17.04.1997

Maclean: honour the internationalist

Comrade Bob Pitt, author of John Maclean and the CPGB, presented a Communist Party-organised seminar in London last weekend, entitled ‘John Maclean, nationalism and the Party’

Despite his left nationalist detractors in Scotland, comrade Pitt insisted that it was essential not to ignore the negative side of Maclean, as well as his great positive revolutionary characteristics. Several of Maclean’s defects he saw as having their roots in the method of the Social Democratic Federation - in particular its sectarianism and ultimatism.

Comrade Pitt said that examples of Maclean’s sectarianism could be seen in his attitude to the TUC-sponsored councils of action, set up in response to the Hands Off Russia campaign in 1920. Maclean dismissed the idea that they could provide a site for independent working class struggle and instead called for alternative, communist councils of action, somehow imagining that millions of workers would abandon reformism and follow the ‘correct’ line advocated by revolutionaries.

Similarly he thought that the unemployed should be organised exclusively on a revolutionary basis. His ultimatism featured here too: “The unemployed must accept the communist lead or stand in the way of revolution.”

His Scottish Workers Republican Party, unlike the Communist Party of Great Britain and against the advice of the International, stood candidates against the Labour Party in 1922, at a time when millions had real illusions that the Labour Party would bring socialism and liberation for workers.

The SWRP was formed, comrade Pitt said, “at a time when the Scottish national question had ceased to have any real resonance in the working class”. Despite the claims of left nationalists that Maclean’s nationalism was a consistent feature of his entire political career, comrade Pitt was clear that it developed pragmatically during his later years. Because he believed that the CPGB was run by British state agents, he stubbornly refused to lead his followers into the young Party and preferred to set up his own group where he had influence, comrade Pitt said. He repeated his opinion, which so outraged left nationalists, that Maclean had suffered psychological damage during his incarceration by the British state.

Left nationalists have seized on Maclean’s call in 1919 for a “soviet or parliament for workers in Scotland”, but comrade Pitt stated that this was envisaged as part of an all-Britain workers’ state. Most of Maclean’s agitational work in 1919 was carried out in England and Wales - at that time more politically backward than Scotland.

In fact, said comrade Pitt, Maclean had no clear position on the national question, and contrasted his earlier internationalism with later statements which “smacked of anti-English chauvinism”. This lack of clarity, he said, was “useful for those who want to fuse Scottish nationalism with Marxism”.

One difference among those attending was brought out over the CPGB’s application to affiliate to the Labour Party. Although all agreed that Maclean’s attitude to Labour had been wholly sectarian, Bob Pitt believed that the CPGB had deliberately couched its application in terms that were bound to be refused.

CPGB comrades thought that it was more a case of the Labour leaders’ determination to keep the CPGB out, rather than the Party’s unwillingness to enter. In any case the application’s main purpose was to expose the reformist nature of the Labour Party, and either acceptance or refusal would achieve that. There was a suspicion that comrade Pitt’s criticism of the way the tactic was employed had an air of retrospective justification. His present position as a Labour Party member who dogmatically insists that workers’ political advance must come through Labour - even today’s Thatcherite New Labour - prevents him, for example, from viewing the Socialist Labour Party as anything other than a diversion.

Comrade Pitt ended his remarks with a call to honour John Maclean, the internationalist, for his stand against the imperialist war, not the later sectarian nationalist: “He was completely devoid of self-interest and careerism, and totally dedicated to what he believed were the interests of the working class”.

Alan Fox