MacLean’s release in June 1917 had been preceded by a dangerous deterioration in his health. He had been moved to Perth Prison infirmary at the beginning of the year.
Since beginning his sentence at Peterhead Prison in 1916, MacLean had contended that his food was being drugged. These allegations have never been taken seriously but were used instead as evidence of the comrade’s ‘mental instability’. Conveniently, this so-called delusional behaviour was then used to explain his subsequent political action and development. John MacLean’s principled record and conduct demand that this be challenged.
In an otherwise reasonable and fair biography of MacLean by BJ Ripley and J McHugh, the authors state that his claims ‘clearly confused the doctors. They knew his food was not drugged and could think of no reason why a normal individual should think it could or would be drugged’.[1] While the authors accept that official restrictions on prison records have limited the debate, they conclude that the claims are without basis.
Prison brutality
However, evidence is there to the contrary for those prepared to examine it. The British prison system is capable of acting with the most sinister violence and calculation against all prisoners. It reserves its most refined physical and mental torture in particular for those who struggle for justice and political rights. The treatment of Fenian prisoners like O’Donovan Rossa in British gaols and the unprincipled tactics of the press in relation to any exposure of such treatment is well-known. In 1870 Karl Marx’s daughter Jenny wrote:
‘Some time ago, O’Donovan was put in a dark cell with his hands tied behind his back. His handcuffs were not removed night or day so that he was forced to lick his food, gruel made with water, lying on the ground.’[2]
Floggings, daily strip-searches, solitary confinement and beatings took their grim toll. Twenty Fenians died or were driven insane in the prisons of humanitarian England.
The ‘confused doctors’ of MacLean’s time had obviously failed to keep up-to-date with the professional literature: in 1909, Charles Mansell-Moulin, vice president of the Royal College of Surgeons, spoke out against the dangers of forced feeding. In that year, militant suffragettes in Dundee had adopted the hunger strike tactic to protest at the authorities’ refusal to recognise them as political prisoners. The campaign spread and the government introduced the barbarity of forced feeding. It was described as ‘government torture of militant women, incompletely disguised as feeding to save their lives.’[3]
Emily Davison, who died in 1913 under the hooves of the king’s horse at the Derby, described the horror she suffered:
‘It was the nasal tube that was used now; up one nostril it goes and down into the throat; if it does not go down properly the doctor pushes it down with his hand.’[4]
MacLean, who was force-fed twice daily for three months in 1918, was not unreasonable or deluded in claiming adulteration of his food. The same Mansell-Moulin continued to expose the physical dangers of forced feeding in the pages of The Lancet and British Medical Journal and significantly, in 1914, focused on the question of drugging militant prisoners. In this context, MacLean’s contestation in 1916 was not absurd. He too had demanded treatment as a political prison and, at a rally after his release, he publicly decried the barbarism of British gaols. In July 1917 in The Call, newspaper of the British Socialist Party, he stated:
‘In my bare cell I resolved that on my return to civilian life I would appeal to the workers to demand the release of conscientious objectors, especially those detained in ordinary prisons, on the grounds of the harsh treatment meted out to them. I know that they are suffering from what I saw in Perth Prison.’[5]
Back in the fight
MacLean’s prison experience served to strengthen his determination to pursue his political activity and in autumn 1917 he was described as ‘a driving dynamo of energy driving, always driving towards his goal.’[6]
MacLean was back in the fight, agitating and educating for the socialist revolution. He had declared on his release that all the forces of the workers’ movement must be thrown into the fight against the war and for the overthrow of capitalism. Three years of war had brought about increased calls from religious and liberal circles for peace by negotiation, but MacLean instinctively linked the issue of peace and the class struggle: ‘I want peace, but it must be a peace with revolution in it.’
It was the working class of Russia that delivered peace and revolution and began the process of breaking out of imperialist war. MacLean saw the strike in August 1917 of 50,000 Lanarkshire workers against rising food prices as representing a political step forward in their receptiveness to anti-war and socialist agitation, but this was insignificant on a world scale. The workers of Moscow and Petrograd under Bolshevik leadership rose and took power. When news of the October Revolution came, Tom Anderson records that MacLean shook hands with him silently for several minutes, too overcome with emotion even to speak.
MacLean was elected as an honorary president of the first Congress of Soviets, along with Lenin and Trotsky. In January 1918 he was appointed by Lenin as the Bolshevik Consul for Scotland. MacLean travelled across the country – Clydeside, Fife, Durham, Consett – speaking at pitheads, factory gates, street corners, football pitches and public parks. Speaking before thousands, his powerful oratory united passionate denunciations of the war and exposure of British imperialism’s murderous role in Ireland with a call for workers to follow the example of their Russian comrades.
The police spies at these meetings were pointed out and challenged, but MacLean’s activity was alarming the ruling class. They by no means agreed on how to deal with him but, critically, they were able to recognise that despite MacLean’s enormous stature, there existed more ‘reliable’ leaders of the working class:
‘Another report on the role of agitators distinguishes between those like MacManus, Gallacher and Moxton who keep to industrial issues and the even more notorious MacLean and MacDougall who continually raised political questions, including the war.’[7]
MacLean: true defender of the working class
The decision to arrest MacLean again was based on an assessment that industrial calm would continue to prevail despite this repressive step. That this assessment arose from a recognition that the leadership of the a significant section of the working class would limit itself to narrow, trade union issues in the midst of the hell of imperialist war is an indictment of that leadership. That same leadership was to play a major role in the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain. It was MacLean’s revolutionary communism that represented the fundamental interests of the working class nationally and internationally. While MacLean showed the clear-sighted determination and preparedness to fight for those interests in his revolutionary character, he was numerically and politically isolated in Scotland and Britain.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks had explicitly based the revolution on the expectation it would spread to Europe. While consolidating actual working class power in the new Soviet state, they were having to on front the isolation, thought temporary, of that revolution internationally. Socialist revolution did pose a potential threat to the ruling class of Europe, particularly in Germany, while the imperialist war and its effects continued. The example of the October Revolution in Russia existed now as an historical fact. Despite the cowardice, timidity and political opportunism of the leadership of the working class in Britain, men with ideas like MacLean had to be dealt with.
On 15 April 1918, two detectives arrived at the Russian Consulate in Glasgow and arrested MacLean. He was tried, again for sedition, in May at the High Court in Edinburgh. His conduct at this trial was historic and its uncompromising revolutionary message should ring even louder today after two world wars, fascism and 80 years of imperialist violence and oppression.
‘I am not here, then, as the accused. I am here as the accuser of capitalism, dripping with blood from head to foot.’ [8]
MacLean refused to plead and objected to the whole jury, demanding one drawn exclusively from the working class. He patiently explained his motives, the economic basis of war and its probable re-occurrence within 15 years ‘if capitalism lasts’. During the trial he again publicly asserted that his food had been drugged while in Peterhead serving his previous sentence, and stated that he would therefore accept no government food.
This was no dramatic exaggeration, as he was aware. Nine months previously, in September 1917, Thomas Ashe, a commandant during the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, had died during force feeding. He was on hunger strike for political status. In Dublin, a huge demonstration of 30-40,000 people took part in the funeral procession in military formation. Irish Volunteers carried rifles and Constance Markievicz led a Citizen Army contingent wearing full uniform, with a revolver in her belt. A year later MacLean was to stand with her at the May Day celebrations in Glasgow and she was to support him as a candidate for the Scottish Workers Republican Party in later years.
MacLean was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude in May 1918. Lenin wrote:
‘MacLean was sentenced for a second time, to five years’ imprisonment …for exposing the real objects of the war and speaking out about the criminal nature of British imperialism. MacLean is in prison (again) because he acted openly as the representative of our government; we have never seen this man…he has never belonged to our party, but we joined with him.’[9]
MacLean found himself in gaol again, facing possible death for his politics. While across the world workers and the oppressed moved forward, the British working class, the workers of the Clyde, stood by in dumb shock at the savagery of his sentence and its possible outcome. Protest demonstrations did take place; in July the police attacked marchers as they reached Jail Square in Glasgow, but those with the responsibility to lead and organise did nothing.
From this period MacLean was to increasingly identify with the anti-imperialist forces in Ireland, in India and across the British Empire. He saw these struggles as exemplifying the revolutionary attitude and organisation needed to seriously challenge capitalism. MacLean was developing the revolutionary communist, Leninist position of the soon-to-be-born Third Communist International: ‘Workers of the world and oppressed peoples, unite!’
Michael MacGregor
[1] Ripley and McHugh, John MacLean (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p100
[2] Jenny Marx, article in La Marseillaise, 27 February 1870 in Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1984), p.478
[3] Ann Morley with Liz Stanley, The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison (Women’s Press, 1988), p.103
[4] Emily Davison, quoted in Gertrude Colmore, The Life of Emily Davison (London: Women’s Press, 1913), p.13
[5] John MacLean, article in The Call, 19 July 1917, quoted in John Broom, John MacLean (MacDonald, 1973), p.93
[6] William Gallagher, quoted in Ripley and McHugh, MacLean, p104
[8] John MacLean, ‘Speech from the Dock, 1918’ in Nan Milton (ed.), John MacLean: In the Rapids of Revolution (Alison & Busby, 1978), p.101
[9] Lenin, ‘Concluding Speech at 4th Congress of Trade Unions, 28 June 1918’ in British Labour and British Imperialism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969), p.201
From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 149 June/July 1999
