MY LAST article caused some issues through my current job and questions were raised. 

So I find myself a wee bit constrained on this voices of Scotland piece. 

I have been involved with many Morning Star meetings and sometimes have even been a contributor. So this piece is less a voice of Scotland and more a voice of me.  

As such I start with this: everything written here is my own personal opinion. 

It is not in any way to be confused with the opinions and ideology of any of the organisations I am a member of, whether it is my union, party or any other group or organisations. 

I write this as a response to some comments from the Dundee Our Class Our Culture meeting, where it was stated that us auld buggers had it so good (I am paraphrasing). This will and should cause a debate.

From my teens in the mid-70s until I was auld in the mid-90s, I actually adhered to an anarchist communist set of political ideologies, some might say anarcho-syndicalist but, having read the works of Peter Kropotkin, I think I was an anarchist communist, who did lean towards the syndicalists. 

This was a result of the whole punk then anarcho-punk movement that began with the Clash, The Ruts, Stiff Little Fingers, UK Subs and then onto Crass, Poison Girls, Flux of Pink Indians, Discharge etc. 

From the start of punk in 1976 through to 1984, these punk groups opened my eyes politically, kindred spirits searching for a reason for being. 

They were not very politically aware, of course, and very utopian in outlook with very little political theory. 

But it was still an awakening in political thinking and thought out with the mainstream. 

Very utopian in outlook and very opinionated as I was – I was young and very, very opinionated (some might say that only the young bit has changed) – I refused to vote for anything or anyone as all good anarchists do. 

Except in Scotland, in 2014, where Scottish anarchists actually forgot all political ideology and campaigned and voted for independence. 

“Schoolboy sedition backed by big time promoters” (see Crass) is how I view all that now. 

I believed then, as I do now, that change, real change, can only come from below. That is from the working class taking control and shaping their own lives and future as part of a mass movement, built from and of the working class. 

Many of my family had been members of the old Communist Party of Great Britain. My great uncle Peter Aird was jailed in 1926 during the General Strike, and I remember the debates I had with my uncles when I was an anarchist and “communism” was the enemy of all. 

They were very long and very good debates, but even more, they taught me class politics and the need to be educated and ready for any counter-argument. 

This was where, at the age of 14, I originally discovered Marx, Engels and Lenin. Where reasoned debate and education from them made me research and up my game politically, so I could counter their arguments. 

This all worked, it forced me to question everything. Read and research before debating. 

What I state below will cause dissent and will antagonise many, as it did me.

This type of political education by the auld to the young seems to be lost now. 

Where the auld are somehow held in contempt because we apparently “had it so much better.”

Where we now sit in committees and do nothing. Where we had mass union membership and more opportunities than now, they have nothing. 

Where they have zero-hours contracts and no union help. Where the auld don’t understand the issues and are stuck in some ’70s-style rebellion. 

That is all a crock of shite of course, because my generation and the generations before were faced with an onslaught from the capitalist class that has always been hell-bent on the destruction of our organised movement. 

But they organised and fought back given the limitations they faced. 

The trade union and labour movement were created because they had no voice — in an era where there was no mass industrial movement and workers were isolated even more than they are now. 

Every generation has had to confront the capitalist onslaught and no generation has ever had a monopoly on the consequences of the exploitation by the capitalists of our class. 

We live in and have to react to the situation created by capitalism. 

How we react to these times is the key. It is not the older generations who have failed us, but the question is, how does the movement move forward as a unified organisation, both auld and young, given the current situation.

In the words of a great working-class syndicalist — don’t mourn, organise.