John Maclean

John Maclean was the Glasgow schoolteacher who became the most famous revolutionary of Red Clydeside, a Marxist so renowned that Lenin himself made him Bolshevik consul for Scotland. He spent his life teaching workers, opposing war, and in and out of prison, and he died worn out at just forty-four.

A son of Pollokshaws

Maclean was born in Pollokshaws, then a village on the edge of Glasgow, on 24 August 1879, to Highland parents driven south by the Clearances. His father died young and his mother struggled to raise the family, a hardship that shaped his politics for life. He trained as a schoolteacher and studied part-time at the University of Glasgow, graduating with an MA in 1904.

The great educator

By day a schoolteacher, by night Maclean became the most influential Marxist educator in Britain. His classes in economics taught thousands of Clydeside workers and helped to create the generation that made Red Clydeside, the story we tell in our post on what Red Clydeside was. He was a familiar figure at the great open-air rallies on Glasgow Green and in George Square.

War and prison

When war came in 1914, Maclean was its most prominent socialist opponent in Britain. He was jailed again and again for sedition, lost his teaching post, and endured hunger strikes and force-feeding that ruined his health. At his trial in 1918 he famously told the court that he stood not as the accused but as the accuser of a capitalism he held responsible for the slaughter. His struggle is woven through the history of trade unionism and Glasgow politics.

The Scottish Lenin

After the Russian Revolution, Maclean was appointed Bolshevik consul for Scotland by Lenin, and hailed as the ‘Scottish Lenin’. He broke with the new Communist Party of Great Britain, believing Scotland could lead the way, and founded his own Scottish Workers’ Republican Party. He died in 1923, aged forty-four, his health broken by prison, and thousands lined the streets of Glasgow for his funeral.