From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No. 152 Decmber 1999 / January 2000
MacLean only broke with the Labour Party in the last year of his life. His political work amongst the unemployed, radicalised by the experience of war, led to this critical and progressive development. While Labour gained in municipal and general elections, its completely reactionary character became clear to the poorest sections of the working class. Labour councillors and MPs ignored, manipulated and conspired against the poor and those who stood with them.
Political progress for the working class means more than just withdrawing support for Labour. It means organising consciously against Labour. MacLean was successful in beginning to draw hundreds of people into an open fight against the Labour Party. Then and today, this struggle represents the only way forward for the mass of the working class. Labour represents the privileged minority of the working class in alliance with the middle class, an alliance cemented by imperialist profits. MacLean’s most important contribution as a communist was to challenge the political representative of this corrupt, decadent and violent alliance – the Labour Party. This challenge remains the central political issue and is the foundation of our organisation, the Revolutionary Communist Group.
Fight or Starve!
1920 saw the beginning of the economic depression predicted by MacLean. The war boom was over and unemployment increased rapidly. From a total of 691,000 in December 1920, it had risen to 1,355,000 by March 1921 and reached a peak of 2,171,288 in June of that year. The recent Unemployment Insurance Act had provided a bare subsistence for a limited period. As poverty and starvation became widespread MacLean acted and established the Glasgow Unemployed Committee.
Across Britain the police clashed with the workless as they protested outside town halls or attempted to seize and occupy workplaces. MacLean convened the first demonstrations in the city with the aim of putting pressure on the local authorities to provide boots and clothes for the children, food for the hungry and shelter for the homeless. He united direct action for practical measures to relieve poverty with popular political agitation and serious Marxist education and debate. It was a powerful and effective combination; a sound example of communist work amongst those who were suffering the reality of capitalism. From a gathering of around 200 in October 1920, 3,500 jobless were meeting at the beginning of 1921. In February a meeting of delegates from Glasgow, Dundee and Edinburgh formed a Scottish Committee with MacLean as Secretary. The demands were economic and political:
‘Among the decisions arrived at were: The urging of a joint conference to recommend a general strike; the opening up of trade with Russia and the granting of independence to Ireland, India and Egypt; the exemption from payment of rent for the unemployed; the maintenance of the present rate of wages; and the release of all political prisoners.’[1]
At the end of the month the first large demonstration was held, led by a banner proclaiming the present reality for the poorest sections of the working class: ‘1914, fight: 1921, starve!’[2] At MacLean’s suggestion thousands would form up behind this slogan and head for the West End with the declared aim of ‘frightening the bourgeoisie’. While there was no justice, there would be no peace!
MacLean was able to organise a significant political force in a short period, leading it openly as a communist and an anti-imperialist. His general view of the political direction of the masses was being confirmed in practice, yet its progress would require not just describing but directly challenging the false friends of the people; the Labour Party. MacLean did not yet recognise that this would have to be a conscious political development:
‘Let us remember that although the trade union and political leaders of the working class have been afraid to be as audacious as the leaders of capitalism, have failed, as ever, at the critical moment and will do so again, nevertheless the mass of people are coming more and more to our position…Therein lies salvation. The safety of society rests not in the hands of a few…but in the masses of mankind, conscious or unconscious.’[3]
The Labour Party and the unemployed
MacLean had led an early version of Stop The City through Glasgow’s Stock Exchange in 1910 when he was last organising with the unemployed. He had angrily condemned the Labour MPs’ sudden agitation in Parliament over the Osborne Judgement’s threat to their wages:
‘Why did they not do that on behalf of the unemployed millions two years ago? Why did they not get thrown out with Grayson, and do as he did afterwards? Why did they not fight for the Tyneside engineers or the Belfast dockers?’[4]
Yet up until 1923 MacLean advocated the tactic of continued electoral support while fighting to expose the Labour Party before the working class. Indeed he had stood as a Labour Party candidate on his release from gaol in 1918. Lenin argued that communists should affiliate to the Labour Party and support it ‘as a rope supports a hanged man’ without refraining from attacking its opportunism.[5] He was concerned that communists maintain the closest links with the ‘masses’ whom he understood were represented in the Labour Party through the trade unions. MacLean’s newspaper, The Vanguard of November 1920, expressed his attitude to the Labour Party:
‘…to defeat Labour is positively criminal. A Labour Town Council will respond to our pressures more readily than a bourgeois one. If Labour fails then a forceful revolutionary fight is the logical next stage.’[6]
This next stage faced the unemployed; political reality was moving towards the point where supporting Labour and defending the workless could no longer be reconciled. Despite the election in Glasgow of 44 Labour councillors, the delegations from the workless were shut out from the Town Hall. The Labour councillors did not come out to support them. The struggle of the unemployed demanded organisation and the communist standpoint of MacLean provided this. The Communist Party of Great Britain’s official biography of MacLean (1943, Tom Bell) was anxious to belittle his role:
‘Unfortunately MacLean did not belong to any powerful trade union, or any well-organised body capable of intimidating the government.’[7]
The unions were intimidating no one at this stage; unemployment and the recent defeat of the miners had seen to that. However, the working class is more than the trade union movement and MacLean fought to provide politics and organisation to those outside it. Asked at his trial in October 1921, how he came to organise the unemployed, MacLean replied ‘because no one else would’.[8] He was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment for urging people not to starve but to take the food they needed. The ‘powerful’ trade unions did nothing for the poor or for MacLean. In allowing the defeat of the poorest sections of the working class they prepared the way for the crushing defeat of the whole organised working class in the General Strike of 1926.
Prison again, 1921
From his cell MacLean fought as a candidate for the Unemployed Committee. His credibility was such that he came out ahead of Labour gaining 2,241 votes to their 1,885. This was repeated at elections up until his death and refutes the lie that MacLean found himself isolated from the working class. Immediately after his release in 1922 he increased his vote to 4,287 in a municipal ward and polled 4,027 in the General Election. His address began:
‘I stand in the Gorbals and before the world as a Bolshevik, alias a Communist, alias a Revolutionist, alias a Marxist.’[9]
It ended with a request that those unable to agree with his programme should vote Labour! This contradiction was about to be resolved. Labour gained 142 seats and Glasgow sent off 10 ‘Red Clydesiders’ to Parliament to abolish poverty. It is recorded that on the train down these MPs were concerned chiefly to discover if being thrown out of the House of Commons meant a loss of salary. Abolishing poverty was one thing but joining the ranks of the poor was not their intention.
The break with Labour, 1923
‘Pink Labourism is of no use to the workers, never will be. Your poverty and misery are more intense today than ever before.’[10]
MacLean finally broke with Labour and formed the Scottish Workers Republican Party (SWRP) in 1923. The new organisation attracted the unemployed, the youth and women in large numbers – a definite contrast to a labour movement composed of old, male, skilled workers! MacLean was still able to beat Labour into third place at 2,008 to Labour’s 1,865. The vote scrounging opportunism of Labour, particularly its left wing, the Independent Labour Party, disgusted MacLean. The Communist Party of Great Britain, had led the local Unemployed Committee into supporting Labour:
‘…as all realise now that a deadly fight has started between the “Pinks” and the “Reds”. Against us were the Trades Council, the Labour Party, the ILP, and the CPGB – the last-named playing it very dirty.’[11]
Such methods, which were to become an endemic part of political practice in the British labour movement, persist today. MacLean and the comrades organised openly, amongst the people, directly against Labour and its apologists. Sectarianism was not their weapon. The SWRP led demonstrations in support of Harry McShane, now of the CPGB, when he was evicted. They campaigned for the release of another CPGB member, Tom Hitman, who had received a prison sentence of 15 months for activities amongst the unemployed.
The Irish revolutionary Constance Markievicz campaigned for MacLean, as did Sylvia Pankhurst. A leaflet published by Pankhurst exposed the role of the Labour left and the CPGB. A protest by the unemployed had led the Poor Law Guardians in Poplar, London to call the police. The dire situation of the poor had led them to abandon the traditional and ‘respectable’ methods of the labour movement; they had locked the Guardians in and demanded food and work. 52 people were wounded as a result of repeated police baton charges. The Guardians were ILP members overwhelmingly and two were members of the CPGB. MacLean called a counter-demonstration when Wal Hannington of the CPGB spoke in Glasgow. Hannington attempted to explain away the incident but such was the anger at the use of police against the unemployed that the meeting had to be abandoned. Pankhurst described MacLean at this time:
‘He had gathered around him latterly a big movement in Glasgow. When we saw him a month ago he was holding great meetings and seemed stronger and more confident than ever.’[12]
But MacLean had been weakened by years in gaol, brutal force-feeding and ceaseless political struggle. He died on 30 November 1923 aged 43 and his funeral drew 10,000 mourners. Lenin’s words should serve as an epitaph to this courageous working class fighter. His memorial must be the movement he fought for: ‘Communism is the intelligence, conscience and honour of our times’ (Lenin).
Long live John Maclean!
Michael McGregor
[1] John Broom, John MacLean (MacDonald Publishers, 1973), pp.137-8
[2] Charlie Doran, eyewitness account, cited in Nan Milton, John MacLean (Pluto Press, 1973), p263.
[3] John MacLean, ‘Will capitalism collapse?’, The Call, 28 August 1919 in Nan Milton (ed.) John MacLean: In the rapids of revolution (Allison & Busby, 1978), p.196
[4] MacLean, ‘The Labour Party muddle’, Justice, 29 October 1910 in Milton, Rapids of revolution, p.42
[5] Lenin, ‘Left Wing’ Communism: an Infantile Disorder (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970), p.90
[6] MacLean, ‘The unemployed’, Vanguard, November 1920 in Rapids, p.206
[7] Tom Bell, John MacLean: a fighter for freedom (Communist Party Scottish Committee, 1944), p.74
[8] John MacLean quoted in Milton, John MacLean, p.272
[9] MacLean, ‘General Election Address, Gorbals, Glasgow’, November 1922 in Rapids, p.234
[10] MacLean, By-election address, Scottish Workers Republican Party, 14 February 1923 quoted in Milton, John MacLean, p.286
[11] John MacLean, letter to James Clunie, cited ibid., p.287
[12] Sylvia Pankhurst, ‘Obituary to John MacLean,’ Workers Dreadnought, 8 December 1923 in Rapids, p.297
