Chapter 2

Marx and Engels on the Scottish Highlands1

Introduction

Marx and Engels wrote little about North Britain. A compilation called Marx and Engels on Scotland, of the kind once regularly produced by Progress Publishers in Moscow, would be short, the contents mainly extracted from incidental comments and the quality highly uneven. If this imaginary publication ever did appear in print, however, the Highlands would feature more often than any other topic in the index, and the majority of these references would be to the destruction of Highland society after 1746.2 Two different and opposed responses to the fate of the Highlands—which I will henceforth refer to as Interpretations 1 and 2—have been ascribed to Marx and Engels on the basis of these fragments.

According to Interpretation 1 Marx and Engels treated the Highlands as part of the underdeveloped world, one geographically closer than most to the metropolitan centres of capitalist power, but still requiring “development” in the same way as far-off India, and with as little consideration for the wishes of the native inhabitants. Engels is particularly identified with this position. James Young, for example, writes that “Engels, who lived out his life under the shadow of [Walter] Scott’s understanding of Enlightenment thought, was thoroughly racist in his attitude to the Scottish Highlanders and the extermination of primal peoples.”3 Evidence to support this claim is usually found in an article from 1849 called “The Magyar Struggle,” in which Engels dismisses the Highlanders as “a people without history,” doomed to be the foot soldiers of counter-revolution until deservedly crushed at the Battle of Culloden by the forces of progress. Yet shortly afterwards, in 1853, Marx wrote several newspaper articles, some of which were later incorporated into Capital, attacking the treatment of the Highlanders during the Clearances. Is this an example of a different attitude on his part? Young asserts that “Unlike Scott and Engels, Marx did not approve of the capitalists’ ‘improvements’ in the Highlands resulting in mass expulsion and expropriation of countless peasants and land workers.”4 For more consistent adherents of Interpretation 1, however, these differences are more apparent than real, and Marx is simply guilty of hypocrisy—or more charitably, inconsistency—in failing to face up to the logical consequences of his own theory. Harvie concludes that: “Marx violently attacked the Sutherland clearances in Capital vol. II, but the Duke only seemed to be carrying out his own prescription.”5

According to Interpretation 2, Marx and Engels originally held the position represented by Interpretation 1, but later rejected it for a position that saw the communism of the Highland clan system (and comparable social organizations elsewhere), not as a fetter on capitalist development, but as a model for and means of entering into the realm of socialist freedom. Alan Armstrong argues that:

Only recently has it become clear that Marx did not believe that all ancient communal property must first dissolve into individual property, before further social advance was possible. . . . Marx saw that where communal property still existed, it might be possible to move directly to higher stages of social organization, without passing through the capitalist stage. It increasingly depended on an alliance with the new popular forces, which also had an interest in opposing private property relations.

Eventually this change was registered even by Engels, who “looked back sympathetically on ‘primitive communism,’ or the ‘liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gens,’ based on ‘communal property.’”6

Marx and Engels are therefore either blamed for an economic determinism that retrospectively makes them complicit in the suffering of the Highlanders during the Clearances, or praised for adopting a political voluntarism in which Highland clan society could have been the basis for the transition to socialism, regardless of its low level of socio-economic development. However, these interpretations merely apply to the Scottish Highlands more general claims concerning the attitude of Marx and Engels to “primitive” societies faced with capitalist development. Interpretation 1 has clear affinities with the position represented in the following passage by John Strawson:

For Marx the Indian uprising of 1857 was no more progressive than the resistance of the first nation Americans against the European settlers. In the triumph of European colonialism—including its genocide—Marx saw the progress of Capital and with it the creation of a working class that would put an end to it. To the victim of colonialism there was not much to choose between Marx’s progress and the Imperialist conquest. Both represented Europe’s power to destroy cultures and languages, introduce forms of slavery, and in the Americas and Australia, genocide. For these peoples there is little in Marx’s talk of creating the material conditions for human liberation that contained much attraction. Human liberation appears more as European power built on their graves.7

Or, as Robert Young writes, “the dominant force of opposition to capitalism, Marxism, as a body of knowledge remains complicit with, and even extends, the system to which it is opposed.”8

Interpretation 2 has equally strong affinities with a more general position that, in this case, asserts that Marx and Engels later abandoned their earlier endorsement of capitalist progress, however qualified this may have been. Hobsbawm was perhaps the first writer to make this claim: “It seems probable that Marx, who had earlier welcomed the impact of Western capitalism as an inhuman but historically progressive force on the stagnant pre-capitalist economies, found himself increasingly appalled by this inhumanity.”9 Later writers ascribed this shift to a more complex set of determinations. Teodor Shanin argues that four developments of the 1860s and 1870s helped produce what he calls the thought of the “Late Marx.” First, the occurrence of the Paris Commune of 1871 suggested not only the actuality of the socialist revolution but the form that it might take. Second, the increasing availability of scientific knowledge about prehistoric communities by the middle decades of the century suggested that primitive communism had held sway over human society for a much longer period than had previously been accepted: it could therefore be argued that primitive communism, rather than relatively short-lived forms of class society, was the “natural” condition of human beings. Third, the growing awareness of contemporary noncapitalist communities suggested an existing link with primitive communism. Fourth, and finally, his interest in the revolutionary potentialities of Russian society brought together all three other developments, in “the theory and practice of Russian revolutionary populism” and the “rural communes,” whose existence seemed to stretch from the primitive communist past to the present-day peasant mir. Shanin particularly stresses not only the negative impact of capitalism on tribal societies but also the positive example that these societies offered as a model for contemporary socialists. “The Iroquois ‘red skin hunter’ was, in some ways, more essentially human and liberated than a clerk in the City and in that sense nearer to the man of the socialist future.”10 Similar views have been expressed by Franklin Rosemont, who claims that, after reading of the Iroquois described by Lewis Morgan, Marx’s “entire conception of historical development, and particularly of precapitalist societies, now gained immeasurably in strength and precision,” and that this new knowledge of tribal societies “sharpened his sense of the living presence of indigenous peoples in the world, and of their possible role in future revolutions.”11

Both interpretations present difficulties for those who stand in the Marxist tradition. Interpretation 1 undermines the moral authority of Marxism to speak on behalf of the oppressed and exploited, for it appears to imply that their needs must be sacrificed to those of capitalist development. Interpretation 2 restores our image of Marx and Engels as defenders of the oppressed and exploited, but brings into question the explanatory power of Marxism to interpret human history, for it suggests that socialism is possible at any stage of development—indeed, perhaps the more backward the better, because nearer to the original state of primitive communism. We are not, however, required to choose between these interpretations (which generally involve isolating individual fragments of their work and treating them as representative), for either the Highlands in particular or the noncapitalist world in general.

In the argument that follows, I want to reconstruct the views of Marx and Engels on the Scottish Highlands, stripping away later misrepresentations—introduced by supporters and opponents alike—to show their views to be not only more complex than the two existing interpretations, but also morally and politically defensible in ways that these interpretations are not. The subject is not only one of interest in its own right, but acts as a barometer for their changing positions on “progress” and “development,” since their discussions of the Highlands present these issues in a remarkably clear form, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that the region was not territorially situated in the colonial world but in that of the most developed capitalism of that time: the British state where they lived out their exile after 1849. Despite the physical distance of the Highlands from the rest of the noncapitalist world, Marx and Engels’s views on the former are not separable from their views on the latter. It will therefore be necessary to refer, at various points in the argument, to what Marx and Engels wrote about three other areas in particular: Ireland, India, and Russia.

Interpretation 1: The onward march of the productive forces

What evidence is there that Marx and Engels held the views ascribed to them by Interpretation 1? Take Engels first. He spent twenty-one months in Britain between 1842 and 1844, ostensibly working in the Manchester thread-making factory of his family firm, but in fact spending much of his time researching his first major work, The Condition of the Working Class in England, which was published in Germany the year after his return. Engels was not a “Marxist” when he wrote this book since the theory did not yet exist. (Indeed the two men only renewed their friendship—and began their partnership—in Paris while Engels was on the return journey to Germany.) It is unsurprising, therefore, that it leaves a contradictory impression. Engels was among the first commentators to see beyond the existential misery of the British working class—a subject that had already exercised such notably nonrevolutionary figures as Thomas Carlyle—to the potential power it possessed, and in this he was in advance of Marx himself. Nevertheless, in those sections of the book where his focus shifts away from the working class to a more general discussion of the industrialization process, Engels frequently repeats the ideological preconceptions of those bourgeois commentators whose analysis he had otherwise surpassed. In such passages we first encounter him on the subject of the Scottish Highlands:

In Scotland the Department of Public Works built since 1803 nearly 900 miles of roadway and more than 1,000 miles of bridges, by which the population of the Highlands was placed within reach of civilization. The Highlanders had hitherto been chiefly poachers and smugglers, now they became farmers and hand-workers. And although Gaelic schools were organized for the purpose of maintaining the Gaelic language, yet Gaelic-Celtic customs and speech are rapidly vanishing before the approach of English civilization.12

Such uncritical advocacy of “English civilization,” which in this context can only mean capitalist civilization, seems to align Engels closely with his bourgeois contemporaries, an impression strengthened by reading his comments on non-European peoples written shortly afterward. In an article of 1847, Engels considered the suppression by the French of a prolonged rising of Algerian Bedouins: “The struggle of the Bedouins was a hopeless one, and although the manner in which brutal soldiers . . . have carried on the war is highly blameable, the conquest of Algeria is an important and fortunate fact for the fate of civilization.” Engels goes on to remind his readers that the Bedouins survived through robbing and enslaving more settled communities: “And after all, the modern bourgeois, with civilization, industry, order and at least relative enlightenment following him, is preferable to the feudal lord or to the marauding robber, with the barbarian state of society to which they belong.”13 A similar attitude, but concerning Europeans rather than Africans, permeates a more famous article, to which I have already referred, “The Magyar Struggle,” written for and published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in January 1849.

As the Europe-wide revolutionary movement of 1848 began to recede, Engels tried to identify the social basis of the emergent reaction, and thought he had done so in the particular characteristics of certain national groups. Engels was particularly concerned with whether or not support for any particular national movement would help prepare the way for capitalism and ultimately the working class itself. From this perspective the Slav nationalism that Engels targets in his article is an obstacle to both. Indeed, for him it cannot even be described as a genuine national movement, since it ultimately relies on the Russian absolutist state—then the main bastion of reaction in Europe—for its continued existence:

There is no country in Europe that does not possess, in some remote corner, at least one remnant-people, left over from an earlier population, forced back and subjugated by the nation which later became the repository of historical development. These remnants of a nation, mercilessly crushed, as Hegel said, by the course of history, this national refuse, is always the fanatical representative of the counter-revolution and remains so until it is completely exterminated or de-nationalized, as its whole existence is in itself a protest against a great historical revolution.

There were, however, earlier examples of such “human refuse” than those that concerned Engels in 1848, and the reader will no doubt have guessed their identity: “In Scotland, for example, the Gaels, supporters of the Stuarts from 1640 to 1745.” Engels concludes by expressing his hopes for a revival of the revolutionary movement of the French proletariat and the German and Magyar peoples:

The general war which will then break out will scatter this Slav Sonderbund [that is, “special path”], and annihilate all these small pig-headed peoples even to their very names. The next world war will not only cause reactionary classes and dynasties to disappear from the face of the earth, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that too is an advance.14

This makes uncomfortable reading for contemporary socialists, since we associate calls for “extermination” or “annihilation” of whole peoples—understandable if not forgivable even given the counterrevolutionary danger of time—with another political tradition altogether. The “pig-headed peoples” of the Scottish Highlands had of course already seen their society destroyed, although their names and (in most cases) their persons survived. Engels returned to the theme in later years, again within the context of a comparison with Eastern Europe. In an article of 1866 for Commonwealth discussing the Polish question, he noted, more restrainedly but no less decisively: “The Highland Gaels and the Welsh are undoubtedly of different nationalities to what the English are [sic], although nobody will give these remnants of peoples long gone by the title of nations, any more than to the Celtic inhabitants of Brittany in France.”15

These remarks can be usefully compared with those of John Stuart Mill in Representative Government on the advantages to “the Celtic inhabitants of Brittany” of adopting French nationality, thus gaining access “to all the privileges of French citizenship, sharing the advantages of French protection, and the dignity and prestige of French power.” The alternative being “to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world.” The relevance for Scotland is pressed home at the conclusion of this observation: “The same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander, as members of the British nation.”16 Eric Hobsbawm (who quotes this passage) has suggested that Engels’s views can therefore be assimilated to those of “every impartial mid-nineteenth century observer,” all of whom would apparently have agreed that “non-civilized” peoples should be incorporated into more advanced national bodies for their own benefit.17 As is so often the case, however, Hobsbawm is too eager to discern an identity of interest between Marxism and the more advanced forms of Liberal thought. For these views were not only shared by commentators like Mill, which for the period after 1848 were compatible with certain kinds of reformist socialism. Matthew Arnold was none of these things; yet in a very similar program advanced in 1866 with regard to the Welsh he calls for “the fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogeneous, English-speaking whole,” as a “necessity of what is called modern civilization.” Elsewhere Arnold makes it clear that these remarks are also applicable to the other “Celtic” areas of Britain: “But at any rate, let us consider that of the shrunken and diminished remains of this great primitive race, all with one insignificant exception, belongs to the English Empire; only Brittany is not ours; we have Ireland, the Scotch Highlands, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall.”18

The last example from Engels that appears to support Interpretation 1 is a letter to Eduard Bernstein of 1882, on the national question in the Balkans:

[The] independence [of the Croats and Montenegrins] consists in demonstrating their hatred of the oppressor by stealing cattle and other valuable chattels from their own oppressed Serb compatriots as they have done for the last 1,000 years, and any attack on their right of rapine is regarded as an attack on their independence. I am enough of an authoritarian to regard the existence of such aborigines in the heart of Europe as an anachronism. And even if these little folk had a standing as high as Sir Walter Scott’s vaunted Highlanders, who were also really shocking cattle thieves, the most we could do is condemn the manner in which they were treated by present day society. If we were at the helm, we too should have to put an end to the Renaldo Renaldini-Shindehannes business which, by long tradition, these laddies indulge in.19

Let us summarize the case for the prosecution on the basis of the evidence presented so far, leaving aside questions of interpretation for the moment. Pre-1848, Engels did indeed occasionally display an uncritical attitude toward capitalist development. Post-1848, he expressed the view (which—on one interpretation of the material cited above—he appears to have held until the end of his life) that certain peoples, including the Scottish Highlanders, were congenitally incapable of either forming nations or—as a consequence—of achieving capitalist development. Were these perspectives peculiar to Engels alone? Did Marx, perhaps as a result of his knowledge of the Highland Clearances, take a different attitude?

There is some evidence to support this contention. In 1845, the same year as The Condition of the Working Class in England was published in Germany, Marx and Engels began joint work on what was to become The German Ideology. The finished text was to remain unpublished in their lifetimes but nevertheless is of key importance in clarifying the theoretical basis of Historical Materialism. For our purposes, it is important because it features the first reference to the Clearances in their writings, albeit as the punchline of a Hegelian joke (“for example, if one says that the real ‘task’ which the institution of landed property ‘originally set itself’ was to replace people by sheep—a consequence which has recently become manifest in Scotland”).20 Authorship of this can safely be ascribed to Marx, if only because the following year the same example is used for a similar purpose, although more elaborately, in the individually written The Poverty of Philosophy: “It is a fact that in Scotland landed property acquired a new value through the development of English industry. . . . by successive transformation, landed property in Scotland has resulted in men being driven off by sheep. Now say that the providential aim of the institution of landed property in Scotland was to have men driven out by sheep, and you will have made providential history.”21 In both quotations Marx uses the example of how the Highlands were depopulated to make way for capitalist sheep grazing to satirize the philosophical views of two political opponents (respectively, Max Stirner and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon). Between January 1853 and May 1854 Marx returned to the question no less than four times in a series of articles written between 1853 and 1854, published in the New York Daily Tribune.22 In these articles, however, the impact of the Clearances is not used as a stick to beat the philosophical pretensions of Stirner and Proudhon, but to express outrage at events that clearly haunted his imagination, for he returned to them again in the first and only volume of Capital to be published in his lifetime (1867). In the most famous of the articles, written a mere four years after Engels wrote “The Magyar Struggle,” we find Marx launching a morally outraged defense of the very same Highland society. Here he attacks the hypocrisy of Highland landowners who verbally opposed North American slavery while forcing (“clearing”) their own tenants off the land: “As for the large number of human beings expelled to make room for the game of the Duke of Atholl, and the sheep of the Countess of Sutherland, where did they fly to, where did they find a home? In the United States of North America. The enemy of British Wages-Slavery has a right to condemn Negro-Slavery; a Duchess of Sutherland, a Duke of Atholl, a Manchester Cotton Lord—never!”23 Material from these articles was subsequently incorporated into Capital Volume 1, in the famous lines describing the process whose origin Marx traces back to the civil war of 1745–6:

What “clearing of estates” really and properly signifies, we only learn in the promised land of modern romance, the Highlands of Scotland. There the process is distinguished by its systematic character, by the magnitude of the scale on which it is carried out at one blow (in Ireland landlords have gone to the length of sweeping away several villages at once; in Scotland areas as large as German principalities are dealt with) . . . 24

We can therefore reject the claim by James Young that “most of the evidence touching on the middle Marx’s attitude to the Scottish Highlanders is mostly anecdotal,” although it is certainly true that “he was more sympathetic towards them than Engels had ever been.”25 Did this sympathy however also extend to other indigenous peoples?

The original article attacking the Duchess of Sutherland was dated January 21, 1853, and published on February 8 in the New York Daily Tribune. Yet in the concluding passage of his equally famous article “The British Rule in India,” dated June 10 and published on June 25 in the same paper, his comments are quite different in tone from those on the Highlands, but strikingly similar to those written by Engels on Algeria. Both condemn colonial methods, rather than objectives, and endorse the civilizing role of colonialism, rather than supporting the colonized, and England is described as “an unconscious tool of history” in causing a “social revolution” in Asia.26 This disparity is all the more striking since Marx and Engels believed that social relations in both India and the Highlands were essentially the same. Such comparisons were not original to Marx. James Mill had noted that “some curious strokes of resemblance appear in the following particulars of the Celtic manners, in the highlands and islands of Scotland.” He then proceeds to quote from a description, by Samuel Johnston, of a cow being divided into specific parts between various members of Clan Donald according to their function. Later in the same book, we learn that “the domestic community of women among the Celtic inhabitants of Britain was a diversity, to which something very similar is said to exist among some of the castes on the coast of Malabar.”27 We know that Marx had read Mill on India and presumably absorbed these comparisons.28

In his critique of the article “The British Rule in India,” Edward Said accuses Marx of succumbing to an “orientalist” discourse that overtakes his human sympathy for the sufferings of Indians subject to British colonialism.29 For other commentators their work can be dismissed more generally as merely another Eurocentric defense of capitalism, no more concerned with the resulting impact on indigenous peoples and their civilizations than apologists for the World Trade Organization. Indeed, according to critics, treating the extension of the capitalist mode of production as a necessary precondition for socialism necessarily led them to support the destruction of all obstacles to capitalist dominance, both retrospectively in their historical judgments and contemporaneously in their political interventions. And if those obstacles were people—Indians, Native Americans, or Scottish Highlanders—this was merely the unfortunate but unavoidable cost of human progress.

Given his belief in the similarity of Indian and Highland social forms, it could be argued that Marx was being inconsistent or hypocritical in not showing the same degree of support for the “social revolution” imposed by the British in the Highlands as he did for that imposed on India. If so, then Engels was speaking the “truth” of Marxism in his attack on the Highlanders. It is certainly true that the positions associated with Interpretation 1 were prevalent, for example, among many—perhaps a majority—of early Scottish Marxists. John Carstairs Matheson, for example, was a leading member of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and subsequently of the mainly Scottish “impossiblist” secession of 1903, the Socialist Labour Party (SLP). Although himself a Gaelic speaker of Highland descent, he declared in 1910 that, prior to 1746, “The Highlander in tartan dared not, unless in time of war, venture on the south side of the River Forth if he wished to avoid being hanged on sight, and if he had, he would have created as big a sensation as a Red Indian Chief, who took a promenade along the Broadway, equipped with a blanket, moccasins, and a scalping knife.”30 What is of interest here is not the historical inaccuracies concerning the Highlanders, or the racist references to Native Americans, but the comparison between the two peoples, on which Matheson was quite explicit, writing that “the Highlands are no more part of the Scottish nation than the Sioux are part of the American nation.” How faithful is Matheson to his mentors in these passages?

Against interpretation 1

Interpretation 1 combines, in relation to the Scottish Highlands, two general beliefs that Marx and Engels are supposed to have held throughout their careers: the existence of “non-historic” nations on the one hand, and the essentially progressive role of capitalism in relation to the noncapitalist world (which “historic nations” inhabited) on the other. Ephraim Nimni, for example, alleges that, for Marx and Engels, “historic nations” “are national communities capable of being agents of historical transformation, that will further the formation of a strong capitalist economy.” Consequently: “The theory of ‘non-historic nations’ is not a curiosity, a slip of the tongue, an ad hoc argument, or a regrettable mishap. It is rather the result of the rigid and dogmatic universal laws of social evolution that define the precise historical location of the ‘modern nation’ and by default render obsolete national communities that cannot fulfil this rigid Eurocentric political criterion.”31 In fact, opposition to the “non-historic nations” and unqualified support for capitalist progress are not necessarily linked. Furthermore, Marx and Engels not only abandoned their belief in the former but never subscribed to the latter.

The belief in the existence of “non-historic” peoples was closely linked in the thought of Marx and Engels with that of “races,” including a distinctly “Celtic” race that included the Highlanders and native Irish, as opposed to the “Anglo-Saxon” Lowlanders and English. “Nearly four-fifths of the whole emigration are, accordingly,” wrote Marx in 1853, “to be regarded as belonging to the Celtic population of Ireland and of the Highlands and islands of Scotland.”32 This notion was familiar in the work of contemporary bourgeois writers. Macaulay wrote that the difference between Scotland and Ireland in the nineteenth century was that: “The Anglosaxon and the Celt have been reconciled in Scotland, and have never been reconciled in Ireland.”33 In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels’s references to the civilizing role of “Anglo-Saxon” capitalism in the Highlands are matched by similar effusions regarding its impact across the Irish Sea: “so, too, in Ireland; between the counties of Cork, Limerick and Kerry, lay hitherto a wilderness wholly without passable roads, and serving, by reason of its inaccessibility, as the refuge of criminals and the chief protection of the Celtic Irish nationality in the South of Ireland. It has now been cut through by public roads, and civilization has thus gained admission even to this savage region.” Not only was the region characterized by savagery, but the inhabitants: “The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him little above the savage, his contempt for human enjoyments, in which his very crudity makes him incapable of sharing, all favour drunkenness.”34 It is clear that Engels does not place the blame for the misery of the native Irish entirely at the door of the British: “That poverty manifests itself in Ireland thus and not otherwise, is owing to the character of the people, and to their historical development.”35 That national character might itself be the product of historical development does not seem to have occurred to Engels at this stage. These notions are important in our context because they make clear that, contrary to what is claimed by Nimni, Engels began his literary career by including the native Irish alongside the Highlanders in the “non-historic” category, which is clearly linked to the notion of racial groups (“peoples”) discussed above.36 There are two issues here, one general and the other specific to the Highlands.

The general issue, as the Ukrainian Bolshevik and Left Oppositionist Roman Rosdolsky wrote in his classic critique, is that nonhistoricity “represents a relic of the idealist interpretation of history and so has no place in Marxism.”37 To argue that particular national groups display inherent and, moreover, eternal characteristics seems particularly idealist and, unsurprisingly, led Engels into wrong predictions. Many of the peoples that he attacks as incapable of forming nations, such as the Czechs, subsequently went on to do precisely that, while those that failed to do so, such as the Basques, were prevented then, and continue to be prevented now, by repression, not some congenital incapacity bred in the bone. In other words, the content of national movements changes over time. Whatever the role of the Basques in 1848, would any socialist argue that their struggle for independence was reactionary during the period of the Franco regime in Spain?

The specific issue is that to talk about nationality in the context of the Highland clans is in any case anachronistic. One of the chief characteristics of the clan rank and file was the fact that they considered themselves to be neither a separate nation—their level of development would scarcely have allowed them to do so—nor part of the Scottish nation before 1707. This was explicit even in their vocabulary: the word sassenach (in Gaelic, sasunnach) means “saxon,” and was used to describe both the English and Lowland Scots.38 Far from wishing to form a nation, but being incapable of doing so because of their socioeconomic backwardness, their condition ensured that the Highlanders hardly knew what the word meant. The possibility that a separate Gaelic nation could have formed beyond the Highland Line is not a theoretical absurdity, but was rendered practically impossible by the destruction of Highland society during and after 1746. As Nairn writes: “It started from too far back (having been left relatively untouched by the weak authority of the Scottish monarchy, during the period of Absolutism) and was then exposed too abruptly, and too brutally, to the very dynamic capitalist societies in proximity to it.”39 In other words, the Highlanders, unlike the Irish, did not have the structural capacity or material resources to form a nation of their own during the period in which national formation occurred in Europe.40

But Engels abandoned the notion of “non-historicity” toward the end of his life. Why? One answer might be that his views had been influenced by current events in the Highlands to which Marx had drawn his attention. There is no suggestion in his writings, however, that Engels was ever hostile to the contemporary inhabitants of the Highlands, nor does it seem credible that he would have needed Marx to stimulate his outrage at the Highland landlords. What is puzzling is his changed attitude toward historical clanship. Two factors seem to have been involved.

One was a refinement of his concept of the nation. In an unpublished manuscript written as late as 1882 Engels still treats nations as “primordial” constructs, the German nation apparently having existed as early as the first century BC.41 Two years later he situates their formation at a specific historical juncture—the emergence of the absolutist states out of the feudal estates-monarchies during the fifteenth century.42 Whatever one thinks of this later assessment—and I believe that Engels still places the process far too early in the development of capitalism—it clearly constitutes a break with racial conceptions of the nation.43

The other, connected, factor was the realization that supposedly “non-historic” nations could become “historic” through the process of struggle. The particular nation to illustrate this type of transformation was one that acquired ever-greater significance for both men during their exile in Britain: Ireland. Engels fails to mention Ireland in “The Magyar Struggle,” yet as we have seen, both he and Marx originally regarded its native inhabitants as equally “non-historic” as the Highland Gaels. And as Rosdolsky correctly points out, the native Irish played as reactionary a role in the British Revolution as the Highlanders, and one of much greater political significance. Far from remaining so until the socialist millennium, however, they had, within a century, ceased to be the main basis of support for absolutist reaction in the British Isles and moved to the forefront of revolutionary republicanism in Europe, where their role was celebrated by, among other revolutionaries . . . Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

By 1855, Marx was already expressing a more positive view of the Irish in the People’s Paper: “It is a . . . very remarkable phenomenon that in the same measure as Irish influence in the political sphere grows in England, the Celtic influence on the social sphere decreases in Ireland.” His explanation for the latter aspect contained elements of the same belief in English civilization that had characterised Engels’s first comments on the question: “Irish society is being radically transformed by an Anglo-Saxon revolution.”44 By the occasion of his visit to Ireland in 1856, Engels too was emphasizing the effects of colonial rule on shaping the Irish character: “through systematic oppression, they have come to be a completely wretched nation and now as everybody knows, they have the job of providing England, America, Australia, etc with whores, day labourers, maquereaux [that is, pimps], pickpockets, swindlers, beggars and other wretches.45

By the time Engels came to prepare notes for his uncompleted History of Ireland, after a second visit to Ireland in September 1868, his attitude has undergone a further shift. Now the stress is less on the oppressions the Irish people have endured at the hands of the British, with the consequent degeneration of their national character, and more on their resistance to that oppression. More importantly for our purposes, he also notes that although “the English have been able to reconcile people of the most diverse races to their rule,” including the Scottish Highlanders, there is difference between the latter and the Irish, who alone “have proved too much for the English to cope with.”46 Ireland in this sense had national “advantages” that the Highlands lacked, and their assertion by the Fenians led Marx and Engels to reassess the source of Irish liberation and consequently to change their attitude to the Irish people. From being a consequence, almost an offshoot, of the revolutionary movement in Britain, Marx and Engels came to regard the revolution in Ireland not only as being brought about by the Irish themselves but as preceding that of Britain. Contrary to what is sometimes said, however, they did not believe that the former would cause the latter; rather they believed that it would weaken the British ruling class by removing from its control the land that was one of its main sources of wealth (“one prerequisite for the proletarian revolution in England”), ending the supply of cheap immigrant labor to British industry and (“most important of all!”) resolving the hostility between the working classes of both countries caused by racism on the British side.47 The most important thing about the shift is that it involves the tacit abandonment of the theory of “historic nations” as a determining factor in deciding which national movement to support—for Ireland was originally not one of these—and an assertion instead of the centrality of politics.

By mid-1870 Engels could draw definite conclusions from the failure of the Lowland Scots and the English to assimilate Ireland to Britain: “If . . . assimilation has failed after seven hundred years of struggle; if instead all the intruders who swept in over Ireland in waves, one after the other, were assimilated by Ireland; if, even at present, the Irish are no more English or “West Britons,” as they are called, than the Poles are “West Russians” after a mere century of oppression, if the struggle is still not yet at an end and there is no prospect of any end at all except through the extermination of the oppressed race—if all this is so, then all the geographical excuses in the world will not suffice to prove that England’s calling is to conquer Ireland.”48 As Engels wrote to Kautsky in February 1882, “I am of the opinion that two nations in Europe are not only entitled but duty bound to be national before they are international—Ireland and Poland.”49 To have attained parity with Poland—one of the nations described in “The Magyar Struggle” as having “actively intervened in history” and being “still capable of independent life”—can only mean that Engels had by this point completely, if implicitly, abandoned the notion of “non-historicity,” which he used in relation to the Highlands as late as his Commonwealth article of 1866.50

How then can we explain the letter to Bernstein, also written in February 1882, in which Engels comes out in retrospective support for “put[ting] an end” to the activity of the “cattle thieves”? Surely this indicates that his attitude toward the historical clans had not changed? James Young is in the habit of quoting from this letter—in his habitual tone of injured sanctimony—to prove that Engels remained unregenerate over this issue to the end of his life.51 It will be worthwhile, however, to consider what Engels is actually saying. He is discussing the necessity, under socialism, of “putting an end,” not to peasant communities, but to banditry, to the ability of parasitic elements (such as existed in the Balkans during the 1880s and had existed in the Highlands before 1746) to live by stealing from the peasant community. This seems an eminently reasonable position, unless Young actually believes that one of the characteristics of socialism will be the conscious maintenance of antisocial gangs to prey on the citizenry.

Both Marx and Engels were acutely aware of the contradictory nature of “progress” in relation to capitalism. In a remarkable speech to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the Chartist periodical The People’s Paper in 1856, Marx devoted the majority of his comments to this theme: “On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of former human history ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing horrors recorded of the latter days of the Roman Empire.”52 His understanding of how “everything seems pregnant with its contrary” was also present in his concrete analysis of particular societies. Let us return to his writings on India, which as we saw earlier have been held to demonstrate his inconsistency or hypocrisy over the Highlands.

As Ahmad has written: “For buttressing the proposition that Marxism is not much more than a ‘modes-of-production narrative’ and that its opposition to colonialism is submerged in its positivistic ‘myth of progress,’ it is always very convenient to quote one or two journalistic flourishes from . . . ‘The British Rule in India’ and ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India.’”53 Said is an example of a writer availing himself of just such a convenience. Although he nowhere suggests that the first article is representative of Marx’s views, his highlighting of particular passages from it implies that it can be treated as such. It is not the case that the article is beyond criticism. As Callinicos notes, it suffers from at least three major defects: a teleological attitude to history implied by the notion of England acting as “an unconscious tool”; a reliance on the concept of an unchanging “Asiaticism” that—whatever its relevance for earlier periods in history—cannot be justified in relation to nineteenth-century India; and—most relevantly for this discussion—an unqualified acceptance of the progressive impact of capitalism in areas where it had not previously existed.54 Ahmad argues however that these weaknesses were in part the result of shortage of accurate information on Marx’s part, particularly with regard to the nature of the dominant mode of production, Marx’s “sustained oppositional practice” leading his materialism “in a direction where it is impelled to assert universal laws of its own, different from those it opposes, but without sufficient evidence of its own.” But this is not all that there is to the article. As Ahmad writes, the best reference point for the argument it contains is not the notion of “Orientalism” but his own writings on the development of Western capitalism, “where the destruction of the European peasantry in the course of the primitive accumulation of capital is described in analogous tones, which I read as an enraged language of tragedy—a sense of colossal disruption and irretrievable loss, a moral dilemma wherein neither the old nor the new can be wholly affirmed, the recognition that the sufferer was at once decent and flawed, the recognition also that the history of victories and losses is really a history of material production, and the glimmer of hope, in the end, that something good might yet come out of this merciless history.”55 This is very well said, yet it still does not come to terms with the full complexity of Marx’s views; for these, we must turn to the second article to which Ahmad refers, which Said ignores: “The Future Results of the British Rule in India.”

Written on July 22 and published in the New York Daily Tribune on August 8, this second article clearly belongs to the same set of considerations as the first (“I propose . . . to conclude my observations about India”). That is to say, it is not a subsequent rethinking at a later date. Here the tragic dimensions of the Indian colonization are fully articulated: “All that the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people.” Marx holds out two possible ways by which British rule can be ended—proletarian revolution in Britain itself or a colonial rebellion by the native population in India—before ending (“I cannot part with the subject of India without some concluding remarks”) with a passage that dwells on the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization” in the colonies. The best that can be said for bourgeois society is that it has “laid the material basis of a new world” in “the mutual dependency of mankind” and “the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production.” As a result: “When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”56 Even this magnificent passage is not without its ambiguities (“domination of natural agencies,” “the most advanced peoples”), but as Callinicos writes, it can scarcely be accused of evading the consequences of British rule for the Indians.57 More positively, the concept of progress that Marx employs here is not merely the development of the productive forces as such, but in so far as this “represents an expansion of human capacities,” the potential for which can only be realized by a revolution, a revolution that, it will be noted, Marx does not suggest will necessarily be achieved for the Indians from outside. In the drafts of his letter to Zasulich during 1881 the change of perspective is made explicit: “As for the East Indies, for example, everybody except Sir Henry Maine and others of his ilk realizes that the suppression of communal landownership out there was nothing but an act of English vandalism, pushing the native peoples not forward but back.”58 It is clear from these comments that Marx not only refused to share the views of those who colonized India but also that his hostility to what they did there increased throughout his life.

The final position of both Marx and Engels is perhaps best expressed by the latter in a response of 1882 to one of Kautsky’s endless requests for clarification:

As I see it, the actual colonies, i.e. the countries occupied by European settlers, such as Canada, the Cape [i.e. South Africa], Australia, will all become independent; on the other hand, countries that are merely ruled and inhabited by natives, such as India, Algeria and the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish possessions, will have to be temporarily taken over by the proletariat and guided as rapidly as possible towards independence. How this process will develop is very difficult to say. India may, indeed very probably will, start a revolution and, since the proletariat that is effecting its own emancipation cannot wage a colonial war, it would have to be given its head, which would obviously entail a great deal of destruction, but after all that is inseparable from any revolution. . . . Once Europe has reorganized, and North America, the resulting power would be so colossal and the example set will be such that the semi-civilized countries will follow suit quite of their own accord, their economic needs alone will see to that.

Engels closes his letter by stating the impossibility of saying how long it would take for the ex-colonies to reach socialism, only that it cannot be imposed upon them by a victorious proletariat in the metropolitan centers: “Only one thing is certain, namely that a victorious proletariat cannot forcibly confer any blessing whatever on another country without undermining its own activity in the process.”59 It could still be argued, however, that his opposition to the Highland Clearances was inconsistent with this theoretical position, and that he should have welcomed them with at least the same ambivalence as he did the modernizing role of the British in India. Such an argument would, however, be based on a misunderstanding of their nature.

Many socialists take their view of the Clearances from a misinterpretation of the discussion in chapter 27 of Capital Volume 1, “The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land.”60 Here Marx demonstrates how the expulsion of the rural population from their holdings, the enclosing of common land, and the turning over of arable land to pasture were crucial components of the “primitive accumulation of capital.” These characteristics of the origins of capitalism can be traced in England back to the period after the Tudor accession in 1485. Reading about the Clearances in this context, many socialists have tended to assume that the Clearances were equally necessary for the establishment of capitalism in Britain and, indeed, were the last episode in the process. Grigor, for example, writes that “Marx and Engels, albeit very briefly, explained, or at least began to explain, the Clearances in terms of primitive accumulation of capital.”61 These claims are wrong, and quite unnecessarily provide Scottish nationalists like James Young or Harvie with a license to accuse Marxists of retrospectively endorsing the Clearances in the name of historical progress. Even if the Clearances had been necessary for capitalist development, the solidarity of socialists would still retrospectively be with the dispossessed peasants rather than with their oppressors, but the fact is that the Highland Clearances had nothing whatsoever to do with the primitive accumulation of capital.

The introduction of capitalist agriculture was so long delayed in the Highlands that the process was concentrated into a much shorter timescale than the original English pattern of enclosure and eviction. Consequently, as Marx noted, “the clearing of the land proceeded more ruthlessly.”62 Not only did the Highland Clearances have a different duration from that of, say, East Anglia, they also took place at a different time in the historical development of capitalism. The Highland Clearances are conventionally dated between 1760 and 1860, but the vast bulk of the enforced migrations fell within the latter half of this period and the outrages that accompanied them were being closely reported, particularly as the process reached its climax in the 1850s.63 The newspapers during the period in which Capital was written seemed to show Marx what he had previously only observed in the writings of Sir Thomas More or Sir James Steuart. But by the time the Clearances were taking place—and certainly by the second phase—capitalism was already dominant throughout Britain and the working-class movement had begun to organize against it. While soldiers were helping expel tenants from their homes in Ross-shire during 1848, considerably greater numbers of them were mustering in Edinburgh to repel the Chartist challenge. If there is a parallel to the English “primitive accumulation” in Scotland it is not to be found in the Highlands, but in the transformation of the Lowlands between 1750 and 1780. The Highlands, far from being crucial to the development of British capitalism in any economic sense, were peripheral to it, which is where they remain to this day.64

What Marx was actually doing in Capital, apart from expressing his own moral revulsion at the Clearances, was drawing an analogy between the events then taking place in the Highlands and the original process of primitive accumulation, as if to say to his readers: “If you want to see what the process was like, this is the nearest parallel in the contemporary world.” But clearing the land of people in the first half of the nineteenth century had different implications from doing so in the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries. The Highland Clearances were carried out by an existing, and thoroughly rapacious, capitalist landowning class seeking to increase its income as efficiently as possible. Far from being “necessary” to the development of capitalism, the Highland Clearances were an example of the activities of an already triumphant capitalist class whose disregard for human life (and, indeed, “development”) marked it as having long passed the stage of contributing to social progress. The difference between the Highlands and India, which accounts for the more ambivalent tone taken by Marx in relation to the former country, is therefore that the Highlands were already part of the capitalist world; India (and similar territories) were not, and would not succeed in becoming so without the external intervention of the existing capitalist states. The issue here is not that Marx was right about the supposed “immobility” of sections of Asian society—there is now a significant body of work that suggests he was in fact wrong—but that his views were an expression of this theoretical assessment, not a racist or “Eurocentric” disregard for the fate of Asian people.

Interpretation 2: Back to Communism and forward to Communism

The textual evidence to support Interpretation 2 can be presented more briefly, as it largely consists of two letters by Marx to Russian revolutionaries (one of which exists in several drafts) and of Engels’s The Origin of the Family.65 Let us look at these sources in turn.

In 1877 Marx wrote a letter to the Russian journal Otechesivenniye Zapiski criticising the interpretation of Capital made in its pages by the populist N. K. Mikhailovsky. Marx makes two points in this epistle.66 The first is that the Russian peasant commune may provide the launching pad for the advance to Communism in Russia, but the possibility of that happening is already being undermined by the advance of capitalism. The second is that even if the latter development does come to fruition, it will not replicate exactly the earlier process in Western Europe, contrary to what is asserted by Mikhailovsky, who wants to turn a “historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historic-philosophical theory of general development, imposed by fate on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they are placed, in order to eventually attain the economic formation which, with a tremendous leap of the productive forces of social labour, assures the most integral development of every individual producer.” Marx was to repeat the first point in a letter to Vera Zasulich of March 8, 1881. He reaffirms his conviction that “the commune is the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia,” but then adds the same rider as in his earlier critique of Mikhailovsky: “in order that it may function as such, it would first be necessary to eliminate the deleterious influences which are assailing it from all sides, and then ensure for it the normal conditions of spontaneous development.”67 Under what conditions might the peasant commune play the role that Marx has suggested for it? These were outlined the following year in a preface, published under the names of both men, for the second Russian edition of the Manifesto: “The only possible answer today is this: if the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for communist development.”68 That the victory of a revolutionary movement in the West could establish a socialist context for Russian development and thus avoid the fate of capitalism was in their view a possibility, but by no means a certainty.

In 1884, three years after Marx had given his assessment of the Russian situation (and only two years after Engels wrote to Bernstein retrospectively supporting the suppression of Highland cattle thieves), Engels wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that “the oldest Celtic laws” characteristic of primitive communism were “still in full bloom in Scotland in the middle of the last century” before clan organization “succumbed only to the arms, law and courts of the English” after 1746: “The precise function of the Scottish clan in this organization still awaits investigation; but that the clan is a gentile body is beyond doubt.”69 These remarks certainly indicate a more sympathetic attitude toward Highland society as it existed before 1746. Nevertheless, does the shift evident in Engels’s position justify the positions associated with Interpretation 2? The very paucity of material to support Interpretation 2 means that later Marxists are drafted in to strengthen the case, notably John Maclean, who along with James Connolly is the greatest of all Scottish revolutionaries.70

Like Matheson, Maclean began political life as a member of the SDF. Unlike him, MacLean remained a member until the Russian Revolution convinced him of the political and organizational inadequacies of the Second International.71 The clan societies of the Scottish Highlands (and Ireland) were treated positively by Maclean in a review of Thomas Johnston’s History of the Working Classes in Scotland during 1920, in which he upbraided the author for failing to recognize the difference between the feudal and clan systems, namely “that in feudalized Scotland the abominations of serfdom obtained because of feudalism, whereas in those parts of the country that escaped feudalism and remained under the Celtic or communistic system these abominations were non-existent.”72 Earlier in the same year Maclean drew explicit parallels between the historical Scottish and contemporary Russian examples:

The communism of the clans must be re-established on a modern basis. (Bolshevism, to put it roughly, is but the modern expression of the communism of the mir.) Scotland must therefore work itself into a communism embracing the whole country as a unit. The country must have but one clan, as it were—a united people working in co-operation and co-operatively, using the wealth that is created. We can safely say, then: back to communism and forward to communism.73

The political implications of this were spelled out in another article of 1920: “The old communal traditions of the clans must be revived and adapted to modern conceptions and conditions. If the Bolshevik notion of world communism through national communism is scientifically correct, then we are justified in utilising our latent Highland and Scottish sentiments and traditions in the mighty task confronting us of transforming capitalism into socialism.”74 Maclean had doubtless read The Origin of the Family, but could not have been aware of Marx’s letter to Zasulich, since (although both the letter and the drafts were discovered by David Ryazanov in 1911) they were only published for the first time (in German and Russian) in 1924, the year after Maclean died.75 By 1920 Maclean was committed to the demand for a Scottish Socialist Republic and is clearly using the supposed communist nature of the historical clans for two purposes: first, to reassure his readers that Communism was not an alien form of society in Scotland, but was already present in Scottish history; second, to make the Russian Communist experience more comprehensible by comparing Scottish clan society to the Russian mir. The merits or otherwise of Maclean’s strategy during this period is not our concern here. (Although it is worth noting that the last quotation misrepresents the entire attitude to the mir, not merely of the Bolsheviks, but of the entire Russian Marxist movement from the Emancipation of Labour group onward.) The case is different from that of Matheson in relation to Interpretation 1, for Maclean is clearly following Engels’s (if not Marx’s) view of clan society. The issue is rather: was this view correct?

Against interpretation 2

Interpretation 2 also combines in relation to the Scottish Highlands two general beliefs held by Marx and Engels, only in this case they are supposed to have arrived at them later on in their careers: the continued existence of communal property amidst a world capitalist economy and the possibility of societies based on this form of property becoming the basis of future Communist society. Again, these claims cannot be sustained. First, Marx and Engels were aware of the existence of what they took to be communal property in Scotland and in the contemporary colonial world from no later than 1853, over two decades before their encounter with Lewis Morgan and the Iroquois, but this assessment was in fact wrong, at least as far as Scotland was concerned. Second, they never believed that communal property could be the basis of modern Communism.

The first expression of the theory of patriarchal society in Marx’s own work actually appears in the same article in which he attacks the Duchess of Sutherland, where we learn that “the clan system belonged to a form of social existence which, in the scale of historical development, stands a full degree below the feudal state; viz., the patriarchal state of society.” He was also aware of the comparisons between this society in Scotland and in Asia: “The clan is nothing but a family organized in a military manner, quite as little defined by laws, just as closely hemmed in by traditions, as any family. But the land is the property of the family, in the midst of which differences of rank, in spite of consanguinity, do prevail as well as in all the ancient Asiatic family communities.”76 Marx means by “patriarchal,” not primitive communism, but what is usually referred to as the Asiatic mode of production, the first form of class society to emerge, but one that nevertheless still maintained many features of that earlier state of equality. Marx believed that the land was still collectively owned by the clan, but was divided up amongst clan members according to their military function by the chief for nominal tributes: “These imposts were insignificant, more a tribute by which the supremacy of the ‘great man’ and of his officers was acknowledged than a rent of land in the modern sense, or as a source of revenue.” Engels only expressed this view in print much later, with the publication of The Origin of the Family, but took it further, identifying clan society with primitive communism itself. Engels drew the comparison again on the eve of his death in 1894: “It [i.e. common ownership] prevailed among the Germans, Celts, Indians—in short, all of the Indo-European peoples in primeval times; it was only recently suppressed by force in Ireland and Scotland, and although it is dying out, still occurs here and there in Germany today.”77 Where did these views come from?

The theory of social development (“modes of subsistence”) bequeathed by the Scottish Enlightenment to Marx and Engels was one of the great intellectual achievements of the modern epoch and is particularly evident in the early sections of The German Ideology. Unfortunately, it also erroneously identified the inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands as examples of the first and most primitive stage of that development. The specific insertion of Highland society into the reworked Marxist theory (“modes of production”) was carried on the basis of the writings of Sir Walter Scott, who was in many ways the climactic figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, but not, alas, a reliable guide to the nature of the Scottish Highlands.78 Scott was as capable of comparing Highlanders to Native Americans or similar peoples as Macaulay. He wrote of the historical Rob Roy, subject of his novel of the same title, that: “Thus a character like his, blending the wild virtues, the subtle policy, and unrestrained licence of an American Indian, was flourishing in the Augustan age of Queen Anne and George I.”79 He was also capable of more sophisticated analysis. In a letter to Lord Dalkeith in 1806 he noted of clan organization: “The patriarchal right or dominion of a Chieftain of a Clan over those of the same name and who were presumed to be of the same family with himself—a right of dominion the most ancient in the world—was acknowledged in both countries, while the authority exercised by the lowland Scottish nobles and barons depended upon the feudal principle of Superior and vassal, or upon that of Landlord and tenant.”80 It was this concept of “patriarchal” society that was carried into the novels that were so admired by Marx. Eleanor Marx wrote of her father: “I should say that Scott was an author to whom Marx again and again returned, whom he admired and knew as well as he did Balzac and Fielding.” 81 According to Paul Lafargue, Scott was among the “modern novelists whom he found the most interesting” and he considered Old Mortality “a masterpiece.”82 It is Engels, however, who makes the connection most clearly: “In Walter Scott’s novels the Highland clan lives before our eyes.”83 The concept of “patriarchal” society was also carried into the work of Lewis Morgan, from where it was absorbed by the revolutionary duo again, reinforcing their original beliefs:

The Celtic branch of the Aryan family retained, in the Scottish clan and Irish sept, the organization into gentes to a later period of time than any other branch of the family, unless the Aryans of India are an exception. The Scottish clan in particular was existing in remarkable vitality in the Highlands of Scotland in the middle of the last century. It is an excellent type of the gens in organization and spirit, and an extraordinary illustration of the power of the gentile life over its members. The illustrious author of Waverley has perpetuated a number of striking characters developed under clan life, and stamped with its peculiarities.84

Morgan had a significant influence on both men in that his book appeared to demonstrate, using the existing example of the Iroquois, the reality of “primitive communism.”85 Ironically, Morgan may have been more alert to the realities of Scottish history than Engels, writing at one point: “The same clans [as written about by Sir Walter Scot], a few centuries earlier, when clan life was stronger and external influences were weaker, would probably have verified the picture.” In other words, the original clan organization had begun to dissolve before 1746.86 But even this does not go far enough. In fact, Marx, Engels, Morgan, and Maclean all misunderstood the nature of Highland society, which was not dominated by the primitive communist or even Asiatic mode, but by one much more familiar in the West: feudalism.87

Clannic organization was typical of all human societies before the origin of classes. By the time the kingdom of the Scots was established in 1057, however, none of the original kinship groups survived anywhere in Europe, even in Scotland, where feudalism in the socioeconomic sense was dominant across the entire territory. The transition to feudalism involved the disintegration of the original clan lineages, and the substitution of notional familial identities in which clan membership signified little more than a political allegiance. This took place in several ways. One was “artificial kinship,” where warriors swore to act as if they were kin of the chief. Another was the submission of one kin group to another, where the now subordinate leaders take on the role of headmen. Still another was where captives were brought up as warriors. The most important of all was where “companions” handpicked by the chief agreed to fight, in return for land, against their actual kin if necessary. The last was of course the very model of the vassal relationship at the core of military feudalism, and its existence undermines the view that clans were examples of primitive communist organization that had survived through geographical isolation into the early modern period. Indeed, even the type of military tenure supposedly introduced by David I, and allegedly so alien to the clan ethos, could be found in the Highlands well before the opening of his reign, albeit in a less systematic form than the Anglo-Norman model.

No clans are listed as fighting at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Their appearance, or rather their reappearance, was a response by the Highland lords to events after the death of Robert I in 1329. The extent to which the power of the central state collapsed after this date was unparalleled in Western Europe. No monarch ascended the throne as an adult between 1390 and 1625, and between 1406 and 1587 alone there were nearly one hundred years of minority and regency rule. “Feudalism collapsed as a vehicle for unity,” writes Christopher Smout, “and became instead the vehicle of faction.”88 The collapse was general throughout Scotland, but in the Highlands the process of fragmentation continued even after relative stabilization had been achieved in the Lowlands. The second coming of the clan system was therefore a product of the general chaos of these centuries. 89 There were three options for a local lord who wished to hold onto power with any degree of legitimacy in the eyes of his followers, rival lords, and the crown—although, given the weakness of the monarchy for much of this period, the crown was often the least important: first, the straightforward imposition of the feudal military relationship on those lesser landowners who had previously held land directly from the Crown, but now agreed to hold it as a subvassal of the lord; second, by “banding” or “bonding,” whereby men formed alliances, either as equals or where the lesser man bound himself and his followers to obey the greater in return for protection; and third, by claiming authority as the senior in a real or (more usually) imagined kin group. These methods were common to both Lowland and Highland Scotland, but only in the latter did they lead to the formation of clanships.

The physical qualities of the Highland region had a bearing on this outcome in two ways. On the one hand, the expanses of moor and mountain that comprises much of the Highlands presented natural obstacles to permanent human settlements and acted as physical barriers between those that did exist. The true distinctiveness of the Highland region lies, however, at a still deeper geological level. The amount of rock that breaks down into soil is as low as one percent in many areas, resulting in a land supremely inhospitable to arable farming. Agriculture in much of the Highlands was therefore mainly pastoral by necessity. On the other hand, communities already widely scattered by the nature of the terrain, and whose main produce took the mobile form of cattle (and to a lesser extent sheep and goats), were more susceptible to attack and theft than even their Lowland counterparts. The threat of a subsistence crisis, too, was ever-present. In such circumstances the defensive political structures developed by the local lords, usually formed out of the “bonding” and “kinship” options, gave them some level of security. In return for joining his host and taking his name, the lord-cum-chief would promise military protection and a guaranteed food supply in times of need.

The political groupings typical of the transition from tribal to feudal society had therefore returned to the Highlands (and, for a shorter period, the Borders) of Scotland: the core minority of gentry with real blood ties to the chief; the septs or kin groups with their own chiefs who accepted his authority as the more powerful; and the conquered groups and “broken men” who would otherwise have been outside any defensive structure. Had the quasi-egalitarianism of the original clan societies returned with them? Three supposedly distinct aspects of clan life in particular are cited to support the view that they represented a permanent bonding of “kin” whose loyalties and activities lay outwith the structure of feudal society.

The first was the practice of collective agriculture. The form of tenure known as runrig is often thought to have involved communal farming, with the strips of land being reallocated by lot on an annual or at least regular basis, so that the best land was never permanently in the possession of any one tenant family. In fact, runrig was practiced in parts of Scotland other than the Highlands and involved a type of shareholding tenancy. Tenancy granted on these terms gave each shareholder a separate title to a specific quantity of land, but not to a specific location, which might vary at different times in the history of the lease. The allocation of the actual land would happen either at the start of a lease or upon its renewal, which—given the short-term nature of most leases—would often be on an annual basis, but this would be a condition of the individual lease, not a collective decision by the tenants.90 In short, far from representing what Weber called a “diluted village communism,” it is hard to see runrig as anything other than a form of private property in land.91

The second supposedly distinctive aspect of clan life was less the material situation of the Highland peasant than the beliefs they held about their place in society. The peasants who took the name of Fraser or MacDonald or Campbell were aware that this was a symbolic act.92 But whereas Lowland peasants knew how dependent their continued occupancy of the land was on the will of the lord, Highland clan members believed that they had rights as kinsmen of the chief—artificial or not—to heritable possession of the land. The chiefs were prepared to encourage this belief as long as they needed the presence of fighting men on their territory, but, as was to become all too apparent after 1746, a right that subsists on the sufferance of the powerful is no right at all.

The third and final distinctive aspect of clan society was the fact that clan territories tended to cut across those of the heritable jurisdictions. If peasants had all been tenants of the chief whose name they adopted, then clanship would appear little more than an elaboration of existing feudal relationships, but their conditions of life drove many to seek the protection of the nearest lord capable of delivering it, even though he was not their own feudal superior and indeed might even be in dispute with their feudal superior, as the Camerons of Locheil and MacLeans of Duart were with the House of Argyll. At one level, therefore, clanship appears to be both different and perhaps opposed to feudalism. At a deeper level, however, the differences and oppositions assume a lesser significance. A feudal superior might indeed act as chief to a clan whose members only partially corresponded to his own tenants, but if some clan members were not his tenants they would certainly be those of some other lord. None of the peasantry was free from the necessity of handing over the product of their labor to one lord or another, and it was this labor that provided the wealth enjoyed by the Highland nobles, whether they were considered lords, or chiefs, or both. Indeed, those who entered a clan led by a man who was not their feudal superior might also have to pay a tribute to him in addition to paying feudal rent to their lord. Clan organization was therefore not only compatible with but also dependent upon the feudal exploitation of the peasantry and must therefore be understood as part of the political superstructure of Scottish feudalism; it corresponded to no other mode of production. There is a certain irony in the fact that, contrary to the myths of Highland exceptionalism, by 1688 the majority of the clans had organized themselves on the classic military-feudal system of vassalage supposedly so alien to their nature. Indeed, Scotland may well have been one of the last areas in Europe, outside of Poland, where such organization still flourished at the end of the seventeenth century. The differences between Highland and Lowland society were therefore matters of degree rather than of kind. If anything, the clans, far from being opposed to feudalism, were representative of its most extreme form.

Where does this leave the argument that Marx and Engels believed primitive communism, where it still existed, could act as the basis for that overthrow? It will be recalled that this was an open question for them in relation to Russia. By January 1894 it had become clear which direction events had taken. In the “Afterword” to “On Social Relations in Russia”—his last intervention on this subject—Engels attempts to compile a balance sheet that is clearly loaded against those who still expected the peasant commune to act as the social basis of the Russian Revolution. The Russian commune, he notes, “has already forgotten how to till its land for the common good”; its ultimate salvation must await “the industrial proletarians of the West.” Engels explicitly links the Russian experience to that of Scotland: “The Russian commune has existed for hundreds of years without ever providing the impetus for the development of a higher form of common ownership out of itself; no more than in the case of the German Mark system, the Celtic Clans, the Indian and other communes with primitive, communistic institutions.” In response to the capitalist impositions all “lost more and more of their communistic character and dissolved into communities of mutually independent landowners.” Engels notes that the few thousand Russians who are aware of the problems that capitalism will bring to their nation are as isolated from and as irrelevant to the 50 million who live in the commune as Robert Owen was to the Scottish working class who filled his factories: “And, of the working men Owen employed in his factory in New Lanark, the majority likewise consisted of people who had been raised on the institutions and customs of a decaying communistic gentile society, the Celtic-Scottish clan; but nowhere does he so much as hint that they showed a greater appreciation of his ideas.” Why? Primitive communism is incapable of producing out of itself “the future socialist society, this final and most intrinsic product of capitalism”: “Any given economic formation has its own problems to solve, problems arising out of itself; to seek to solve those of another, utterly alien formation would be utterly absurd. And this applies to the Russian commune no less than to the South Slav Zadruga, the Indian Gentile community or any other savage or barbaric form of society characterised by the common ownership of production.” With typical generosity of spirit toward Russian revolutionaries of the time, Engels adds that “we do not blame them for regarding their Russian compatriots as the chosen people of the social revolution. But this does not mean that we need to share their illusions.” There seems no good reason to revive these illusions today.93

If the “peasant commune” was not to be the basis of socialism in backward Russia at the end of the nineteenth century it was clearly of no relevance whatsoever in Scotland, which had been at the forefront of capitalist development since the latter half of the eighteenth century. Contrary to what is sometimes asserted, this was understood by Maclean. For all that he shared the mistaken views of Marx and Engels concerning the historical nature of clan society, he also shared their correct assessment, expressed by Engels in the 1894 “Afterword,” of how little this mattered in the contemporary struggle for socialism. Maclean’s evocations of the clan system talk of “re-establishing” and “reviving” the communism of the clans, which suggests—quite rightly—that it no longer exists and must be created anew for the whole of Scotland, as a result of the proletarian revolution.

Conclusion

Marx and Engels made two theoretically compatible claims about the nature of Highland society and advanced two apparently incompatible political positions (one of them retrospective) based on those claims. I want to argue in conclusion that although neither claim can be upheld in the light of modern research, both political positions were in fact correct, in relation to the different historical periods for which they were formulated.

The theoretical claims involved defining Highland society in two ways: on the one hand, politically, as a “non-historic” nation unable to attain statehood and consequently condemned to rely on the forces of counter-revolution—in this case the Stuart dynasty and the French absolutist state—for national preservation (Engels); on the other, socioeconomically, as a formation transitional between primitive communism and class society of the type that would later be described as being based on the Asiatic mode of production (Marx). The category of “non-historic” nations is an idealist one whose lack of explanatory or predictive power in relation to Ireland led Engels eventually to abandon it, but even had the category possessed greater validity, it would still have been irrelevant in the context of the Highlands since the Highlanders did not think of themselves as constituting a nation, nor were they the only or (the ’45 apart) even the main supporters of Jacobite counter-revolution between 1688 and 1746. Equally, had Highland society been as Scott described, then Marx would have been correct to assimilate it to the Asiatic mode of production, but it was not, and the classification on these terms fails on simple empirical grounds. In fact, the Highlands were dominated by the feudal mode of production, albeit in the “classical” military variant that had by 1746 been superseded across the rest of Western Europe.

The political positions involve the alleged discrepancy between the respective positions of Marx and Engels. The first was that the defeat of the Jacobite rising of 1745–46 was necessary for the development of British capitalism. The second is that the clearing of the estates between 1780 and 1860 was a crime against the Highland population. James Young asks: “How can Marxists argue that the extermination of the Scottish Highlanders was necessary for the growth of capitalism, and yet morally criticize the historical actors who brought this about?”94 The first position is that of Engels in “The Magyar Struggle”; the second, that of Marx in Capital. Is there a way of resolving this apparent contradiction? The term “extermination” (which is in any case hyperbolic) conflates the repression directly after Culloden, in which hundreds were killed, with the Clearances themselves, in which thousands were forced to leave their homes. Yet although these processes are clearly linked, they also fall into distinct historical times. The general point is well made by Vogel, who notes of Marx (and I take this to include Engels) that

until the contingent fact of the advent of the working class, there was no satisfactory resolution for, or conduct-guiding political answers available to, the question of what we should do as historical or political agents. Before the development of the working class our choice was either to support the suppression and misery of the masses or to oppose economic and cultural development and the potential for human liberation. Neither of these is minimally acceptable. . . . Now we have a political choice other than choosing either to suppress the masses or to stop human progress. The development of the working class is the basis for Marx’s political recommendations, which allows him to act on the basis both of action of human dignity and human progress.95

It is in this context that we must look for an explanation of the apparent difference between Marx and Engels over the fate of the Highlanders.

The Jacobite rebellions whose suppression Engels retrospectively supported took place in a period when the survival of capitalism was still precarious (“our choice was either to support the suppression and misery of the masses or to oppose economic and cultural development”). The fact that both he and Marx overestimated the importance of the Highlands as the basis of Jacobite support and misunderstood the precise nature of Highland society does not infirm this judgment: inside Scotland the Jacobite movement was based on a precapitalist social class (the lesser feudal gentry—some of whom were also clan chiefs); outside Scotland it was allied to precapitalist states (principally France). The alternative to the Hanoverian victory in 1746 was the dismemberment of the United Kingdom and the effective reduction of the British Isles to dependencies of absolutist France. Nor would this outcome have saved the Highlands, since the Stuarts, no longer dependent on Highland support, would no doubt have resumed the absolutist onslaught against the clans that they had pursued (except at times of crisis) since 1455, but would now have done so with the support of the most powerful state in Europe. No social force existed that could have offered a positive outcome for the Highlanders. Not even Armstrong, who has argued that an alliance between the English Levellers and Scottish and Irish “clan democracy” in the mid-seventeenth century could have bypassed “Western capitalist development,” believes that a similar alliance was possible by 1746. It is therefore with this period in Highland history, rather than that of the Clearances, that Marx’s comments on India have the greatest relevance.

The Clearances themselves, however, although separated from the aftermath of Culloden by mere decades, belong to a different period of historical time, one in which capitalism was already triumphant and, in Marx’s view, on the verge of being overthrown. (“Now we have a political choice other than choosing either to suppress the masses or to stop human progress.”) For Marx the “clearing of estates” was, not a tragic but unavoidable aspect of capitalist development, but one of the brutal and avoidable aspects of capitalism as the dominant mode of production. The tragedy that the Highlanders experienced was not, as it was after the ’45, that no social force existed that could have come to their aid, but that the social force that did exist failed to do so. The landlords were not predestined to succeed in driving their tenants off the land, since the Clearances took place against the development of the labor movement in Scotland, from the Friends of the People through the United Scotsmen, the Radicals of 1820, and finally to the Chartists. What we are registering here is the failure of that movement to intervene or to intervene sufficiently to prevent the tragedy of the Highlanders.96

In the 1880s, Highland crofting communities were to rise in the first successful struggles for tenurial rights that we know as the Highland Land War. James Hunter has noted, in the second edition of his great work on the crofting communities of the Western Highlands, that a Marxist theoretical framework was essential for him to tell the story of that struggle and those that followed it.97 If the framework had simply been one that either uncritically welcomed the development of the productive forces under capitalism, or unthinkingly expected socialism to circumvent capitalist development altogether through the agency of “clan democracy,” it is unlikely that it would have been of much use to Hunter, or indeed anybody else. But Marx and Engels were involved in neither apologetics nor utopianism. They understood that the expansion of the productive forces brought about by capitalism was a necessary condition for the ultimate goal of human emancipation, because without it there will be neither a working class to seize power from the capitalists nor a sufficient level of material resources with which to feed, clothe, house, or educate the world’s population. It was also an insufficient condition, because unless the working class was conscious and organized it would not succeed in achieving its revolutionary potential. But the objective situation (the existence of capitalism) precedes the subjective (the conscious mobilization of the social classes that capitalism has brought into being).

The possession of this general theory enabled them to correctly evaluate the political meaning of historical and contemporary events in the Scottish Highlands, despite the errors and misconceptions that they inherited about clan society. Their writings on this subject are entirely compatible with the overall attitude to capitalism that they maintained from The German Ideology to the end of their lives. Shorn of the misinterpretations that this article has tried to correct, they offer no reason why Marxists should either abandon their tradition or believe that Marx and Engels themselves did so.