Letters

Open letter again

Reply to RWT (Weekly Worker 110)

The Revolutionary Democratic Group (faction of the Socialist Workers Party) and the Communist Party of Great Britain agreed an open letter to the SWP. We invited the Republican Workers Tendency to support it. They rejected this and did not propose any amendments. The RWT has suggested that we adopted unprincipled methods in drafting this letter. We reject this as a false allegation.

The RDG has previously requested that the RWT explain fully the substance of their complaint. The secretary of the RWT failed to respond to this in his letter to the Weekly Worker (110). We call upon the RWT again either to substantiate the allegation or withdraw it.

We reiterate that there are other important questions that communists should be discussing and coming together on. We urge the RWT to join us in the real process of communist rapprochement that our organisations and others are engaged in.

The CPGB will soon be submitting a document on factions for the consideration of your organisation. We are sure that you will respond positively to this principled platform.

RDG (faction of the SWP), CPGB Provisional Central Committee

Meddling Bolsheviks

Jack Conrad’s disgusting diatribe which passed for a review on the subject of John Maclean (Weekly Worker 106) contained so many factual inaccuracies that it really cannot go unanswered.

Like the Scottish national question itself, Maclean’s ghost still haunts British socialism. Hence the Brit left like to claim the parts of Maclean that they like (his Marxist internationalism) and deride the parts that they do not like (his Scottish republicanism).

Jack Conrad, and Mr Pitt for that matter, could at least honour Maclean’s memory with a political polemic. It is appalling that the lie that Red John was mentally unhinged is paraded before us again. Where is the evidence? The word of two British state prison quacks with vested political interests, added to the word of two very Brit political enemies (Tom Bell and Willie Gallacher), whose argument amounted to the fact that Maclean must be mad not wanting to join the Great Brit Communist Party. This not evidence; rather it is an insult to Maclean’s memory.

You only have to read Maclean’s collected works, In the rapids of revolution, to contradict Jack Conrad’s assertion that, “Paranoia, not principle, explains Maclean’s political evolution”. In this volume Jack will find that it was John Maclean who called for “a separate Communist Party in Scotland, an independent Scottish workers’ state”, and who “was opposed to the meddling of the Bolsheviks in the internal affairs of other countries”. Maybe GB’s CP should have listened to Red John! It was Maclean who warned against the rise of fascism and of a future world war. Yes, the same Maclean who stood against the war in 1914; who taught Marxian economics to Scottish workers; and who argued for home rule and a Scottish national council of the BSP in 1911.

Maclean was consistent and supported independence for Scotland as a principle. Indeed he placed more emphasis on the national question at the end of the war, as ‘self-determination’ became the watchword. Maclean signed Ruaraidh Erskin’s petition to the Paris Peace Conference calling for Scottish self-determination. Please note, Jack: almost two years before the formation of the CPGB.

Maclean summarised his position in 1920: “Scotland must again have independence, but not to be ruled by traitor kings or chiefs, lawyers and politicians.”

Was John Maclean so wrong in stating that GB’s CP was controlled from Moscow and kowtowed to London? Dougie Chalmers, one-time Scottish organiser of the Party, stated that Moscow gold had kept the CPGB going. Willie Gallacher took the road to London as an MP, did he not? Britain, sorry, the workers must stay united! It was incredible to read Jack Conrad condemning the “nationalist and sectarian farce” of the Scottish Workers Republican Party. Should Great Brit communists not put their own house in order first? I give you the reaction to the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 or Hungary 1956.

John Maclean supported a Scottish Workers Republic and continually carried the socialist message to England, Wales and Ireland after 1918. A true Scottish rebel, he sold out to neither Moscow nor London. With James Connolly he was the leading anti-British socialist to come out of these islands. Jack Conrad insults, not honours, Maclean. Perhaps Jack can tell we Macleanites: as a communist, what is so great about Britain?

Gerry Cairns
Secretary John Maclean society