20.03.1997

Rambling and incoherent

Bob Pitt reviews John Maclean: Clydeside socialist by James D Young (John Maclean Society, 1996. Reprinted with permission from What next? Marxist discussion bulletin No3)

Subtitled ‘A reply to Bob Pitt’, James D Young’s pamphlet claims to answer my own pamphlet John Maclean and the CPGB, in which I analysed the opposition of the celebrated Scottish Marxist to the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The conclusion I reached confirmed the explanation put forward in the memoirs of one-time communist MP Willie Gallacher - that Maclean suffered psychological damage as a result of his sufferings in prison and that his antagonism towards the Communist Party was fuelled by his paranoid delusion that the CPGB, and its precursor the British Socialist Party, had been taken over by spies and state agents.

Not surprisingly, this thesis aroused resentment in some quarters - particularly within the John Maclean Society, for whose members it has long been an article of faith that Gallacher was a liar who invented the story of Maclean’s psychological problems in order the destroy the political reputation of an opponent of the Communist Party. An extended debate ensued in the correspondence columns of the Weekly Worker with Gerry Cairns, the secretary of the John Maclean Society, while another prominent member of the Society, Paul Smith, subjected my pamphlet to a lengthy (and inaccurate) critique in New Interventions. The pamphlet under review here is thus only the latest instalment in the John Maclean Society’s counteroffensive.

It has to be said that James D Young’s effort is by far the worst of the contributions so far. A small-scale version of his rambling and incoherent ‘biography’ of Maclean, it amounts to little more than a stream-of-consciousness journey through various subjects linked to Maclean, interspersed with the occasional abusive remark about yours truly. Young is so convinced of the falsity of my arguments that he obviously hasn’t bothered to read my pamphlet properly. Thus we are told (p20) that “despite ... the unimaginably reactionary attitudes of the prison doctors that Maclean encountered in jail, Pitt used their ‘evidence’ to prove his contention that Maclean was ‘mad’. He acknowledges none of the evidence that contradicts his ‘thesis’ that Maclean denounced the leaders of the CPGB because of ‘insanity’.” It would be difficult to pack more inaccuracies into a couple of sentences.

In fact John Maclean and the CPGB evaluates the evidence of Maclean’s prison doctors objectively, points out that medical opinion was divided between the view that Maclean was already insane when he entered prison in 1918 and the view that he suffered no ill effects at all from months of force-feeding and isolation, and therefore rejects the material from Maclean’s medical files as inconclusive. At no point in my pamphlet do I describe Maclean as “mad” - I argue that “if it would be an exaggeration to describe Maclean as actually insane, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that his mental state was seriously impairing his judgement”. The evidence I use to back this up includes Special Branch reports of Maclean’s political activities, contemporary newspaper articles, the reminiscences of participants in the events and Maclean’s own writings. Together these form a consistent picture of Maclean’s motives in opposing the CPGB, and James Young’s pamphlet makes no attempt to refute any of this evidence.

The sloppiness and dishonesty of John Maclean: Clydeside socialist did not prevent Peter Fryer from giving it an uncritical boost in one of the last issues of the Workers Revolutionary Party’s now thankfully defunct paper, Worker Press. Applauding Young’s pamphlets as one of the best recent publications he had read, Fryer endorsed the baseless accusation that I was guilty of suppressing evidence from Maclean’s files and claimed I was “not so much replied to as annihilated”. Well, I don’t know about annihilated, but I’m certainly not replied to, as anyone who has read the two pamphlets will confirm. Anyone, that is, except Peter Fryer.

I’ve often wondered why Fryer, who has built up a reputation as a serious writer and historian, is willing to discredit himself by acting as a literary hatchet man for an unpleasant sect like the WRP (or whatever fraudulent front organisation it has now transformed itself into). I can only suppose that it’s the result of his early training in the Stalinised CP, where he acquired the habit of prostituting his journalistic talents in the service of rotten politics. Of course, Fryer has come down a bit in the world since then. At one time, by slandering the victims of Stalinist show trails, he had an impact on significant historical events. These days he’s reduced to slagging off the author of an obscure historical pamphlet.

Bob Pitt