John Maclean Red Clydesider

This updated edition of John Maclean: Red Clydesider marks the centenary of the death of John Maclean; the Glasgow schoolteacher who became one of the finest socialist leaders the British working class has ever produced. A fierce opponent of empire, Britain's war cabinet saw Maclean as public enemy number one, whereas Lenin and the leaders of the first ever workers' government in Russia regarded him as Britain's outstanding revolutionary. A key figure of Red Clydeside, Maclean was involved with the Clyde Workers' Committee, which spearheaded the rank and file revolt against the dismantling of trade union conditions during the First World War. He campaigned against spiraling wartime prices and helped lead the successful Glasgow rent strike of 1915, which pioneered council housing. He was only forty four when he died of pneumonia in November 1923. Yet his powerful legacy of anti-imperialism and commitment to workers' power lives on, making him a figure from history whose political message speaks to our new age of barbarism and catastrophe: 'I am not here as the accused. I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot... Fifteen years from the close of this war we are into the next war: if capitalism lasts, we cannot escape it. My appeal is to the working class because they and they alone can bring about the time when the whole world will be in one brotherhood, on a sound economic foundation. That can only be obtained, when the people of the world get the world and retain the world'. - From Maclean's speech from the dock, May 1918