10.08.1995

Lenin’s misused consul

Jack Conrad reviews ‘John Maclean and the CPGB’ by Robert Pitt (London 1995, pp44, £1.50)

IN PUBLISHING this small pamphlet Robert Pitt has performed a big service to the communist movement. His work makes no pretence to be a definitive study of the life and struggle of John Maclean - undoubtedly one of the most intransigent and outstanding British socialist leaders during World War I.

The focus is specific. Pitt wants to get to the truth about Maclean’s negative response to the process of communist rapprochement that successfully brought about the Communist Party of Great Britain in July 1920. This is an important question given our ongoing fight for communist rapprochement around the central need to reforge the CPGB.

Maclean the internationalist, elected an honorary chairman of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets immediately after the October revolution; Maclean the revolutionary, whom Lenin appointed Russian consul in Glasgow in January 1919, is today used as an anti-communist weapon. All manner of left nationalists, academic ‘Marxists’ and Labourite rogues maintain for their own nefarious reasons that Maclean was hostile to the CPGB because he was committed as a matter of principle to a separate Communist Party in Scotland, an independent Scottish workers’ state and was opposed to the “meddling” of the Bolsheviks in the internal affairs of other countries.

The conclusion Pitt comes to is very different. After detailed research, using everything from contemporary special branch reports to the writings of friends, he finds that the evidence conclusively proves that Maclean had become mentally unbalanced. Everyone was suspect. Spies were everywhere. His mental state was in all likelihood the result of the maltreatment endured while imprisoned by a government fearful of his courageous anti-war agitation. Paranoia, not principle, explains Maclean’s political evolution.

Here Pitt agrees with Maclean’s former comrades, Willie Gallacher and Tom Bell. Many supposedly serious historians have claimed that they were bare-faced liars, unable to openly confront Maclean’s ideas. Yet Pitt shows that on the contrary Gallacher and Bell were reliable witnesses, who as partisans of the newly formed CPGB, had no need to resort to slander.

To begin with the Bolshevik leaders in Moscow saw Maclean as a key personality who would play a central role in the CPGB. Despite that Maclean did not participate in the British section of the Communist International. He broke with the British Socialist Party just as it was about to fuse with other smaller communist groups - most notably the Communist Unity Group - to form the CPGB.

Evidently Maclean became convinced that the whole project was fronted by police agents. He repeatedly directed this un-substantiated accusation against Theodore Rothstein, who had emerged as a dominant figure in the BSP - he was in fact the main conduit for Bolshevik funds. Showing a complete divorce from reality, Maclean ridiculously claimed the money Rothstein made available to the Hands off Russia campaign and the CPGB originated with the British government!

Only after his sorry refusal to join the CPGB did the idea of a separate Scottish organisation and Scottish independence grow in his mind. Maclean’s advocacy of separatism however did not result from some theorised nationalism. It was pragmatically arrived at through antagonism to the CPGB and was driven by the fantastic notion that its leadership were paid agents of the British government.

Not surprisingly, Maclean found himself marginalised and deserted by all his important followers. They joined the CPGB.

Before a premature death in November 1923 Maclean’s politics degenerated into the nationalist and sectarian farce of the Scottish Workers’ Republican Party. Nevertheless Pitt rightly says that this should not take away from his “heroic stature”. Maclean, who had been employed as a schoolteacher, used his skills as an educator to win a generation of revolutionaries to Marxism. He stood against the floodtide of patriotism in World War I, rebelled against the social chauvinist leadership of Henry Hyndman in the BSP, welcomed and championed the October revolution in 1917. No turncoat, though broken physically and mentally, he remained a revolutionary till the end. We honour that John Maclean.

Jack Conrad