FW: A few remarks concerning Wales

["Mark Jones" <markjones011@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Pearn has added another great contribution to this thread about
Wales.

I have a few comments to add.

Gwyn Alf Williams book is indeed seminal but it raises as many or more
questions than it answers, and now we are starting to address these crucial
theoretical issues which each generation of Marxists has to clarify anew in
their own circumstances, reworking the theoretical ideas which informed
earlier discussions. I mean the issues of what constitutes a nation, what is
the relationship between nationality (and nationalism) and the state, and
the relationship between nationality and class. And how do we understand
these questions in the context of modern imperialism?

Wales, like other fringe nations in Europe, is disprivileged in relation to
the larger core nations, typically suffering from higher unemployment, more
deprivation, loss of popular sovereignty and so on. But compared to the
Global South, the Welsh are privileged members of the corrupted metropolitan
proletariats which prey on the rest. The Welsh are part of the 15% of the
world's population which consumes 85% of the global resources and which is
doing most to wreck the global environment; this Golden Billion is the
demographic and popular base for modern imperialism which is doing all it
can to preserve its own position at the expense of the rest. The ongoing oil
wars (aka war on terror) have come about because all of the metropolitan
states/regions are now oil and energy importers, and because global oil and
gas production has now reached the half way mark. In other words, we are
passing thru the Global Hubbert Peak, and after 50% of the world's original
endowment of oil and gas has been pumped out, the laws of physics and the
facts of geology mean that total annual world production is now set to
decline. The imperialist metropolitan states intend to grab a larger share
of an increasingly-smaller pot, and to deny life-chances and social
development (and any degree of social justice and equity) to the five-sixths
of the world which currently have little or no access to modern cheap forms
of energy. This energy crisis is only one aspect of the overall and
underlying general crisis of capital, but it is a defining one.

The Wall Street Journal and media generally are already celebrating the
return of cheap oil in the wake of the US capture of the raq oilfields which
is already factored-in as a foregone conclusion--oil at $10 a barrel will
reignite growth in the West. But this low price will also mean utter social
and economic devastation for the masses in Russia, the Middle East, Mexico,
Venezuela, Nigeria, Angola, and all the other Opec oil producing states
which are the energy breadbasket for the West but are themselves being
plundered and despoiled, just as Wales was plundered for its coal a century
ago.

And a low oil price will also destroy any attempt at finding alternative,
sustainable, non-global warming forms of energy. What it will do is fuel an
industrial boom in China and India resulting in the creation of a mass
automobile market and middle class suburban culture in those
countries--which would be a developmental strategy dictated by Western
corporations but in itself an act of unconditional surrender of their own
future by the Chinese and Indian elites, and an act of supreme historical
folly as well. Not only will this last glory-day of the petroleum economy
aggravate global warming and threaten overwhelming climate change, it will
also ensure that in 20 years time (assuming this preposterous scheme doesn't
result in thermonuclear war long before) when the Iraqi oil-splurge or
boomlet is finally busted, world capitalism will face still grimmer
scenarios and choices than it does today.

Today it is clear that capitalist growth in the metropoles can only resume
by means of a savage war waged on the defenceless, multibillioned masses of
the Global South. But there are no easy solutions. The idea hyped by some
Greens that it is possible to smoothly transition to an alternative future,
one that is sustainable in both energy and enironment terms, is complete
bullshit. It cannot happen. Only socialism can prevent a new Dark Ages, but
it too must involve huge sacrifices especially by those of us among the
Golden Billion. There is just no way round this. A socialist alternative
thus equally involves huge and terrible choices, it entails a massive
redistribution of wealth and power from the North to the South.
Revolutionaries in the North (even in Wales!) have a duty to argue, not only
for a United (socialist) States of Europe, but for a socialist
redistribution to our working class brothers and sisters in Africa, Latin
America and Asia, not just out of solidarity, but as a necessary political
sacrifice (like rationing in wartime) to save us all from looming and final
catastrophe.

What happened historically in Wales is only a historical exemplar of what
happened to marginal nations and states everywhere during the rise of the
West and of industrial capitalism and modern imperialism.

Of course, all that Michael Pearn says about the unreliability of my
'romanticised' view of Welsh history is true on its face. I agree. Yes, I
'bent the stick' too far in one direction. That's because *ALL* the
histories I know, from right or left, including Williams, pretty much concur
with the view Mike Pearn  takes: that the Brythonic warrior-prince castes
were actually a bad lot, that they were slave-holders 'when the English
already weren't') [this isn't actually true, and what's more the history of
the English Middle Ages is about the submerging of a free peasantry into
feudal duress, but anyway], and I agree when he says that the Brythonic
princes mostly had no interest in state-formation or in the fate of their
own people. Mostly, but one or two did, and those were the ones who
immediately connected with the masses and became lightning conductors for
mass anger at Anglo-Norman colonialism.

Yes, they lived by the blood-feud and each little valley was its own
kingdom; their civil wars, or more likely, cattle-raids, wife-stealing,
hostage-taking, revenge-seeking mob violence, to describe most of it as it
really was, were not the hallmarks of a great and ascendant world
civilisation. All true. But it is also true that a nation subject to the
exterminist competition of larger and more powerful neighbours, either
disappears entirely or it resists. If there is a Welsh language spoken at
all, that is because of deep and long-enduring popular resistance. Are there
any Irish, Cornish or Scottish communities a million-strong speaking a
non-English language? I don't think so. You have to look far and wide to
find such phenomena, but here is one that survived right in the belly of the
imperial beast. We should at least acknowledge its existence and marvel at
the popular resistance it demonstrated, and not simply rush past it as if
this is simply an embarrassing reminder of Victorian sentimentalising. It is
not that.

There is no communist utopia to be found in the past, and that includes the
Welsh past. Nevertheless, in 13th century Wales you had a society
characterised by solidarity, the complete absence of money (there are no
Welsh coins with Llyelwyn Fawr's face on them), and a nobility which,
whatever its faults, was free to live among its people and did not have to
hide in castles like the  Normans (castles being the gated communities of
the day).

Between 1200 and 1240, this was a period of national consolidation and
successful struggle against the English. It was not successful, as was true
of such struggles generally in Europe. But this history shows an important
thing, which has been shown countless other times in different struggles
too: The concept of the nation did not originate in the minds of princes or
bishops but arose out of the common struggle of people who shared a
language, genealogy and birthplace. People from a common ethnoterritorial
and linguistic origin formed nations (to use the Leninist definition).
Nations arose deep in the midst of the masses; princes were neutral, cynical
or opposed to such ideas until they found ways to incorporate them and wrap
the popular banner round their own ambitions.

Speaking as Leninists and Marxists, we can only regard nations as sites of
historical and ideo-cultural struggle, in the first instance. In the Welsh
context, nobody ought to better articulate the dreams, hopes and popular
myths at the heart of Welsh nationalism than we do. But then we ought to
relentlessly deconstruct and criticise the national idea, stripping from it
its mythical, atavistic, chauvinist layers and showing that the material
content of the national idea is always *class struggle*, and that the
totemic elements of national myths are always to begin with accidental,
contingent things, not divine gifts or Arks of the Covenant, things which
have to be worked upon in the process of becoming the cultural artefacts
that can be placed on the  altars of nationalism and can become reliable
controls of popular consciousness available for use (i.e., cynical
manipulation) by the ruling class. What we cannot do is simply ignore or
turn our backs on the national idea just because we are self-confessed
internationalists and we don't like the arcane, atavistic primitiveness of
nationalism. Because that is to turn our backs on what is most formative and
constitutive of popular and even individual consciousness and of people feel
themselves to be in the world, how they makes sense of their everyday lives,
families, births and deaths. We ignore that only if we are happy to be
marginalised and politically irrelevant.

But I repeat that Mike Pearn has written some great and really elucidating
stuff here.

When Mike says:

> 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.

This is hugely important and undoubtedly true; in fact, as was true from
medieval times and before, the reworking of specifically Welsh national
myths and the national idea, was always carried on in spirited dialogue with
the preoccupations and claims of the English. From the times of Gerald of
Wales (writing in the late 12th century) there were always people who
themselves came of mixed stock (Gerald hailed from Norman barons) who
identified with the Welsh cause and yet sought to assimilate that cause to
the greater and seemingly invincible logic of imperial England
(incidentally, Gerald too ranted on about the self-defeating behaviours and
ludicrous, posturing pomposity of the Welsh self-styled 'princes'--but you
only do that if you believe that something ELSE is possible and also worth
doing--that there is some point to the Welsh dreamworld of Arthurian tales
which one would prefer the locals to live up to, rather than just forget).

I agree completely with Mike that

> 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.

On the history and provenance of the Welsh language we obviously don't agree
but I think this is a matter, like much else, which just needs more time and
forensic discussion to clarify.

Mark


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