As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a vagrant – unemployed, on the road, unattached, unaligned, undomesticated, etc. I left school aged 16 in July 1976 during the heatwave, on the 200th anniversary of American independence, at the time of the Israeli special forces raid on the hijacked plane at Entebbe to free the hostages, the Montreal Olympics, and punk rock. ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven’; albeit nearly a hundred miles away from the action. I was there in 1976, as much as I was in 1966 when I broke my arms swinging from a tree after England won the World Cup.

And here is some more- about Vague Number One

In 1978 I went back to Salisbury Tech College to do a building studies course and duly started Vague fanzine; for something to do, other than attempting to play guitar or sing, rather than with any literary aspirations. The original Vague editorial team consisted of the cartoonist Perry Harris, the Dutch poser Iggy Zevenbergen, Sharon Clarkson and Chris Johnson from the art college, and Jane Austin and Christine Nugent from Mere. The first Vague office was Iggy and Sharon’s place on Nelson Road. Other notable figures on the early Salisbury punk rock scene were Terry Watley, Spanish Alf, Bournemouth Christine, the catering punks Martin Butler and Tim Aylet, the black post-punk artist Dave Somerville, Mike Muscampf (who went on to the goth group Dormannu), the punk jeweller Simon Loveridge, and our hippy correspondent Frank Stocker. Our local pub was the Star and later the Cathedral; the record shops were Derek’s in the George Mall and Wilmer’s.
Inspired by Tim Aylet’s Channel 4 fanzine, post-punk and reggae – Ants, Banshees, Joy Division, Pop Group, PIL, Slits – in 1979 we launched Vague on the world. The first few issues were co-edited by Perry, Iggy and me; I assumed more or less total editorial control by the 3rd or 4th issue with Jane and Chris Johnson as assistant editors. On the back cover of Vague 1, Iggy, Alf and Dave Somerville are pictured outside the common room between the tech and art colleges on Southampton Road. The first issue was designed and printed by Mark Cross from the art college, who went on to design album sleeves. The second issue was photocopied down Fisherton Street. Perry’s ‘Lovable Spiky Tops’ cartoons best documented the evolution of Vague and the Salisbury scene; attempting to put on gigs, avoiding bikers, Teds, rockabillies, squaddies, smoothies, young farmers, etc.

 the end of alienation and the revolution of everyday life

Recently I was interviewed for 90 minutes for a research project on punk. The focus was on what influence my engagement with punk /anarcho-punk has had over the past 30 + years. As I was answering the questions I realised that punk/anarcho-punk had not directly influenced my political views. By 1976 I was already a self-confessed anarchist. Although I then, through 1977/8, became fascinated by punk, that interest would probably have faded if I had not met up with the Kill Your Pet Puppy collective at an anarchist [Persons Unknown] meeting in late 1979.

But, as even a brief flick through the pages of Kill Your Pet Puppy shows, KYPP stands apart from both Crass inspired fanzines and straight anarchism. The inspiration for KYPP was derived from the revolutionary aspirations of the surrealists and situationists, mixed with hints of gothic occultism. Looking back, KYPP was /is a potent record our lives and histories against ‘the false spectacular memory of the unmemorable’.

Another side of the deficiency of general historical life is that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events which rush by in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those informed of them; moreover they are lost in the inflation of their hurried replacement at every throb of the spectacular machinery. Furthermore, what is really lived has no relation to the official irreversible time of society and is in direct opposition to the pseudo-cyclical rhythm of the consumable by-product of this time. This individual experience of separate daily life remains without language, without concept, without critical access to its own past which has been recorded nowhere. It is not communicated. It is not understood and is forgotten to the profit of the false spectacular memory of the unmemorable. [Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1967, #157]

What we were resisting was our alienation. What we were celebrating were our utopian desires which we took for reality because we believed in the reality of those desires.


Fast forwarding to the present, I was reminded of the situationists when I found this passage in David Harvey’s new book  ‘Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism’.

The traditional Marxist approach to the revolutionary transfor mation to socialism/communism has been to focus on the contra diction between productive forces (technology) and social (class) relations. In the lore of traditional communist parties, the transi tion was seen as a scientific and technical rather than a subjective, psychological and political question. Alienation was excluded from consideration since it was a non-scientific concept that smacked of the humanism and utopian desire articulated in the young Marx of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 rather than through the objective science of Capital.
This scientistic stance failed to capture the political imagination of viable alternatives in spite of the passionate beliefs of adherents to the communist cause. Nor did it provide any spiritually compelling and subjective (rather than scien tifically necessary and objective) reason to mobilise arms in a sea of anti-capitalist struggle. It could not even confront the madness of the prevailing economic and political reason (in part because scien tific communism embraced much of this economic reason and its fetish attachment to production for production’s sake). It failed in fact to fully unmask the fetishisms and fictions peddled in the name of the ruling classes to protect themselves from harm. The tradi tional communist movement was, therefore, in perpetual danger of unwittingly replicating these fictions and fetishisms. [Harvey, 2014, p. 269]

The situationists’ ‘spectacle’ is our alienation from society, from ourselves. Instead of actively participating in the construction of our own lives, in the making of history, we have become observers and spectators, watching our unlived lives pass before us. Punk- or at least the version I found via Kill Your Pet Puppy- was the negation of alienation. In this version of punk the DIY ethic was applied not just to the making of music or fanzines, but to the lives of the participants. To become a punk was to reinvent yourself as an actor rather than a spectator.

What the Harvey quote implies is that this process was and is ‘revolutionary’ even if traditional Marxists -and anarchists- do not recognise it as such.

Coming back to the present, the political struggle I am engaged with now is one which, unlike punk, is unambiguously  a history making struggle. On 18 September 2014, voters in Scotland have the chance to create a new nation-state. What is interesting about the Scottish independence referendum is the contrast between the Yes and No campaigns.

The No campaign is a top-down campaign. To get its negative message across it relies on newspapers and broadcast media. In contrast, the Yes campaign is relying on thousands of local activists who are organising meetings, canvassing and leafleting in their communities to get its positive message across- supported by hundreds of internet sites. If the Yes campaign wins in September, it will have done so by overcoming voters’ alienation from the political process. If a new Scotland is born on 18 September, it will be a DIY Scotland, a Scotland created by its citizens.

In their attempt to overcome alienation, radical punks turned first to squatting and then to travelling. These moves extended the brief experience of liberation achieved through collective participation at punk gigs.  Through squatting punk became a continuously lived experience, something closer to a counterculture than a music based subculture. Within the ‘underground’ network of squats which extended across London and other cities, participants were able to reinvent themselves as full time rather than part time punks. This movement echoed  that of the pre-punk  radical counterculture.


 In the early seventies, the pre-punk radical counterculture gave rise to the first free festivals. As the number of free festivals increased, by 1976 it became possible to spend the whole summer travelling from festival to festival. By the early eighties, many punks began to adopt travelling as an alternative to squatting. Kill Your Pet Puppy 6, published in June 1983 documented the transition as it described a journey from a punk squat in London to Stonehenge free festival. KYPP was successor to punk fanzine Ripped and Torn which was first published in October 1976.

However, the mass arrest of 500 travellers en route to Stonehenge on 1 June 1985 , along with other events from that year- the eviction of Molesworth peace camp in February and the crushing of the Miners’ Strike- revealed the limits of  the alternatives to alienation. As Margaret Thatcher had proclaimed ‘There is no alternative’. For what David Harvey now call the neoliberal counter-revolution  demanded the forcible re-imposition of alienation.

This is an important point. While the Miners’ Strike fits within a class struggle narrative and the eviction of Molesworth peace camp was part of the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union, the attack on the free festivals and the travellers suggests that the neoliberal counter-revolution was also a cultural counter-revolution, one which was continued through into the nineties when the focus was on acid house raves and road-protestors. So while traditional Marxists may have neglected the importance of alienation [see Harvey quote above], the neoliberals did not. They understood that the hegemony of capitalism depended on eliminating the (by now) punk infused counterculture and its Situationist inspired efforts to negate alienation.

The pre-punk counterculture relied on a combination of  alternative media, including music and its own underground newspapers and magazines, to reproduce itself- with  some help from LSD/acid. The punk and post-punk counterculture likewise was able to reproduce itself  by similar means. Within these countercultures, the alternative media were more trusted than the hegemonic media which demonised the countercultures via a repetitive stream of ‘folk devil / moral panic’ news stories.

It is interesting/ significant that a similar situation has emerged in the context of the Scottish independence referendum. As James Foley and Pete Ramand spell out in their book ‘Yes- The Case for Radical Scottish Independence’ [Pluto, 2014],the driving force behind the campaign for Scottish independence is not nationalism but opposition to the neoliberal counter-revolution. At the same time, while support for independence is strongest among poorer Scots/ people living in Scotland, it is more than a straightforward class struggle campaign. Many non-working class people living in Scotland are also alienated from a UK political structure which is moving further and further to the right. If this group could vote for a UK level form of north European/ Scandinavia social democracy, they would do so. But since the Labour party have become a neoliberal party, this option is not available. Therefore the option of voting Yes to the Scottish National Party’s version of social democracy within an independent Scotland is appealing.

At the same time such potential (former Labour) Yes voters are being turned off by the unremitting negativity of the No campaign. Fortunately the Yes campaign is able to reproduce itself via social media, the internet and thousands of small scale / community level public meetings. The No campaign are unable to match this grassroots ‘countercultural’ movement. What the No campaign can and are doing, through their complete control of the media, is radicalise  the Yes campaign. As the No campaign reveals itself to be a front for the neoliberal State, the Yes campaign is having to confront the everyday reality of alienation.



As the countercultures discovered, the act of self-creation is the negation of alienation. The difference is that what is being created in Scotland is not a large group of empowered individuals, but a new nation. In a talk I gave to Radical Independence Dumfries and Galloway, I argued that the Yes campaign represented Scotland’s civil society which was in the process of creating a rational state as ‘the actuality of the ethical idea’. The phrase is Georg Hegel’s, taken from his ’Philosophy of Right’ (1821). Hegel had borrowed the idea of civil society from the Scottish Enlightenment. Civil society was held to exist between the private realm of individuals and families and the political realm of government and the state. Civil society was also the realm of economic activity.


The idea of civil society emerged out of the alienation of Scottish thinkers from the shift in political power which followed the Union of 1707. Without a Scottish state centred on a parliament in Edinburgh, most of Scotland’s former elite- including its intellectuals- were physically separated from  the new centre of power in London. Without the French Revolution, the Scottish Enlightenment may have eventually nudged the UK state towards a rational form. Unfortunately, reactions to the French Revolution and the later struggle against Napoleonic France saw the rationality of the Scottish Enlightenment as dangerously subversive. Then came the Industrial Revolution which established capitalism as the dominant power, rooted in economic alienation.

In Scotland the impact of industrialisation was immense. For over 100 years, iron and coal were mined to feed the furnaces which produced the iron and steel which  were made into ships and locomotives. These industries are virtually all gone now but,  until very recently, their legacy survived in support for the Labour party. What Scottish voters expected from the Labour party was progress towards a rational state exercising democratic control over the economy. By aligning itself with the neoliberal UK state  as part of the No campaign, a crisis of legitimacy has overwhelmed the Labour party in Scotland. The Labour party in Scotland have been revealed as a conservative organisation, holding back and suppressing aspirations for the democratic control of the economy. Without the deadweight of the Labour party, via the grassroots yes campaign, civil society in Scotland is rediscovering its radical, even revolutionary, traditions.

But is a rational state anything more than an ideal? The way I look at this question is shaped by the problem of climate change. Our knowledge of climate change is scientific knowledge, which is a form of rational knowledge. It should be promoting rational debate about how best to make the transition from economies based on  energy from fossil fuels to economies based on energy from renewable sources. This debate had the potential to begin in the 1970s when advocates of ‘radical’ or ‘alternative’ technology proposed a shift towards renewable energy sources. These proposals were understood to be part of the radical restructuring of society imagined by the counterculture.


The problem then and now is that such a restructuring of society would require an economic system focused on minimal or zero growth- which would make existing models of capitalism, which depend on ‘infinite economic’ growth, impossible. In the 1970s, climate change was an obscure theoretical possibility and was brushed aside during the neoliberal counter-revolution. Now climate change is a reality which challenges neoliberalism. The reaction to this challenge has been an attack on science and rationality. What the attack on the science of climate change shows is that the neoliberal project is an irrational project and that neoliberal dominated states like the UK and the USA are irrational states. Such states, in order to continue ‘business-as -usual’ are prepared to sacrifice the interests, the future, of their citizens for the short term profitability of the corporate elites which have captured these states.

What has obscured the irrationality of the neoliberal/ capitalist world order in the past has been the lack of any absolute choices between the world as it is and the world as it must become. Climate change is an absolute. Global temperatures are rising, the oceans are warming and the polar ice caps are melting. Working back from this absolute, we can re-understand  the radical counterculture (including punk) as a rational response to the absence of a future. However, following Hegel, we can also now see the consequences of the counterculture’s failure to recognise the necessity of rationalising the state. The persistence of irrational states which fail to impose democratic control over capital now threatens not only the heat death of modern civilisation but also the liquidation of capitalism in a drowned world.

On the other hand in all my years as a keen countercultural I never came across the idea of the/ a rational state. Or mentions of Hegel. My discovery of Hegel came via stray mention that he had  read and been influenced by Scottish Enlightenment political economists and social theorists. I have been reading up on Hegel’s political theories about a rational state because part of the discussions about Scottish independence involve a plan to create a written Constitution for the new state. Which conflicts with the more anarchist aspects of the counterculture and also with the ‘independence as a class struggle‘ aspects of the radical independence campaign.


Is it possible to embed social and economic justice with a written constitution so strongly that the new Scotland becomes a rational state rather than an ‘external state’ (Hegel’s term) or neoliberal state?  That a written Scottish Constitution would be full of fine words but the reality of economic power in the new nation would prevail (realpolitik). There are proposals to crowd-source  the Constitution, to involve civil society via a continuation of the Yes campaign in its formation, but unless such participation can be maintained over time, the interpretation and actualisation of the Constitution will revert to ‘experts’, to lawyers and other members of the professional class. Thus the people or citizens of the new state will once more become alienated from  their/our nation. The Scottish state would still be an external state rather than a rational state.

To end, for now, on a positive note, it does seem that the unremitting negativity of the No campaign and its full spectrum projection is pushing the Yes campaign to towards Hegelian ‘[collective] self-consciousness’. This is potentially a revolutionary development which picks-up from the frozen moment of modernity when conservative reaction to the French Revolution stopped the Scottish Enlightenment in its tracks.

I guess that is my next job. I need to write up my research on the Scottish Enlightenment and show the links to Hegel and then on to the present/ near future. I have already covered some of the ground in my talks at Radical Independence Dumfries and Galloway meetings. Quite a challenge to make it relevant though.



.

Common Weal- Practical Idealism for Scotland.

On 30 July 1971 Jimmy Reid, chair of the shop stewards committee at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders held a press conference where he announced

This is the first campaign of its kind in Trade unionism. We are not going on strike. We are not even having a sit-in strike. We are taking over the yards because we refuse to accept that faceless men  can make these
decisions. We are not strikers. We are responsible people and we will conduct ourselves with dignity and discipline. We want to work.

Over the next decade, the UCS occupation was followed by more than 260 worker occupations across the UK. [Alan Tuckman ‘Workers’ Control and the Politics of Factory Occupation’, Haymarket Books, 2011] As well as these occupations, in 1974 the Lucas Aerospace Shop Stewards Combine Committee began working on an alternative Corporate Plan designed to save 3600 jobs threatened by re-organisation. The alternative plan was for Lucas to move out of the military market and begin producing social useful products including kidney dialysis machines, electric cars and wind turbines.

The potential for a radical shift in manufacturing industry from a focus on the pursuit of profit to  production for a sustainable future  was set out by Victor Papanek in his 1971 book ‘ Design for the Real World-Human Ecology and Social Change’,  by David Dickson in 1974 with ‘Alternative Technology and the Politics of Technical Change’ and by Godfrey Boyle and Peter Harper in 1976 with ‘Radical Technology’. As ‘Practical Idealism’ puts it [p.119]

Design and innovation are at the forefront of our hopes for the future. A new generation of designers of all sorts is challenging the old order. Do products have to be mass-manufactured in sweat shops? Do the goods in our houses have to harm the environment in which we live? Must things be designed to wear out? Can’t our communities be planned with good spaces to play in?

These are good questions and taken altogether ‘Practical Idealism’ sets out a range of proposals which challenge and offer practical alternatives to the ‘Me-First’ economy and society we live with today.

Reading through ‘Practical Idealism’, the proposals set out seem eminently sensible and reasonable. The contrast is between an economy based on ‘social provisioning’  and an economy based on ‘social extraction’. Social provisioning is described as ‘the process for taking resources (raw materials and skills) and turning them into things that people need and distributing them to people that need them. Social extraction is ‘the process of taking out of society as much wealth as possible in the shortest time possible with the least investment possible.’ [p.38]

Back in the early 1970s it seemed that social provisioning was the future and social extraction was the past. But then, with election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA, social extraction gained the upper hand in what David Harvey has called the neoliberal counter-revolution. This counter-revolution saw the end of the post-world war two social democratic consensus, when the gap between rich and poor had begun to narrow. Since 1980, the gap has once more widened, returning us to the extremes of wealth and poverty which marked the early stages of the industrial revolution.

In the heyday of the UK as a world power, the process of social extraction was matched by the physical extraction of coal, the fossil fuel which powered the industrial revolution. The fear that Britain’s coal reserves might run out was tackled Stanley Jevons in 1865in ‘The Coal Question’. In his conclusion, Jevons argued against attempts to conserve Britain’s coal reserves for the future.

The alternatives before us are simple. Our empire and race already comprise one-fifth of the world‘s population; and by our plantation of new States, by our guardianship of the seas, by our penetrating commerce, by our just laws and firm constitution, and above all by the dissemination of our new arts, we stimulate the progress of mankind in a degree not to be measured. If we lavishly and boldly push forward in the creation of our riches, both material and intellectual, it is hard to over-estimate the pitch of beneficial influence to which we may attain in the present. But the maintenance of such a position is physically impossible. We have to make the momentous choice between brief but true greatness and longer continued mediocrity.

UK coal production peaked at 292 million tons in 1913, the same year that shipbuilding on the Clyde peaked when 756 973 tons of ships were launched. The eclipse of Britain as a great power since 1913 should have led to the reform and re-invention of the UK as a medium if not mediocre nation. The immense wealth which began flowing from the North Sea oil reserves in the 1970s could have been re-invested in the UK’s infrastructure and in the renewal of our manufacturing industries.

Instead the wealth was wasted in a futile attempt to restore Britain’s greatness by reversing progress towards social provisioning through a return to an economy based social extraction. The answer to the ‘oil question‘ was the same as Stanley Jevons answer to the coal question- maximise extraction now.


The Prologue to ‘Practical Idealism’ states that ‘This is not meant to be a case for or a case against independence but only a case for a better Scotland’ [Prologue p.4] but it is very difficult to see how a better Scotland can emerge as part of a united kingdom which is still haunted by the spectre of Stanley Jevons’ vision of ‘true greatness’. For a better Scotland to emerge, civil society must become self-aware, become conscious of itself- of ourselves. ‘Practical Idealism for Scotland’ is a significant step-forward in this process.

Why is it significant? To understand why we need  to go back to an unintended consequence of the Union of 1707- the Scottish Enlightenment. The Union of 1707 created an anomaly which separated political power, now concentrated in London, from Scotland’s intellectual resources - its universities, its Church and its legal establishment. In a development of world historical importance, the Scottish Enlightenment emerged out of this new situation, contributing major advances to philosophy, to political, economic and social theory, to aesthetics and to scientific and technological knowledge.



While Scottish Enlightenment thinkers were keen to distance themselves from the religious ‘enthusiasm’ of the seventeenth century and from Scotland’s medieval past, the  idea of civil society developed by Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith contained elements drawn from pre-Union Scotland. Civil society was held to exist between the private realm of individuals and families and the political realm of the government and the state. Civil society was also the realm of economic activity. From this developed the later liberal and current neoliberal belief that government and the state should not interfere in economic activity.

Translated into French and German, the ideas of the Scots thinkers became part of a European wide enlightenment and also influenced  political thought in what was to become the United States of America. However, the French Revolution led to a reaction against the more radical aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment. So when Robert Burns composed ‘Scots Wha Hae’ in August 1793 during the trial in Edinburgh of Thomas Muir and William Palmer for sedition as supporters of the French Revolution, Burns had to hide ‘the glowing ideas of some other struggles of the same nature, not quite so ancient’ within a song about the Battle of Bannockburn. Muir was sentenced to transportation for 14 years and Palmer for seven.



While Burns was a radical poet, Professor Dugald Stewart was a leading light of the Scottish Enlightenment. But  in 1794, William Craig, a senior judge and Lord of Session, wrote to Stewart asking him to retract a section of ‘Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind’ which Craig believed might ‘unhinge established institutions’. Stewart refused to do so and denied that he was encouraging revolution.

Although the more radical ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment were muted in the nineteenth century, the combination of James Watt’s steam engine and Adam Smith’s doctrine of free trade transformed Britain into the world’s first industrial nation.

In 1818, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars but before the industrial revolution had taken root in Germany, Georg Hegel was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Berlin University in Prussia. Hegel was deeply influenced by Scottish Enlightenment thought, including James Steuart and Adam Smith’s theories of political economy as well as the idea of civil society. However, in Hegel’s version, civil society emerged out the disintegration of the family as the focus of ethical life and in turn a rational state would  emerge out of civil society as the ‘actuality of the ethical idea’. The ethical aspect of the rational state would limit the destructive extremes of wealth and poverty found in a civil society based on economic self-interest.

In an essay on the English (British) Reform Bill of 1831, Hegel argued that the minimal reforms contained in the bill would still leave most of the archaic elements of Britain’s constitution in place. Landowning aristocrats would still dominate a minimal (‘external’) state. This in turn might lead opponents of the status quo to inaugurate not reform but revolution. Hegel died in November 1831. Had he lived he might have developed his political theories to include an active role for the organised industrial working class in the movement from civil society to the rational state. Instead it was left to Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx to adjust Hegel’s political theories to include the proletariat.

Since the 1832 Reform Act and further constitutional reforms which extended the electoral franchise, the British revolution Hegel, Engels and Marx all anticipated has been avoided. Under pressure from an increasingly organised working class, the British state began to become more rational. But since the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, narrow economic interested centred on the City of London have ‘re-captured’ the state. Gradually these economic interests have managed to reverse the social democratic policies pursued first by the Liberal party and then by Labour and Conservative governments during the post-war consensus period. In Scotland the response to the Thatcher era was a revival of the idea of civil society. It was pressure from Scotland’s civil society which led to the establishment of a devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999.


The crisis of capitalism which began in 2008 and the policies of austerity pursued by the UK coalition  government have revealed the limits of civil society and of devolution- without provoking a British Revolution. Instead, with the movement towards Scottish independence, a dramatic solution to the constitutional contradictions of the British/ UK state identified by Hegel in 1831 is underway. This revolutionary reform will cut the constitutional Gordian knot by dissolving the Union of 1707.

In this movement, the active involvement of civil society in the Yes campaign has the potential to create a rational state based on a written constitution as the actuality of the ethical idea. If this occurs it would truly be, in Hegel’s language ‘a world historical event’. However, before this can happen, civil society in Scotland must first overcome -negate- the negativity of the No campaign. To do this civil society must become self-aware, become conscious of its limitations and contradictions and find the will to re-invent itself. Common Weal’s ‘Practical Idealism’ is an essential part of this process.

At the same time, the Radical Independence Campaign have been pursuing a strategy recommended by James Foley and Pete Ramand in ‘Yes-The Radical Case for Scottish Independence’ [Pluto books, 2014]. This strategy involves actively canvassing areas of high social deprivation where voter registration and participation are low. Voters in these areas have become increasingly alienated from the Labour party as it has become part of the neoliberal consensus. By accepting what Mark Fisher calls ‘capitalist realism’ in the 1970s-that there is no alternative to the re-establishment of the conditions for capital accumulation and the restoration to power of economic elites- the Labour party has become part of the problem rather than the solution.

For the Yes campaign to win in September 2014, the majority of current and former Labour voting Scots will have to be persuaded that an independent Scotland  offers the best chance of achieving their aspirations for a more rational (post-neoliberal) state. But a yes vote on 18 September will mark the beginning not the end of the real struggle to secure Scotland’s future. As Foley and Ramand ask, will Scotland’s elites ‘freely surrender their existing privileges’? Without coercion, will they submit to the ‘common good’? [p. 64]

In Hegel’s model, Scotland’s elites would be compelled to surrender their privileges as part of the process through which civil society, as economic society, gives way to the rational state. The ethical idea of the rational state is that economic activity must benefit all of its citizens, not just an elite. A state in which only a few benefit from economic activity would not be a rational state.


Unfortunately, such absolute idealism runs smack up against capitalist realism. Under capitalist realism a rational state which attempts to minimise the extremes of wealth and poverty is an impossible state. Under capitalist realism, the state does not exist to secure the welfare of all its citizens. It exists to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation and the power of economic elites. But what Hegel argued 200 years ago, looking at the USA and the UK was that they were forms of civil society, not states. That capitalist realism - and the No campaign- cannot imagine the possibility of anything beyond civil society does not mean that a rational Scottish state is impossible. It just reveals their collective poverty of imagination.

To conclude.

Although the Scottish Enlightenment was the product of an intellectual elite, it was an elite alienated by the Union of 1707 from the new centre of political power in London. This distancing led the Scottish Enlightenment to two related modern concepts- civil society and political economy. Conservative reaction to the French Revolution cut short further evolution of these ideas in Scotland and the rest of the UK. In Germany they were developed by Hegel who argued that the limitations and contradictions of a civil society focused on economic self-interest justified by political economy would give rise through reform to a rational state.

Reflecting on the apparent inability of the UK to properly reform itself and become a rational state, Hegel evoked the spectre of a British Revolution. Engels and Marx added a new element to Hegel’s notion of civil society - a revolutionary class struggle. The crisis of capitalism which began in 2008  and the policies of austerity pursued by the UK coalition  government have revealed the limits of civil society and of devolution- without provoking a British Revolution. Instead, with the movement towards Scottish independence, a dramatic solution to the constitutional contradictions of Britain identified by Hegel in 1831 is underway. This revolutionary reform will cut the constitutional Gordian knot by dissolving the Union of 1707.

In this movement, the active involvement of civil society in the Yes campaign has the potential to create a rational state based on a written constitution as the actuality of the ethical idea. If this occurs it would truly be, in Hegel’s language ‘a world historical event’. However, before this can happen, civil society in Scotland must first overcome -negate- the negativity of the No campaign. To do this civil society must become self-aware, become conscious of its limitations and contradictions and find the will to re-invent itself.

Significantly, there parallels between this process and the Marxist concept of ‘class-consciousness’. The Radical Independence Campaign’s contribution to the Yes campaign is an ongoing attempt to re-engage Scotland’s working class communities with the political process, a process which can be described as ‘consciousness-raising’.

Common Weal is not directly engaged with the Yes campaign, arguing that their proposals ‘[are] not meant to be a case for or a case against independence but only a case for a better Scotland’. Common Weal’s proposals have their roots in the progressive ideals of the 1970s, in the movements for industrial democracy, socially useful production and what was to become the Green movement. These movements had the potential to deepen and extend the social democratic post-war consensus but were blocked and then suppressed by the neoliberal counter-revolution.

Shared by both Common Weal and the Radical Independence Campaign is a focus on the recent past which has been dominated by the neoliberal counter-revolution. However, since, neoliberalism has its roots in Scottish Enlightenment theories of political economy and civil society, we should be aware that our debates and discussions about Scotland’s future are also haunted by the ghosts of Hegel and Marx.

I have chapter in this.

An eclectic collection of academic articles, personal recollections, short stories, artwork, poetry and more. An anthology of work about Punk written by the survivors and by those who want the world to see not just the writings of those who were in the bands, but by those who were the supporters of the punk movement. 

Available now for £8 plus post and packing from Lulu. 

Fields, Factories and Wind Farms.
Available for £5 including  post and packing from Radical Independence Dumfries and Galloway

And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars. "And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth." 

                    Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Early last year (2013), Lucy Brown got in touch to ask if I would be interested in joining the Radical Independence Campaign (RIC) in Dumfries and Galloway. Lucy had been reading  and enjoying Greengalloway with its eclectic mix of local and countercultural themes. I thought ‘Why not?’ and said yes.

Over the past 18 months, as well as giving several talks to RIC meetings locally, I have written many posts for the Radical  Independence Dumfries and Galloway blog. ‘Fields, Factories and Wind farms’ is a collection of edited  -by Kevin Witt- highlights from these talks and blog posts plus (last article)  a talk I wrote for an academic conference on contemporary anarchism . A version of the same article also features in ‘Tales from the Punkside’.


I had a test pressing of ‘Fields, Factories and Wind farms ’(the title is inspired by Kropotkin’s ‘Fields, Factories and Workshops’) to read over the weekend . Although it is rather random collection of articles, a few connecting themes began to emerge.

One is a very broad theme which starts from the origins of feudalism in Scotland 900 years ago and winds  through  political/ religious conflicts over the divine right of kings to the Scottish Enlightenment and the Age of Reason and ends with the dramatic transformation brought about by the Lowland and Highland clearances and the industrial revolution.

This theme then becomes modern history in the 1970s. The radical politics and counterculture of that era inspired and influenced me as a teenager but were blocked and reversed during the 1980s and 90s. Marxist geographer David Harvey has described this era as a ‘neoliberal counter-revolution’. This is where  things become confusing. Many possible futures seemed to come to end with the election of Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1979. Were these unconnected futures, or was there an underlying logic behind them?

At the time  I did not connect the failure of a proposal for Scottish devolution with the failure of the radical technology (proto-Green) movement. I did not connect my interest in the Do It Yourself ethic of punk with the closure of a factory I had worked in due to Thatcher’s economic policies. Even in 1990, when anti-Poll tax protests in London where I was living turned into riots, I did not notice that in Scotland they did not.

Only now by reading back through the articles in ‘Fields, Factories  and Wind farms ’ can I begin to see the connections between  Harvey’s neoliberal counter-revolution and my ‘broad’ historical theme. It is in this context that references to Hegel’s theories of the state start to fit in. Hegel anticipated the emergence of rational states 200 years ago. So far, no such state exists. We live in a world of irrational states pursuing economic gains at the expense of a sustainable future.

Although I only mention it a couple of times, the prime example of irrationality is the failure of states to respond to climate change. This failure is intimately linked to the dominance of industrial capitalism and has been since coal replaced renewable sources of energy 250 years ago. Oil is the main energy source today. Without it the whole machinery of modern life would collapse into chaos. But then it  will anyway thanks to climate change.

The Radical Independence Campaign’s slogan is ’Another Scotland is Possible’. Although RIC is determinedly  non-nationalistic, only voters in Scotland have the chance to choose a different future this September. Even if there is a Yes vote, James Foley and Pete Ramand have made it clear in their book ’Yes- the Radical Case’  that the struggle for another Scotland will be long and hard.

The first Stop the City  protest  took  place  31 years ago this September. One of the organisers was my future wife. She was 21, younger than any of our children are now. She was already a veteran of the Greenham Women’s Peace Camp. In the booklet I quote Rich Cross on the event.

Called on 29 September 1983, to coincide with the quarterly calculation of the City’s profits, protestors were encouraged to take part in a ‘carnival against war’ and deliver ‘a day of reckoning’ for the warmongers and racketeers of the Square Mile. Around 1500 anarchists, libertarians, punks and radical peace activists descended on the City to occupy buildings, block roads, stage actions and swarm through the streets.

Cumulatively these efforts were designed to snarl up the operation of the capital’s financial hub. In an analogue era, long before the City’s ‘Big Bang’, when files and paperwork still had to be physically couriered between companies, the impact of mobs of unruly demonstrators filling the City’s narrow streets could be dramatic. Estimates differed, but the occupation of corporate space interrupted scores of monetary transactions, and drove down the day’s profits. The cost to those demonstrating was significant too: more than 200 arrests at the first STC; nearly 400 at the March 1984 event; and close to 500 in September 1984.

The Stop the City protests are all but forgotten now. ‘When ideology becomes absolute,  the thought of history is so perfectly annihilated that history itself can no longer exist.’ and ‘The spectacle, as the present social organization of the paralysis of history and memory, of the abandonment of history built on the foundation of historical time, is the false consciousness of time.‘ [Debord]

It was against the forgetting, the annihilation, of such histories and the false consciousness of time that I began writing Greengalloway in 2005. The talks and essays in ‘Fields,  Factories and Wind farms’ are a bridge between my anti-Spectacular writings and  current events in a Scotland which the UK’s constitutional experts say  ‘was extinguished as a matter of international law’ by the Union of 1707.

Image of iron furnaces from 1853 plus text from book

For the launch of my book - on sale here -there will be an event and exhibition in September 2014. It will be held at the  Workshop Gallery in Castle Douglas (where I live in Scotland). The gallery is attached to my brothers’ furniture restoration/making workshop.

The plan is to illustrate the themes of the book with a collection of graphic images. I have done a quick trawl through images I have but they will need to be whittled down to 12 or so. There will also be some of my daughter Elizabeth’s paintings. Elizabeth designed the cover image of my book.

The chapters in the book began life as a series of blog posts for Radical Independence Dumfries and Galloway. Reading through them in print there are three phases of history  present

I. Deep history
This  phase runs from the origins of feudal land ownership in Scotland a nearly  thousand years ago when Scots kings borrowed the idea from the Normans in England. This phase carries on through taking in the Reformation, the ‘English’ civil war, the Jacobite rebellions, the Scottish Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and  reaches the present with the idea that the aim of Scottish independence is a democratic revolution .

2. Modern history
This phase covers the past 40 years. The argument here is that the radical possibilities of the 1970s, which could have pushed the post-war social democratic consensus towards a more sustainable society through a combination of social, economic and ecological justice, were  blocked by a neoliberal counter-revolution. More than blocked, the radical possibilities were actively suppressed. The problem here is that I link together what were quite separate ‘alternatives’ at the time- for example punk and the proto-Green radical technology movement .

3. Immediate history
This is where I am responding to, for example, Nigel Farage of Ukip being run out of Edinburgh last year. It is where I try to bring  the deep  history and modern history phases into alignment with the as yet unknown outcome of the Scottish independence referendum vote on 18 September.

To overcome the ‘too long, didn’t read’ problem, the text of the original blog posts is broken up by the insertion of images every 500 words or so.  Although there are illustrations/images in the booklet there are far fewer. The idea of the book launch exhibition is to re-illustrate the book  with a set of powerful/striking images.

Here are some of the possible exhibition images,

From the 'School Kids Oz' 1970

South Scotland Bio-sphere Reserve Stop the City

Nigel Farage plus Sex Pistols/Jamie Reid graphic

Wind farm

Airds Moss, Ayrshire- monument to Richard Cameron and his followers  killed after declaring war on Charles II in 1680.

Lugar Iron Works 1858- close to Airds Moss above Original art work for  Mob album Let the Tribe Increase, 1983

Another bad day for the Stock Market

So it’s a mess. It would have been a mess either way the vote went. If it had been a Yes I was expecting an economic / sterling crisis. The No vote has postponed that crisis, but now we have a constitutional crisis which has the potential to tear the Union apart anyway.  You can‘t have a Union Parliament and ‘English votes for English laws’.

If there had been a Yes vote I would have been writing about a Scottish constitution and the problem of how to embed social and economic justice in it. The problem I was going to focus on was how to establish democratic power over economic power. Instead of that, here are some thoughts on  economic power and the British constitution .

The British constitution goes back to 1100 when king Henry I of England needed to legitimise his rule in the face of opposition from the barons, the Church and the recently conquered  (Anglo-Saxon) English .he did this by offering concessions to all three groups in a ‘Charter of Liberties’. In 1215, king John 1 of England had to make  similar concessions in order to legitimise his rule- the famous Magna Carta. One of the signatories was Alan, lord of Galloway and constable of Scotland. The aim of these charters was to resolve disputes between the centre represented by the king and peripheries represented by regionally powerful barons. The power of the barons was determined by  their military strength, which was influenced by  their wealth which was influenced by the agricultural/ economic  prosperity of the lands they owned.

Four hundred years on from Magna Carta, the English economy had developed and with it the English constitution. Now rent from land rather than military strength indicated the barons’ power. This power was exercised through the House of Lords. The beginnings of  ‘middle class’ also existed in the House of Commons, occupied by wealthier farmers and merchants. Taxation was the source of the constitutional conflict which led to a civil war across England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The turmoil lasted  from  1638  to 1746-  from Charles I’s  first war against the Scots to the defeat of the Stuart cause at Culloden.

The end result, which included  the Union of Parliaments as a side effect, was an increase in the power of the English Parliament and a dramatic reduction in the power of British queens and kings.  However, the power of the new British Parliament was then challenged by the American colonies over a constitutional problem- taxation without representation. The new American state then adopted a written constitution.

The French had supported the American’s against the British but to meet the cost of this support the French needed to raise money through taxation.  To do this, an assembly called the Estates General which had not met since 1614 was summoned in 1787 by Louis XVI. This was done to bypass the Paris Parliament which was refusing to help the king. But, similar to the problems experienced by Charles I in England, the Estates General made demands on the king in exchange for agreeing to new taxes.

When these demands were refused a constitutional crisis broke out which led to a revolution and Louis XVI’s execution.  Like the revolutionaries in America, the French revolutionaries drafted a written constitution in 1793. This was ratified by a referendum but then replaced by a fresh constitution in 1795.

In Britain, the idea of a written constitution became associated with fears of revolution and democracy. The situation was further complicated by the industrial revolution which shifted economic power towards the midlands and north of England, to south Wales and to Scotland. The industrial revolution also led to the rapid growth of new industrial towns and cities although few of their inhabitants had the right to vote.

Gradually and grudgingly the constitutional system was reformed until representation in the House of Commons, but not the House of Lords, roughly matched the new economic and demographic reality. This created a rough balance of power between the financial interests of the City of London and the manufacturing regions. But as  the UK’s role as ‘workshop of the world’ declined, so economic power and hence political power shifted  to London as a centre of global finance. This process has speeded up over the past 35 years.

The central problem with this concentration of economic power in London is that because it is based on banking and financial services it relies on the confidence of global markets that London will remain a good place to do business. If that confidence wavers, London’s wealth will vanish in an instant. At the same time, given the problems of a global economy which is still struggling to  recover from  the collapse of confidence which occurred in 2008, London’s failure could well trigger another global crisis of capital.

"The British pound (also called the pound sterling) is one of the most economically and financially important currencies in the world. The pound is the fourth-most traded currency in terms of turnover and it is the third-most widely held reserve currencies among the countries of the world."
Source 

Any threat to the value of the British pound is therefore of international as well as local importance. The loss of export earnings from oil would have impacted on the British pound’s international status. That fear has now receded, but the constitutional crisis triggered by the No vote may also have an economic impact.

The problem here is that to maintain London as a centre of global finance requires huge investments in London’s infrastructure, including transport. But, as the Scottish independence campaign showed, this is at the expense not just of Scotland, but of other English regions, Wales and Northern Ireland. The ‘devolution all round’ demands from other parts of the UK which have emerged  in response to  the ‘vows’ of more power to Scotland conflict with the need to maintain investment in London. The political demands to rebalance the UK economy, to shift power away from London, are impossible demands.

It is very difficult to see how the UK’s  Londoncentric status quo can be maintained  in the face of  a UK wide constitutional crisis. If Scotland is not given more powers, then  pressure for independence will increase. But if Scotland is given more powers, then pressure for a shift of resources away from London will also increase. This risks checking London’s growth and disrupting economic policies designed to maintain London as a global financial centre.

A further constitutional conundrum is the idea of  ‘English Votes for English Laws’ as a solution to the West Lothian question.  Labour are against it because it would mean that even if  elected,  Scottish and Welsh Labour MPs  could not be used as lobby-fodder to push through reforming legislation affecting England. If more powers are transferred to Scotland, the scope of  EVEL would be increased.  The danger  for Labour in Scotland would be having a group of second class MPs with  no effective power.

The answer would be for Labour to win a majority  in England so they don’t have to rely on their Scottish and Welsh MPs. However to win in England Labour have to break out of their traditional heartlands and gain LibDem and Tory seats. That will be very difficult if Labour are seen as being ‘soft on the Scots’ - which they need to be to win seats in Scotland. Even in their traditional heartlands, Labour could suffer if they are seen as neglecting deprived areas of England by failing to promise them equivalent devolved powers.

To conclude.

Constitutional history is rooted in civil wars and revolutions. Constitutional change is driven by crises of legitimacy, by an old order trying to hang on to power or a new order seeking to establish itself. Changes in constitutions reflect changes in the structures of power and the balance between economic and political power.

In the nineteenth century, the present ‘unwritten’ UK constitution was forced to adapt itself to economic and demographic changes which  followed the industrial revolution  The UK is no longer a significant industrial power but it is, via the City of London, a key part of the global financial system. Economic power dictates that the rest of the UK is drained of resources in order to maintain  this status.

The fearful desperation which drove the No campaign to hold onto Scotland at all costs was driven by the nightmare scenario of a loss of global confidence in UK plc and the British pound. That moment of fear has passed, but the slowly unfolding constitutional crisis which victory has wrought will be no less damaging.

Stop the City flyer from 1983

Here are scans of three road protest related documents composed by Tanith Livingtson (1962-1996)

First set- Newbury 1996
Tanith (aka Pinki) last piece of direct action was posthumous. On 4 January 1996 she reflected on her experiences at the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp (from 1981 to 1984) to make some suggestions for the ongoing Newbury Road Protest. I typed them up on 5 January and took the pages through to show her in the bedroom ...only to discover that she was dead. However, thanks to her best friend Tinsel the suggestions got passed on and one of them- to blockade the bailiffs/ security guards/ contractors in their camp -was used successfully on 9 January.

Second set Bath 1994
In 1994 Tanith had been a protestor at the Bath Road Protest and been arrested- she reckoned it was her 24 'political' arrest. She was summoned to appear before Bath Magistrates Court 15 July 1994. Tanith had been a student at the London Schoolof Oriental and African Studies on and off since 1987 and had most recently passed courses on Public International Law and Law and the Environment.  She used this knowledge to construct a her defence based on international environmental law. However, although we all went down to Bath for the 15th, her case wasn't heard and seems to have been dropped.


Thirds set- Wanstead/ M11 1993
In 1993, Tanith was involved with the ant-M11 extension Road Protest at Wanstead in east London. The protestors occupied a couple of houses due for demolition and decided to declare independence for Wanstonia as they called it.[This was probably inspired by Frestonia ] Tanith decided to take this idea seriously and used her international law text books to explain how Wanstoniua could declare independence properly.

1. Newbury Road Protest 1995

Demolition of Ravenscraig Steel Works 1992

Wow, that was fun. Just spent  90 minutes on the phone (due to Skype malfunction) with Matt Grimes doing an interview for a  research project on ‘the role of cultural memory in the lives of former participants in the British anarcho-punk scene aged 52 to 65’. This was the third  interview I have done with Matt.

Why is it fun? It is fun because it is quite challenging. With some of the questions Matt asks I can answer almost by rote, they are questions I have answered before in various (written) interviews but every so often Matt throws in a question which stumps me and my reply becomes more vague, less certain as I rack my brains trying to formulate a coherent response.

There are two aspects to this problem. One relates to conflicts and tensions at the time. The other are conflicts and tensions which emerged later.

At the time there were conflicts and tensions between both the anarchist aspect of anarcho-punk and the punk aspect. From the perspective of  people who were already self-professed  anarchists, the punks were not really anarchists at all. Most punks had picked upon ‘anarchy’ via the Sex Pistols and were only in it for the chaos [‘get pissed, destroy’] and knew nothing of the history and current practice of actually existing anarchists.

At the same time, by 78/79, musically punk was already splitting off into 57 varieties of  what is now called post-punk. What was to become anarcho-punk was only one part of this creative confusion and, apart from Crass, scarcely existed as a genre. But punk was always about more than the music.

One of the questions Matt asked me was about direct action as an anarchist tactic. In my answer I talked about road protests but I didn’t mention squatting as a form of direct action. Thinking about it a bit more,  I think squatting was very important for the development of punk towards anarcho-punk, but also reveals  the limitations of ‘anarcho-punk’ as a descriptive category.

If we go back to 1976, there already were a lot of squats in London  which had their origins in the late sixties/early seventies countercultures revival of squatting .[There had been a large spontaneous squatting movement post- WW2 as a response to the immediate post-war housing crisis]

Punk squatting began 1977/78  when hundreds of young people were inspired by punk to move to London and had nowhere to live. It was not a ‘political’ act, it was purely practical, but once established within the punk community it became part of  punk-as-a-way-of-life  as an alternative and in opposition to punk as music based subculture. Squatting could not be co modified, could not be ’sold’ as a punk product, it meant living punk 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. Squatting was also a practical way in which punk acted out the situationists’ theory of re-imaging the city.

Although there were punk squats in other cities, the sheer size of London and its then possession of  thousands of derelict/ empty/unused properties plus the continuity of squatting from pre- through to post-punk eras allowed the creation of a critical mass of punk squatters.  At the time, via my involvement with the Kill Your Pet Puppy collective, my perception of ‘anarcho-punk’ was of its emergence out of the punk squatting scene and its overlap with the counterculture squatting scene- for example  pre-Wapping Autonomy Centre gigs at a squatted church (St James) on Pentonville Road where Rubella Ballet and the Mob amongst many others played1980/81. [The first punk gigs at the Wapping Autonomy Centre were in late 1981].

That trajectory carried through from Wapping to the Centro Iberico on Harrow Road and then to a whole string of squatted buildings across London. [And in other cities but that is not part of my direct knowledge.] But although what was to become anarcho-punk overlapped with the London  punk squatting scene the two were not identical. Through Crass’ high profile and their willingness to play  in village halls and community centres across the UK, anarcho-punk grew and flourished  in many very different situations and contexts.  Equally, the punk squatters in London were a very diverse group numbering in the thousands while  the Wapping Autonomy Centre and Centro Iberico gigs attracted only a few hundred punks, many of whom were teenagers.

My benefit of hindsight  interpretation of this is that  although squatting is a practical form of direct action and therefore has a political/anarchist dimension, living in a squat in itself/ on its own did not ‘politicise’ punk squatters. Rather, where there was an awareness of squatting as a significant act, its significance was understood within a generalised/vague countercultural opposition to the status quo. This aspect or element of the punk squatting scene acted as a pathway towards many punk squatters becoming ‘new travellers’ in the mid /late eighties, with a corresponding blurring of the distinction between ‘punks’ and ‘hippies’.

In the conversation /interview I also tried to highlight the ways in which Kill Your Pet Puppy  engaged with the more Crass influenced aspects of anarcho-punk which we felt at the time were narrowing the possibilities punk had opened up. One way we did this was by putting together a ‘recommended reading list’ which republished in KYPP4 (summer 1981 -ie pre-Wapping Autonomy Centre). Here it is…

KYYP 4 (1981) recommended reading list (complied by Brett Puppy)

The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
The Floodgates of Anarchy by Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer
News from Nowhere by William Morris
Play Power by Richard Neville
Ivan Illich’s books
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer
Functions of the Orgasm and The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich
The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea
Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach
The Christie Files by Stuart Christie
Spectacular Times (booklets) by Larry Law
Beneath the City Streets by Peter Laurie

Music (listed immediately below the reading list)
The Mob x 2 , Soft Cell, Lou Reed, Syd Barrett, T. Rex, The Associates, The Cramps, The Igloos, Charge and a couple I can’t read plus the Barracudas….

I think the diversity of books suggested above illustrates the diversity of sources  KYPP was able to draw on in constructing our particular version of punk. It is important to remember here that KYPP was successor to Tony Drayton’s Ripped and Torn which was first published in October 1976 and ran through 19 issues to1979. This meant that KYPP never doubted its punk credentials so we [the Puppy Collective] were fully confidant that what we were doing was a continuation and expansion of  ‘punk’ in its pure form.

But were we really  articulating the essence of punk? Yes we were, if punk is a ‘permanent revolution’, a continuing creative ferment which keeps re-inventing itself/ ourselves, resisting commodification, resisting ossification, resisting becoming a known and knowable entity. Neti, neti. Not this, not that, but always something more, something beyond limits and constraints, always challenging the fixed and frozen time/space of the spectacle. Cue Situationist quote…

Another side of the deficiency of general historical life is that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events which rush by in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those informed of them; moreover they are lost in the inflation of their hurried replacement at every throb of the spectacular machinery. Furthermore, what is really lived has no relation to the official irreversible time of society and is in direct opposition to the pseudo-cyclical rhythm of the consumable by-product of this time. This individual experience of separate daily life remains without language, without concept, without critical access to its own past which has been recorded nowhere. It is not communicated. It is not understood and is forgotten to the profit of the false spectacular memory of the unmemorable. [Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967, # 157]

The above quote is what inspired me to start my Greengalloway blog in 2005, but even before then - back in 1996-  I was challenging limited versions of the history of (anarcho-) punk as this quote from my sleeve notes of ‘May Inspire Revolutionary Acts’ (2007) by the Mob shows.

I am listening to The Mob’s 1983 album ‘Let the Tribe Increase’ and looking at the cover of a 1996 book which  shows two ‘new age traveller’ style road protestors standing on a pile of chalk at Twyford  Down, blowing horns.  The photo is on the cover of ’Senseless Acts of Beauty : Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties’. It is a damn good book, moving from free-festivals to acid house raves, but it annoys me. Or rather this quote does:                      
Of all the successful punk and post-punk outfits, Crass alone managed that most difficult of manoeuvres: to avoid recuperation, to maintain political and artistic autonomy in the music industry. That is such an achievement. If punk was a discourse of authenticity, obsessed with street credibility, with not ‘selling out’, Crass must be placed at the centre of that discourse.
 [Back in 1996 when I first read the book] I underlined  the ‘Crass alone’ bit and   scribbled ‘ What about the Mob!’ in the margin. Then I took  it up with  the author, George MacKay, who was a lecturer, now professor, of Cultural Studies. He apologised. He had never heard of The Mob, did not know about the many ‘Anarchy Centres’, about the punk squatting scene, about fanzines like Kill Your Pet Puppy… about any of it. A whole underground  punk ‘culture of resistance’ had grown, flowered and faded between 1978 and 1985. It spread like some strange mutant weed through an ever shifting and changing network of squats across London. Then it vanished without trace, leaving only ‘Crass’ in its wake.

Although the Crass/MacKay interpretation of anarcho-punk remains the dominant narrative, 18 years on the MacKay ‘argument from ignorance’ cannot be sustained without a 1984 style re-writing of history to consciously exclude alternative constructions of anarcho-punk. In particular the sheer volume of material archived since 2007 on the KYPP blog site -music, print material, photographs and personal recollections- challenges the simplification of anarcho-punk. At the same time, Rubella Ballet, Zounds, the Mob and Hagar the Womb to name but four groups have all played live, recorded and released new material recently.

At the same time, to give credit to MacKay, he did attempt to trace the continuing story of the counterculture through the free festivals and new travellers as a parallel and overlapping narrative from the seventies through into the road protests and anti-criminal justice act protests (which drew in the acid house ravers) of the nineties as ‘cultures of resistance’. Although the targets for the resistance may change, there is a continuing counter culture of creative opposition to power. Significantly, this counterculture has emerged and grown as what is now called neoliberalism has developed and grown as the dominant ideology of global power.

EDIT- I have just cut a 2000 word section on the history of neoliberalism which I wrote here. My conclusion was that neoliberalism can be equated with the situationists’ society of the spectacle.

But this conclusion confuses the construction of anarcho-punk as a distinct genre, as a distinctive subculture. Instead it becomes one among many historical forms of resistance to/ disruption of  ‘the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue.’ [From Chapter 1 part 24 of ‘The Society of the Spectacle’].

Such historical forms of resistance are very interesting. I started my Greengalloway blog while I was researching the (armed) uprising of the Galloway Levellers in 1724. Although now regarded as only a minor incident, I found that it had connections backwards to the early 17th century Plantation of Ulster and forwards to the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the late 18th/early 19th centuries. I also found that only one account by a participant had survived- that of John Martin 1710-1801. Martin had run away from home to join the Levellers as a teenager, had been fined for his actions and gone on to become a respectable clock-maker, living long enough to pass on his recollections to a local antiquarian.

So when I started jotting down my memories of anarcho-punk, I was also thinking of the Galloway Levellers, of history from below as a form of resistance to history from above. The idea being that the existing order’s laudatory monologue contains the subliminal message ‘resistance is futile, resistance is futile’, that opposition will always be negated and/or assimilated. What this does is keep the possibility that resistance is fertile submerged below the level of historical consciousness.

The world already possesses the dream of a time whose consciousness it must now possess in order to actually live it. [Debord, Society of the Spectacle #164] 

taken from :

Marx, Letter to Ruge, September 1843: "The world has for a long time possessed the dream of a thing, of which it now suffices to become aware so as to really possess it."

But ‘dream of a thing/time’ suggests fantasy not reality. I would re-word this as ‘The world already contains the potential of a future which we must become conscious of before we can make it happen’.

This fits with the experience of the independence referendum in Scotland. At the beginning of the process, independence was a possibility. As the grassroots Yes campaign began to develop outside the official Yes campaign, through thousands of debates and discussions on doorsteps, community centres, village and town halls and online, the reality that another Scotland is possible became part of a collective, historical, consciousness.

But as opinion polls showed the Yes vote gaining traction in the last few weeks of campaigning, the No campaign went into overdrive. Scotland was bombarded with scare stories of job losses, price rises, pensions being slashed and economic meltdown. At the same time promises -a ‘Vow’- of maximum home rule and the federalisation of the UK were made.This combination of fear and hope was enough to win the vote for No on the day.

However, it is beginning to look as if it is not over yet. The No vote on 18 September 2014 now appears to have been a pause rather than a defeat for the process of independence. Attention has now shifted to the next UK general election which will be held in May 2015.

Stepping back, the bigger picture is that it is neoliberalism/the spectacle which seems more and more like a dream (nightmare) or fantasy. In this dream, the global economy stimulated by the free play of competition, would continue to grow forever and ever. That dream died with the global economic crisis of 2008. The spectacle of  neoliberalism is  now on life support, kept from flat-lining only by billions of money units being pumped into the system via quantitative easing and near zero interest rates.

The problem is that the spectacle of neoliberalism has been so successful at presenting itself as the only possible reality while eliminating and extinguishing alternative realities that it has become an evolutionary dead-end. It cannot adapt to changing circumstances, to shifts in the tectonic plates of reality. Locked in to its cold-blooded ideology of competition uber alles, it cannot conceive of warm-blooded progress through cooperation and mutual aid.

To talk of evolution and adaptation to changes in environmental/ecological circumstances brings in a final theme- climate change. Throughout our history, humanity has survived living under many oppressive/repressive social/economic systems. But history is only a record of the relatively recent past, the 6000 years or so since writing was invented, against the 195 000 years that ‘anatomically modern’ homo sapiens sapiens have existed. Writing and history can be connected to the domestication of plant and animal species (farming/ Neolithic revolution) which began about 10 000 years ago when the end of the most recent Ice Age created a more stable climate. This was essential for farming and the ability of post-Ice Age human communities to cooperate in building up surpluses of food which in turn allowed settled/fixed communities to develop. Within these communities specialisation of labour emerged and with it ‘civilisation’.

Climate change will disrupt out ability to create food surpluses. No food surpluses = no civilisation.

The spectacle of neoliberalism comes in to play here because it sees the shifts necessary to mitigate climate change as ‘anti-competitive’, as placing limits and restrictions on economic behaviour. Unfortunately by the time the food starts to run out it will be too late to do much about it. Fortunately, civilisation is about more than food surpluses, it is also about the accumulation of knowledge. Civilisation requires education as well as farming. Both are long term projects.

Liberalism as an economic doctrine had its beginnings when the industrial revolution took place in late 18th century Manchester gave rise to modern/industrial capitalism. This place and period strongly influenced Marxism because Karl Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels wrote ‘The Condition of the English Working Class’ based on his encounter with Manchester 1842/3. Marx’s major work ‘Capital’ was subtitled ‘A Critique of Political Economy’. In Engels’ book he mentions that Galloway born John Ramsay McCulloch (1789-1864) was the English bourgeoisies’ ‘favourite political economist’.

McCulloch is interesting since he provides a link between the theories of political economy developed by Adam Smith before the industrial revolution and the practices of industrial capitalism/ political economy which was then developed in Manchester. By the 1850s these had become the ‘Manchester School’ doctrines of free-trade and laissez-faire - the idea that economic success requires minimal state intervention. This can also be called economic liberalism.

Neoliberalism could then be described as an attempt to wind the clock back to the golden years of capital in the nineteenth century before it was contaminated by socialism. It was the doctrine adopted by Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the USA in the 1980s and which has now gone global. This was the version of neoliberalism set out by David Harvey in ‘A Brief History of Neoliberalism’ in 2006. However…in 2009, French authors Pierre Dardot and Christian Lavall came up with an alternative understanding of neoliberalism which was published in English in 2013 as ‘The New Way of the World-On Neoliberal Society’.

Dardot and Lavall trace neoliberalism back to the later nineteenth century when Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who came up with the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ as a simplification of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. This simplification was challenged by Friedrich Engels in 1875.

The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbe's doctrine of bellum omnia contra omnes [a war of all against all] and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus's theory of population. When this conjurer's trick has been performed...the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved.

By the 1870s, Britain’s supremacy as the first industrial nation was threatened by Germany and the USA. Dardot and Lavall suggest that this led to a shift from the idea of the market as a place of exchange to the idea of the market as a place of competition. By the 1930s, as old fashioned liberalism was threatened by the rise of ‘state capitalism’ via fascism and Stalinism, a new liberalism based on the need to ensure competition began to emerge. The outlines of what was to become neoliberalism were established at an economic conference in Paris in1938 but had to wait until after WW2 to take root- in post-war Germany and in what was to become the European Union.

Dardot and Lavall go on to argue that neoliberalism has moved on from being an economic doctrine or ideology to becoming a ‘rationality’. Within this rationality the necessity of ‘competition’ has become so deeply embedded that, for example, the idea of cooperation is considered irrational and therefore impossible. What this means is that, as Margaret Thatcher once said ‘there is no such thing as society’, there are only individuals competing with each other as economic agents. Human beings are not social animals, they are calculating atoms existing within a global market place in an economic war of all against all. In this war the fittest, those who maximise their economic advantages, survive and prosper while the unfit, those who fail to compete successfully, must resign themselves to lives of enduring poverty.

This rationalisation of competition takes us back to Thomas Hobbes and ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’ - the war (or struggle) of all against all- which Hobbes believed was humanity’s condition before the invention of civil[ised] society. Yet, based on studies of existing pre-agricultural societies, their survival is rooted in cooperation rather than competition. We are a social species.

The spectacle of neoliberalism is a flawed rationality, a false consciousness which is slowly destroying our socialised humanity and the ability of the planet to sustain ourselves and a large part of life on earth.

Yet even now, there still seems to be a separation between economy and ecology, a belief that the struggle for economic justice is separate from the struggle against climate change. Bringing the two together is therefore the most pressing challenge we face.

Coming back to anarcho-punk… its cultural memory is useful to the extent that it was a culture of resistance, but it is also distraction, shading over into nostalgia. Of more interest to me right now is work I am doing-writing/researching- on the 19th century Scottish iron industry, showing how it combined economic exploitation of its workforce who lived in appalling physical conditions with unsustainable exploitation of natural resources-  iron ore and coal- leaving a legacy of social deprivation and adding millions of tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This combined legacy is very relevant to the present day in Scotland, influencing the political landscape and acting as a warning for the future against economic reliance on an oil industry which is also a contributor to climate change.

Kennedy & McConnell's cotton factory , Manchester 1815

1. Introduction

On 13 May 1988, prime minister Margaret Thatcher addressed the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party conference in Perth. In the speech she launched a campaign to ‘strengthen the Union by winning back Scotland for the Conservative and Unionist cause’. Thatcher went on to say:

Mr. President, I'm sometimes told that the Scots don't like Thatcherism. Well, I find that hard to believe—because the Scots invented Thatcherism, long before I was thought of. It is more than two hundred years since Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Fergusson and others first set out their ideas of a world in which wealth would be generated and spread ever more widely. They saw that it's not Government which creates wealth—it's people. That People do best when they pursue their own vision. And that a wise Government will harness the efforts of individuals to improve the well-being of the whole community. So they proposed to restrain Government and to liberate men and women. Mr. President, those are the ideals I hold most dear. And they had their origins in the Scottish Enlightenment.

In making this claim it is unlikely that Margaret Thatcher was aware that nine years earlier leading French philosopher Michel Foucault had made a very similar claim. In March and April 1979, Foucault concluded a series of lectures at the College de France on neoliberalism by identifying Adam Smith, David Hume and Adam Ferguson  as the ‘inventors’ of what he called English liberalism. It was on the foundations of this English liberalism , so Foucault argued, that neoliberalism was built.

Since Thatcher did not become prime minister until May 1979, Foucault was unable to connect neoliberalism with Thatcherism. However, it is now widely accepted that Thatcherism was a form of neoliberalism. [For example see David Harvey ‘A Brief History of Neoliberalism’(Oxford, 2006) pp 56-63]

In which case, since the very different figures of Margaret Thatcher and Michel Foucault both identified the Scots as the ‘inventors’ of neoliberalism making a counter-argument will be difficult. Difficult but, I hope, not impossible. However, in making this counter-argument I will be drawing on some obscure corners of Scottish history. In particular, my starting point will be the Lowland Clearances which preceded the more familiar Highland Clearances.

2. From Local to National History 

During and since the referendum campaign I have noticed many people commenting that they were never taught Scottish history at school. I was fortunate since ‘Changing Life in Scotland 1760 to 1830’ was the topic I had to study for O Grade history at Kirkcudbright Academy in the 1970s. Looking back however, it would have been even more interesting if connections had been made between Scottish and local history during the period covered. It was only after I returned to Galloway after 20 years in England that I began to discover the connections as I read my way through the local history section of Castle Douglas Library.

One of the discoveries I made was that what we had been taught at school to call the Agricultural Revolution is now described as the Lowland Clearances during which a whole class of farm workers- the cottars- disappear from Scottish history. Unlike the dramatic Highland Clearances, the Lowland Clearances were a ‘silent revolution’ which did not lead to rural unrest- apart from in Galloway. Here in 1724, the beginnings of Scotland’s eighteenth century agricultural revolution were met with an armed uprising by cottars and tenant farmers who had been evicted from arable farms to make way for cattle farms. The uprising lasted for several months and was only suppressed after a regiment of dragoons was sent to Galloway.

Inspired by the Galloway Levellers, I began digging deeper into local history. One surprising discovery is that in the 1780s a small group of young men from Galloway became apprentices to a textile machine maker (also from Galloway) who was based near Bolton in Lancashire. In the 1790s four of these young men moved to Manchester where they soon became leading cotton spinners. One of this group was John Kennedy (1769-1855) who promoted the Liverpool-Manchester railway and was a judge at the Rainhill Locomotive Trials in 1829 which were won by George and Robert Stephenson’s with their famous ‘Rocket’.

Kennedy’s business partner was James McConnell who married Margaret Houldsworth. Her brother Thomas owned a rival cotton spinning business and later became an MP for Manchester. Her other brother, Henry moved from Manchester to Glasgow where he set-up Scotland’s first steam powered cotton mill in 1801, using machinery supplied by Kennedy and McConnell. Then in 1836, with financial help from his brother Thomas, Henry Houldsworth bought Coltness estate near Wishaw in Lanarkshire.  Beneath the estate were rich seams of coal and ironstone which provided the raw material for the Coltness iron works which Henry established.

Ten years later, Henry Houldsworth established the Dalmellington iron works in Ayrshire. Part of the finance for this venture was provided by James Murray, Henry’s son-in-law. James’ father was George Murray who with his brother Adam was one of the Galloway-Manchester cotton spinners.

As well as the Galloway-Manchester, cotton-iron connections, I also found a Liverpool   connection. William Ewart senior was a Galloway born merchant in Liverpool where his business partner was John Gladstone from Biggar. William Ewart’s son William became an MP. William Ewart junior was a supporter of the Anti-Corn Law League and a keen advocate of free-trade. William Ewart senior was godfather to John Gladstone’s son  William Ewart Gladstone the famous Victorian prime minister.

To this group can be added another significant player, Galloway born economist John Ramsay McCulloch who was described by Friedrich Engel’s as ‘the English bourgeoisies’ favourite political economist’ in 1844.

However, before discussing the role these Scots played in the creation of ninettenth century ‘English liberalism’ we need to go back to the early eighteenth century and take up the story of the Galloway Levellers again.

In 1723, the year before the Levellers uprising began, the Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture was established in Edinburgh. Its patron was John Dalrymple, second earl of Stair and its secretary was Robert Maxwell of Arkland in Galloway. Amongst the  Society’s members were John Clerk of Penicuik, Patrick Heron of Kirroughtrie in Galloway and James Steuart of Coltness. Of these, Patrick Heron of Kirroughtrie was one of the landowners who attempted to negotiate with the Galloway Levellers and John Clerk’s brother was a customs officer in Kirkcudbright at the time and kept his brother Clerk informed of events through a series of weekly letters. The troops sent to quash the Levellers were the earl of Stair’s dragoons. Members of the Society were therefore very aware of the events in Galloway.

Although Galloway was quiet the following year, cities across Scotland were not. An attempt to raise the duty paid on malt, essential for beer making, led to riots. The worst of these took place in Glasgow where  the rioters had control of the city for two weeks in 1725 before General Wade was able to restore order with his troops.

Tucked away in the ‘Select Transactions’ of the Society of Improvers, edited by Robert Maxwell and published in 1747 is ‘An Account of the Society’s Endeavours  to Promote our Manufactures’. The Society began these endeavours in November 1723, focussed on promoting the linen industry in Scotland. Work on this idea continued through 1724 and 1725.  In 1726, a ‘Bill for Encouraging and Promoting Fisheries and other Manufactures and Improvements in that part of Great Britain called Scotland’ was laid before Parliament. The ‘Select Transactions’ includes the complete text of this Bill.

The Bill was supported by prime minister Robert Walpole but opposed by English members of parliament who objected to the costs involved. Walpole replied that it would be cheaper than maintaining 6000 troops in Scotland to maintain order. Walpole’s fear was that so far the Union of 1707 had failed to stimulate the Scottish economy and that this was being exploited by the Jacobites to stir up resentment against the Union. While Glasgow and Dumfries had been hostile to the Jacobites in 1715, if nothing was done to increase employment and prosperity in the Presbyterian west of Scotland, this could change. Indeed, if there had been popular support for the Jacobites in southern Scotland in 1745, the Jacobites might well have succeeded.

Between 1727, when the Board of Trustees for the Improvement of Manufactures and Fisheries was established, until state regulation of the linen industry was abolished in 1823, Scottish production of linen rose from 2.2 million yards in 1728 to 36 million yards in 1822. Although since 1780 the linen industry had been overshadowed by the rapid growth of Scotland’s cotton industry, the Board of Trustees successful improvement of the linen industry laid the foundations for the rise of cotton.

The significance of the establishment of the Board of Trustees is that it operated through the era of the Scottish Enlightenment as a successful example of state intervention in the Scottish economy. When the Board’s origins in the work of the Society of Improvers is taken into account a further significant factor emerges. In 1723 the Union of 1707 had not delivered an economic boost for Scotland. Since key members of the Society like the second earl of Stair and Sir John Clerk were supporters of the Union and opponents of the Jacobites, they were very aware that without some form of state support and intervention in the Scottish economy, the future of the Union was at risk.

Of course the Union might still have survived without state support for the Scottish linen industry in the eighteenth century, but it is interesting that the movement towards Scottish independence was boosted in the late twentieth century by Margaret Thatcher’s antagonism to state intervention and support for key Scottish industries.  

3. The Scottish Enlightenment and the Origins of Liberalism

The Union of 1707 created an anomaly. While the centre of political power moved south to London, only a few Scottish landowners, like the dukes of Buccleuch, were wealthy enough to live in London. However, the remaining landowners were still influential through the Commissioners of Supply (local government) which the Union had not affected. The Church of Scotland retained its autonomy, as did the Scottish universities. Along with the Convention of Royal Burghs and the persistence of the Scottish legal system, the shadowy outlines of a Scottish state endured thus giving members of Scotland’s ruling elite limited but real power within ‘that part of Great Britain called Scotland’.

I believe that it was the uncertainties and ambiguities of their new situation which forced the more intellectual members of the Scottish elite to think more deeply about the nature of society, about the economy and about political power. These philosophical speculations were given an extra edge in the aftermath of the Jacobites final defeat in 1746. As the Jacobites advanced south, there was panic on the streets of London and Scots were portrayed as barefooted barbarians and destroyers of civilisation. It was only after 1746 that the Scottish Enlightenment really took off and the Age of Improvement began.

What occurred was an elite led, top-down attempt to modernise and civilise Scotland and the Scots. Across Lowland Scotland landowners began sweeping away the physical signs of the old Scotland by rationalising the farmed landscape. The Military Map of Scotland made by William Roy in 1755 captures the beginnings of this process. It shows, dotted across the Lowlands, the houses of large landowners surrounded by neat chequerboard patterns of square fields bounded by hedges and dykes. Over the next fifty years, estate by estate, county by county, the square or rectangular fields of improved farms spread out over the landscape. The old fermtouns were swept away and  new stone built steadings replaced them. New villages and towns were built, 86 in Dumfries and Galloway alone. These in turn were linked together by a network of new roads, improving and speeding up communications.

Significantly, this transformation was brought about not by the actions of the British state, but by Scotland’s civil society. However, the actions of the British state did facilitate the process by providing opportunities for Scottish merchants, soldiers and even doctors to make huge fortunes as what was to become the British Empire expanded across the globe. Many of the improving landowners were not members of the traditional landowning elite but had bought their estates with wealth gained overseas. By improving their new estates and, in the process themselves, the newly rich could disguise the origins of wealth gained  through crude and brutal exploitation and become ‘gentlemen’.

Across Dumfries and Galloway and the rural south of Scotland, the late eighteenth century landscape of Enlightened Improvement survives. In central Scotland it is overlaid by a very different landscape, a landscape shaped by the Industrial Revolution. While it has been argued, for example by Joel Mokyr in ‘The Enlightened Economy’ [Yale, 2010] that the Industrial Revolution was a product of the Enlightenment I am not so certain.

Although the first of James Watt’s steam engines began working in 1776, they were used as pumping engines. It was not until the 1790s in Manchester that steam was used to directly power cotton spinning machinery. For Friedrich Engels, writing in 1844, it was this combination of steam plus cotton machinery that began the Industrial Revolution and Engels was the first to use the term in an British context.

Freed from reliance on water power and close to sources of coal, the cotton industry grew rapidly in Manchester. The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway in 1830 removed transport problems caused by the slow and expensive canal network, leading to further growth. But then the cotton manufactures encountered another problem. During the Napoleonic Wars, farmers and landowners profited from the high price of wheat. When prices fell in 1815, their dominance in the unreformed House of Commons and in the House of Lords led to the passing of a law to keep corn (wheat) prices high by excluding imported wheat. High corn prices, it was argued, led to high wages which in turn pushed up the production costs of cotton. After several years of struggle, in 1845 the Manchester based Anti-Corn Law League succeeded in getting the 1815 act repealed. From 1845 until 1914, ‘free trade’ became the cornerstone of economic policy in the UK, supported and promoted by the ‘Manchester School’ of  English (British) liberalism.

In the mid-nineteenth century, France Belgium, Prussia, Sweden, Spain, Norway, Holland, the Hanseatic league, Switzerland, Austria and the German principalities adopted free-trade polices. However, beginning with France in 1875 and soon followed by Germany, enthusiasm for free-trade began to wane and measures to protect domestic industries from ‘unfair’ competition were introduced.  In the USA, the slave-owning, cotton producing states favoured free-trade while the more industrialised northern states were protectionist. The victory of the northern states in 1865 was therefore also a victory for protectionism.

After WW1 there was a period of economic recovery but the Great Depression which followed saw even the UK give up free-trade in favour of a protectionist system of ‘imperial preferences’. Combined with the rise of fascism and communism it seemed that economic liberalism was dead. But, as Foucault argued, the same period saw the birth of what was to become neoliberalism after WW2. The key moment identified by Foucault was a conference held in Paris in August 1938, inspired by the work of Walter Lippman in the USA.

As well as Lippman himself, the meeting was also attended by Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow from Germany and Austrian School theorists  Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Participants from France included Raymond Aron, Robert Marjolin, Louis Rougier, and Jacques Rueff and entrepreneur Ernest Mercier. Hungarian born but UK based  Michael Polanyi was another participant. Participants from France included Raymond Aron, Robert Marjolin, Louis Rougier, and Jacques Rueff. Walter Eucken, the founder of German neoliberalism, called ordoliberalism, was invited to the conference, but was not given permission to leave Germany.

Significantly, based on his experiences as a journalist, Lippmann argued that policy makers could ignore public opinion and even dismiss it. Lippmann believed that public opinion is incoherent, ill-informed and lacks an organised or coherent structure. Effectively, Lippmann was arguing for a tightly controlled and limited form of  democracy. Eucken's contribution was drawn from his writings, where he argued that the state has the task of providing  the political framework for economic freedom, in contrast to Adam Smith's doctrine of 'laissez-faire'. For Eucken, the essence of the market was competition rather than exchange To facilitate market competition, the state should maintain legal and institutional frameworks, including the maintenance of private property, enforcement of private contracts, liability, free entry to markets, and monetary stability. However, the state should not direct or intervene in the economic processes of daily practices, as occurs in a centrally planned economies.

Necessarily, since his lectures were delivered before the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA, what Foucault called neoliberalism is not quite the same as today’s neoliberalism. However, by locating the origins of neoliberalism in the 1930s rather than the 1970s, Foucault’s work challenges the tendency, especially in Scotland, to simplify its complex history by equating neoliberalism with Thatcherism.

4. Scottish Influence on English Liberalism

Finally, from my own research, I have found a Scottish link which connects Adam Smith’s ‘laissez faire’ liberalism with Foucault’s ‘English liberalism’. In his book ‘Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence , 1600-1850’ (Cambridge, 2011), Prasannan Parthasarath highlighted a significant lecture given to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society by John Kennedy in November 1815. Kennedy’s lecture was on ‘The Rise and Progress of the Cotton Industry’ and Parthasarath noted that Kennedy drew on Adam Smith’s work to explain the success of the British cotton industry. This was the first time Smith’s work had been used in this way.

This marked a significant change since in the final quarter of the eighteenth century the cotton manufactures of Lancashire had favoured and benefited from protectionist policies which cushioned them against Indian competition. It was only after improvements pioneered by Kennedy and others increased the quality and lowered the cost of their cotton that Smithian free-trade was adopted by the Manchester cotton barons. One result was that the flow of the cotton trade was reversed.

Textile manufactures in the Indian subcontinent suffered grievously with the rise of Lancashire and the rapid growth in exports of British cotton yarn and cloth. By 1820 the English [British] East India Company had terminated its cloth trade and closed down the network of factories that had been purchasing Indian cloth for nearly two centuries. [Parthasarath 2011, p.153]

In addition to John Kennedy, the work of the Galloway born economist John Ramsay McCulloch (1789-1865) provides an important link between the liberalism of the Scottish Enlightenment and that of the Victorian era. Described by Engels in ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ as the ‘English bourgeoisies’ favourite political economist’, McCulloch edited The Scotsman from 1817 to 1821 before publishing ‘ The Principles of Political Economy’ in 1825. Unable to secure a university position in Scotland, McCulloch moved to London where he became professor of Political Economy at University College in London from 1828 to 1837. In 1838 he was appointed Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, a position he held until his death.

The move to London brought McCulloch into close contact with leading politicians like Robert Peel who was prime minister 1834-5 and 1841-46. Peel became a close friend and McCulloch, despite disagreements over economic policies, also had a ‘cordial’ relationship with William Ewart Gladstone who was a member of Peel’s cabinet and then Chancellor of the Exchequer 1852-5 and again 1859-66. After McCulloch’s death, Gladstone became prime minister four times. Gladstone’s great rival Benjamin Disraeli attended McCulloch’s lectures on political economy in the 1830s.

Although, as Marx pointed out in ‘Theories of Surplus Value’ (1860) McCulloch did not make any major contributions to political economy as theory, through his journalism, lectures, books and influential friendships, McCulloch brought the practice of economic liberalism into the heart of the British state. In addition, through his friendship with leading cotton manufacturer John Kennedy of Galloway and Manchester, McCulloch was able to bring the Scottish Enlightenment version of economic liberalism up-to-date by including the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the British economy.

A final connection is provided by William Ewart (1798-1869). Ewart was the son of the Galloway born Liverpool merchant William Ewart mentioned above and was first a Member of Parliament for Liverpool before becoming M.P. for Dumfries. Ewart was a keen supporter of free-trade and a fierce opponent of the Corn Laws, working closely with Richard Cobden and John Bright of the Anti-Corn Law League.

5. Conclusion

In the Introduction to their book ‘Yes-The Radical Case for Scottish Independence’, James Foley and Pete Ramand noted that the 300th anniversary of the Union of 1707 passed with very little public celebration despite the fact that the Union ‘marked  the beginning of two centuries of global domination’ by the Britain and its empire. Although the immediate results of the Union were slight, its long term consequences shaped world history no less than the French Revolution or the American War of Independence.

While the sun has long since set on the British Empire, a very different legacy of the Union continues to influence and shape the world today. What is now called neoliberalism has become over the past 35 years the dominant economic paradigm or belief-system. However, before advent of Thatcherism in the UK and Reaganomics in the USA, in series of lectures in 1978-79 French philosopher Michel Foucault identified an earlier form of neoliberalism. Foucault’s neoliberalism had its roots in the Great Depression of the 1930s which had created a crisis of confidence in traditional economic liberalism. Faced with the threat from the left and the right of state intervention and control of national economies, the neoliberals’ counter proposal was to deepen and extend liberalism so that the state would become the servant of the economy.

Foucault then showed that the idea that the economy should act as a limit or restraint on state power was already present in what he called ‘English liberalism’, drawing on the work of Adam Ferguson, David Hume and Adam Smith to support this claim. But as I have found, the failure of the Union of 1707 to improve the Scottish economy led to lobbying by the Society of Improvers  for state supported intervention via the Board of Trustees for the Improvement of Manufactures and Fisheries. The Board played an active role in developing the Scottish linen industry from 1727 to 1823.

In England over the same period, the early cotton industry was protected from competition from India by import tariffs. Manchester’s cotton capitalists only adopted the doctrines of free-trade after the process of mechanisation allowed Lancashire cottons to be mass produced at high quality. This had a devastating impact on India’s traditional cotton industry. Beginning with John Kennedy’s 1815 lecture, the history of the English cotton industry was then re-written to fit with Adam Smith’s economic theories.

Once its history had been re-written, the huge success of the Lancashire cotton industry in the later nineteenth century was used to prove the economic superiority of laissez-faire and free-trade policies over state-led economic policies based protectionism and market intervention. This went hand-in-hand with a selective reading of Adam Smith’s work to emphasise his support for the ‘free-market economy’ while the work of former Jacobite James Steuart of Coltness was sidelined. Steuart was a former member of the Society of Improvers. Steuart favoured more interventionist economic policies in his book ‘The Principles of Political Economy’ which was published in 1767, nine years before Smith’s ‘On the Wealth of Nations’.

Margaret Thatcher was an admirer of Adam Smith and told a Conservative party conference in 1988 that it was the Scots who first invented Thatcherism. Thatcher was also a committed Unionist. But as the Society of Improvers recognised in the 1720s, unless the Union could improve the Scottish economy, it would fail. Their response was to actively promote state support and intervention in key Scottish industries. It may prove to be an irony of history that it was Margaret Thatcher’s version of Adam Smith’s liberalism which began the break up of the United Kingdom.

The Neilson Mausoleum- Tongland kirkyard

How iron furnaces forged modern Scotland.

Post-referendum, the Labour vote in Scotland appears to be in meltdown. It now seems possible that despite victory for the No campaign last September, the SNP will win enough seats in the May UK general election to create a further constitutional/political crisis/major headache. But will a strong SNP vote mean that most former Labour voters  have become nationalists?  Or will a significant number of SNP voters in May be voting not as ‘nationalists’ but as opponents of neoliberal austerity? That suggestion is a simplification of an older and deeper dimension of Scotland’s politics, one which is tied up with the beginnings of the Labour party in Scotland. This in turn connects to the Scottish experience of industrialisation and ‘old’ rather than neo liberalism.

The following is a beginning. When it got to 3500 words I paused it. Even in this condensed form it will need another 4000 to finish and many more to do justice to the subject.


Hot Blast

In 1994 an attempt was made to blow-up a statue erected in 1834 on Beinn a' Bhragaidh. Attempts to have it more lawfully removed have also been made. An inscription at its base reveals why.

In lasting memorial of-George Granville-Duke of Sutherland Marquess of Stafford KG-An upright and patriotic nobleman-a judicious kind and liberal landlord-who identified the improvement of his vast estates-with the prosperity of all who cultivated them-a public yet unostentatious benefactor-who while he provided useful employment-for the active labourer-opened wide his hand to the distresses-of the widow the sick and the traveller-a mourning and grateful tenantry-uniting with the inhabitants of the neighbourhood-erected this pillar-AD MDCCCXXXIV (1834).

For many people the statue and its inscription  mocks and insults the memory of the thousands of people evicted from the land by the duke of Sutherland and other landowners during the Highland Clearances.

Three hundred miles to the south of Beinn a' Brigade a smaller monument on Barstrobrick hill in Galloway erected in 1888 commemorates an event which changed and disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of Scots, Irish and other nationalities. Yet this monument to human misery has never attracted any more than passing attention and has never been threatened with demolition or removal. Perhaps if the monument had been built on the same ‘eminence’ as this parish church, it would have attracted more attention and less indifference.

From the steeple of the parish church, which stands on a considerable eminence, the flames of no fewer than fifty blast furnaces may be seen. In the daytime these flames are pale and unimpressive; but when night comes on, they appear to burn more fiercely, and gradually there is developed in the sky a lurid glow similar to that which hangs over a city when a great conflagration is in progress. Dense clouds of smoke roll over it incessantly, and impart to all the buildings a peculiarly dingy aspect. A coat of black dust overlies everything, and in a few hours the visitor finds his complexion considerably deteriorated by the flakes of soot which fill the air, and settle on his face. There is something grand in even a distant view of the furnaces but the effect is much enhanced when they are approached to within a hundred yards or so. The flames then have a positively fascinating effect. No production of the pyrotechnist can match their wild gyrations. Their form is ever changing, and the variety of their movements is endless. Now they shoot far upward, and breaking short off, expire among the smoke; again spreading outward, they curl over the lips of the furnace, and dart through the doorways, as if determined to annihilate the bounds within which they are confined; then they sink low into the crater, and come forth with renewed strength in the shape of great tongues of fire, which sway backward and forward, as if seeking with a fierce eagerness something to devour.

In 1869, when the above was written, the parish church mentioned overlooked the rapidly growing town of Coatbridge in Lanarkshire. This growth began in 1830 when the first blast furnace built  for the Baird family at Gartsherrie  was fired up. The blast furnace was one of the first to use a new technique which was to revolutionise  the Scottish iron industry and make Scotland the workshop of  the world. The new technique involved superheating the air blasted into the furnace. This reduced coal consumption from 8 tons per ton of iron produced to three tons. This made the Scottish pig iron the cheapest in the world. In 1825, Scotland produced only 25 000 tons of pig iron per year. By 1840 this had risen to 240 000 tons, to 564 000 tons by 1848 and over 1 million tons by 1862.

The ‘hot blast’ technique of iron smelting which created this phenomenal growth was discovered by James Neilson, manager of the Glasgow Gas Works in 1828. The monument on Barstobrick hill was erected by his son Walter Neilson in honour of his father’s revolutionary discovery. After making his fortune through his discovery, James Neilson had bought Queenshill estate, including Barstobrick hill, in 1848. Neilson’s choice of Galloway to retire to was influenced by a family tradition that John Neilson of Corsock in Galloway was an ancestor. James Neilson was a strongly religious man and John Neilson was a Covenanter ‘martyr’ -or rebel- who was executed in Edinburgh in December 1666 after being captured following the battle of Rullion Green.

There is a difficult point to make here. When the duke of Sutherland and other Highland landowners began reorganising their estates, were they intentionally setting out to destroy the traditional ways of life of their tenants, or were they trying to improve the lives of their tenants? In Lowland Scotland, it is accepted and understood that the re-organisation of estates by landowners was intended to modernise and improve farming practice, making it more profitable for landowner and tenant. The aim, which was accomplished, was to move from subsistence to surplus, banishing the spectre of ‘dearth’ (famine)  from the land.

The problem in the Highlands was that the its very different physical and human ecology meant that trying to copy a process which had worked in the Lowlands failed, with disastrous consequences. But, given the very limited knowledge of physical and human ecology available at the time, how could  Highland landowners have predicted the destructive consequences of their actions? In the context of the Highland Clearances, such arguments are dismissed as apologetic excuses. But by the same logic, does that mean we must hold James Neilson and the Scottish iron masters who profited from his invention accountable for the appalling human cost of the industrial revolution they created?

Extending this argument and with the benefit of environmental hindsight, would it have been better for Scotland if its coal and ironstone had been left untouched beneath the ground?

Coal had been exploited in Scotland since the middle ages, a move pioneered by the great abbeys who used it to boil sea water in  to make salt. However, even by the beginning of the nineteenth century, most coal was still used domestically and production was based on small, shallow mines. Of the future iron producing areas, the expansion of coal mining in Ayrshire had been limited by the failure of several attemtps to break into the Irish coal trade. Since the mid-seventeenth century, coal mining had been built up in West Cumberland to supply the Irish market and Cumbrian coal retained its dominance of this market through the eighteenth century. While coal from Lanarkshire supplied Glasgow, as late as 1769 coal mining was still not a major industry.

By 1769 work had begun on the Forth and Clyde canal and James Watt had surveyed the route of what was to become the Monklands canal. James Steuart, who owned the 12 000 acre Coltness estate was a former Jacobite who had spent 20 years in exile in Europe. Steuart was interested in political economy and had already published his book ‘Outlines of Political Economy’.  In 1769 Stueart published ‘Considerations on the Interest of the County of Lanarkshire in Scotland’. The main focus of this paper was Steuart’s fear that the Forth and Clyde canal would damage the economy of Lanarkshire by allowing imports of grain from the eastern Lowlands to be sold cheaply in Glasgow. Lower grain prices would have a damaging impact on the process of agricultural improvement in Lanarkshire. Ironically, in 1836 Steuart’s son sold Coltness estate for £80 000, not for its agricultural value, but for the coal and ironstone which lay beneath its fertile fields.

Between 1769 and 1836, Scotland did undergo an industrial revolution. This revolution was based on cotton. By 1835 there were 125 cotton mills in Scotland, but although steam was a mature technology, 44 % of the power used in the mills was still supplied by waterwheels. Likewise although there were steamships and steam locomotives at work in Scotland by 1830, their demand for coal could still be met by traditional coal mining. Population growth and economic growth would have increased demand for coal through the nineteenth century. More modern, deeper mines would have been developed to meet this demand, but without the stimulus of the iron industry, this change would have been more gradual and less traumatic.

The discovery that coke could be used instead of charcoal to smelt iron was first made by Abraham Darby in England in 1709. It took fifty years before the technique was successfully applied in Scotland at the Carron iron works. After 1759 no new iron works were built in Scotland until 1785 when the Clyde iron works was built and over the next forty years only a further eight  were constructed. This contrasts with the situation in South Wales where production of pig iron grew from 12 300 tons in 1788 to 277 643 tons in 1830. This was 41% of total UK production. Scottish pig iron production in 1830 was only 39 000 tons or 5.5% of total UK production.

Why was the South Wales iron industry so much more successful than the Scottish iron industry before 1830? There are two main reasons. Firstly, production costs were lower. The Welsh coal had a carbon content of 80%, twice that of Scottish coal. This meant that the Welsh needed less coal to produce their iron. The Welsh coal and ironstone were close to the surface in the hills and could be mined using horizontal shafts driven into the sides of the Welsh valleys. This reduced the labour costs involved in mining the coal and iron stone, producing another cost saving. Secondly, the Welsh had the advantge of ‘location, location, location’. The iron works were linked to Cardiff and Newport by dense network of eighteenth century canals and waggonways. From Cardiff and Newport the Welsh iron could not only be exported by sea but also sent, via the river Severn and the English canal network, to the already well established metal bashing industries of the West Midlands.

Until 1830, the main disadvantage of the Scottish iron industry was that the low -35% to 40%- carbon content of Scottish coal meant that it took as much as 8 tons of coal to produce one ton of iron. This made Scottish iron more expensive than Welsh iron. Apart from the Carron iron works, which specialised in the production of cannons -the Carronade- the other Scottish iron works were only able to survive because the transport costs of shipping Welsh iron to Scotland offset its cheaper production costs. If progress on deepening the Clyde to Glasgow had been more rapid, or if a rail link to England had been established earlier, the Scottish iron industry might have withered away before Neilson’s hot-blast could revolutionise it.

Neilson had become manager of the Glasgow Gas Company in 1817. In 1824 he was approached by an ironmaster who asked if the techniques used to purify the gas could be used to remove sulphur from the air used in blast furnaces. As Neilson explained in a paper he read to the Glasgow Philosophical Society in 1825,this question had arisen because ironmasters had observed that the iron produced in winter was superior to iron produced in summer. In the absence of  scientific knowledge, some ironmasters believed that there was more sulphur in the air in summer while many others believed that colder air produced finer iron. Neilson argued that the difference was due to the higher oxygen content of cold air. He also noted that warmer air had a higher water content.

This led him to experiment with heating the air to dry it out. His first experiment involved supplying an ordinary blacksmith’s forge with heated air ‘the effect was that fire was rendered  most brilliant, with an intense degree of heat’ while blasts of cold air produced only ordinary brightness and heat. Unfortunately, as Neilson later recounted, there was a ‘strong prejudice’ and a ‘superstitious dread’  amongst furnace managers against meddling with furnaces that were producing good quality iron. However, one of the furnaces at the Clyde iron works was producing poor quality iron so Neilson was allowed to experiment with heating the blast supplied to this furnace. This improved its performance and Neilson was able to use the results of his trials at the Clyde iron works to produce a provisional patent for his invention in 1828 and a full patent in 1829. The first hot-blast furnace using an ‘improved apparatus’ began operations at the Clyde iron works in 1830.

If it had been left to existing ironmasters, their ‘strong prejudice’ against innovation would have led to a slow uptake of Neilson’s hot-blast. The rapid adoption of the new technology was driven by the Bairds of Gartsherrie. The Baird family had been tenant farmers in Lanarkshire for generations. They had profited  rise in food prices during the Napoleonic wars,  but as prices fell after 1815, Alexander Baird took on the lease of a coal mine near the Monklands canal in 1816. Alexander had 8 sons and made William, then aged 20, manager while Alexander junior, aged 16, became the selling agent in Glasgow. In 1825 the brothers took the lease of a pit at Gartsherrie in Old Monklands parish. The problem with supplying coal for the Glasgow market was its seasonal nature with high demand in winter and low demand in summer. The existing coal suppliers also operated a cartel, keeping the price of coal high by restricting production. It seems likely that the Bairds decision in 1828 to build an iron furnace at Gartsherrie was driven by a need to find a use for surplus stocks of coal and the fact that there were extensive reserves of ironstone in the immediate area.

The Bairds first furnace was fired up in 1830 and was a hot-blast furnace. This meant that they were immediately able to produce pig iron more cheaply than their traditionalist competitors. Emboldened by the success of their new venture, by 1843 the Bairds had built 16 blast furnaces at Gartsherrie producing 100 000 tons of pig iron per year making it the largest iron works in the world. As they built more iron furnaces, the Bairds improved the hot-blast systems used and stopped paying royalties to Neilson. This led to a legal dispute which Neilson won in 1843. During the trial, the Bairds revealed that in the ten years between 1833 and 1843 they had made £ 260 000 net profit from hot-blast iron.

The Bairds ability to make huge profits from Neilson’s hot-blast was in part due to the discovery that Lanarkshire’s blackband ironstone (iron ore mixed with coal) and raw splint coal could be used directly in their furnaces. More pig iron could then be produced from less coal and iron ore. But in addition to this cost saving, the Bairds and other ironmasters made sure that the labour costs involved in mining the coal and ironstone were also reduced. This was achieved by what can only be described as a class war directed against their employees.

The problem faced by the ironmasters was that, as Alan Campbell explained in ‘The Lanarkshire Miners’ (Edinburgh, 1979), between 1606 and 1799 Scottish coal miners had been legally bound to their place of employment. While this form of neo-feudal serfdom guaranteed mine-owners a dedicated workforce, it also deterred new entrants to the workforce. The bonded miners believed that their wages were linked to the price of coal, so when coal prices were high so were their wages. This encouraged them to limit the amount of coal they mined so its price remained high. Well into the nineteenth century, the early miners’ trade unions continued trying to keep their wages up by restricting how much coal they mined.

However, although the new hot-blast iron furnaces needed less coal, high coal prices risked losing the resulting cost-advantage. The furnaces also had to be kept going 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. The ironmasters needed a constant supply of cheap coal and as more hot-blast furnaces were built, they had to keep increasing the supply of coal and ironstone to the furnaces. To do so, the ironmasters opened their own coal and ironstone mines. At first these mines were close to the iron works but as production increased the ‘industrial frontier’ was pushed further out into the Lanarkshire and Ayrshire countryside.

To accommodate their workforce, the ironmasters built housing for them, as cheaply as possible. To feed their workers, they also opened company stores where the workers had to spend their wages. In theory the Truck Act passed in 1831 made this illegal, but as late as 1871 the House of Commons had to set up an inquiry into its effectiveness after a petition signed by 100 000 miners. In Lanarkshire it was found that there had been no criminal prosecutions under the Truck Act. This, it turned out, was because the ironmasters had effective control over the legal system in Lanarkshire.

Before Coatbridge became a centre for the new iron industry, the parishes of Old and New Monklands had been rural parishes with no need for a police force. By the 1840s this situation had changed but the Commissioners of Supply for Lanarkshire, who were mainly rural landowners, did not want to take on the expense of providing a police force. The Bairds of Gartsherrie and other local ironmasters then had the two parishes plus parts of Shotts and Bothwell made a into a special police district, paying for the new police force through the rates they paid on their extensive properties in the area.

By 1869, although there were 415 Commissioners of Supply owning property with an annual value of £100 in Lanarkshire, the smaller Finance Committee, dominated by the ironmasters and large landowners like the duke of Hamilton who was also a mine owner, controlled the purse strings of the Procurator Fiscal. Before proceeding with a potentially expensive legal case, the Procurator would have to have the approval of the Finance Committee. In 1871, the auditor of the accounts for Lanarkshire’s Committee of Supply said that he would not allow the expenses for a prosecution under the Truck Act because he believed the Commissioners ‘would not sanction it’.

James Baird’s account of a strike at Gartsherrie iron works.

In April 1837 the colliers were receiving five shillings a day, but as trade was looking rather unfavourable, they took it into their heads that they would be able to keep up their wages by working only three days in the week, and they continued to do this for some time. The other coal masters took no steps to resist it ; but we resolved that we would not, if we could help it, have our output limited in this way, and we accordingly gave every man notice to quit in fourteen days.
Thus we were left with eight furnaces, and not a single collier at Gartsherrie. We were not
obliged, however, to draw upon our reserve supplies. We had  now an " open cast " ready for work, and at Gartgill we had about twenty acres of the Pyotshaw coal hanging on the roof of the main coal, and it could be easily brought down. This we found could be accomplished by ordinary labourers, and we were soon able to procure a large output from the open cast and  from the Pyotshaw coal—a good many labourers who had been
working about the pits being now employed at the common coal faces. In the course of three weeks the output had been so much increased that we were able to carry on the whole of the furnaces. So stubborn, however, were the colliers, notwithstanding what they saw we were able to do, that they did not look near us for fifteen weeks.
This strike taught the poor men a lesson which they did not soon forget. It was as determined and prolonged a strike as any we have ever had at Gartsherrie. Many of the wives and children suffered greatly during the fifteen weeks of their foolish idleness. When they returned their condition was sadly changed. The best their furniture was gone. Most of the people who returned were in squalid wretchedness, and some of those who had left us had succumbed to their sufferings, and were in their graves. All the time I remained about Gartsherrie—down to 1851 or 1852—I never again saw the colliers up to the same mark of health and comfort as that in which they were before this strike.

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I’ve hardly encountered a specimen from the postpunk years of the early 1980s that better exemplified how mixed up and stimulating all the categories were getting, than The Encyclopaedia of Ecstasy, Vol. 1, an utterly mind-boggling zine put out by Alistair Livingston in 1983. Livingston had/has associations with the anarchist collective/zine Kill Your Pet Puppy which ran from 1979 to 1984…. he references Crass and Bauhaus and Blood and Roses. While one wouldn’t necessarily expect that a “psychedelic goth punk fanzine,” as Livingston himself termed the project, would contain visions that might have emerged from Arthur Rimbaud‘s absinthe-drenched writings, the fact is that any movement led by Crass and Psychic TV was going to be awfully erudite and aestheticized, fueled by some pretty foreboding concerns over technology and culture. It’s so “political” that it fans out into almost pure (hyperverbal, psychedelic) sensation. In keeping with the absinthe feel, one page is titled “Vivé La Decadence, Paris 1893-London 199?”

The cover, complete with an all-seeing Masonic pyramid, reminds me a great deal ofGustav Klimt, which when you consider that it appears to have been executed purely with blocky magic markers, is awfully impressive. (The Klimt association is far from accidental—page 6 features a Xerox’d shout-out to Klimt’s “Jurisprudenz,” which was later destroyed by the Nazis.) At one juncture Livingston inquires, “why aren’t crass the psychedelic furs?” (Good question!) There are suggestive cut-and-paste headlines such as “whoops there goes another nuclear plant” or “man sees world saved by robots.” At the bottom of page 1 is an exuberant shout-out to the like-minded: “There is more… Like “Kill Your Pet Puppy” (a zine)…. The Anarchy Centres, the Black Sheep Co-op, punk lives (!), the people, the music, the squats, the whole beautiful chaoticness.”

‘When Darkness Dawns’ :The Encyclopaedia of Ecstasy Volume Two : November 1983

The last part of Volume Two was written on 11 November 1983,the same day that Operation Able Archer ended. During the ten days of Able Archer 83 the world came as close to nuclear annihilation as it had in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

The front and back cover were created by Paul Forder and the drawing on the last page by Val Drayton. The text was written by Alistair Livingston between 1979 and 1983. It is an extreme piece of writing.

Operation Able Archer 1983- from wikipedia 

Able Archer 83 was a ten-day North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) command post exercise starting on November 2, 1983, that spanned Western Europe, centered on the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) Headquarters in Casteau, north of the city of Mons. Able Archer exercises simulated a period of conflict escalation, culminating in a simulated DEFCON 1 coordinated nuclear attack. The exercise also introduced a new, unique format of coded communication, radio silences, and the participation of heads of government.

The realistic nature of the 1983 exercise, coupled with deteriorating relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and the anticipated arrival of Pershing II nuclear missiles in Europe, led some members of the Soviet Politburo and military to believe that Able Archer 83 was a ruse of war, obscuring preparations for a genuine nuclear first strike. In other words, they were concerned that what was called by those staging it, a training exercise disguised as an attack, was instead an attack disguised as a training exercise. In response, the Soviets readied their nuclear forces and placed air units in East Germany and Poland on alert.

This is known as the 1983 war scare. The 1983 war scare is considered by many historians to be one of the closest times the world has come to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The only incident more severe was the Norwegian rocket incident of 1995. The threat of nuclear war ended with the conclusion of the exercise on November 11