In
this case, class was to win won out over nation.

As for the working class of Wales, it was face with a parallel choice:
Liberalism, or its own parties and unions. As for its relation with the
language, it seems that in many places a collective decision was taken
to use English as the language of political struggle: the boom in the
coalfield attracted not only migrants from rural Wales but from
elsewhere in Britain, Ireland, Spain, Italy and eastern Europe. From
surviving documentary evidence, we know that many predominantly
Welsh-speaking coalfield areas chose to conduct their politics in
English. What happened in the coalfield is best summarised by the
following anecdote:

'In 1909 at a meeting of the Rhondda district of the Fed [South Wales
Miners' Federation], the chairman asked: "Is there anyone here who wants
the resolution in Welsh?" The reply - "Everyone here understands
English."' [4]

But the supplanting of Liberalism in the working class movement by an
admixture of syndicalism and Labourism was only one part of the top to
bottom reconstruction of Welsh society and politics. Also set adrift
were processes which were to result in the next wave of popular Welsh
nationalism. Petty bourgeois and rural layers, previously trenchant in
their Liberalism, were cast adrift with their interests apparently
undefended. The state now entered the smallest rural land-holding to
conscript a youth whose deaths would be relayed back in a foreign
language: English. Migration to the coalfield compounded rural
depopulation and debt. Key in the construction of a response to these
dislocations of rural society was a section of the Welsh-speaking
intelligentsia: despite church disestablishment, land reform, the
setting up of a University of Wales - i.e. the achievement of a
substantial chunk of the programme of Cymru Fydd - the unremitting
retreat of Liberalism, the growing division between town and country
(especially as perceived in language terms) led to the establishment in
1925 of Plaid Cymru (literally: 'The Party of Wales') as a defensive
reflex on their part. Despite the disparate nature of the forces that
came together in the party - a layer of the Welsh-speaking
intelligentsia, a section of the non-conformist clergy, small farmers,
teachers, artists, and a layer of rural workers - they were united by
their opposition to the destruction of the rural way of life and the
erosion of the Welsh language.

Yet Plaid in particular and nationalism in general was to remain
marginal to Welsh politics for two generations: although a tradition of
support for Welsh Home Rule survived in the labour movement - at least
up to the Second World War - this was in the main an inheritance of
Liberalism and as a consequence more associated with the movement's
right wing.

Nevertheless, the first essential point to grasp about modern Welsh
history is that it is not the history of a colony of either England or
the British state: the Wales - especially the south Wales - that was
built in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not an
underdeveloped colony but an *overdeveloped* section of the most
powerful imperialist power in the world.

It is also fundamental to understand that the integration of Wales and
Welsh culture into English/British culture was by and large not forced:
social and economic forces undermined, for example, the language - and
in the context of a chauvinistic culture - but the process was an
organic and voluntary one on the part of the overwhelming bulk of the
Welsh.

It is necessary to make these points - to cut the thicket of nationalist
mythology back a little - because of the pernicious misunderstandings
that prevail on the left in relation to the national question, both in
general and in relation to the British state. The point is that is not
necessary to either 'prove' the prior existence in history of a 'Welsh
nation' by objective criteria or to 'prove' the existence of a colonial
relationship or material oppression before accepting that
self-determination is either valid or necessary in a particular
situation. As I have made these points repeatedly on this list I shall
not go into them further here, other than to comment that to by going
down this road in relation to Wales you not only end up making something
of a fool of yourself [5] but also that you end up making a case for
national (and in this case Welsh) self-determination which is
particularly easy to shoot down.

To return to our story. The coal economy that was built in the latter
half of the nineteenth century was nothing if not an *imperial* economy:
Britannia ruled the waves and the Welsh dug its coal. Consequently, the
fortunes of the former followed those of the empire. The peak of south
Welsh coal production - both in terms of output and numbers of workers
(I normally hesitate about using the word 'manpower' but here this is
what it was) was 1913; and as the British empire went into relative
decline so did Wales, although the word 'relative' is most decidedly
inapposite. The scale of the social and economic catastrophe that was
wrought in the 1920s and 1930s is difficult to grasp: between 1921 and
1939 official figures (which probably underestimate the phenomenon) tell
us that the population of Wales fell by something of the order of 20 per
cent, i.e. one person in five left - many of them on foot - in search of
work (the population of Wales did not return to its 1921 level until the
1960s). But this catastrophe was accompanied by a very high level of
political radicalism, typified not only by the struggles against scab
unionism in the coalfield and against the government's new means testing
for unemployment assistance (struggles accompanied by incredibly deep
and sophisticated levels of organisation at the community level) but
also by a significant degree of internationalism: witness the campaign
for aid - and volunteers - for the Spanish revolution. [6] Needless to
say, the secular struggles of the southern working class movement left
little space for nationalist concerns, and, in turn, Plaid Cymru, with
its almost exclusive concern with matters cultural, could see little
utility in the working class agenda: 'Pentecostal utopianism,' declared
Saunders Lewis, referring to working class radicalism, 'Is the curse of
the country.'

Like much of war-torn Europe, from the later 1940s Wales underwent a
significant degree of social and economic restructuring, much of it
prompted and impelled by British-state government interventionism;
indeed, what was implemented in Wales at this time can be understood as
something of a mini-Marshall Plan all of its own. The major extractive
industries declined sharply in importance in the Welsh economy, to be
replaced by manufacturing, services and construction [7]. This process
of economic restructuring was accompanied by a parallel phenomenon of
administrative devolution, a process itself bolstered by the increasing
- if temporary - acceptance of Keynesian ideas. Bodies such as the Welsh
Advisory Council of the Ministry of Reconstruction began to work out
policies which would combine economic restructuring with the maintenance
of social peace. A single Welsh Gas Board was set up. Government offices
were moved to south Wales: the Royal Mint to Llantrisant, the DVLC to
Swansea, the Passport Office to Newport. In 1964, the Wilson government
created the cabinet position of Welsh Minister, and the administrative
department of the Welsh Office.

The fundamental consequence for our purposes here is that this dual
process - the restructuring of the economy and the restructuring of the
state - created new social layers with a vested interest in a more
developed state structure in Wales. It was these layers - mainly petty
bourgeois and/or white collar workers, but - later - combined with more
traditional sectors of the working class and radicalising students (this
last especially evident in the campaigns led by Cymdeithas yr Iaith
Gymraeg - The Welsh Language Society, formed in 1962), that lay the
basis in the 1960s for the rise of the third, and so far most recent,
rise of a nationalist movement in Wales.

The electoral scene that was to confront a quite literally rejuvenated
and resurgent Plaid Cymru was of course dominated by this point almost
completely by Labour, although by the turn of the decade Labour
dominance had begun to slip a little from that near total achieved in
1966 when it won 60 per cent of the popular vote in Wales and when only
four Welsh seats were not held by Labour. [8]

Of course, it had been the 1945?51 Labour governments that had
consolidated Labour's hold over the working class in Wales and the
bureaucracy's hold over the party. In the post?war period Labour in
Wales presented an increasingly abhorrent, chauvinistic and
paternalistic face to the world. With the Welsh economy increasingly
dependent on the British state, for a significant period Welsh Labour
provided both foot?soldiers and generals for the Labourite bureaucracy
in Britain. It is noteworthy that three successive Labour leaders in the
1970's and 1980's - Callaghan, Foot and Kinnock - were MPs with Welsh
constituencies: over this period Welsh Labour played a role analogous to
that played by the Scottish Labour mafia in the 1990s.

It was into the Labourist redoubt that Plaid was to burst. The
springboard was to be Carmarthen, to the west of the coalfield, where
Gwynfor Evans, the leader of the party, won a shock by-election to
become the party's first ever MP. In the general elections of 1970 the
party lost the seat, but its overall vote just topped 11 per cent, and
it won surprising support in the valleys themselves. In 1976 the party
won control of Merthyr and Rhymny councils (at he heart of the
coalfield); its three Westminster MPs spent the 1970s propping up the
minority Wilson-Callaghan government of 1974-9.

Since this point to almost the present day, Plaid has maintained this
more or less ten percent share of the vote in elections in Wales, though
its most solid base of support - from where it gets its MPs - is in the
west and north (Gwynedd and Caerfyrddin?Carmarthen and its hinterland in
particular). Nevertheless, Plaid has also consistently picked up
something of a protest vote - small but significant - in the south Wales
coalfield valleys.

Where does Plaid fit into the political spectrum in Welsh politics?
Although ostensibly a 'nationalist' party, of petty bourgeois origins,
Plaid has since the 1980s maintained itself on a programme of
'independence in Europe' (a plain contradiction in terms) coupled with a
mild and largely inoffensive social democracy. Yet even this gentle
appeal to 'social justice' begins to look radical against the new model
Blairite Labour Party, especially when measured against the degree of
social and economic crisis that Wales has suffered since the 1974
recession burst the post-WW2 Keynsian restructuring bubble, and
especially following the appalling consequences of the Thatcher
governments' crash-and-burn restructuring of the British economy.

And it is in this context that we see the Plaid's recent breakthroughs
in the traditional Labour heartlands of the south, in both the 1999
Assembly elections and last year's general elections [9]. Has a mould
been broken in Wales? It really is too early to say, but it is possible,
on the strength of the analysis offered above, to draw some general
conclusions.

Modern Wales is clearly not in good shape. Although the processes of
reorganisation and restructuring in Welsh society and economy that are
described above are long term trends with deep historical roots, the
Thatcher governments and their successors of the 1980s and 90s variously
consolidated, sharpened and exacerbated them to such a degree that 1979
can be regarded as something of a watershed in the evolution of Welsh
society. The legacy that faced today is both manifest and devastating.
There has been a structural increase in male unemployment, a lowering of
wage rates and a fall in trade union membership. All this has
facilitated an intensification of the labour process and a reduction in
the limited degree of control that workers once had over the rhythms of
production. Aggregate economic activity has declined. Some new jobs have
come, but on the basis of labour that is both cheap and flexible; and
they have been more than offset by the old traditional jobs that have
gone forever. In the south Wales valleys and in much of rural Wales
underdevelopment and poverty reign. If there were grounds for belief in
the immediate post war period that capital could alleviate the
structural inadequacies of the Welsh economy that led to the social
catastrophe of the 1920's and 1930's then the last 30 years should have
buried those illusions forever.

Of course, many illusions do persist in Wales today: as ever, mass
consciousness lags reality. Nowhere is this more clear than when we
measure the inadequacy of the present political leadership of the Welsh
working class against the contemporary realities and the historical
necessities that are today posed. If one conclusion can be drawn here,
it is the necessity of constructing new leaderships that measure up
rather better to the aspirations of the working class in Wales. Space
permits only the briefest outline of the strategic contours of this
process.

Outside of revolutionary crises, the working class follows its
traditional organisations, which themselves reflect the 'normal'
conservatism of the mass of the class. The mainstream political
character of the traditional organisations of the working class in
Britain today - Labourism - owes its dominant position to the nature of
the privileged labour aristocracy in Britain of the late nineteenth
century, which, because of its beneficial position, was not able or not
willing to challenge the British bourgeoisie politically, i.e. at the
level of the state. From this position developed the main political
traits of Labourism: the separation of economic struggles from
'politics', the trade unions forming the future political party, the
working class of Scotland, Wales and England accommodating themselves to
the Union because it was considered generally acceptable and because
political struggle against it was regarded as  subordinate to 'economic'
issues.

The fact that the working class in Wales more unanimously vote Labour
than their English sisters and brothers does not reflect a political
'immaturity' but rather indicates that they are further along the road
to discovering that Labourism will betray them. This is a discovery that
they will have to make for themselves: they are not at this stage going
to listen to a small band of revolutionary desperados telling them what
lies at the end of this road. The best revolutionaries can do at this
stage is to assist the development of this process.

Integral to this overall development in Wales is the centrality of the
national question: questions of Welsh self?government and autonomy will
remain at the heart of the political agenda in Wales in the long term,
not least because the pattern of industrial decline partially precludes
the prospect of gains through 'economic' struggle. The development of
the consciousness of the working class and the resolution of the
problems of leadership in the long term in Wales will revolve around the
intersection and supersession of nationalism and Labourism.

This informs what revolutionaries do today in Wales. I have elsewhere
argued on this list that the twin demands for Welsh self-government and
for a united states of Europe need to be at the heart of revolutionary
politics in Wales; indeed, I'm going to be demagogic and claim that a
revolutionary movement that does not grasp the fundamental nature of
these tow questions will not lead the revolution.

Some will claim that the call for self-government fosters nationalism;
but it should by now be clear from the above that if there is a
nationalist movement in Wales it is there precisely because both labour
and Labour have *failed* dismally to address real national grievances.
It is never the workers' movement's championing of national demands that
bolsters national sentiment but precisely a sectarian approach to them.

Regarding the question of Europe, it is necessary to emphasise the
importance of internationalist concerns. By this is suggested more than
solidarity with struggles in other countries, especially those dominated
by imperialism (in particular our own), necessary though this is. It
also suggests the fact that the international nature of capitalism (and,
by implication, of its successor, socialism) has penetrated ordinary
people's consciousness to the degree that purely national solutions to
the social crisis appear increasingly untenable, be they solutions posed
by traditional Welsh nationalists of the old school or by the little
Englander Europhobes of the Labour (or Tory) right. Twenty years ago the
rallying cry of the left was the Bennite slogan of 'Britain out of the
Common Market'; today we have to say more. Alongside convinced
opposition to the economic and political strictures of Maastricht we
also have to advance positive notions of common European (and world)
development. The idea that the United States of Europe is the necessary
task of the working class also has to be at the heart of a revolutionary
view of the measures necessary to resolve the social crisis.


NOTES

[1] Ceri Evans, 'For Welsh Self-government and Socialism', unpublished,
1996.

[2] The 'Welsh Not' was a wooden sign hung around the neck of a child
found speaking Welsh. In order to be free of the sign, the child had to
find and inform on another child speaking Welsh: the Not was then duly
passed on. The child wearing found wearing it at the end of the day
would be beaten.

[3] As, for example, the report of the Commissioners of Inquiry for
South Wales (1844), which argued that: 'The people's ignorance of the
English language practically prevents the working of the laws and
institutions and impedes the administration of justice.' This report led
to another Royal Commission, held in 1847, whose report is what has come
to be called 'Brad y Llyfrau Gleision' - The Treachery of the Blue Books
('Blue' after the colour of the binding): the inability of the
Welsh-speaking children interviewed to answer simple questions was put
down to ignorance, and the habit of speaking Welsh variously blamed for
dirtiness, laziness, ignorance, superstition, promiscuity and
immorality. The report concluded that: 'The Welsh language is a vast
drawback to Wales and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and
commercial prosperity of the people. It is not easy to over-estimate its
evil effects.' The point about the Blue Books is not their sickeningly
reactionary and ignorant character, which stands clear enough, but that
they were never, because they did not need to be, implemented.
Parenthetically, it is also interesting to note that the motive of the
Commissions principally arose from the 1839 Newport Insurrection, which
caught the authorities completely on the hop, since it was organised in
a language - Welsh - its police spies did not understand (it is
necessary here to remember that 'physical-force' Chartism was - uniquely
in Britain - the majority current in Wales).

[4] Gwyn Alf Williams, _When Was Wales?_ (Harmondsworth, 1985), 245.

[5] A textbook example of this approach can be seen in Tim Richards'
laughable _A Class History of Wales_, which can be read on the Cymru
Goch website (<http://www.cymrugoch.org/hannes/CHoW_I.htm>).

[6] A struggle typified by the Communist and writer Lewis Jones, who
literally campaigned himself into an early grave over Spain, and whose
two novels _We Live_ and _Cwmardy_ stand as essential background to
understanding both the scale of social and economic catastrophe of the
period as well as its accompanying extreme political radicalism.

[7] It is something of a myth that it was the Thatcher governments that
were responsible for the decline of he Welsh coal industry. All Thatcher
did was administer the coup de grace, since the industry had already
suffered decades of decline prior to 1979: between nationalisation in
1947 and the oil crisis in 1974 150 collieries and 75,000 jobs had
disappeared from the coalfield.

[8] In fact, in the latter half of the twentieth century the Labour
Party enjoyed a preponderance of electoral support in the south Wales
valleys there exists practically without equal in the rest of Britain.
The only areas that compare are parts of 'greater' Glasgow (where the
Scottish National Party also vies for the Labour vote), the Yorkshire
Dales and 'greater' Liverpool. In this respect, as in some others, the
south Wales valleys really are sui generis in the British state.

[9] See the analysis I posted at
<http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2002w40/msg00136.htm>

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