Tom Nairn
Tom Nairn's many books include The Break-up of Britain, Faces of Nationalism, After Britain, and The Enchanted Glass. He writes for, among others, New Left Review and the London Review of Books.Blog
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The welfare state we’re in – A reading list for the present class war
In the UK this month austerity has revealed itself to be in the mode of naked class war. Monday began with welfare reforms, the introduction of the notorious bedroom tax and reductions in the access to Legal Aid. These attacks will be followed in the coming weeks by the replacing of disability living allowance with a personal independence payment policed by Atos, the reduction in the 50p tax rate (providing tax cuts to the rich) and the introduction of the controversial Universal Credit scheme. Combined with other aspects of late capitalism (from food prices to housing shortages) the reality of life in austerity Britain is uglier than it has been for some time.
With textbook ideological manoeuvring these assaults have been accompanied by a rhetoric designed to divide the working classes between “workers and shirkers.” To the chorus of the right wing press, statements, such as this one by Liam Fox or this from Iain Duncan Smith, ultimately aim to crush the possibility of an organized resistance. Most revealing this week has been efforts by the right wing to frame the horrific Philpott manslaughter as a result of ‘benefit dependency.’ Almost beyond belief, this story’s beginnings in the Daily Mail and right wing blogs were reinforced yesterday with this statement from the grubbiest man on earth: Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. -
A Reading List for the Olympics: Part One
Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague — Marc Perelman
Perelman’s book takes a subversive look at sport and global sporting events such as the Olympics to reveal their darker side. He argues that sport has become an instrument of political control and a vehicle for capitalist monoculture. This timely polemic offers refreshing reading to those looking for an antidote to this summer’s Olympian frenzy.
Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism — Stephen Graham
This authoritative study examines the rapid and dangerous spread and normalization of surveillance and state policing in western cities and warzones alike under the guise of national security. As such it provides an unsettling and provocative insight into the global backdrop of the rising costs and militarization of London’s Olympic Games security operation.
A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain— Owen Hatherley
Hatherley’s critical tour of Britain’s urban centres incorporates the latest and most high profile attempt at regeneration offering a carefully considered indictment of the architectural and social failures of Stratford’s Olympic sites.
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Towards a "Republican Monarchy"? Tom Nairn extract in The Scotsman
The Scotsman has published an extract from the new edition of The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy, the acclaimed dissection of Britain's relationship with its monarchy, by the foremost historian of nationalism Tom Nairn. In the extract, Nairn discusses the idea of a "Republican Monarchy":
The term appears self-contradictory, and yet nothing else corresponds to what may be emerging right now, following the decisive SNP victory in the Scottish Parliamentary election. There will be a referendum on Scottish independence quite soon, and Premier Alex Salmond has repeatedly made it clear he does not want outright republicanism to be part of the bid. The future envisaged is therefore one of statehood equality over the former United Kingdom, in which a crowned head of state will remain, as the symbol of partnership and good will, established social and personal relations, and the historic closeness derived from 1688. It should also change and probably moderate the "surrogacy" mentioned earlier, through which English national identity has been transmuted into an adulatory obsession with royalty. One way the English have avoided "little England" (the country on its own) has been the curiously amplified elevation of a regal family dynasty described in this book, informally shared by the peripheral countries. A formal agreement between the periphery and the core-majority, by contrast, could include the acceptance of monarchy in a spirit different from what has so far prevailed. In effect, the replacement of "enchantment" and emotionality by a straightforward calculation of joint benefits and their costs.
Visit the Scotsman to read the extract in full.
Discussions
Discussions occur on book pages throughout the site. The most recent discussions about the works of Tom Nairn are listed below.
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Perry Anderson wrote, “At least four alternative readings of the times - there may be more - offer diagnoses of the directions in which the world is moving … The best known is, of course, the vision to be found in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, to which the other three all refer, at once positively and critically. Tom Nairn’s Faces of Nationalism and forthcoming Global Nations set out a second perspective. Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century and Adam Smith in Beijing constitute a third. Malcolm Bull’s recent essays, culminating in ‘States of Failure’, propose a fourth.”[i] Anderson summarised Nairn’s thinking: “Tom Nairn’s account goes roughly like this. Marx-ism was always based on a distortion of Marx’s own thought, formed in the democratic struggles of the Rhineland in the 1840s. For whereas Marx assumed that socialism was possible in the long run, only when capitalism had completed its work of bringing a world market into being, the impatience of both masses and intellectuals led to the fatal short-cuts taken by Lenin and Mao, substituting state power for democracy and economic growth. The result was a diversion of the river of world history into the marshlands of a modern middle ages. But the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989 has now allowed the river to flow again to its natural delta—contemporary globalization. For the core meaning of globalization is the generalization of democracy around the world, fulfilling at last the dreams of 1848, crushed during Marx’s life-time. Marx, however, himself made one crucial mistake, in thinking class would be the carrier of historical emancipation, in the shape of the proletariat. In fact, as the European pattern of 1848 already showed, and the whole of the 20th century would confirm, it was nations, not classes, that would become the moving forces of history, and the bearers of the democratic revolution for which he fought. “But, just as a counterfeit democracy would be constructed by Marx-ism, so nationality too was in due course confiscated by national-ism - that is, imperialist great powers - in the period after the American Civil War and Franco-Prussian War. “Hardt and Negri concur that globalization is essentially a process of emancipation …”[ii] Anderson sums up, “Politically, all four versions agree that globalization is to be welcomed …”[iii] Nairn denies all Marx’s work and thought after he left the Rhineland in 1848. Anderson writes of ‘the fatal short-cuts taken by Lenin and Mao’. This echoes Plekhanov to Lenin, “you shouldn’t have taken power.” Lenin should just have let the First World War carry on, killing yet more millions of Russians and others. He should have reinstalled tsarist feudal absolutism. Mao should have let Japanese aggression succeed, and let Chiang Kai-Shek carry on misruling ever-smaller areas of China. Anderson writes of Lenin and Mao ‘substituting state power for democracy and economic growth’. So socialism can’t use state power to establish democracy and produce economic growth? And if it does, it’s not socialism? Anderson writes that capitalism completes its work by creating a world market, but, inconsistently, that ‘the core meaning of globalization is the generalization of democracy around the world’. It is superficial to see globalisation as basically a political process. It is also a ridiculous prettification of the political processes actually occurring in the world. Is the partition of Iraq part of ‘the generalization of democracy’? The destruction of Yugoslavia? The ‘ever closer union’ of the EU? Anderson writes, ‘national-ism - that is, imperialist great powers’, absurdly equating nationalism (even Scottish?) with ‘imperialist great powers’. In reality globalisation is just a liberals’ word for imperialism. Countries are right to assert their sovereignty against imperialism. Economist Shahid Alam wrote in his brilliant book Poverty from the wealth of nations (Macmillan, 2000), “In the long run, sovereign countries will structure their international relations to develop manufactures and indigenous capital, enterprises and technological capabilities; they will impose at the outset, or gradually, policies that regulate the entry of imports and foreign capital, labor and enterprises. On the other hand, the quasi-colonies and colonies will implement policies which facilitate the free entry of imports and foreign factors; the establishment of foreign monopolies over their markets; and direct expropriation of their resources. These asymmetries ensure that loss of sovereignty will produce lower levels of industrialisation, lower levels of productivity in the subsistence sector, lower levels of human capital, lower rates of taxation and public expenditure and, finally, lower growth rates of per capita income.”[iv] He summarised, “All other things remaining the same, the loss of sovereignty retarded industrialisation, human capital formation and economic growth. … The results showed a strong positive correlation between sovereignty and industrialisation.”[v] This materialist analysis demolishes Anderson and Nairn’s bourgeois idealism. Nairn is a counterfeit Marxist, who distorts Marx’s thought in order to back the reactionary ideal of Scottish nationalism.
[i] Perry Anderson, Jottings on the conjuncture, New Left Review, 2007, 48, 5-37, p. 31.[ii] Ibid, pp. 31-2.[iii] p. 36.[iv] M. Shahid Alam, Poverty from the wealth of nations: integration and polarization in the global economy since 1760, Macmillan, 2000, pp. 10-11.[v] M. Shahid Alam, Poverty from the wealth of nations: integration and polarization in the global economy since 1760, Macmillan, 2000, pp. xi and 13.