Though Cowards Flinch

There’s been a great deal of discussion about the nature of liberties amongst various writers on the net recently, what with the recent Convention on Modern Liberty. I thought it would be useful for me to chart out a few conceptual thoughts of my own. I have decided to take this in separate parts, since treating them as a whole is rendered unfeasible by the practical constraints of a blog – long articles tend to be ignored. Multiple shorter articles may receive better treatment and clearer argument in the comments.

The first part shall attempt to discuss the notion of national (English) identity. The second shall present a discussion of the history of English liberties in the context of the first article. The third and final shall draw the conclusions of both of these into an analysis of the different demands for liberty in modern Britain.

Brought to my attention by Christopher Hill’s masterful Puritanism and Revolution, the title of this article is drawn from a refrain of the 1381 peasant’s rebellion. Hill argues that virtually every society has had and continues to have the tendency to regard some time in its own history as ‘pure’, and the present time as an era of lost rights. Some strands of counter-hegemonic narrative aims to incorporate this tendency in order that tradition and precedent may be cited in defence of the desire for change.

During the English Revolution, the myth of the Fall from Grace was cited by Thomas Astbury (1641) as part of the revolutionary notion that men should live by the sweat of their brow, not by that of others – as all were equally the sons of Adam and entitled to their full inheritance. Different precedents were invoked in argument; at the Putney debates, anti-Normanism and a utopian view of Saxon England is often cited, as by John Wildman, against the officers’ citation of precedent in defence of property rights and heirarchy.

To quote Rainsborough, “I hear it said, ‘It’s a huge alteration, it’s a bringing in of new laws!’ and that this kingdom has been under this government ever since it was a kingdom.” The point of such anti-Normanism was an attempt to overthrow the conservatism of Ireton and Cromwell and force through the Agreement of the People, establishing manhood suffrage – an argument which took the participants into the very depth of what such suffrage might mean for property rights and other central elements of the State and society.

The English revolution was far from the only time that a search for precedent was carried out by those seeking to establish the grounds for change. After the Glorious Revolution, some Radicals would cite 1688 as their precedent; the Norman Yoke was popular too as grounds to return to some pre-Norman ideal. Sometimes these two things were conflated – as by John Baxter, who claimed that all the settlement of 1688 did was to confirm the Saxon laws of pre-Norman times. This continued to the 19th Century.

Even in the early 20th century, the concept of Merry England was a popular one in socialist pamphleteering.

Yet the historicity of any of these precedents is negligible. There is no way in which the facts can be made to fit the narrative which our illustrious Radical and Revolutionary forebears claimed for them. Contained within the very rhetoric of the Saxonist utopians is the reality of their contention. To borrow from Wildman, speaking in 1647: “Our very laws were made by our conquerors…those that were our lords, and made us their vassals, would suffer nothing else to be chronicled.” (CP 1.318)

On the surface this may seem to be a direct reference to the Conquest following 1066, especially with reference to vassalage, the hallmark of autocratic feudalism, the more important part is the first. Our very laws were made by our conquerors. The Saxons themselves were conquerors, having invaded Romano-Celtic Britain and displaced, annihilated or subjected the indigenous population. This makes it somewhat hypocritical, from a modern standpoint, to critique post-1066 society as the suppression of the ‘real’ British.

The core of truth within Wildman’s words are simply that in all ages and all forms of civilisation hitherto, a ruling class imposes its laws by means of the State. The nature of the State and ‘legitimate’ government is, especially in pre-modern times, essentially the retrospective and/or contemporary identification of the armed body of men who exercised direct control. This is as much true for the Saxons as for the Normans, though the ideological fig-leaf of the two civilisations was somewhat different.

Nevertheless, the reality was often the same. As the Laws of Ine reveal, the noblemen of Saxon England could still be tenants of the King. Similarly the Laws of Ine, though they regulated the degree of exploitation (e.g. clause 67, which laid out terms whereby a tenant could ignore an attempt to increase his rent by the demand for service), also recognised the power of the landed aristocracy to exploit their subordinates’ labour – in the fields, in the household or on the battlefield.

Indeed the heirarchical disposition of Saxon society is a matter of historical record – from the Ceorls at the head of a village right up to the King, whoever that might be. My purpose through all of this brief discussion (compared to the time spent on it by Chris Hill, or chapters in E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class) is to repudiate any modern identification of English ‘national’ identity with the different exploited classes that have existed throughout English history.

Such identification is an error on the part of the Agitators and their sympathisers at Putney; in their attempt to establish precedent and cast down the royal line of Charles Stuart, they fall back on an older precedent which is equally exploitative in historical reality. Similarly modern identification of “the English” with the survivors of Saxon England, wending their way through the centuries whilst suffering the Norman Yoke, is equally preposterous and doesn’t stand up to historical scrutiny.

Such a concept as English national identity, including both exploiters and exploited (if we are permitted to think in Marxist terms) or rich and poor (if not), powerful and powerless, must instead be looked for elsewhere than in some mythical theme of continuity between Saxon England and the modern nation-state. Except in extremely basic conceptual terms (such as a declaration that the existence of ‘a state’ in each renders them fraternal in some degree),  modern and Saxon England may as well be different countries.

No theme runs through English history that does not to some degree run through the history of every other country. Whether it is the unsung history of the subjugated Celts of Britain or France or Ireland, or the persecuted Saxons in England, displaced from their hegemony, or any other ethnic body rudely displaced by violence, English history no more renders a trans-historical, universal definition of what it means to be ‘English’ than the similar histories render to their respective nationalities an identity descended from the Ages.

Tom Paine makes the decisive break with this conservative desire to cite precedent and establish unhistorical links with the past, though Paine’s narrative is cloaked in what might at first be seen as anti-Normanism. “A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself King of England, against the consent of the natives, is, in plain terms, a very paltry, rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it. (…) The plain truth is that the antiquity of the English monarchy will not bear looking into.”

Our first conclusion is to echo Paine’s Common Sense. It is to popular consent that we must look for guidance, the self-actualizing praxis of the working people of England, not any appeals to false history or the equal obscurantism of national identity. National identity cannot resolve or magically dissipate the opposed interests of different sections of the nation. That is not to say it has not played a role in English history, either for better or for worse. It has certainly been a key motivating ideology.

In the ‘national’ interest, a a result of self-identification with a nation, men have gone to war and died. But phrases such as national interest and national identity suppress, rather than resolve, the differences which I spoke about. In discourses of national interest, British governments have attempted to avoid large scale industrial action during war time, only for industrial action to flare up massively not only once war was over, but once the participants in the action collectively rejected the propositions put to them by arguments in defence of the national interest.

Indeed, during strikes by the FBU or RMT, ‘national’ interest is frequently cited to cast aspersions at the ‘sectional’ demands of the workers. And yet, this notion of national identity and interest – the contention that English people (or Englishmen, as it has been for most of English history) have more interests in common with one another than with others – is set in an historical context whereby both identity and interest are essentially produced for mass consumption by small sections of English society.

When this is not the case, when elements of identity are spontaneous, you find the ground warred over by the Socialist Left and the Fascist Right: the specific language of working class exploitation and class-based grievance becomes the vague and generalised notion of racial or national persecution. This is true of such spontaneous markers as anti-capitalist resentment of the wealthy in times of mass unemployment, poverty and a general, widespread economic crisis of capitalism.

Even such concrete historical factors as crisis prove that ‘national interest’ is not the lowest common denominator of English society. One party is in favour of restoring a regressive tax such as VAT, in order that the cost of economic recovery be foisted all the heavier upon the working class majority, one party is not. Not to say that Labour don’t have their own issues going on right now, this is simply an example of the subdivisional capacity of any concept of national interest.

Likewise with national identity. National identity must find a way to subsume other identities, such as religious identity, in order to generate a coherent narrative – a narrative which is by definition political, since national identity attempts to speak for the unified polity in the same was as national interest does. Yet it can’t – since other identities are often in competition with one another for a finite amount of resources. This is as much true of the multiple competing religious identities as it is for class-identity. As a Marxist, it’s simply my place to assert the primacy of class-relations and the ideological superstructure begotten of a definite class correlation of forces in determining the role of the other identities and, to some extent, in defining the content of a ‘national’ identity.

It would, after all, be remiss to note that while national identity is formulated within a definite context of power relations biased towards the ruling class, the strength of working class opposition also has a role to play, by the effect its opposition has on the general ideological tenor of the era. Through this interplay, the ‘national’ identity of 18th century Britain – especially with its attachment to the ancestral constitution and to a certain conception of liberty – has changed over the last two hundred and fifty years. Not in a given direction, but multiple times and in multiple ways. This the second conclusion.

National identity does not arise in mystical fashion. Our first conclusion was that transhistorical appeals to our past to answer for us in determining the content of national identity are inadequate. Our second conclusion is a more appropriate, scientific use of history; national identity is simply one more ideological narrative. Its creation is complex but ultimately material and therefore historical. Its evolution can be traced and examined to isolate different components, which can then be studied to determine from whence they come.

This is not to say that from one end of English history we can at whim draw ‘lessons’ for our modern England, or resort to Whiggish history and see in the English past a constant motif which we can designate Progress, or in this case ‘national identity’. This dissolution of national identity is vital to our conception of liberties today – as it is to a historical understanding of the times in our past when all elements of society have wrapped themselves up in discourses about liberty in general and specific liberties in particular, in reaction to initiatives such as the creation of a professional army during the Napoleonic Wars.

It is to that theme which I shall turn in my next article.