Saturday 9 May 2020

Tradition and Liberation: a memory of Neil Davidson (1957 - 2020)


I had been expecting to see Neil Davidson again at Historical Materialism in London last year, where we had caught up last – in 2015 – shouting snatches of a conversation about the Independence Referendum over the hubbub at the student bar. And then news came that he was ill and, now, gone. Comrades who knew him better and longer have written movingly on his political commitments and contributions (here are two from Jamie Allinson and Raymond Morrell), and Jordy Cummings has offered a memorial to his role as a cultural theorist. I want to pay tribute here to how those two lines of thought combined, in writing and activity, in a way that was important for me.

My first encounter with Neil was after meeting at Marxism 2007, when he and his partner Cathy hosted Shomi and I for an afternoon in Cauther Ha’. It was a wonderfully incongruous occasion: the day still and mid-summer, sitting in an open garden looking out on countryside and enjoying a plate of cheese while the talk raced over almost every direction: MacDiarmid and Scottish modernism; the Anti-Nazi League and abstraction; Stalinism and Science Fiction. Neil seemed to have read everything – a visit to the garage-cum-library at the end of the day confirmed this – and to have an opinion on more still, all the while being encouraging, open, wide-ranging. All this despite a generation’s age gap between him and us, two near strangers from the other side of the world. We were wary of some topics initially, being in different socialist groups from a shared political family and some history of disagreements, but the talk moved quickly to current struggles. Like most older activists still in the fight Neil always talked about what was happening now; I wouldn’t find out about many of his past experiences until reading his obituaries. We stayed in email contact from there and in a few difficult patches, when I’d made bad political decisions coming back to New Zealand that had shaken my confidence, he offered much-needed and understated encouragement. His working life as a public servant made this odd from time to time: I had parts of an email exchange on James Kelman bounced back from the Scottish Office’s server for their obscenities!

Neil’s politics were thoroughly internationalist, as was his thinking and outlook, and so, of course, he was also contemptuous towards British nationalisms. It was no surprise, then, that his case for Scottish independence was a non-nationalist one, working, in immediate politics just as in his historical writing, against any illusions in a sentimentalized vision of Scottishness as naturally more progressive or worthy than any other national identity. But, as Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia, “one must have tradition in oneself to hate it properly”. Unlike the “late-comers and new-comers” Adorno saw breaking with radicalism under the weight of tradition, Neil was formed, intellectually and politically, in Scotland, and in the general atmosphere of a small nation that, until recently at least, didn’t figure all that much in the wider debates of the state under which it’s ruled. This made him pay attention earlier than many on the UK (if not Scottish) left to changes in national consciousness that required shifts in political attention; it also insulted him against hopeful projections onto Scottish politics we see now from elsewhere. The Origins of Scottish Nationhood (2000) is such an important book, among other reasons, because it carries on this political task into historical research: understanding Scottishness – and its creation – not to deride or gush but to understand and, in a wider internationalism, transform.

There is a passage in How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (2012) on the question of tradition that is my favourite in Neil’s writing, and that fuses his historical work, political commitments and wide-ranging cultural interests. In the course of one of How Revolutionary’s (many) digressions, Neil pauses to look at how old Stalinist ways of ‘rediscovering’ revolutionary traditions in the past have tended to creep into much liberationist and libertarian socialist writing on culture and history. It’s natural to want to find inspiration, and ancestry, in the past, and to admire the bravery of Covenanters or to want to be able to narrate one’s own struggles now as part of a longer story of human campaigning, suffering, and endurance. Neil draws out how so much of this kind of story-telling in Stalinist scholarly and popular history was actually a way of dulling internationalism, stitching socialism into pre-existing national stories and thus deadening its revolutionary, world-breaking and changing promise and necessity. But he also, firmly and sharply, insists on how these searches for tradition blur conceptual lines between proletarian revolution – world-transforming, democratic, mass, participatory – and bourgeois revolution, those breaks that have as their consequence the development of capitalist market relations. The latter need no heroism, and have as their consequence colonialism, exploitation, and environmental destruction as much, if not more, than a free press, elections, and the rule of law. There are no ‘democratic tasks’ for the bourgeois revolution, Neil insisted, and no clear line between their breaks and what ours will be.

For someone working as a socialist activist and writer in a society formed by settler colonialism these passages had a particular resonance, as does Neil’s Scottish example. His inspiration – to work from one context while facing the world – stands, as does, for me, the lesson his writing gives about what a New Zealand internationalism would be. There is nothing to redeem a search for a (Pākehā) New Zealand dissenting tradition decoupled from internationalism, in a culture based on dispossesion of Māori land, the import of British capitalist social relations, and the racialised and gendered injustices of the welfare state era. No point speaking of the First Labour government without discussing state repression under the Second World War; nothing to be gained glorying in the Waterfront Workers’ battles without remembering the racial politics of the union’s dominant currents; none of Ettie Rout’s sexual liberation without her eugenics. History is an occasion for contest, not a rummaging-box for progressive narratives. Or: not tradition – precedents!

Neil’s personal virtue was, sometimes, a stylistic vice: even his best books and articles have an air of the Internal Bulletin to them, with their numbered arguments and counter-arguments. This came from an admirable desire to achieve things politically, and to write, unlike so much academic production-for-production’s-sake, with a purpose. I loved the energy and principled agility of his thinking, open to changing his mind on much-treasured points when their usefulness to the project of liberation withered (as in his rejection of the relevance of ‘permanent revolution’, an argument I was won to almost instantly) and to allowing his own thoughts to be seen in movement (as in much of his writing on Scottish history). He couldn’t stand reductive blethers and instrumentalism in others’ writing on culture, once writing a blistering response to a dismissive piece on Walter Benjamin in International Socialism in an evening out of, he wrote to me, ‘irritation. But a (healthy) distrust of pretentiousness and academic pointlessness, such marked aversions in writers in our International Socialist tradition, kept him at times, I think, from integrating his wide-ranging cultural interests and his political-historical work. The counter to that claim are those magisterial reflections on modernism and the spectre of Trotsky he gave to Red Wedge. I wish we could have seen where they would go next.


Neil was a comrade, a mentor and an example. I’m going to miss him and I’m sad he’s gone.

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