"The Communist International, it is too frequently forgotten, was a unitary organisation, a single world party, its headquarters in Russia, its national sections, the CPGB, the PCF, the PCI, the CPUSA no more than local branches of a single unitary political organisation, conforming to a single world discipline… The British, French, Italian, German, Dutch, Irish, Uruguay, South African, Chinese, national sections were each bound by the Congress decisions of the Comintern, bound too, by their constitution to carry out without question all the decisions of its Executive, meeting in Moscow. The Comintern saw the world as one, envisaged the world proletariat as one also. It followed therefore that the "party of the world proletariat" must be a unified organisation in exactly the same way. The "leading role" in the party of the world proletariat belonged as of right to the Soviet Communist Party which had accomplished "The Glorious October Revolution". In fact therefore, although not in name, the Comintern, despite the intentions of many of its founders, inevitably became little more than an extension abroad, into other lands, of the apparatus of the "leading party" of the Comintern, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
In the Russian socialist movement, in the nature of things, and this held true in greater or lesser degree of all its manifold competing factions, ten, twenty or more in number, there was always a tendency for the intellectuals, the intelligentsia, to play a disproportionate role, to substitute themselves for the working class which as yet existed only in embryo; to see the future liberation of the working class as depending on its leadership by an elite possessing the right ideas, rather than the recognition by the class itself of its own true class interest.
Left: John Maclean
Maclean was every bit as much a revolutionary as Lenin, Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, the whole Russian party recognised as much when they invited him to attend the First Congress of the Communist International. Yet Maclean never joined the CPGB, was never a member of the Communist Party or the Communist International.
In Maclean's last years, particularly in the decades that followed his death in 1923, the rumour was widely circulated that Maclean would have joined the Communist Party but for the fact that owing to the rigours of his repeated imprisonments his mind had become unhinged. That these rumours were always quite unsubstantiated is confirmed by all those who knew Maclean in his last years. Further testimony is provided by Maclean's own personal correspondence available for consultation in the National Library of Scotland. Certain of these letters are reproduced in James Clunie's Voice of Labour, published in 1958. Others are cited in Nan Milton's two excellent volumes, her biography of John Maclean, her more recent selection from his writings published under the title of In the Rapids of Revolution.
The essential facts of this matter were conclusively demonstrated in my Revolutionary Movement in Britain published ten years ago in 1969. The rumours of Maclean's alleged mental unbalance were politically motivated, were put about consciously and deliberately by malicious persons unable and unwilling to meet and confront Maclean's ideas head on, persons who sought instead by secret slander to destroy both his personal and his political reputation.
John Maclean was born on 24th August 1879, in Pollokshaws, then a busy industrial town on the outskirts of Glasgow, at this time the very heartland of the greatest industrial and imperial power the world had ever seen… John Maclean was the sixth child of poor working class parents, each the victim of the Highland Clearances… Maclean was of working class origin. Lenin, who on at least one occasion referred to himself as "in a sense .... a scion of the landed gentry", was the son of an hereditary aristocrat who held a rank equivalent to that of a Major-General in the Army. Lenin's Tsarist passport denoted this rank. Formal protocol required that properly he be addressed as "Excellency"…
Maclean was educated at elementary school, gained an M.A. at Glasgow University in his spare time, then worked as a school teacher, taught working class children for the greater part of his adult life.
Maclean joined the SDF early on, as a propagandist toured all of Scotland speaking to working class audiences, toured large areas of England and Wales, spoke also in Ireland, both North and South.
Lenin had spent only the briefest period of his life in England, spoke little English... That Maclean rather than Lenin was best fitted to plot a course for the British labour movement is surely plain. Maclean as befitted a socialist from the Clyde, then perhaps the greatest single concentration of industrial working class power in the whole globe, saw socialism as emerging from the ever rising class consciousness, the consequent ever rising militancy, of the working class as a whole. As a result he devoted the greatest single part of his activity to working class education in the widest sense, an activity well exemplified by his Economic Classes during the War, by the launching of the Scottish Labour College. The problem of revolution in Maclean's eyes was one of CONSCIOUSNESS rather than of leadership. The workers could do the job all right. What they needed was the WILL.
In December 1920, in his paper Vanguard, Maclean wrote with commendable prescience, "We stand for the marxian method applied to British conditions. The less the Russians interfere in the internal affairs of other countries at this juncture the better for the cause of revolution in those countries." In an "Open Letter to Lenin" published in The Socialist of 30th January 1921 Maclean was at some pains to warn the Russian leader that he was being badly misinformed about the true situation in Britain, went on to express well justified suspicion of some of the persons then being appointed to important posts in the Communist Party leadership. Maclean's Election Address during 1922 was yet more forthright. "In spite of my keen desire to help Lenin and the other comrades 1 am not prepared to let Moscow dictate to Glasgow." "The Communist Party" Maclean continued "has sold itself to Moscow, with disastrous results both to Russia and to the British revolutionary movement." Maclean in short was a Marxist but in no sense a Leninist; he knew full well that these two were in no sense the same, indeed were scarcely capable of reconciliation.
Maclean's charge that the Communist Party "has sold itself to Moscow" it should be added, was in no sense a picturesque exaggeration. According to a well known member of the Communist Party of these days, a member of the Communist Party's own Control Commission, a man with open access to all the party's own secret archives, in the first years of the Communist Party "£85,000 had been sent from Russia" and this at a time when the party's income from its own subscriptions amounted only to a meagre £7,500. Even these figures in fact grossly underestimate the extent of the Russo-Comintern subsidy. The facts, with the sources are readily available, Are to be found in the chapter on "The Russian Influence" in my volume on The Revolutionary Movement in Britain. In the early years around 90p in every £1.00 of Communist Party income was forthcoming from Russia. Without this income, the party apparatus, the whole party as we came to know it, would simply have disintegrated overnight."
Maclean's Scottish Workers Republican Party was dependent entirely on popular, subscription. Maclean in fact worked himself to death in the unequal struggle to compete with this externally funded competition. Grossly overworked, badly undernourished, he fell victim, quite without other good reason to pneumonia, and died in November 1923.
John Maclean's fate, and that of his Scottish Workers Republican Party, was a foretaste of what the future would hold for others. Not only in Scotland and elsewhere in the United Kingdom, but also in every other country around the world, the strength of each national Communist party, the size of its professional apparatus, the circulation of its publications, bore no relation to its true level of public support, was determined rather by the size of the expense budget it received from the Comintern exchequer.
Neither in Scotland nor elsewhere in Europe did the Communist Party ever become strong enough to produce a revolution. Yet in case after case, in country after country, external funding made otherwise weak communist parties strong enough to stifle or destroy their native left wing rivals, to gain a measure of public credibility that would have been quite impossible by virtue of their own unaided efforts.
Maclean refused to accept the Comintern-Communist view of the workers party as a closed, conspiratorial, military style, elitist body, chose instead to believe that the party should be an open, democratic organisation. Here too he seems to have been correct." ('John Maclean and the Communist International: Two Views of the Revolutionary Process' by Walter Kendall, 1979, John Maclean: Centenary Essays, http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/History/Kendall.html
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