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John Maclean John MacLean, Nan Milton, Pluto Press, £2.00
This book has already had a considerable influence on the Scottish political scene since its first publication three years ago, and this limited reprint (a very small one, unfortunately) is more than welcome.
Nowadays there is not one leading activist in the Scottish movement socialist or nationalist who has not heard the name of John MacLean and who does not understand, in some degree, the importance of his work and the central position he holds in Scottish politics.
This in itself is of enormous importance, because only ten years ago MacLean and his ideas were being brushed aside as "irrelevant" or "impossiblist" or *out-ofdate". Nan Milton's book has had not a little to do with this remarkable transformation.
In academic circles her book is also treated with respect and is on the bookshelves of every university in Scotland. Not that her book is written in an academic style, but the objective, factual and welldocumented narrative of her father's life, Ideas and activities has the ring of authority and truth which cannot fail to impress any serious reader.
This is the story of the greatest period in the history of the Scottish working people, when they took on the whole parasitical class of exploiters, rack-renters, warmongers, imperialists and chauvinists and fought for the establishment and maintensatit was the period of war against the ance of independent working-class organibosses, of persistent industrial struggles, of the fight against a murderous war, and most glorious of all the fight for the maintenance of the young Sovict republic and the rights of all nations to national independence. It was the period *When Marxism became more deeply rooted in Scotland than in any other part of the British Empire."
And there in the midst of all the battles was the heroic figure of the greatest Marxast of them all, teaching, agitating, urging. exhorting, patiently explaining, building the morale of tens of thousands of working-class. fishters, forcing them on to more and more determined action, making leaders of men and women who, otherwise, might not have achieved even a marginal note in the history of their class.
This then is the portrait which emerges: 'John MacLean, the man of indomitable will, the man who did not recognise the word "retreat, the man who was prepared to sacritice everything his job, his family, his health. his life in the interests of his class, the man who "forged the Scottish link in the golden chain of world Socialism".
A previous reviewer of tnis biography objected that there was little attempt to get close to him as a man". but Nun Milton makes it quite clear in her introduction that she sees her father as Guy Aldred saw him: "The workers message dominated ind consumed him until that message became his personality. Apart from his class he was nothing, because his class, its sorrows, it's strugales, had become he life and bein".
And that is why he was, and remains, the living conscience of the Scottish working class and the "storin-centre of Scottish polities". Any 'storm' that ignores MacLean will blow out only too quickly inimominy and betrayal.
But let the last word remain with the poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, who over the last four decades has fought, as persistently as MacLean himself, to establish the paramount importance of MacLean's message: "For I um corn and not chult, and will neither Be blown by the wind. nor burst with the flail, But will abide them both And in the end prevail".
By Our Guest Reviewer MORRIS BLYTHMAN Chairman, John MacLean Society