The Claymore Communist

John Maclean’s reputation is still well-known in Scotland. This week marks the centenary of the Scottish revolutionary socialist John Maclean’s historic speech from the dock of Edinburgh’s High Court, where he faced charges of sedition following his vocal public opposition to the First World War and attempt to organise a workers’ mutiny against it.

“I wish no harm to any human being,” said Maclean, “but I, as one man, am going to exercise my freedom of speech. No human being on the face of the earth, no government is going to take from me my right to speak, my right to protest against wrong, my right to do everything that is for the benefit of mankind. I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot.”

When a man fights for the workers as hard and as long as John Maclean has, he earns the right to have his mistakes charitably judged. Neither the integrity of John Maclean nor mere sympathy for his fighting spirit is proof against his political fallibility. The man who is honest and dependable will reap disappointment as did John Maclean, and the man who lacks some of his singleness of purpose will soon enough fall to the temptation of getting security by entering the service of the enemies of the workers as shown by many of his Red Clydesider contemporaries in the ILP.

Men and women who clearly recognised the cause of the workers' poverty in the private ownership of the means of production, and who realised that the spreading of socialist knowledge is the only permanent basis for working-class organisation would not have to go into battle as untrained troops, and their activists like Maclean would not risk finding themselves at the end of a life of ceaseless toil for their class, the disappointed leaders of a phantom army. 

 The chief weakness of Maclean's position was his insistence upon a Scottish workers' republic. This demand is both reactionary and utopian. The struggle of the workers of the United Kingdom must be a united one. The workers are under the domination of a class who rule by the use of a political machine which is the chief governing instrument for England, Scotland, Wales, To appeal to the workers of Scotland for a Scottish Workers' Republic is to arouse and foster the narrow spirit of nationalism, so well used by our masters. Economically the demand is utopian, as the development of capitalism has made countries more and more dependent on each other.

 If the worker is to be won for socialism, it is by getting him to understand the principles of socialism, and not by appealing to him to concentrate on Scottish affairs. Socialism is international. Despite his principled stand, MacLean's optimistic illusions about the development of the nationalist and Bolshevik movements show that he did not understand socialism and what was required to achieve it.