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Harry Mcshane, 1891-1 988 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/27/1/247/643648 by guest on 30 September 2021 Harry McShane, 1891-1 988 Harry McShane was a fragment of history, a unique link with the past. Everybody knows of his friendship with the great Scottish revolutionary socialist, John Maclean; of the fact that he was the last living link with the turbulent time which went down in history booksas 'the revolt of the Clyde'. But, really, it went much further than that. In 1987, though frail and ill, Harry spoke at Glasgow's May Day demonstration. When the first May Day demonstration was held, way back in 1890, Tom Mann, for many years a close friend of Harry McShane, was one of the main speakers. And who was that old man with the white beard, standing at the back of a cart watching the procession as it entered Hyde Park? Yes, the rather podgy man, smiling and saying with satisfaction, 'the grandchildren of the Chartists are entering the stmggle' -who was he? Why, it's none other than Frederick Engels. He knew Tom Mann very well, regarding him as the best working-class militant of the time. Engels also knew another friend of Harry's- a Scottish engineer called John Mahon - and held lengthy discussions with him. Harry McShane, therefore, could draw on comrades with a wonderful fund of knowledge and experience. His friends included some who were prominent in the rise of new unionism in the 1890s. when ordinary working people, not the aristocrats of labour, became organized for the first time. It even indirectly extended back to the birth of socialist ideas in the 1840s. Yet, all this must not be allowed to overshadow Harry's own unique contribution. He became a socialist in 1908 and remained one until his death in 1988. In other words, for a colossal period of 80 years. In terms of duration and intensity of commitment, nobody else in the entire annals of the working-class movement has made such a prolonged contribution. Why did Harry McShane do it? What prompted him to take this long, sometimes painful path of protest? Coming from a poor Irish Catholic background, as a youth he became aware of the poverty and suffering - the unnecessary poverty and suffering- that surrounded him in his daily life. When he came to understand these evils were inherent in the existing system, and the churches intended to do nothing to end the 248 History Workshop Journal system, Harry turned to socialism for the solution. Essentially, his was a humanistic approach, a belief that all people, not a tiny few, had the right to the good things of life, to develop their human potentality to the full. Harry may not have read the play in which Shakespeare wrote: You take my life When you take the means whereby I live. What he did know, however, as a leader of the hunger marches in the 1930s, was that Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/27/1/247/643648 by guest on 30 September 2021 unemployment functioned not merely a life-denying but also life-destroying force.On the dole families eked out a miserable existence, often foreshortened because of lack of adequate food and shelter. Again, it is doubtful if Harry read the poem of T. S. Eliot, bemoaning the prevailing condition: The lot of man is ceaseless labour, Or ceaseless idleness, which is harder, Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant. What he did know, however, was that even those fortunate enough to be employed were still wage slaves, shackled to a system of production for profit rather than for human need. Millions of people went hungry while food was destroyed to keep the profits up. Yet, at the same time, to maintain the system, the division of labour imposed its own prison on workers. Instead of developing all their human faculties, creatively and joyously expressing their inner beings, workers found themselves condemned to repeat endlessly and meaninglessly the same limiting productive processes. In doing so, Marx said that human beings were robbed of all but a fragment of their humanity. Harry McShane believed in socialism with a human face. Yet, until 1953, he had an inner contradiction, the result of him being a disciplined member of the British Communist Party. This led him to see Russia in a totally false light. Largely due to an American thinker, Raya Dunayevskaya, he came to realize the Soviet bureaucracy was a ruling class and Russian workers were exploited like their Western counterparts. Now he believed that workers of the world - be they American, British, Russian or whatever-should unite. Fundamentally, they had the same task, that of overthrowing their rulers. The tremendous personal sacrifice and intellectual courage involved in Harry McShane's conversion to Marxist Humanism has, in my opinion, not been properly recognized. This is because there has been a polite silence about his role as an apparatchik of the Communist Party. In fact, he was a hardened Stalinist, prepared to slap down any who criticized King Street or the Kremlin. Yet, remarkably, at the age of 61, he saw the error of his ways. He relinquished his relatively comfortable job in the Communist Party and went back to hard physical labour in shipyards, working there till he was 69 years old so as to qualify for a full old age pension. Why did he do this? To answer that question takes us to the central issue of the legacy Harry McShane has left us. He came into politics before the First World War. In the great period of industrial unrest from 1909 to 1914. trade union leaders were too timid and Labour leaders too respectable to support the mass campaigns of direct action. But Harry was a syndicalist. During the First World War. the trade union and Obituaries 249 Labour leaders agreed to the speed-ups and longer hours. But Harry was a shop steward, defending workers' rights even when it meant breaking the law. In the inter-war years of mass unemployment, the trade union and Labour leaders turned away from protest movement of those on the dole, even in 1936 denouncing the ultra-respectable Jarrow crusade. But Harry was a leader of the hunger marches, fighting against the means test and for a better deal for the jobless. On each occasion, Harry McShane did not look for saviours to come from on high. Rather he looked down to the lower depths, to the poorest and most exploited. It was from there that he expected the answers to come. In 1953, when he left the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/27/1/247/643648 by guest on 30 September 2021 Communist Party, he published, along with Eric Heffer, Hugh Savage and a handful of other comrades, a small socialist journal that, in its title, expressed his advice to working people. It was entitled Revolt. In today's depressing political situation, Labour leaders offer only token resistance to Thatcher. Words rather than deeds are their replies to the poll tax, welfare cuts and treatment of the jobless. Likewise, leaders of the trade unions see their basic task as keeping within the law. Their excruciating failure to defend the hard-won gains of the past, won by Harry McShane and others, will certainly mean, sooner or later, the fight back will occur. When it does we will see that Harry McShane may have died, but thousands of new Harry McShanes have come to replace him. * This obituary is reprinted, with thanks, from RAYMOND CHALLINOR Cencrastus..
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