John Maclean

Hero of Red Clydeside

Henry Bell

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780745338385
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786803559
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

'I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot' – John Maclean, Speech from the Dock, 1918. Feared by the government, adored by workers, celebrated by Lenin and Trotsky; the head of British Military Intelligence called John Maclean 'the most dangerous man in Britain'. This new biography explores the events that shaped the life of a momentous man – from the Great War and the Great Unrest, to the Rent Strike and the Russian Revolution. It examines his work as an organiser and educator, his imprisonment and hunger strike, and how he became the early hero of radical Scottish Independence.

1

Out for Life and All That Life Can Give Us

John Maclean died on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November 1923, at the age of just 44. Three days later, below the sandstone tenements of Eglington Toll on the Southside of Glasgow, more than 5,000 people gathered to begin the three-mile march to Eastwood Cemetery where he would be laid to rest. The Clyde Workers’ Band marched in front, playing socialist anthems, and Handel’s ‘March of Saul’.¹ Some of the most famous socialists, communists, Labour MPs, suffragettes and trade unionists Scotland and the wider British Isles have ever produced greeted each other in the cold, and followed the silver band across South Glasgow. Glasgow’s many unemployed men and women, as well as miners, teachers and shipyard workers held up banners and marched in silence.² Only the sound of their feet striking cobbles and tram tracks, and the strains of the band, rang out across the city.

As they passed through the streets of Govanhill, Pollokshields and Pollokshaws, black and red flags flapped from tenement windows and the pavements heaved with Glaswegians paying their respects. By the time the procession reached Maclean’s home in Auldhouse Road, some estimates put the crowd at 20,000.³ Along with the hearse and carriages, a horse-drawn cart carried a camera crew to capture the event. Soon the mass funeral march would be screened in cinemas across the west of Scotland, and shown on the anniversary of his death each year. To this day, the funeral of John Maclean, Britain’s foremost Marxist revolutionary, remains the largest that Glasgow has ever seen. Tributes poured in from across the political spectrum. Obituaries were carried in Swedish, Russian and French, as well as British and Irish papers. Streets were named after him in Soviet cities, and Maclean was memorialised as an icon of Communism in the USSR right up until its collapse.⁴ His coffin, draped in a red flag, was lowered into the ground as the huge crowd sang ‘A Rebel Song’ and ‘The Internationale’.⁵

Despite the collective camaraderie of the marching men and women that day, divisions over Maclean’s life were already long established. For the two years prior to his death, Maclean was disregarded by many as a political outsider; rejected by large parts of the Communist movement, estranged from his wife and family, and reported to be insane by both the secret police and those members of the left that rejected his increasingly Republican and Celtic Communist views. Over the coming century, Maclean would be alternately claimed and slandered by communists, liberals and nationalists – and charges of madness and foolish nationalism would come to stand alongside a mythology of John Maclean as a lost Scottish Lenin.

Without doubt, the punishment Maclean received in Scottish jails and his early death helped to enshrine him as a Marxist saint. He is remembered still as the revolutionary teacher whose vast classes, Labour College and speeches made sure that Marxist analysis took root in the slums of Glasgow and the coalfields of Fife and Lanarkshire – a man in many ways responsible for the self-conception of Glasgow, and by extension Scotland, as radical and ‘red’. In the 18 years from Maclean joining the socialist movement to his release from jail at the end of the First World War, the Scottish Radical Left was transformed from the fringe eccentricity of a few hundred people, to a force that could muster 100,000 workers to cheer on the Russian, German and British Revolutions.

However, much of this internationalist outlook was overwritten in the century that followed. It was nation building, rather than Marxism, that emerged, perhaps, as the single most prominent cultural and political force in Scotland. Soon after his death, the poets of the Scottish Renaissance began to take up Maclean as a patron saint of their new Scotland. For left-nationalist intellectuals such as Sorley Maclean, Hugh MacDiarmid and Hamish Henderson, John Maclean became a key figure in the poetic re-imagining of the nation, even making it into the unofficial national anthem ‘Freedom Come All Ye’:

So come all ye at hame wi’ Freedom,

Never heed whit the hoodies croak for doom.

In your hoose a’ the bairns o’ Adam

Can find breid, barley-bree and painted room.

When Maclean meets wi’s freens in Springburn

A’ the roses and geans will turn tae bloom,

And a black boy frae yont Nyanga

Dings the fell gallows o’ the burghers doon.⁶

In a Scotland both synthetic and ancient, parochial and international, Maclean was the ideal cipher for that Caledonian Antisyzygy, those duelling Scottish polarities: a Highlander and a Lowlander, rural and urban, a Nationalist and an Internationalist, an atheist and a Calvinist, a moderniser and a voice from history. What the poet Edwin Muir once said of Burns can equally be applied to Maclean: ‘to the respectable, a decent man; to the Rabelaisian, bawdy; to the sentimentalist, sentimental; to the socialist, a revolutionary; to the nationalist, a patriot; to the religious, pious; to the self-made man, self-made’.⁷

A fitting national icon for a changing people, who in his lifetime and after it, would be shaped by industrial revolutions, depressions, world wars and the welfare state, the story of Maclean and his legacy is a story of Scotland, its contradictory political identity, and its tremendous wealth and poverty.

In the years immediately after the First World War, in penning his ‘Open Letter to Lenin’ and demanding a distinctively Scottish Communist Party, it was Maclean who helped open the rift between Scottish and British nationalisms that continues to divide the Scottish left, but it was also Maclean who formed the bridge between socialism and nationalism that influences the institutions that govern Scotland. Today, Maclean is celebrated by unionists and nationalists. Both the Radical Independence Campaign and the Labour Party are happy to march under his image. His stern-seeming face stares down from banners just the same whether he is placed next to Robert the Bruce, Keir Hardie, or Rosa Luxemburg. Maclean is a nationalist to nationalists, a democrat to democrats, and a revolutionary to revolutionaries.

His place at the epicentre of a decisive historical moment for the British Empire – in terms of the Great War and the Irish Struggle but also the very real potential of World Revolution – granted him a prime vantage point from which to witness the traumas and triumphs of twentieth-century politics. He may not have been the hero who delivered his people from capitalism or imperialism, but he was formed, destroyed and continues to be memorialised by those struggles.

Amongst the many competing views of Maclean, one uniting factor emerges: how exceptional the man was in his pursuit of his egalitarian values. He possessed a tenacity that distinguishes him from both comrades and enemies, as MacDiarmid acknowledged when he wrote: ‘of all Maclean’s foes not one was his peer.’⁸ In the popular conception of the Maclean myth, he appears Christ-like in his endurance, single-mindedness and determination to liberate the oppressed masses. Anarchist organiser Guy Aldred, writing for Bakunin Press in Glasgow in 1925, claimed that:

Scholars … tell us that there were many Jesuses in the Jewish portion of the Roman Empire. Some time hence, we may suppose, other scholars will look back to our time, especially those who dwell in other lands, and learnedly dilate upon the fact that there were many John Macleans. Yet all Scotland, and all Labor, knows that there was and is only one — John Maclean, man and agitator, a martyr of the class struggle … Apart from his class, he was nothing, because his class, its sorrows, its struggles, had become his life and being.⁹

Consumed by the struggle in his lifetime and afterwards, Maclean is a symbol of Scottish radicalism itself – an icon, divorced from his wit, his warmth and his human flaws. It is a curious irony that while his legacy has outlived the Communist Party of Great Britain, Maclean’s dramatic fall-out with its founders has become a fundamental part of his myth. His life opens revolutionary possibilities and potential in legend, even as it gained and lost them in real life. He cut the fork in the road where the Scottish Labour movement, had it not fallen under the influences of Moscow and/or London, may – or may not – have transcended those leaders and made revolutionary upheaval possible. At the same time, he forged the closest links between Scotland and the Kremlin, only to hamstring those relationships with his own equally energetic stubbornness.

At the time of his death, Maclean may have been a household name; the nation’s most famous revolutionary, but he was isolated as a husband, father and politician. The socialist and suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst focused on Maclean’s loneliness in her obituary for him:

When we saw him a month ago he was holding great meetings and seemed stronger and more confident than ever. Yet he lived the bare lonely life of an ascetic. Parted from his wife and children he lived quite alone, doing his own cooking and housework … declaring that ‘pease brose’ was one of his daily meals. His tone bespoke the cheerful frugality that was only too near to want.¹⁰

Yet the tragic solitude towards the end of his life belies the warmth and welcome that his home offered, and the love and hope included in all his letters to his wife and children – and indeed his final reconciliation with his family.

This biography seeks to view Maclean through all these prisms – as a nationalist and an internationalist, as a pacifist and a revolutionary, as a social democrat and a Bolshevik, as a father and a husband – and in those overlapping lights, shades and colours, to tell the story of a life devoted to revolution and popular struggle from Russia to Scotland, from Ireland to Egypt. It is not intended as an academic work, or a comprehensive history, but as a portrait of a great figure and the movement that surrounded him; subjective, but offering from its viewpoint a continuation of Maclean’s lessons and legacy. His is a neglected but important chapter in Scotland’s history, one which has more to say to us than William Wallace, Bonnie Prince Charlie, or many others in the pantheon of Scottish rebels. Maclean’s life offers lasting lessons about how capitalist crises and war might be used to unite rather than to divide; how education can be a tool of liberation, not control; how Marxism may compete or combine with different nationalisms; and how physical and mental health, family life and comfort can be destroyed by oppression and resistance. Above all, it is a life lived for a cause, to the very edge of human limits. As Edwin Morgan writes in his poem ‘On John Maclean’:

Failures may be interesting, but it is the firmness of what he

wanted and did not want

that raises eyebrows; when does the quixotic

begin to gel, begin to impress, at what point

of naked surprise?

… Maclean was not naive, but

‘We are out

for life and all that life can give us’

was what he said, that’s what he said.¹¹

Whatever the impressions made by Maclean’s quixotic life, they have lasted a century, and contin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Out for Life and All That Life Can Give Us
• 2. Dispeller of Ignorance
• 3. The Revolutionary Gospel
• 4. The Rapids of Revolution
• 5. Internationalists First, Last, and All the Time
• 6. The War Within a War
• 7. Convict 2652
• 8. We are Going to Live to See the Day
• 9. Scotland’s Bolshevik
• 10. The Accuser of Capitalism
• 11. Let’s Kill Capitalism This Year
• 12. One Big Union
• 13. An Open Letter to Lenin
• 14. All Hail the Scottish Workers’ Republic
• 15. The John Maclean March
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index