Released from prison on 3 December 1918, MacLean had requested a quiet return to his city. It was not to be. A huge crowd had gathered in George Square, Glasgow and he was lifted up onto a carriage where, waving a massive red flag, he called for cheers for the German socialist revolution. That red emblem which now flew over the public buildings of Moscow and Petrograd was unfurled over the skies of Berlin.
A month earlier, the sailors at Kiel in Germany had mutinied, leading to a general strike and the formation of Councils of Workers, Soldiers and Sailors Deputies. Karl Leibknecht was released from gaol to proclaim the Republic as the Kaiser fled. Another ‘crowned head’ had fallen! The revolution against war and the vile profit system which had spawned it was spreading.
The ruling classes of Europe were united in their terror of Bolshevism. Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, described the Cabinet meeting of 10 November:
‘Lloyd George read two wires from Tiger describing Foch’s interview with the Boches, and Tiger is afraid Germany will break up and Bolshevism become rampant. Lloyd George asked me if I wanted this, or would rather have an armistice. I unhesitatingly said “armistice”. All the Cabinet agreed. Our real danger now is not the Boches but Bolshevism’.[1]
An armistice was declared the following day and the First World War ended on 11 November 1918 MacLean did not disagree with the ruling class’s fears:
‘We witness today what all marxists naturally had expected, the capitalist class and their Governments joined together in a most vigorously active attempt to crush Bolshevism in Russia and Spartacism in Germany. This is the class war on an international scale’.[2]
1918 General Election
Maclean made these remarks in January 1919, having recovered his strength after imprisonment and characteristically putting himself at the disposal of the movement. There was no doubt that that the months of torture in gaol had weakened MacLean physically but he was far from broken in spirit. He was unable to participate directly in the General Election campaign following his selection, while a prisoner in October 1918, as a Labour candidate for the Gorbals District of Glasgow. He had been selected as a member of the British Socialist Party, which was affiliated to the Labour Party. A new constitution, designed as a ‘fortress against Bolshevism’ would be adopted later that year by the Labour Party to deliberately exclude revolutionaries, like MacLean, who was only too willing to use any platform to advance socialism at this point. He was no dupe of the Labour Party, as we shall show.
At an eve of poll rally, MacLean advocated a straight revolutionary programme and called for the release of those imprisoned at home and abroad for their political activities: Eugene Debs and Bill Haywood in the United States and Sinn Fein members, Joe Robinson and Barney Freel, held in Peterhead Prison in Scotland. MacLean received a very respectable 7,436 votes against 14,247 for John Barnes, apparently an independent, but in practice Labour’s preferred candidate. Not at all bad for a convicted traitor.
1918 Sinn Fein victory
MacLean, the revolutionary communist, had been defeated in a bourgeois election by ‘an honest and well-tried representative of Labour’ where the right to vote had only recently been extended to women over 30. In Ireland the revolutionary nationalists of Sinn Fein challenged the whole rotten system of British ‘democracy’ by peaceful, electoral methods, winning 73 out of 103 Irish seats. 70% of the Irish people had voted for an Independent Irish Republic. At the roll call of the First Dail Eireann in January 1919 the reply ‘Fé ghlas ag Gallaibh – imprisoned by the enemy’ followed 36 names.[3]
The World War had been fought, it was claimed, to defend the rights of small nations but this small nation had proclaimed its independence through the ballot box, despite widespread arrests and the banning of Sinn Fein election meetings and leaflets. The majority of the new Sinn Fein MPs were in British gaols while Ireland was under British military rule again. The revolutionary struggle against British imperialism had a profound effect on MacLean. In May 1919 he shared the May Day platform in Glasgow with Constance Markievicz, before 150,000 workers. A comrade of Connolly’s in advocating a workers’ republic in Ireland, she had become the first ever woman MP but followed Sinn Fein in abstaining from taking her seat in the British Parliament, having just been released herself from Holloway gaol. MacLean visited Dublin for the first time in July and recorded his impressions. He witnessed the workers’ boycott of the Allies’ ‘Peace Saturday’ parade: ‘The solemn farce of 15,000 soldiers with bayonets fixed, machine guns and tanks marching through the streets to celebrate peace.’[4]
MacLean was typically blunt in his remarks at meetings, and was heckled when he attempted to lecture the Irish on their struggle. He honestly records the arguments and it was MacLean who was learning. His assertion ‘that Irish labour would not be free under a Sinn Fein Republic, but only under a socialist workers’ republic’ provoked a hostile response, where the audience demanded to know why Scottish regiments who refused to serve in India to suppress rebellion there came to Ireland.[5] MacLean reflected deeply:
‘Hot stuff like that was poured into me, and through these manifestations of the Irish mind at home I began to realise the spirit that nine hundred years of oppression had failed to subdue. Once the workers develop a similar hatred of capitalism things are going to move on avalanche-like.’[6]
A year later, faced with the ebbing away of working class struggle in Britain he was to conclude:
‘The Irish Sinn Feiners, who make no profession of Socialism or Communism, and who are at best non-Socialists, are doing more to help Russia and the Revolution than all we professed Marxian Bolsheviks in Britain.’[7]
MacLean’s increasing understanding and interest in the Irish struggle was the starting point of an analysis of British imperialism which sought to develop amongst the working class in Scotland, England and Wales a common cause with Ireland, India and Egypt, obvious and significant as major colonies of the Empire, to destroy that Empire.
Nationalism in Scotland was at this period confined to small groups advocating Home Rule. The end of war saw an increase of interest amongst established bodies, such as the Scottish TUC, calling for varieties of constitutional reform and full independence. MacLean associated himself with a National Committee in late 1919 and openly advocated the Sinn Fein tactic of abstaining from the British Parliament. He was to later identify the Irish in Scotland as particular allies in the struggle for a Scottish Communist Republic:
‘Many Irishmen live in Scotland, and as they are Celts, like the Scots, and are out for Irish Independence, and as wage-earners have been champion fighters for working-class rights, we expect them to ally themselves with us, and help us to attain our Scottish Communist Republic.’[8]
Keeping capitalism busy at home
The period of 1918-1919 was one in which, at every level of anti-imperialist, industrial, political and revolutionary struggle, the discredited ruling classes were challenged as at no time since 1848, the year of revolutions throughout Europe, of Chartism and of the Communist Manifesto. Walter Kendall, author of The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-1921 states:
‘The evidence shows that the crisis which British Society faced between 1918 and 1920 was probably the most serious since the time of the Chartists.’[9]
Lloyd George, in a secret memorandum to Clemenceau of France, expressed this fear:
‘The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense, not only of discontent, but of anger and revolt amongst the workmen. The whole existing order, in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other’.[10]
From January 1919, MacLean was out to seize the time. He developed his assessment of what needed to be done in Britain. There were contending views that were to figure significantly in his attitude to the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain. MacLean essentially and realistically advocated the coordination of the industrial struggles that were being threatened throughout the country amongst engineers, miners, railway and steel workers to challenge capitalism. It has been argued that he advanced an unrealistic and ultra-leftist strategy in positing revolution as an actual possibility at this point. He based this strategy on the double imperative of challenging the imperialists’ joint attempt to crush the Soviet Union and averting the nightmare future with which capitalism threatened the world, the working class and humanity. In an article entitled ‘Now’s the time and now’s the hour’ he repeated his warning from his trial: ‘If capitalism lasts, then war is inevitable in five years; yes, and a war bloodier than the present war.’[11]
All the forces of the working class were to be united in the struggle. He held that the unemployed had to be drawn into the strike movements: ‘Socialists everywhere… ought to organise, lecture and drill the unemployed and so create a mighty menace to capitalism’.[12]
Demobilisation after the war had begun to create an army of unemployed men and women and MacLean argued that the campaigns for shorter hours amongst the engineers and miners would motivate these jobless workers to unite with the strike movement: ‘Here we have the economic issue that can unify the workers in the war against capitalism’.[13]
During this unrest arose mutinies of soldiers at Calais and Folkestone. Sailors on board HMS Kilbride ran the red flag up the mast and the police struck in Liverpool and London: ‘The condition of the army, the navy and even the police strengthens us in the fight. Capitalism is in the last ditch’.[14]
But MacLean was not blinded by the spontaneous movements and struggles which had broken out. He clearly emphasised the conscious aspect of revolutionary struggle and took up the debate in this period to state that effort, theory and organisation were absolutely central to seriously taking on the system. Nor was MacLean unable to recognise when the balance of forces had changed in favour of the exploiters. The failure of the strike movements of early 1919 confirmed to him that an advantageous moment of capitalist instability had passed. By the end of August he stated:
‘My impression is that capitalism is more vital today in Britain, Japan and America than ever it was’.[15]
Nevertheless the business of educating, agitating and organising must go on. MacLean reviewed the ebbing of the tide of industrial struggle as the year began to close. There were, he contended, still forces capable of challenging this resurgent capitalism. A report of a speech he made in November 1919 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and demand ‘Hands off Russia’ points to MacLean’s widening identification of the actual challenge to the British ruling class. His stature as a socialist had not diminished, despite the retreat of industrial struggle:
‘On rising to speak he received a truly wonderful ovation and his speech was one scathing attack on British Imperialism throughout the world’.[16]
MacLean was not ditching the battle over jobs, wages and conditions but the class struggle is more than this. He supported the campaign for a 24-hour strike but he argued that it should also adopt the slogan: ‘Hands off Ireland, Egypt and India’.[17] MacLean was a revolutionary communist, more than an industrial organiser; more than a solidarity fighter, he was an anti-imperialist and a socialist. This was the political direction MacLean was to follow from now on.
Michael McGregor
[1] Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson, memoirs, quoted in Nan Milton, John MacLean (Pluto Press, 1973), pp.179-180
[2] John MacLean, ‘Now’s the time, now’s the hour,’ The Call, 23 January 1919 in Nan Milton (ed.), John MacLean: In the Rapids of Revolution (Alison & Busby, 1978), p.148
[3] Dorothy Macardle, The Irish Republic, (Dublin: Irish Press Limited, 1951), p272
[4] John MacLean, quoted in Milton, MacLean, p208.
[9] Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-1921 cited in Graham Bain, John MacLean His Life and Work 1918-1923 (John MacLean society pamphlet, n.d.), p.4
[10] Lloyd George, memorandum to Clemenceau quoted in Milton, MacLean, p.197
[11] John MacLean, ‘Now’s the time, now’s the hour’, in Rapids of Revolution, p.148
[12] John MacLean, article in The Call, 30 January 1919, in Rapids, p.151
[15] MacLean, ‘Will capitalism collapse?’, The Call, 28 August 1919 in Rapids, p.193
[16] James MacDougall, article in The Call, November 1919 quoted in John Broom, John MacLean (MacDonald, 1973), p.127
[17] Article in The Worker, 13 December 1919, cited in Robert Pitt, John MacLean and the CPGB (published by the author, 1995), p.9
From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 150 August/September 1999
