The Socialism of John Maclean

Political biographies of the Clydeside socialist John Maclean - who died 76 years ago last month - generally fall into one of two categories: uncritical adulation, or unqualified condemnation. Stan Crooke places the evolution of Maclean's politics in the context of his time.

John Maclean joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in the opening years of the century. He remained a member of the SDF and its successor organisations - the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the British Socialist Party (BSP) - until 1920.

The SDF and its successors prided themselves on their "Marxist orthodoxy". They saw their role as making largely passive propaganda for socialism. Capitalism was immoral: it would eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Power would fall into the hands of the working class like an over-ripe fruit. This socialist transformation was preordained by History.

The German socialist leader August Bebel summed it up: "Bourgeois society is working so mightily for its own collapse that we need only await the moment when we take up the reins of power which have slipped from its hands." During his first decade of political activity Maclean operated within this framework.

Maclean welcomed industrial struggle in the workplace: "Fighting leads to new facts, these to our new theory, and thence to revolution." But industrial militancy could be fruitful only if channelled through a genuine socialist party, armed with "Marxist orthodoxy". He dismissed syndicalism as "that parasitical and new phased anarchism".

In line with the "Marxist orthodoxy" Maclean regarded the growth of state centralisation as a step along the road to socialism which History had marked out, a precondition of the centralised planning which would be a characteristic of socialism.

He therefore dismissed the idea of a Scottish Parliament as "a buffer betwixt us and our goal, or a brake to curb our revolutionary fervour... The establishment of a Scottish Babel would be a retrograde step and should meet with our opposition and ridicule. What is good or bad for England is good or bad for Scotland."

Nor did Maclean, at this time, argue that Scotland was naturally more politically radical than England. Scotland was "a political puzzle, instinctively conservative and proverbially cautious". Scottish workers were "seething with revolt industrially, but lying like lambs politically", while the Highlanders "still vote Liberal or Tory". What was needed was a party - the SDF, the SDP, and then the BSP - which exposed the false mantra of the syndicalists and the reformists and which brought the true message of socialism to the masses. In the words of David Howell (A Lost Left):

"He was keen to campaign openly on the pure doctrine, concerned to develop the widest-possible class-based solidarity, prepared usually to dismiss other controversies as diversionary or translatable into the language of class and socialism.

"Capitalism, whatever its horrors, would allow socialists space and time to make their case. If it were made with enthusiasm, clarity and relevance, then it would persuade."

The outbreak of war in 1914 shattered the universe of "Marxist orthodoxy". Mass socialist parties, above all the German SPD, sided with their own ruling classes. The voice of passive socialist propaganda was drowned out by gunfire. History was no longer moving along the pre-ordained path to socialism.

Three years later the Russian Revolution delivered another crushing blow to the "Marxist orthodoxy" of the now-defunct Second International. The working class had seized power not in a highly industrialised European country, but in backward, predominantly peasant Russia.

Maclean was confronted with the same questions as other socialists of his generation: how to respond to the outbreak of war, to the Russian Revolution, and to the collapse of "Marxist orthodoxy".

For Maclean such questions were posed in the context of what subsequently became known as "Red Clydeside". Much nonsense has been written about "Red Clydeside", the bulk of it penned by Stalinists who proclaimed themselves its heirs. Nonetheless industrial militancy and housing campaigns were a real social force in Glasgow during the war and immediately after it.

Maclean was unswerving in his opposition to the war. He sought to bring together the different strands of the wartime unrest in Glasgow into a cohesive political force with a perspective which went beyond the immediate issues of conscription and rents.

He argued that Glasgow Trades Council should call a general strike in support of the rents campaign of 1915. And he argued that the Clyde Workers' Committee, which played a leading role in the industrial unrest, should challenge the war itself.

Maclean was unsuccessful on both counts. But to be unsuccessful is not the same as to be wrong. Maclean was attempting to give a political direction to spontaneous working-class struggle.

In an echo of his earlier comment on the nexus of fighting-facts-theory-revolution, he argued:

"Every determined fight binds the workers together more and more, clears the heads of our class to their robbed and enslaved conditions, and so prepares them for the acceptance of our full gospel of socialism, and the full development of the class war to the end of establishing socialism."

Maclean welcomed the Russian Revolution. For him it was not a coup by a small group of conspirators (as its social-democratic opponents alleged) but a genuine working-class revolution. He declared his support for the 21 conditions for membership of the Bolshevik Third International. But Maclean never joined the British Communist Party (CP). In fact, Maclean split from the BSP just at the time it was joining forces with other organisations to found the CP.

On a personal level Maclean was virulently hostile towards the leading figures in the embryonic CP. He denounced them as police spies and informers, an unhealthy obsession which Maclean had developed in the aftermath of repeated spells in prison.

Rothstein and Campbell were denounced as "working for the government". Gallacher was "an instrument of the governing class". Delegates at the Third International in Moscow were "conscious agents of Lloyd George and the property-owning class". Informers in the embryonic CP - real ones - noted with glee the problems he caused. According to one Cabinet intelligence report:

"The Communists have been slow to realise what was patent to everyone else, that John Maclean is the victim of the monomania of the 'hidden hand', and they are now reaping a harvest of suspicion from their loyalty to him. Maclean's obsession is quite likely to break up the Communist movement."

Maclean now entered a political trajectory very different from that of the CP (a relatively open and healthy party, as yet untainted by Stalinism), one of sectarian self-isolation. When the Labour Party and TUC were pressurised into setting up Councils of Action to oppose military intervention against revolutionary Russia, Maclean's response was a boycott:

"The Labour Councils of Action will not fit the bill... We Communists are the only ones that can lead society to Communism. Therefore we must form a Communist Council of Action to assume the real power when the proper moment arrives."

In response to a series of working class defeats in the early 1920s the CP set about rebuilding trade union strength under the slogans "Stop the Retreat" and "Back to the Unions", thereby laying the foundations for a rank-and-file National Minority Movement.

Maclean, on the other hand, launched an Industrial Unity Committee (IUC): "The industrial unity of the workers is the fundamental preparation for the establishment of the World Workers' Industrial Republic." The IUC was stillborn, attracting only Maclean's own supporters and advocates of breakaway "revolutionary" unions.

In the early 1920s the CP also launched the National Unemployed Workers Committee Movement (NUWCM). Maclean refused to participate in it. He denounced it publicly and set up his own "unemployed committee", a pole of attraction to no-one save his own followers.

This was also the period in which the Labour Party emerged as the party of the working class, in the sense that it was organically linked to the trade unions and developed a bedrock of electoral support amongst working class voters. The political space to the left of the Labour Party was occupied by the CP.

Working class electoral support for Labour was regarded by Maclean as a transient phenomenon. After a poor Labour turnout in a Glasgow Council by-election of 1923 - hardly a reliable guide to longer-term voting patterns - Maclean claimed: "Many people were staggered by our work into not voting at all. Next time they'll come down right on our side for ever after."

Maclean likewise believed that the CP's days were numbered: "The CP is getting 'rocky' and as it fades the ground will be cleared for a real fighting party independent of outside dictation and finance."

The "real fighting party" envisaged by Maclean was the Scottish Workers Republican Party (SWRP), launched in February of 1923. It was weak in Glasgow and effectively non-existent outside of the city, condemned to political insignificance by virtue of the sectarianism of its founding member. The advocacy of an independent Scotland in the form of a Communist Republic by Maclean and his SWRP cut across the grain of development of working-class politics in Scotland.

There had been strong support for Home Rule (but not independence) in the labour movement in Scotland in the immediate aftermath of the war. But by the early 1920s, in the context of an employers' offensive and growing success by Labour at the polls, both the political and trade union wings of the labour movement looked to advance at an all-British level.

Maclean's call for a Communist Republic of Scotland was also based on the argument that traditional Scottish society was a form of "Celtic communism". He argued that "the communism of the clans must be re-established on a modern basis," and raised the slogan: "back to communism and forward to communism."

The politics of the post-war John Maclean were summed up in his election manifesto of 1922, when he stood for election in the Gorbals in Glasgow:

"I stand in the Gorbals and before the world as a Bolshevik, alias a Communist, alias a Revolutionist, alias a Marxian. My symbol is the Red Flag and it I shall always keep floating on high."

Certainly, it expressed his commitment to basic revolutionary ideas. But it also reflected his political failure. He stood before the workers of Glasgow rather than with them. He kept the Red Flag flying, but he flew it in a position of increasing sectarian isolation.

The pre-war John Maclean had espoused the "Marxist orthodoxy" of his time. He was quick to recognise that war and the Russian Revolution fatally undermined that orthodoxy. But, never a theoretician, he was unable to develop a coherent political alternative.

On to part two of this article