My Appeal is to the Working Class* MacLean gave his most important lecture in 1918. His class room was the High Court in Edinburgh, and his podium was the dock. Accused of sedition for opposing the war, he turned the accusation round, and demonstrated from Marxist principles the real causes of the war.
He explained himself in words as bright and clear as his devation to his class: "1 stand here not as the accused but as the accuser of capitalism, dripping with blood from head to foot.._. I have squared my conduct with my intellect... act square and clean for my principles. I have nothing to retract. I have nothing to be ashamed of, Your dass position is against my dass position... my appeal is to the working class. I appeal to them exclusively because they and only they can bring bout a time when the whole world will be one brotherhood on a sound economic foundation."
of Marxist economics. He was well fitted for this task, becoming a pupil teacher and studying part-time at Glasgow University, where he obtained a Master of Aris degree in economics. He considered this an important achievement, and thercafter sigued his articles and pamphlets John MacLean MA."
IMMENSE SCOPE the struggies of landiess Highland crafters.
He opened the eyes of his class to the relevance of the intemational class struggle to its day-to-day problems: Scottish miners was between the Labourites and Marxism.
VOICE OF THE RANK-AND-FILE J.D.MacDougall, MacLean's life-long political companion, sugeests that mining conditions produced a torm of social snarchy wauch encouraged the solidarity of the rank and file miners and undermined the authority of the union agent. The defeat of the 1912 strike transformed this into a coherent political opposition to the Union bureaucracy. As MacDougall puts it: "Several popular socialist propagandists began to criticise the action of the men's leaders and although they were not themselves miners, they were acclaimed at huge gatherings of the miners in Fife and Lanarkshire as the true voice of rank-and-file opinion", In 1913 for example, John MacLeun intervened in an inter-union dispute as Coalburn, taking a stand opposed lo that of miners leader Bon Smile. His speech was met with an immense shout of applause from the crowd'. according to Nan Milton, who explained further that: 'Even the accumulated fame of such a veteran fifty years ago today (30 November), was a giant in his day. During the struggles that are referred to as "Red Clydeside", his name was on the lips of every Scottish worker. Behind the militancy of the workers" demands, and the ardour with which they fought, could be glimpsed the influence of MacLean's ideas. MacLean can best be understood as a working class teacher. who was dedicated to usisting the worker to understand society and their situation within it through an understanding Despite the poverty of his background he educuted himself, at the time.
The two other articles published here give a glimpse of the scope of MacLean's struggle. Ray Challinor's piece explairis his challenge to those who have found it politically convenient to praise his name but to obscure the relevance of his ideas. Henry Webb's article outlines the significance of his educational work for the development of the militancy of the Scottish The intense scope of MacLean's work cannot be expisinco simply from his super abundant energy, although only a human dynamo like MacLcan could have kept up the sheer physical effort involved in tuking socialist propaganda to the most isolated purts of Scotland, He was involved in every aspect of the working class because he believed that his revolutionury message Was appsopriate to every aspect. Thus we see him associated with the trade unions. with tenants' strugees. with the unemployed, with the co-operative movement, and with When the October Revolution in Russia fixed the attention of the world, MacLean was in the forefront of its defence. But he was distinguished from the others who took up this cause, in that the Revolution proclaimed his contribution He was made an honorary president nf the Petrograd Soviet, along with Karl Liebknocht and Victor Adler, For Like thern he had stood out for working class internationalise during party the First World War, He was also appointed Soviet Consul for Glasgow, the first person to roccive such an appointment. At the same time, while British dockers refused to load arms for Poland during the Soviet-Polish war, they sent ship-lood after ship-food of arms and troops to crush the Irish national struggle. The founding congress of the Communist Parly of BOB PURDIE as Smillie (the President of the Scottish Miners) could not stand up against the influence that John MacLean bad won with this body of Scottish workers, MINERS REFORM MOVEMENT MacLean and MacDougall played the determining role in the extension of the Miners Reform activity to Scotland. This campaign for nationalisation was inspired by the establishment of Government control of the mines in 1917, The scurcity of coal put the miners in a strong bargaining position, but expressed a basic anti-capitalist outlook.
During the period when MacLean was bullding up the Reform Movement, the Clyde Workers Committee initiated the "Forty Hours' strike in Glasgow in January 1917, This committee was dominated by the eupneers, and was chaired by Willie Gallacher. MacLean advised them to wait for the miners to join in officially, hut his advice was ignored.
The strength of the CW flowed from its strategic position amongst the engincers at a time when the production of arms was imporwar, failed to discuss Treland, MacLean, in contrast, agitated tizelesaly against the British war in Ireland, despile the physical danger which protestant sectarlanism in the west of Scotland represented for anyone who took such a stand. ABSORBED MARXISM How ate we to assess MacIcan as'a Marxist? A recent article in the Sunday Tires (25 November) by Angus Calder, belittles Maclean's contribution to Marxism, 'He had never been a great creative theoretician", says Calder, 'he wrote nothing longer than a pamphlet and his Marxism was narrowly cconomic.' Calder misses the point. No-one could rank MacLean with Lenin or Luxemburg, or even with Daniel De Leon, as a Marxist theoretician, But the importance of his cultribution is precisely that he transcended the narrow economic version of Marcism which was current in Britain MacLean received his training in the Social Democratic Federation, which was dominated by Henry Hyndman's dogmatic version of Marxism. He had acoess only to those works of Marx and Engels which were avallable In English and these decait almost exclusively with the labour theory of vulue. But MacLean had Capital, in which is distiled the ossential elements of Marx's thought Poring over it, he absorbed the Marxist method, and busing himself of the solid rock of Murx's economic theory he analysed the politic problems which faced the workers, His writings consist of short articles and pumphlets, yes -but few Marxists have ever been able to write so succinctly, so profourdly, and so accessibly for u working class audience. REVOLUTIONARY ORGANISATION It was because he had transcended 'Hyndmanism" that he coalesced the opposition in the SDE to lyndman's social ctiauvinism during the First World War. And, unlike Hyndman, he saw the need for the workers to ho organised for every aspect of their strugglo in organisations permeated with revolutionary ideas. He envisaged a network of working class organisations the trade unions at the point of production, the co-operatives at the point of consumption, tenants" neganisations, and organisuttons of the unemployed, The grip of bourgeois ideolugy on the workers would he broken by labour colleges, which would train working class leaders, and the class would be led in pubiticul uction by a Marxist socialist This is not Leninism, It has a great deal in common with the ideas of the De Leonite Socialist Labour Party and Tames Connolly. But it is a million rules shoad of the narrow dog matic economiss of Hyndman, tant. With the end of the war this changed.
The miners on the other hand were in a militan mood. Not only was their nationalisation demand explicitly aoti capitalist, but the South Wales Reform Movement was discuasing the physical take-over of collieries.
MacLean encouraged the miners to establish Refon Committees and attempted, along with MacDougall and others, to establish a national Reform Movement in the South Wales, Scottish and English districts as the left-wing within the Miners Federation of Great Britain. and their militancy was not just wiges militancy, John MacLean's association with the Scottish miners, which only ended with his death in November 1923, endured over eighteen ycars. His activity alongside the miners was hased on his belief in the creativity of the working class, and the suffocating limitations of bourgeois education. His optimistic taith in the working class made him an enemy of the bourgeoisie, but it also made him an opponent of those who aere less optimistic, To honour his deeds, and his struggle is to share in that optimism.
HENRY WEBB