A few remarks concerning Wales

[michael pearn <neprimerimye@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ed George has written an interesting piece about Wales
and I hope to comment further on it and on Mark Jones
rather more romantic piece at a later date. But for
now I?ll content myself with a few brief comments.

When discussing the creation of an Imperial Wales in
the nineteenth century Ed makes reference to Gwyn Alf
Williams work When Was Wales? It?s a superb little
book which I would urge any comrade wanting to know
more about Wales to obtain. But Williams point
concerning Imperial Wales was that this Wales was only
the most recent in a series of historical constructs
which we now call Wales. That the roots of this Wales
can be traced to the eighth century or earlier is true
but until the nineteenth century there was, there
could be, no nation as such. Indeed much of Williams
book is concerned to refute the idea that there has
been a Welsh nation predating the rise of the Imperial
stage of capitalism. His little book originated as
part of a famous polemic on exactly this subject
conducted  as a landmark television series. But
Williams never denied that a Welsh people had an
historic existence prior to the rise of Imperialism.
On the contrary he clearly discusses the continuity
between the Cymry and the current predominately
Anglophone Welsh nation. In certain respects he
exaggerates this continuity I believe and a more
developed approach would indicate the considerable
discontinuities involved in the founding of a Welsh
nation.

Williams himself personified many of the
contradictions of being Welsh. He was bilingual at a
time when Cymraeg was still under attack within
official society, although he lived to see that
reversed in many ways. He was intensely proud of the
community from which he sprang, in all its parochial
narrowness, but was also an intellectual with a
considerable range of interests. His works including
pioneering translations of Gramsci, a book on Goya, as
well as work on the French revolution and his history
of the Merthyr Rising of 1931. Politically too he
became a member of the party which best attempted to
articulate the hopes and needs of the working class of
the South Wales Valleys from which he hailed, the
Communist Party of Great Britain. But this
ideologically sterile group could never hope to hold a
thinker as fecund as Williams and he conducted a
dialogue with the revolutionary currents which
flourished in the early 70's. But despite his
socialism he ended as a member of the nationalist
Plaid Cymru.

In many ways the Welsh intelligentsia, and there was
such a thing in a way that there never was in England,
of which Williams was one of the most outstanding
examples, has been destroyed as Welsh society and
culture has been homogenised within the dominant
Anglo-American post imperial culture of today. But
Williams life illustrates its contradictions in a way
few others could and that is part of his immense but
neglected contribution. By contrast Saunders Lewis,
the obscurantist theoretician and poet, is outside the
comprehension of most in Wales today. Lewis however is
still lauded by many nationalists and seen even by his
detractors as being the twentieth century?s most
important figure in terms of the development of a
Welsh nation. And so in some respects the founder of
Plaid Cymru, the inspirer of Cymdeithas yr Iaith
Gymraeg and the acclaimed national poet he was must
be. But of what relevance today is his vision of
Wales? Mark it well for his vision of this country was
rural, Welsh speaking and socially conservative, he
was a Catholic conservative in a country where
Calvinistic Methodism was almost a national religion
in both language communities. The certainties of such
a man have no lessons and nothing to teach socialists
in the Wales of tomorrow. But the questioning dialogue
of Gwyn Alf most certainly does repay a careful
examination.

One point that should also be made before passing on
is that just as Williams analyses the birth of the
modern Welsh nation as coming with the triumph of
Imperialism is that this nation and it?s accompanying
nationalism was not formed in contradiction to British
nationalism. On the contrary the advocates of the
Welsh nation within the Liberal Party, David Lloyd
George and the short lived Cymru Fydd movement, and
within society as a whole, including the workers
movement, were firmly committed to a British
patriotism and to its Imperial destiny. There was then
no contradiction between British and Welsh
nationalisms, they were neither distinct from each
other or opposed to one another. Rather they were
complementary parts of the identities of the
individuals and people who embraced them and for many
this is still true. That these two identities have
become more and more separated in recent years is one
of the themes of post war history in Wales. But this
does not and need not mean that socialists should draw
the conclusion that Wales must form an independent
state.

One aspect of both Ed and Marks pieces that struck me
with force was the fashion in which both wrote about
their own specific Wales in a psycho-geographical
sense. Ed, a product of Swansea and South Wales, wrote
of Wales as if this history could be seen as the
history of Wales as a whole, at least from the
nineteenth century. This I accept was not Ed?s
intention but his piece lacked any attempt to show the
differences between both North and South Wales. Mark
too wrote as if his Wales was the only Wales and in
some respects displayed the most grotesque romanticism
of the Welsh speaking nationalists which serves to
merely entrench the divide that has run between the
two language communities all too often. 

Therefore I would like to briefly mention a few of
Marks historical assertions and indicate why they are
false to the core and mere inventions of chauvinism
just as much as the English history he rightly rejects
is a creation of nationalist myth makers. He writes of
their being four Welsh Kingdoms and names three of
them. But this is not the case in fact. The term
Kingdom never being used in either English or Welsh as
far as I am aware. Rather there were a series of Welsh
principalities which from the sixth century to the
final extinction of Gwynedd fought among themselves
for dominance. Each of the three leading
principalities in turn becoming hegemonic over the
others. But there were also many others smaller
princes who at one time or another seized power in
their own small areas. What is for certain is that the
suggestion that such petty lordlings could unite and
form a political entity with enough internal cohesion
to resist the feudal state based on London is an
ahistorical nonsense.  Each and every one of these
princes, to give them a dignity which they all aspired
to but seldom made secure, was as much an exploiter of
the peasantry as the King of England ever was. Mark
also writes of a time when Wales was an independent
Kingdom. A myth if ever there was one. At no point in
history did a single prince hold the whole of Wales in
his control for even a moment. The nearest that they
came to this was with Llewelyn the Great, Prince of
Gwynedd. But even his control of much of South Wales
was fleeting and the coastal regions of the south were
seldom even raided. 

Mark indulges himself in much national myth making and
even seems to regret that the Arthurian tales became
the common property of a European culture. But perhaps
the most offensive, I?m sorry but no other term fits,
is his claim that the Welsh are the descendants of the
ancient Romano-Brythones. That they (we?) are the
claimants to an older better culture by virtue of the
fact that the privileged classes of medieval Welsh
society - a society which preserved slavery when the
English invaders had long abandoned it - were the
bearers of a literate culture in contrast to the Saxon
barbarians. And this claim is bolstered by the
evidence of a tiny sampling of DNA! Taken literally
this is racism of the most foolish, because naive,
kind and I am sure that such is far from Marks
meaning. Rest assured Mark that the princes you write
so fondly of may have been descended from Troy but the
peasants most certainly were not. And those of us
whose families only came here in the last hundred
years are we not Welsh too though even dreams of Troy
are not ours?

Finally Mark discusses the Welsh language as dating
from the Ice Age and surviving as an act of
resistence. The latter is most certainly true but the
language itself is not among the oldest, if not the
oldest, as many nationalists will claim. Rather it is
among the youngest. Allow me to illustrate this by a
personal experience. A number of years ago
translations of slogans were needed for posters at
Cardiff University, a translation service is available
but these were needed urgently, and my comrades and I
asked a native Welsh speaker to do the honours. He did
but it transpired they were of very poor quality.
Another comrade, who hailed from the same valley but
only learnt Welsh as a second language eventually did
correct translations. The point being that the native
Welsh speaker had learnt his tongue at his Mothers tit
and learnt the dying dialect of just that one small
locality. The comrade who learned Welsh in her teens
learned a language which only became standardised in
recent years, long after English for example. As Mark
will know where there are major differences between
the language as spoken in the north and south the
usual rule has been for the northern version to
prevail. A consequence of the domination of that area
culturally within the Welsh speaking communities. 

More generally on the language question I was somewhat
surprised to read Ed?s comments that the abandonment
of Welsh was voluntary on the part of many workers.
For while this is indeed true so too are Marks
comments which indicate that the continued adherence
to Welsh was an act of resistence on the part of many.
The difference between these two positions is largely
geographical I would suggest. In South Wales it is
certainly the case that large sections of the working
class did voluntarily adopt English as their own. As
is clear from the evidence large areas of South Wales,
Welsh speaking in the Eighteenth century, were by the
beginning of the twentieth virtually English and even
monolingual. But this is far less true of North Wales
where the boundaries between English and Welsh
speaking areas has remained remarkably static until
very recently. Given these geographical considerations
both parties are correct but ed?s account does need
supplementing in one respect. For while it is true
that many workers voluntarily abandoned Welsh it
should not be neglected that Welsh was systematically
discriminated against. Thus educational provision was
largely in English whether provided by Chapel or
state. Had Welsh speakers wished to retain their
language in such circumstances would then have found
all of society set against them, the element of
coercion cannot be simply wished away.

As a last point I should point out that Llanwern
Steelworks is still operating or was when I passed it
last week. Its role in producing steel has ended but
most of the plant still operates for the now. Without
doubt it will close but it?s lifetime  is to be
counted in years not months. Nor did anywhere near 600
men die in its construction.

=====
For Communism 

Mike Pearn

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