'Great John Maclean Has Come Home to the Clyde': The Life and Times of Scotland's Greatest Socialist
By Donald Robertson
London: Resistance Books, 2025
576pp
Available in Australia from
$45
Donald Robertson has written a powerful and revealing account of the life of John Maclean, one the most important, but little known socialist leaders of Scotland and Britain.
Robertson’s groundbreaking biography of Maclean, who was a leading Marxist teacher and agitator in early 20th century Scotland, is also a revealing history of key events of those revolutionary times.
Maclean was born in Glasgow on August 24, 1879, to Highland parents and grew up in Pollokshaws as part of a poor, working-class family. After completing school, he trained as a teacher, obtaining a Master of Arts at Glasgow University.
In addition to teaching, Maclean ran adult night classes where he taught economics to workers, explaining the corrupt nature of the capitalist system and outlining a socialist perspective for organising society and the economy.
Maclean’s staunch opposition to the imperialist warmongers in Britain and Germany ahead of the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and his outspoken criticism of a war that pitted worker against worker, made him a marked man in the eyes of the authorities.
Maclean’s socialist agitation and the strength of his opposition to WWI were summed up by Willie Gallacher, one of the Clyde Workers Committee leaders, when he wrote in 1915: “Maclean was everywhere. His indoor meetings were packed out, until he was forced to run two meetings a night. He was the centre of the anti-war movement; and all the other movements, whatever their tendencies, supported the general line he was taking.
“He demanded an immediate armistice, with no annexations and no indemnities; along with this went his drive for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist class.”
After speaking at a public meeting in Glasgow, on February 6, 1916, Maclean was arrested as a “prisoner of war” and locked-up in Edinburgh Castle, charged under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA).
The indictment against him included having made statements “likely to prejudice recruiting, to cause mutiny, sedition and disaffection amongst the civil population, and to impede the production, repair and transport of war material”. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The jury eventually found Maclean guilty on four of the six charges and he was sentenced to three years imprisonment with hard labour.
However, unprecedented public opposition to Maclean’s conviction and sentence led to massive protests and social unrest, which forced the authorities to release him on June 30, 1917, after he had served 14 months and 22 days.
Maclean was a strong supporter of the Bolsheviks in Russia, and their ultimate success in creating a workers’ republic following the 1917 revolution was seen by many Scottish socialists as inspiration to recreate the situation in Scotland.
However, this provoked a further clampdown on left-wing publishing and printing by the British authorities.
In early 1918, in recognition of his work through the Glasgow-based Russian Political Refugees Defence Committee, which had supported political prisoners held by the regime of the deposed Tsar, the new Soviet government appointed Maclean as the “Bolshevik consul to Great Britain”.
Maclean established a Consul of the Soviet Republic in Glasgow, but the British government refused to recognise it or Maclean’s position.
A few months later, police raided Maclean’s office and arrested him. He was charged with sedition and denied bail.
Maclean conducted his own defence at the trial. His impassioned closing speech lasted 75 minutes and has become a cornerstone of Scottish socialist history.
Opening his remarks, Maclean said: “It has been said that they cannot fathom my motive. For the full period of my active life I have been a teacher of economics to the working classes, and my contention has always been that capitalism is rotten to its foundations, and must give place to a new society.
“I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot.
“I am a socialist, and have been fighting and will fight for an absolute reconstruction of society for the benefit of all. I am proud of my conduct. I have squared my conduct with my intellect, and if everyone had done so this war would not have taken place. I act square and clean for my principles…
“That, and that alone, can be the means of bringing about a re-organisation of society. That can only be obtained when the people of the world get the world, and retain the world.”
The jury found Maclean guilty and he was sentenced to five years hard labour.
After a powerful public campaign, Maclean was eventually released in November 1918, after the end of WWI. A huge crowd greeted him in Glasgow city centre after his release.
Over the next few months Maclean led the militant struggle for a 40-hour week in Glasgow. This culminated in the Battle of George Square in January 1919.
In early 1919, Maclean was prominent in the “Hands off Russia” campaign, launched throughout Britain against the Allied military intervention against the Soviet government.
Maclean also campaigned in support of a movement among mining workers and unionists for nationalisation of the coal industry, and just as adamantly for the establishment of Soviets according to the Russian example.
Maclean had for some time been a leading member of the British Socialist Party (BSP), and at its Easter 1919 annual conference pushed for a concerted campaign for the formation of Soviets, and for unity of the British socialist parties as part of a move to affiliate with the developing Third International.
He told the conference, “The general strike will be the next stage towards getting the land and the means of production into our hands,” to loud cheers from the audience, Robertson writes.
Maclean continued with his educational classes. But, having spent much of his adult life in prison, including a period of hunger strike and forced feeding during 1918, he died in 1923 at the age of just 44.
Reverend William Fulton, the chaplain of the jail in Glasgow in which Maclean spent five prison terms over his life of struggle, paid tribute to Maclean, saying: “Even while in prison the fire within burned fiercely ... indeed it burned him up and burned him out in the end, for if ever a man deserved the name of martyr to the cause he espoused so passionately, it was John Maclean.”