In Part 1 of this blogpost, I referred to Black Lives Matter (BLM) being a movement that challenges the self-image of nations whose symbols and icons include celebration of their imperialist pass. Implicitly, the accepted symbolic message carried by the flag and the national anthems of both the US and Great Britain contains a celebration of the imperial history of these nations. The Black Lives Matter movement, in challenging this self-image and highlighting the role that slavery and exploitation of other peoples played in the creation of the wealth of those nations has effectively exacerbated an already existing crisis of national identity. This crisis, in Britain, had become abundantly apparent in divisions over the Brexit referendum. In the United States, during the last presidential election, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and his ubiquitous use of the symbols of the Stars and Stripes and national anthem created a desire, including in many of the victims of the economic crisis, for a return of US imperial supremacy. It demonised foreigners, especially immigrants. This galvanised the de-industrialised so-called “red states”, including many of the remnants of the defeated industrial working class, to vote for him. The opposition was centred mainly in the big cities and other areas with a high concentration of black and other ethnic minority populations who largely rejected Trump’s interpretation of the national ethos. They wanted a different nation to be built in the future.
In this part, I will explore the relationship between nation, empire and class in the context of this crisis of national identity exacerbated by the BLM movement. Since the results of the Brexit referendum were announced in 2016, this inter-relationship has been the focus of my thinking.
What can Scotland, England and Wales’ responses to Brexit tell us about nationalism?
In approaching this issue, I investigated how the remnants of English, Scottish and Welsh working classes in the now de-industrialised areas of those countries had voted and found that in Wales voting had largely followed the English pattern of solidly backing “leave”, but in the Scotland the vote had been uniformly for remain. In fact, in the whole of Scotland only one constituency seems to have voted leave, Banff and Buchan. I felt that if an explanation for this were found, it could tell us a great deal about the roots of different kinds of nationalism. I asked everyone I knew if they could provide a hypothesis, but no-one could.
My own hypothesis was that it might have something to do with the relationship of the working class to imperialism, but at that stage it remained as vague as that. I wondered whether the well-established affection of significant sections of the traditional English (British?) working class for the Union Jack and the Queen could be an indication that it also identified with empire and felt its benefits.
I delved into the historical literature on the relationship of the working class to nationalism and patriotism and found an ongoing unresolved debate dating back to the end of the 19th. Century. The main problem, recognised by historians, is that it is exceedingly difficult to establish what the working class actually felt. For instance, whilst there is a lot of evidence of working class support for the many forms of patriotic mourning for the war dead, including Armistice Day, rituals like the Cenotaph ceremonies and the two-minute silence observed throughout the empire, could it not be said “that were they for many workers a grim reminder of sacrifices unrewarded, of being thrown on the slag heap after 1918” ?1. There is also plenty of evidence of popular support for the monarchy in such events as street parties organised to celebrate the Queen’s jubilee, but many historians question whether this represents anything more than an excuse to enjoy a spirit of community and a party. The upsurge of patriotism that surrounded the Falklands war, which appeared to engulf the working class and led to Thatcher’s runaway victory at the subsequent election, caused a great deal of soul-searching on the British left and led to the History Workshop holding a national conference on patriotism.
However, the literature on the left’s view of the relationship of the working class to the monarchy and empire seems, throughout its history, to revolve around two themes. The first is to ascribe the apparent manifestations of affection on the part of the working class for the monarchy and empire and expressions of patriotism as a form of “false consciousness” created deliberately by the bourgeoisie playing on the irrational side of people’s minds. Often the ‘aristocracy of labour’ is identified as the vehicle for this. Lenin made considerable use of it.2
The other constant theme was to try to redeem patriotism and nationalism for the left by using alternative symbols to identify the nation to create an ‘alternative radical and pluralistic patriotism’.3 Orwell was a major contributor in The Lion and the Unicorn. Danny Boyle’s choreography of the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics as an homage to the NHS could perhaps be understood along these lines. It achieved some degree of success and has resonated to this day, during the pandemic. The latest expression of this line of thinking can be found in a recent Soundings editorial which begins: ‘One of the key problems for the left today is to find a better story about who we are as a country’.
I couldn’t find in the historic literature any suggestion that the industrial working class might have actually benefitted from empire and that therefore its attraction to its symbols could possibly be a genuine expression of economic interest rather than false consciousness.
Possible support for this hypothesis came from debates within Marxist economics. The idea that the working class of industrialised countries might have benefited from imperialism was first suggested in 1962 by Arghiri Emmanuel through the concept of unequal exchange. His work was very controversial, as it posed major challenges to the standard left assumption since Marx that the working class of industrial countries constituted the main agent for the development of socialism. Critiques of Emmanuel’s arguments were numerous and tended to become the accepted orthodoxy in Marxist economics. However, the debate continued to this day. Original contributions were made from different economic perspectives and alternative derivations of the concept have acquired acceptance. A recent paper surveying the debate and making a contribution to it, concludes that
‘(i)n terms of income distribution, unlike Emmanuel’s thesis on Northern workers as exclusive beneficiaries of unequal exchange, value transfers are reflected in both higher profits and higher monetary wages per unit of international homogeneous labor in inflow countries’4.
Thus, it seems that industrial working class expressions of attachment to monarchy and empire might, after all, derive more from the economic benefits it received from it rather than from ‘false consciousness’.
Explaining the apparent difference in the working class Brexit vote in England and Scotland
The search for explanations of the apparent differences in the voting behaviour of the remnants of the English and Scottish industrial working classes in the Brexit referendum finally began to bear fruit when I came across an ethnographic study of the ex-mining town of Cardenden in Fife.5 The study revealed that the move to support Scottish nationalism and vote for the SNP rather than Labour occurred mainly amongst younger residents, including the offspring of miners. The remnants of the mining community and industrial working class had mostly become bitter, disillusioned with New Labour’s abandonment of socialism and tended to vote Labour reluctantly or abstain in elections. It is even possible that they might have voted ‘leave’ in the EU referendum as the constituency in which Clarenden sits (Glenrothes) had a smaller ‘remain’ majority than the average for Scotland. The average remain vote for Scotland was 62% and in Glenrothes it was 52%. The article suggested that newer working class generations had become strongly anti-English and voted SNP. They are also likely to have voted remain.
However, a particular paragraph in the article attracted my attention:
‘Looking at old photographs from past local events hanging on the walls in what was, until 1992, the Miners’ Welfare Institute, in every scene of any communal celebration such as an annual dance, the ubiquitous Union-flag bunting strikes one as belonging to another era as all such decoration has long gone. In proportion to the disappearance of the acceptability of the Union flag, the Scottish saltire flag of St Andrew has grown in popularity and legitimacy as a decorative feature at all such social occasions’.
Scottish miners are well-known to have had amongst the most developed level of class consciousness and militancy in the British working class. Even in defeat, the bitterness at New Labour relinquishing socialism might be understood as a manifestation of this. Therefore, it seemed to me that the presence of the ‘ubiquitous Union-flag bunting’ in miners’ communal celebrations could scarcely be an indication of ‘false consciousness’ imposed upon it by the bourgeoisie. It is more likely to be a spontaneous expression of allegiance to the Union and all it represents.
I therefore decided to delve into the history of the Union and found that historians all persuasions are virtually unanimous in giving the common benefits derived from Empire a central role in cementing the Act of the Union in 1707.6
Scotland played a major role in British industrialisation and Scottish entrepreneurs and inventors feature prominently in the process. Historians argue that the Scottish working class also benefitted:
‘In the years leading up to World War I, the Empire provided employment opportunities and relative prosperity to at least the upper layers of the Scottish working class. Scotland was a world leader in fields of industry such as shipbuilding, railway-engine construction, and metalworking, and much of the production was for imperial market. Not for nothing was Glasgow known as the ‘‘Second City of the Empire’’. Scottish industry trained some of the most skilled artisans in the world, and they became the technical backbone of the new industries of Australasia, southern Africa, Canada, and other parts of the Empire’7
Marxist historian of Scottish nationalism, Tom Nairn, in his The Break-Up of Britain (1977), ascribes the rise of movements tending to break-up the Union to the end of Empire. This is, however, contested.8
The conclusion to this investigation is that it is entirely plausible9 that British industrial working class expressions of patriotism and identification with the Union Jack and the monarchy are, at least partly, an expression of self-interest based on sharing in the spoils of empire. Class struggle, in this context, can be viewed as being both about the division between wages and profits of the value-added in British industry, but also about the division of profits extracted from Empire. Imperialism thus becomes an important element of British national identity shared by the main classes, and the glue that keeps the Union together. It is therefore conceivable that the end of empire should have contributed to the dissolution of British national identity shared by the classes and by Scotland and England.10 The ethnographic case study of the mining town of Clarenden seems to suggest that the remnants of the industrial working class of Scotland may have followed, at least to some extent, the English working class over Brexit and therefore maintained some allegiance to the Union. The disillusion of the most politically conscious elements with New Labour for relinquishing commitment to socialism is shared with those of the politically conscious elements of the English industrial working class. The resulting bitterness contributes to the growth of nostalgia for the past. In the less politically conscious parts of the class, this may have included all that is symbolised by the Union Jack and the monarchy. Hence the attraction of Nigel Farage.
The conundrum, which is beyond the scope of this blog, is why their descendants should have turned to Scottish nationalism and the SNP.
Immigration and the Labour and Socialist Movements
Immigration has played a major role in the recent politics of the de-industrialised countries of Europe and North America. Its rejection has been the source of the rapid growth of far-right and right populist parties and movements. It figured centrally in the Brexit debate in the UK, particularly in the de-industrialised areas of England where foreigners in general, and immigrants in particular were blamed for the loss of jobs.
The issue of immigration has long been a vexed one for the labour and socialist movements and not merely in the guise of international migration. Internal migrations too have created many problems. In Italy, for instance, migrants from the poor and rural South to the industrialising North were viewed with great antipathy by Northern industrial workers and an object of scorn and ridicule. Southern Italy was portrayed as a drain on the wealth being created in the North. This even led to the creation in 1991 of the Lega Nord (Northern League for the Independence of Padania) as a party seeking independence for the North of Italy to which the name of Padania was given.11
In the United States, migration of freed slaves from the Southern states to the industrialising North after the Civil War were seen by industrial workers there, who were becoming unionised, as a source of competition depressing wages. The Democratic Party, which had started life as a slave-owners party of the South, moved to recruit Northern industrial workers, themselves mostly European immigrants, to the U.S. by arguing that the abolition of slavery was bad for them. Its pitch was largely successful and eventually the party became the main political representative of U.S. industrial labour to this day, thus cementing racism in the U.S. white industrial working class. This contributed to its remnants in the de-industrialised so-called red states supporting Trump.12
International migration too has always been viewed with hostility by labour and socialist movements in industrialising countries. In the U.S., immigration was a main issue of contention in the development of the Socialist Party, formed in 1901, the only socialist organisation ever to have had some degree of electoral success in the United States. One of its leading members, Morris Hillquit, managed to convince the 1908 and 1910 party conventions to oppose all immigration on economic grounds and to denounce Asian immigration on racial grounds. He said
the majority of American socialists side with the trade unions in their demand for the exclusion of workingmen of such races and nations as have yet not been drawn into the sphere of modem production and who are incapable of assimilation with the workingmen of the country of their adoption and of joining the organization and struggles of their class.13
Its most famous leader, however, Eugene Debbs, opposed strongly this position.
In England, hostility to Irish immigration dogged the developing labour movement in the 19th. Century and was a major concern for Karl Marx. The First International faced the threat of an internal division over the role played by Irish immigrants in England14. In 1968 thousands of London dockers, one of the most strongly unionised, militant and class conscious group of British workers, went on strike in support of Enoch Powell after he was sacked as a minister for his “Rivers of Blood” anti-immigration speech. One placard in their demonstration read “Back Britain, Not Black Britain”. This has remained one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the British labour movement. In the official Trade Union movements of both the U.S. and the UK, the standard approach to the question of immigration has been to try to avoid talking about the subject as much as possible. The current Labour Party stance towards immigration can only be described as ambiguous.
The problems posed by migration for the labour movement have been said to stem from the political limitations what has been described as trade union consciousness.15 This seeks improvements for labour within the capitalist system without challenging the system as a whole and leads to hostility to fellow class members, the migrants, who appear to threaten the improvements already achieved through trade union struggles. However, as my previous discussion has argued, in imperialist countries this can be further complicated by the fact that the industrial working class has developed a national identity at least partly shaped by the perceived benefits it has received from imperialism, as expressed in the ‘Back Britain, Not Black Britain’ slogan of the London dockers demonstration in support of Enoch Powell. The complication is compounded by the left conceiving the project to achieve a better and more equal society exclusively in national terms through the use of the national state, from which Labour Party ambivalence on the issue of immigration stems.
Black Lives Matter shows that the new working class suffers from no such limitation, although its consciousness as a class has yet to develop.
Conclusions
From this somewhat meandering discussion structured around the development of my line of thinking, we can draw a few tentative conclusions about the relationship between class, nation and empire in the formation of identity.
The first is that in industrial nations with an imperial past, empire may have played an important role in the development of national identity. This national identity is shared between classes with ostensibly contradictory interests because they both share in the spoils of empire. This is the cement that maintains a degree of national unity and underpins the concept of the national interest. In conditions of economic growth, it helps create a degree of political consensus expressed particularly in foreign policy. In the case of the United Kingdom, empire also helped create the Union between England and Scotland and a degree of unity across classes of both nations. This was shattered by the loss of the empire.
In this context, the hope that the industrial working class in industrialised imperialist countries would constitute the main agency to bring about a more just society conceived as (national?) socialism may have always been an illusion. It may have had a stake in imperialism and wasn’t just suffering from artificially produced “false consciousness”. Allegiance to flag and empire may have been based on economic benefits obtained at the expense of other peoples.
The end of the British empire in the post-World War II period coincided with a period of significant economic growth which generated a wave immigration, starting in 1948 with the arrival of the appropriately named Empire Windrush. The empire was coming to Britain. A crisis of national identity, which was kept in check for a while by economic growth, began to brew here. The year 1968, when Powell made his “Rivers of Blood” speech and the London dockers marched in his support, marked the beginning of the end of the post-war boom.
The irony is that it was the neoliberal era initiated in the 1980s by Thatcher in the UK and by Reagan in the U.S. that facilitated the de-industrialisation of both countries and led to the geographic polarisation of their economies, with declining “left behind” de-industrialised areas losing population and growing large cities with thriving service industries. These were increasingly operated by immigrant labour, and became the loci of what I have termed the new working class. When economic growth stalled and then crashed in 2008 (and again now), a full scale social crisis developed, including one of national identity. People originating in the empire and their descendants now constitute a significant proportion of the population of the imperialist countries. They, in particular the young, are challenging its previous national self-image and they are being supported by native members of their generation.
Black Lives Matter can be interpreted as a revolt of the new working class demanding, as the Soundings editorial put it, ‘a better story about who we are as a country’. Unfortunately, the ‘left behind’ are unlikely to sign up to that better story unless drastic economic measures are proposed to improve their condition. This isn’t what capitalism wants, and Boris Johnson will struggle to find the resources to ‘level up’ amidst a major economic crisis brought about by the pandemic.
The crisis of national identity appears unresolvable and the future looks bleak. The Black Lives Matter movement represents our best hope, but is the new working class strong and conscious enough to prevent a further upsurge of neo-fascism? It seems unlikely at the moment, unfortunately. We can but hope.
Alvaro de Miranda
Alvaro de Miranda is retired from the University of East London where he co-founded a Department of Innovation Studies. He came to the UK in 1958 aged 15 to join his parents who were exiles from the Salazar regime in Portugal. Having experienced fascism, he is particularly alarmed with the recent worldwide electoral rise of the far-right and has been following it comparatively in this blog.
2 August 2020
[1]Field, G. “Social Patriotism and the British Working Class: Appearance and Disappearance of a Tradition” Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008 DOI: https://10.1017/S0147547900011212 ↩
For a discussion of the concept and its use by several left writers including Engels, Lenin and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, see the 2012 Monthly Review article by Eric Hobsbawm ‘Lenin and the Aristocracy of Labour’. ↩
See Taylor, M. (1990) ‘Patriotism, History and the Left in Twentieth-Century Britain’, The Historical Journal, p. 986 ↩
Ricci, A. (2019) ‘Unequal Exchange in the Age of Globalization’ Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 51(2) 225–245, https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613418773753 ↩
Gilfillan, P. (2003) ‘Cardenden 1999 : an ethnography of working class nationalism in a Scottish village’ ↩
For an expression of this see, for instance, Armitage, D. (1997) ‘Making the Empire British: Scotland in the Atlantic World, 1542-1707’, Past and Present 155 : 34-63. ↩
Hyslop, J. (2010) ‘Scottish Labour, Race, and Southern African Empire c.1880–1922: A Reply to Kenefick’, International Review of Social History, vol. 55, pp. 63–81 doi:10.1017/S0020859009990629 ↩
Devine, T.M. (2006) ‘The Break-Up of Britain? Scotland and the End of Empire’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 16 (2006), pp. 163-180 https://www.jstor.org/stable/25593865 ↩
I use the word ‘plausible’ judiciously. I couldn’t claim to have proved anything, or even conducted an extensive literature search. Scholars in the various fields from which I have drawn my arguments can no doubt dispute their validity. However, the fact that they hang together as a narrative and a plausible explanation of current events may be seen as contribution to their validation. ↩
I haven’t attempted to provide an explanation for the voting behaviour of the remnants of the Welsh industrial working class over Brexit, but this is less of a puzzle now that I have discovered that the Scottish pattern may not have been so different after all. ↩
The party grew in influence and participated in the government of Italy in a Berlusconi coalition in 1994 and again in 2001. For the 2018 general elections, the party dropped Nord from its name, and became simply La Lega, seeking to transform itself into a national party mainly on the basis of anti- foreign immigrant and xenophobic rhetoric. On this basis, it gained significant support in the South of Italy and shared power on an equal basis with the 5Star Movement. ↩
This story is well told in the post ‘Origins of the U.S. Two-Party System’ by Marxist blogger Sam Williams in his blog entitled A Critique of Crisis Theory. ↩
Mink, G. (1990) Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development, Cornell University Press, p.230 ↩
Deleixhe, M. (2019) ‘Marx, the Irish Immigrant Workers, and the English Labour Movement’, Historical Materialism 27,2, pp 222–247 ↩
The origin of this, from which most subsequent discussion stems, was that of Lenin in chapter 3 of What is to be done? ↩