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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