The First World War was not unexpected. In 1919 John MacLean stated ‘We Marxists knew the war with Germany was coming, as both Germany and Britain were conducting a life and death struggle to dominate the world and its markets’.[1] Lenin had earlier characterised the war as ‘between two groups of oppressors, between two freebooters over the division of their booty’.[2] Michael McGregor continues the tribute to John MacLean, Revolutionary Communist, on the 75th anniversary of his death, with an account of MacLean’s campaign against imperialist war.
What was unexpected was the capitulation of socialist organisations in Europe affiliated to the Second International. At congress after congress in the years leading up to the war, these parties had pledged to oppose the coming war. In 1907 the Stuttgart Congress of the International agreed that ‘should war break out socialists must do all they can to take advantage of the economic and political crisis precipitated by the war to rouse the masses and accelerate the downfall of capitalist class domination’.[3]
Yet when war was declared, they rushed to take ‘sides with their General Staffs, their government and their bourgeoisie against the proletariat’ (Lenin 1915, Collapse of The Second International).[4] In Germany, France and Russia leading socialists like Kautsky urged the working class to rally round the national flag. In Britain, the Labour Party, TUC and Co-operative Movement all pledged their support for the Allies. The TUC offered an industrial truce for the duration.
MacLean and imperialist war
MacLean’s response was exemplary. On the day war broke out he chalked the streets with slogans against the war and the government. Within five days a protest demonstration was organised on Glasgow Green. From then on MacLean and his comrades literally fought on the streets, at factory gates and outside army recruitment offices to expose the real causes of the war and its effect on the working class. MacLean openly declared ‘war against the war makers!’, stating ‘Our first business is to hate the British capitalist system…Plunderers versus plunderers with the workers as pawns…it is our business as socialists to develop “class patriotism”, refusing to murder one another for a sordid world capitalism’ (17 September 1914).[5]
Glasgow: city of empire
Having identified capitalism and colonial competition as the motives behind the war, MacLean struggled to develop an anti-war movement in the second city of the British Empire, a significant section of whose working class was engaged in building merchant ships for empire trade and battleships to defend it. They were therefore directly dependent on imperialism. The Clyde was also the biggest centre of industrial production in the British Empire, with a population of one million in 1914. Alongside the skilled engineers, fitters, boilermakers and shipwrights who were well organised into trade unions, there were masses of manual workers of Irish and Scots Highland origin driven to the area through poverty and the land clearances of the previous century. By 1914 a large proportion of local production was connected with warships. This trade brought other munitions work, like shell production, in its train. 10% of the membership of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers – 20,000 workers – were concentrated in 31 factories on Clydeside, of which by 1917 all but 10 were directly concerned in some form of marine engineering or munitions work. Solid union organisation, skill shortages and a critical role in the imperialist economy had secured for these workers high wages, status and job security. This was ‘the blue blood of the working class’: an aristocracy of labour.[6]
The Clyde Workers Committee
In parallel with MacLean’s ceaseless anti-war agitation, a militant shop stewards movement emerged, based on the Clyde workshops engaged in producing war materials. The first strike of the war began in February 1915 over a wage claim, which, despite the opposition of the official union, the owners, and the rabid hostility of the patriotic newspapers, held out for three weeks and eventually gained the workers a penny on the hourly rate. The government conceded this as a ‘war bonus’, of the sort that had already been paid to railwaymen.[7] However the needs of war production hardened its stance, and throughout 1915, shop stewards were dismissed for ‘slacking’, and some sentenced to three months in gaol. However, union organisation and impressive solidarity forced a temporary retreat.
Yet such militancy was far from being the basis of an anti-war movement on the Clyde. These workers were, as JT Murphy asserts in Preparing for Power, ‘demanding a price for carrying on the war’.[8] He singled out the example of John Muir, a major figure on the Clyde Workers Committee (CWC) and editor of its newspaper The Worker, and notoriously pro-war. When Lloyd George came to Glasgow at Christmas 1915 to address the workers, Muir boldly laid out their demands: ‘the control of dilution by the workers engaged in industry in terms which would not be detrimental to the workers in general and especially the skilled workers, whose position was shattered by dilution.’[9] His speech did not challenge the war.
The struggle widens
MacLean’s stature as an anti-war agitator and revolutionary socialist grew enormously in this first full year of war. At the beginning of 1915, MacLean and the anti-war section of the British Socialist Party had organised meetings all over Glasgow, the Clyde and Scotland. Sunday night in Glasgow’s Bath Street became a focal point. Surrounded by recruiting posters, MacLean thundered against the war, calling for revolution against the warmongers. He spoke to hundreds, then thousands of workers as the horrific slaughter on the front continued. An outraged citizen complained to the Glasgow Herald in October 1915 that ‘at 9.30 last night at the foot of Kilbowie Road, I heard a man preaching treason. He was telling a crowd of working men that the war was not being fought in the defence of Belgium, but in the interests of greedy capitalists, who wish to seize Germany’s trade. What organisation of Germans or pro-Germans sent this man? Why is he allowed to go this way?…Are there no men in Clydebank to stop him without waiting for the law to act?’[10]
In fact, the Glasgow police were not idle. They alleged obstruction against the meetings, brought along rival speakers and encouraged ‘patriot’ organisations to attack the meetings. By autumn the state stepped up its harassment of MacLean and the anti-war campaign. Charges followed: ‘using language likely to cause a breach of the peace’, offences under DORA [Defence of the Realm Act] such as ‘making statements likely to prejudice recruiting’. Plainclothes police were now a regular feature of the meetings and MacLean helpfully pointed them out to the audience.
John MacLean
His courageous and principled stance attracted the anti-war members of other organisations. The defence of democratic rights became part of the battle. Free Speech Committees were formed. Demonstrations were held outside the courts where charges were being heard. Workers and socialists gathered outside MacLean’s trial on 27 October 1915. It was a fine or five days in jail for saying ‘I have been enlisted in the Socialist Army for 15 years, the only army worth fighting for. God damn all other armies.’[11] A month later MacLean was dismissed from his teaching job despite his supporters, among them shipyard workers, ‘visiting’ the School Board meeting.
The rent strike
While these struggles were filling the streets of Glasgow with vigorous protest, the landlords had been racking up rent. The wives and dependants of soldiers, whose sufferings MacLean had been concerned with since the war began, organised together with other working class women of the Clyde to withhold the increases and physically defend those facing eviction. MacLean’s paper, The Vanguard, urged a full rent strike as the movement spread, reaching into the factories and shipyards. On the day of the trial of 18 workers who had taken this step, demonstrations came in from all over. The housing schemes and factories were marching. One column stopped at MacLean’s school and carried him, shoulder high, to the court. Ten thousand people surrounded the building while MacLean and others spoke. This was the birth of working class power and the ruling class acted swiftly. A telephone call to Lloyd George, Minister of Munitions, secured the immediate halt to court action and the introduction of a Rent Restriction Act.
MacLean recognised the significance of this development. The limits of trade unionism were being challenged. The strength of unity demonstrated by the working class communities over the rent issue had created the conditions where the working class organised in the factories and yards felt confident enough to use its power for wider issues. However, MacLean had a serious warning. Analysing the role of the CWC in December 1915, he argued ‘Whether the Clyde Workers Committee as constituted today is able or willing to cope with the situation is doubtful; but it is just as well to give it a further chance with the added support of miners and railwaymen. However just as this unofficial committee views with suspicion the official committees of the various unions and attempts to act as a driving force, we warn comrades that they ought to adopt the same attitude towards the unofficial committee and see to it that it pushes ahead. If it still clings on to academic discussion and futile proposals, it is their business to take the initiative into their own hands as they did in the case of the recent rent strike.’[12]
Conscription and repression
The day after the rent strike victory MacLean started five days in prison for refusing to pay his fine. On the day of his release miners from Lanark marched to meet him and the demonstration went on to the shipyards at Govan, where a huge meeting carried resolutions condemning the government, the Munitions Act, and conscription. The threat of conscription sharpened the anti-war message and now thousands were prepared to listen. Repression intensified: the authorities cancelled the letting of the City Hall before an anti-conscription meeting at which MacLean and Sylvia Pankhurst were due to speak. A near riot ensued as MacLean threatened to organise the workers to break down the doors. Lloyd George and ‘traitor’ Arthur Henderson of the Labour Party had to suffer public humiliation at the hands of thousands of Clyde workers when they spoke in Glasgow that December. The Conscription Bill was brought before Parliament on 5 January 1916; socialists redoubled their efforts against the war and MacLean was the centre of the anti-war agitation. The ILP paper Forward was banned for printing an account of the Lloyd George meeting whilst MacLean’s Vanguard was seized on 8 January 1916 and the CWC’s The Worker closed down.
MacLean addressed the crowds at Bath Street on 6 February and after the meeting was detained in Edinburgh Castle. William Gallagher, chair of the CWC, and John Muir were also arrested for writing, it was claimed, a ‘seditious’ article. But MacLean’s warning about the CWC proved correct as it refused to challenge the first prosecutions under the Munitions Act. In the face of the repression, the CWC recommended a return to work. Workers in the yards and factories demanded action but the CWC did nothing. At a meeting of the CWC on 25 March a motion to declare a strike in the Clyde District was put forward; William Gallagher as chair ruled it out of order ‘as it was against the accepted aims of the CWC’.[13] This was the same Gallagher who was to become a founder of the Communist Party of Great Britain and its MP between 1935 and 1950, and whom MacLean had criticised for not speaking out against the war.
At their trial, management testified to John Muir’s commitment to the war effort, whilst Gallagher stated that the CWC could not call a strike and that he had no desire to impede production. In the end, by not opposing the war, the CWC could not even defend its own narrow interests. On 11 April 1916, MacLean was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude. He had not concealed his anti-war activity and had proudly proclaimed his revolutionary socialism. He and his comrades had reached out to working class forces beyond the traditional organised workers.
In the end, no anti-war movement was to emerge on the Clyde of the character of the Irish movement under the leadership of Connolly. MacLean’s imprisonment saw to that. Yet his stance was recognised internationally. Lenin stated ‘The world working class revolution was first begun with engagements by isolated combatants representing with unequalled courage all the honest elements of official “Socialism” a socialism rotten to the core which is in reality nothing but social chauvinism. Liebknecht in Germany…MacLean…such are the best known of these isolated heroes who assumed the heavy task of precursors of the revolution.’[14]
Michael MacGregor
[1] MacLean, ‘The Coming War with America,’ 1919 quoted in Nan Milton, John MacLean (Pluto Press, 1973), p.60
[2] Lenin, ‘A Caricature of Imperialism and Imperialist Economism,’ Collected Works: volume 23 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), p.34
[3] Lenin, editor’s notes to The Collapse of the Second International, 1915 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976)
[5] MacLean, letter in Justice, 17 September 1914 cited in Milton, MacLean, p.80
[6] JT Murphy, Preparing for Power, 1934 (republished by Pluto Press, 1972), p.120
[9] Ibid., pp.120-1. Murphy is quoting from a speech by John Muir, CWC chairperson, Glasgow, December 1916
[10] MacLean, letter to the Glasgow Herald quoted in John Broom, John MacLean (MacDonald Publishing, 1973), p.59
[11] MacLean, from speech to anti-war street meeting on Bath Street, Glasgow, October 1915 quoted in Milton, MacLean, p.99
[12] MacLean, article in Vanguard, December 1915, in Nan Milton (ed), John MacLean: In the Rapids of Revolution (Alison & Busby, 1978), p.87
[13] Report of CWC meeting, 25 March 1916, Labour Party Court of Enquiry quoted in Murphy, Preparing for Power, p.123
[14] Lenin, Collected Works: Volume 21, p.271
From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 147 February/March 1999
