A hundred years ago the Third, Communist International was founded in Moscow, heralding a new era of world revolution. Its creation in 1919 came five years after the collapse of the Second International, whose parties had failed to resist the outbreak of World War I. As Germany’s SPD and British Labourites backed the conflict, Lenin declared that he was no longer a social democrat, but a communist. For the Russian revolutionary, the terrible slaughter that followed was proof of the old reformist parties’ bankruptcy.

While the majority of European socialists supported their countries’ war efforts, small groups formed in each nation to carry on the traditions of working-class internationalism. James Connolly struck against the British in Dublin and Rosa Luxemburg struggled against the German government in Berlin. And in the streets of Glasgow, the socialist educator and organizer John Maclean fought for “a peace but a peace with revolution in it.”

The events of World War I would, indeed, mark out Maclean as Britain’s most famous revolutionary. Throughout the conflict he was tireless in his campaign to foment revolution and spread Marxism among the Scottish working class. Huge rent strikes, programs of mass education, and the largest antiwar strike ever to take place in Britain cemented Glasgow — the largest industrial center in the British Isles and the “Second City” of the Empire — as the most staunchly red city under London’s rule. Just months after peace was declared, in February 1919 the British Government sent tanks and twelve thousand soldiers in to Glasgow in order suppress the insurgent labor movement.