The national question has dominated Scottish politics in recent years, and there is no prospect of that changing in the foreseeable future. Like Ireland, Catalonia, and the Basque Country, Scotland has become one of the West European countries where socialists must decide whether to accept the very existence of the state in its current territorial boundaries. Marxist theories of nationalism can be an invaluable guide to political action in this context.

The Marxist tradition may seem like a peculiar starting point for assessing the dilemmas of nationalism. In his influential work The Break-Up of Britain, Scottish writer Tom Nairn argued that “the theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure.” For Benedict Anderson, who followed in Nairn’s footsteps with his classic study of nationalism, Imagined Communities, it was Marxism’s “uncomfortable anomaly.”

More broadly, a generation of radicals from the ’68 generation developed a critique of Marxism’s failings, which they saw as doctrinaire internationalism, class reductionism, and a failure to grasp the emotional side of human nature that was geared to the construction of meaning. In later years, many of these critics would take these initial provocations further: materialists, according to the emerging cultural sociology, needed to abandon economic abstractions and make room for new modes of identity construction.