Letters to the Editors: Trade Unions and socialism (2011)

Letters to the Editors from the April 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Trade Unions and socialism

Dear Editors

After reading a number of SPGB statements on the unions, among them the SPGB Executive Committee's appeal to trade unionists (Socialist Standard, September 2009), I wonder if you could devote some space to further explaining your position on the role of unions in the revolutionary process.

I am prompted to raise this question by certain things I have read in Marx on the same question, among others the statement in Value, Price and Profit, where he speaks of the unions “using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system”. Similarly with Marx's contention that “only the trade unions are thus able to represent a real working-class party, and to form a bulwark against the power of capital”.

The second statement, with its emphasis on “only the trade unions”, is taken from Marx's 1869 interview with the German trade unionist Hamann, as quoted by Karl Kautsky in his 1909 article, “Sects or Class Parties”,  which is posted to the Marxist Internet Archive. Kautsky also said there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of Marx's statement to Hamann.  I also know the importance Daniel De Leon and the Socialist Labor Party in America attach to it.  (See, for example, De Leon's articles, ”A Brace of Specimens, Even Neater'“ and “With Marx for Text”, both of which are posted to the Daniel De Leon Internet Archive.)

By “union” you will understand that I do not infer today's unions, which are as unfit on the economic field as your country's Labor Party is on the political, but unionism as Marx envisioned a union aiming at “abolition of the wages system.”  Frankly, I cannot reconcile my understanding of the SPGB's position on this question with these statements from Marx, and would like to see a Socialist Standard article devoted to clarifying the SPGB's position on the union question and how it relates to the Marx passages cited here.

Bernard Bortnick (SLP Member), 
Dallas, Texas.

Reply:

As can be seen from the quote in Kautsky’s article Marx was talking about the existing, non-revolutionary unions:

“The trade unions should never be affiliated with or made dependent upon a political society if they are to fulfil the object for which they were formed. If this happens it means their death blow. The trade unions are the schools for Socialism, the workers are there educated up to Socialism by means of the incessant struggle against capitalism which is being carried on before their eyes. All political parties, be they what they may, can hold sway over the mass of the workers for only a time: the trade unions, on the other hand, capture them permanently; only the trade unions are thus able to represent a real working-class party, and to form a bulwark against the power of capital. The greater mass of the workers conceive the necessity of bettering their material position whatever political party they may belong to. Once the material position of the worker has improved, he can then devote himself to the better education of his children; his wife and children need not go to the factory, and he himself can pay some attention to his own mental education, he can the better see to his physique. He becomes a Socialist without knowing it.” (Translation by Zelda Kahan for the July 1909 issue of the Social Democrat, theoretical journal of the SDF),

We can agree with Kautsky that there is no reason to suppose that Marx did not say something like this, as it conforms to his strategy of the time of working within the International Working Men’s Association to encourage a trade union consciousness amongst workers to develop into a socialist political consciousness. His advice to the existing unions to organise workers irrespective of their political opinions and to avoid being linked to a political party is sound (it is our view too). What he says about unions being the only real defence workers have under capitalism against “the power of capital” is also true.

We cannot see that this passage can be interpreted as Marx advocating a syndicalist approach. If it wasn’t for his other writings of the period urging workers and their unions to aim also at the abolition of the wages system he might rather be thought to be advocating here a trade-union based party like the Labour Party in Britain was at the beginning.

In any case, events did not confirm the optimistic view Marx expressed here that the trade unions would be “schools for Socialism”. Kautsky correctly makes the point about this that England showed that the existence of trade unions “alone is insufficient to convert the worker to Socialism ‘without him knowing it’; that they do not necessarily bring Socialist conviction home to the worker because of  ‘the incessant struggle against capitalism which is being carried on before their eyes’. Only a scrap of this struggle is really being pursued daily, and this scrap is not even always sufficient to indicate the real meaning of the whole struggle.” Hence the need for a socialist organisation to point out that meaning.

But this is not a reason for socialists to oppose the existing unions. They are organisations that can, in a limited way, defend the wages and working conditions of their members. That is why our members join them and work with their fellow workers to get what can be got out of employers. Inside them, we advocate a class approach, internal democracy, non-affiliation to a political party (our members refuse to pay the levy to the Labour Party) while of course also arguing that the only framework within which the problems facing workers can be lastingly solved is socialism and the abolition of the wages system.

We have never seen the point of trying to organise a socialist or revolutionary union to rival the existing unions. Since the vast majority of workers today are non-socialists such a union would be small and ineffective. The non-revolutionary position of the existing unions (“a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay”) is a reflection, not the cause, of the non-revolutionary ideas of their members. However, when more and more workers come to be socialists the unions will be transformed.

In fact, we envisage workers, once they have become socialist, organising both politically and economically to bring in socialism. Politically to wrest political control from the parties of capitalism. Economically, to keep production going during and immediately after the changeover from capitalism to socialism. We don’t envisage the socialist revolution being purely electoral and parliamentary (if that’s what you were thinking). – Editors.

John Maclean

Dear Editors

It was with interest that I recently read on the SPGB Blog that the SPGB recognised one positive achievement of Lenin in that he helped to get Russia out of the bloody capitalist First World War (http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2011/02/time-to-bury-leninism.html).

Although I recognise that Scotland's John MacLean  was not in the "Impossibilist" tradition (although he was once a member of the Social Democratic Federation),   I write to ask if the SPGB  recognised the vigorous anti-war work of John Maclean?

Harry McShane, of the CPGB, wrote in his book that John Maclean was persecuted to the extent of exhaustion and eventually dying of pneumonia.   McShane wrote that "....The authorities hated him more than any other man. He was jailed five times; the first time was in 1915, and he spent four of his remaining eight years in prison.   When he was out of jail he was followed everywhere by plain-clothes policemen. They were more frightened of his revolutionary stand than of the shop-stewards...."  (Harry McShane, No Mean Fighter, page 151)

Just being curious, but did the Socialist Standard of the time make any mention of John Maclean during the First World War?

J. Melrose,  

Glasgow

Reply:

We can’t find any mention of John Maclean in the Socialist Standards of the war period, but no doubt we would have respected him for the anti-war position he took up as that was what our members were doing and suffering from it too, also being sent to prison.

We did not think much of his Scottish republicanism and said so in an article on the party he founded in the October 1925 Socialist Standard from which here is an extract:

“A correspondent sends us the Manifesto of the Scottish Workers' Republican Party, and asks for our opinion of it. The object of the Party, founded by the late John Maclean, is a Workers' Republic for Scotland. The Manifesto sets out the slave position of the working class, and urges that the workers must carry through the Social Revolution.
  The chief fallacy of their position is their insistence upon a Scottish Workers' Republic. This demand is both reactionary and Utopian. The struggle of the workers of the United Kingdom must be a united one. The workers are under the domination of a class who rule by the use of a political machine which is the chief governing instrument for England, Scotland, Wales, etc. To appeal to the workers of Scotland for a Scottish Workers' Republic is to arouse and foster the narrow spirit of Nationalism, so well used by our masters. Economically the demand is Utopian, as the development of capitalism has made countries more and more dependent on each other, both through the specialisation of industry or agriculture, and also by the force controlled by the Great Powers to suppress or control the smaller nations.
  The history of " independent " Hungary, Poland, and the Balkan States shows that the realisation of " political independence " by a country leaves the workers' conditions untouched and actually worsens them in many cases.
   The appeal to the worker in this Manifesto to "rally to the cause of a Workers' Republic for Scotland" is made "so that we might win you away from the service of the imperialist gang who direct their activities from London" If the worker is to be won for Socialism, it is by getting him to understand the principles of Socialism, and not by appealing to him to concentrate on Scottish affairs. Socialism is international.”

This is still our position in face of those today who seek to revive the idea of a “Scottish Workers’ Republic” - Editors.

James Connolly and the Easter Rising (2016)

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back Blog

This is the text of a talk given by Adam Buick, one of the speakers at the Wakefield Socialist History Society forum on James Connolly and the Easter Rising

I want to develop the case put by Sean O’Casey in 1919 in his The Story of the Irish Citizen Army that, in participating in the 1916 insurrection, Connolly was not acting as a socialist.

O’Casey wrote that “Connolly had stepped from the narrow by-way of Irish Socialism on to the crowded highway of Irish Nationalism”. He gave “fixing on the frontage of Liberty Hall a scroll on which was written ‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland’” as an example of Connolly’s “determined attachment to the principles enunciated by Sinn Fein and the Irish Volunteers, which were. in many instances, directly contrary to his life-long teaching of Socialism”. As a result, O’Casey went on, “Liberty Hall was no longer the Headquarters of Irish Labour, but the centre of Irish disaffection”.

The Easter Rising, so-called, was an insurrection planned and led by the Irish Republican Brotherhood whose aim was to establish a Republic in Ireland along the lines of those in France and the United States. In other words, an independent Irish capitalist state.

Connolly had always stood for Ireland becoming a separate country. But in this, he was only adhering to the general viewpoint of the Second International that workers had a country and should strive to establish socialism  in it. In so far as they didn't think “socialism in one country” to be possible they envisaged a federation of independent socialist countries. Connolly was insisting that Ireland should be one of these countries. This view led to their downfall in 1914 when most of them rallied to the defence of their “country” in the First World War. It could also be said to have been Connolly’s too as it led to him also rallying to a capitalist state, albeit a would-be one.

Connolly had been a part of the revolutionary socialist scene for a period. In Scotland, where he was born, he had been a member of the Social Democratic Federation, the organisation that first introduced Marxist ideas into Britain, and then of its equivalent in Ireland, the Irish Socialist Republican Party. He participated in the “impossiblist revolt” in the SDF against the authoritarianism and opportunism of its founder Hyndman, which led to the formation of the Socialist Labour Party of Great Britain in 1903 and of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904. Connolly was, in fact, the first chairman of the SLP, but soon afterwards left for America where he joined the Socialist Labor Party of America. Other members of the ISRP who left Ireland joined the SPGB.

The SLP of America was a party which, under Daniel De Leon, combined Second International Marxism and Syndicalism. Syndicalism is the doctrine that the best way, both to get improvements under capitalism and to overthrow the whole system, is through industrial action, culminating in the working class seizing control of the means of production. “Taking and holding” them was the phrase used. Unlike the French revolutionary syndicalists who rejected electoral action, De Leon and the SLP held that the “taking and holding” of the means of production would have to be backed by political action to win control of the state via the ballot box. The SLP called its view “socialist industrial unionism”.

The SLP participated in the formation of the IWW in 1905 but in 1908 the IWW adopted an anti-political stance, i.e. a pure syndicalist position, and De Leon and the SLP were expelled. Connolly, who by this time had fallen out with De Leon, remained and left the SLP.  In 1909 he published a pamphlet Socialism Made Easy setting out his views. The first part was made up of short “workshop talks” he had written some years previously; the second of longer articles explaining his “industrial unionism” which showed that, despite what the IWW had decided in 1908, he still adhered to the same basic position as De Leon: industrial action to overthrow capitalism backed up by political action at the ballot box. Writing in capitals he emphasised:

“IT IS, THEREFORE, ABSOLUTELY INDISPENSABLE FOR THE EFFICIENT TRAINING OF THE WORKING CLASS ALONG CORRECT LINES THAT ACTION AT THE BALLOT BOX SHOULD ACCOMPANY ACTION IN THE WORKSHOP.”

He went on:

“The workers will be industrially organised on the economic field, and until that organisation is perfected, whilst the resultant feeling of class consciousness is permeating the minds of the workers, the Socialist Political Party will carry on an independent campaign of education and attack upon the political field, and as a consequence will remain the sole representative of the Socialist idea in politics.”

Although I think he got it the wrong way round – I think that, while both are necessary, political action is more important than industrial action and he was clearly wrong in assuming that “industrial union consciousness” would automatically reflect itself on the political field as socialist consciousness – this pamphlet shows that Connolly had once been part of the revolutionary socialist scene.

After his return to Ireland in 1910, Connolly came to abandon this position about the need for a socialist party to carry on a campaign of education and attack on the political field and to be “the sole representative of the Socialist idea in politics”. In 1912 he supported the setting up of the Irish Labour Party, a non-socialist party modelled on the Labour Party in Britain, to be the political arm of the trade union movement in Ireland. His 1915 pamphlet The Re-conquest of Ireland envisages this happening through the spread of co-operatives and the gradual nationalisation of more and more industries. It also lists a number of social reforms which “Labour”, i.e the Labour Party, should campaign for. He still believed in “One Big Union” but more to defend workers within capitalism than to take and hold the means of production.

It is not his drift towards Labour reformism that’s the issue here. The mystery is how he came to play a leading role in a pure and simple Irish Republican uprising. He had of course always been a republican in a sense. After all, he was a founding member of the Irish Socialist Republican Party with its paper The Workers Republic (although the terms “Socialist Republic” and “Workers Republic” were also in use outside Ireland as an alternative name for socialism as a system of society). But, precisely, a “socialist” or “workers” republic, not a capitalist republic as in France or the United States.

One of the articles included in Socialism Made Easy was a reprint of an article from The Workers Republic of 1899 entitled “Let Us Free Ireland !” Here’s an extract:

“After Ireland is free, says the patriot who won’t touch socialism, we will protect all classes, and if you won’t pay your rent you will be evicted same as now. But the evicting party, under command of the sheriff, will wear green uniforms and the Harp without the Crown, and the warrant turning you out on the roadside will be stamped with the arms of the Irish Republic. Now, isn’t that worth fighting for?And when you cannot find employment, and, giving up the struggle of life in despair, enter the poorhouse, the band of the nearest regiment of the Irish army will escort you to the poorhouse door to the tune of St. Patrick's Day. Oh! It will be nice to live in those days!“With the Green Flag floating o’er us” and an ever-increasing army of unemployed workers walking about under the Green Flag, wishing they had something to eat. Same as now! Whoop it up for liberty!”

This is prophetic of what did happen after an Irish State was established in 1922. The only thing he didn’t get right was that the flag that floated over the unemployed was a tricolour and not a green one with a harp.

This was not aimed at the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster as they supported only Home Rule. It was, and can only be, a criticism of pure and simple Republicanism, of “patriots who won’t touch socialism” as Connolly called them. So why then did he later join them in a vain attempt to set up an Irish capitalist Republic?

People have speculated as to why Connolly departed even from his later commitment to Labourism to support a typical Fenian stunt. Psychological explanations have been offered such as disillusion with workers for supporting the war or with Irish workers joining the British Army. It’s even been suggested that he had come to share Patrick Pearse’s view that a blood sacrifice was needed to revive Irish Nationalism.

Certainly, the insurrection was suicidal. Its leaders must have known that it had no chance of success, not even with German aid. It had very little popular support and was challenging the might of the world’s most powerful capitalist states which, being at war, was going to be at its most ruthless. And it was.

I want to finish by quoting what the Socialist Standard, the SPGB’s paper, said at the time:

From the May 1916 issue:
“A grave armed revolt in Dublin against English rule is raging at the time of writing. It is a revolt doomed from the outset, both because of the futility of its narrow nationalist aims, and the utter hopelessness of such a revolt against the mighty organised force of the political State.”

From July 1916:

It is true that the Irish workers have a fearful struggle to live, like the rest of their class the world over. But an anti-social movement like theirs, with "Ireland for Irishmen" for its slogan, was doomed to failure from the start. We, the working men and women who form the Socialist Party of Great Britain, sympathise with our fellow workers in Ireland in their struggle against the hideously squalid conditions that prevail among them, but must record our hostility to any movement that is not based upon the class struggle.h

And, finally, from August 1916:

It is a false notion of the Sinn Feiners and Nationalists that the Irish workers must struggle for national independence before they can tackle the problem of poverty. But the working class everywhere is under one capitalist government or another. To split territories, set up new governments, or to re-establish old ones will not help them nor even simplify the problem. Their only hope lies in the speedy establishment of Socialism. They must join hands with the workers of the world, and make common cause against the ruling class. They must make ready use of the last war – the war of the classes, in which classes will be abolished and a real equality established on the basis of ‘common ownership and democratic control of all the means of life.’”

Adam Buick

Letter: Not just political (2012)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

A friend recently brought to my attention the history of the turmoil that took place in GB following WWI when the principal unions had apparently coalesced for unified action and apparently got cold feet when confronted with the situation of the potential power of their organized resistance to capitalist exploitation. The dilemma was expressed in the statement made by the Prime Minister to the Triple Alliance accordingly:

 "Gentlemen, you have fashioned in the Triple Alliance of the unions represented by you, a most powerful instrument. I feel bound to tell you that in our opinion we are at your mercy. The Army is disaffected and cannot be relied upon... If you carry out your threat to strike, then you will defeat us... If you do so, have you weighed the consequences... if a force arises in the State which is stronger than the State itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the state, or withdraw and accept the authority of the State. Gentlemen, have you conferred and if you have, are you ready?" (David Lloyd George to Union Leaders in 1919) 

This seems to have taken the wind out of their sails.

If this statement and the history surrounding is accurate, it would suggest that tactically the idea of a parallel class conscious unified union organization to that of a political party is desirable and indeed, essential in order to use its power to back up the mandate of a socialist ballot plurality. That the Triple Alliance didn't have the mettle to act does not invalidate the potential tactical necessity of unified working class action. During the formation of the IWW Daniel De Leon wrote a series of responses to those who argued that either political or economic action alone were sufficient to create a socialist transformation ("As To Politics") demonstrating with decisive logic that both were essential.

Your Party has apparently steadfastly resisted the dual necessity of working class action, vague allusions notwithstanding, and has given the impression of pure and simple political action as being the sole necessity to transform society into the cooperative commonwealth. Yet David Lloyd George's comment seems to suggest the latent power of working class economic action is a decisive factor.

Perhaps you can enlighten me on the historical significance of what happened way back in 1919 and your reaction to those events and your subsequent applications of lessons learned.

Bernard Bortnick, 
Dallas, Texas

Reply:

The words you quote are taken from, In Place of Fear (1952) by the Labour politician Aneurin Bevan, and published many years after the events in question.  Bevan recounts that, the miners’ leader Robert Smillie, (who died in 1940) told him - and this must have been some years after 1919 - that this is what Lloyd George had said.  So this is a third-hand report - not that Lloyd George would not have said something like this but it can be doubted that these were his exact words.

If correct and Lloyd George wasn't just windbagging, this would illustrate precisely why a political party is essential - the unions had no programme to seize the power that supposedly lay at their feet and backed down. Contrary to what you keep on asserting, the Socialist Party doesn't reject industrial organisation as a key plank of a revolutionary strategy. We are dissimilar to Industrial Unionists and the like in refusing to cut one of our legs off before running the race. We are for the working class using all the resources at its disposal, both political and economic, and chasing the rulers into every centre of their power, wresting that power from them.

For the record, here is what the Socialist Standard of the time (April 1919) said (note the rather different approach taken by Bonar Law, who was the leader of the Conservative party and a Minister in Lloyd George‘s coalition government):

“It was when the Reports of the Commission were given to the Government that the great lesson for the workers emerged. In announcing that the Government had accepted and would act upon the Report of the Chairman's section of the Commission and referring to the possibility of a strike, Mr. Bonar Law said
‘If such a strike comes the Government—and no Government could do otherwise—will use all the resources of the State without the smallest hesitation.’

If such a strike came, the mine-owners, if they decided to fight it out, could win by simply pitting their immense resources of wealth, an indication of which is given by the figures above, against the few pounds the miners could gather together. On the economic field the masters are in a far stronger position than the workers and can beat them any time they decide to fight to a finish. Yet in this, as in so many other cases, they threaten to use the overwhelming power of the State for their purpose because it is so much more speedy and decisive.

But how comes it that they can use the State for this purpose? Because on 14th December, 1918, the miners, in conjunction with the large majority of the other workers, placed the State in the hands of the masters when they voted the latter into possession of political power.

While the workers accept the poisonous nonsense that ‘capital should have a fair profit,’ while they swallow the lies and humbug of the labour leaders like Thomas, Brace, Williams, and so on, that the interests of the master class are the interests of the ‘community,’ or ‘society,’ they will be easily led to vote their masters into possession of the power to rule society.

When the working class rids itself of this stupidity, and realises its weakness in the economic field against the power of the employers, then it will turn to the facts of its situation for a solution and find that the way to salvation lies through organisation for control of the political power. Not until that is assured can the workers own the means of life and operate them for their own benefit. When that lesson is learnt the day of Socialism will be dawning.”

Editors

Is The S.P.G.B. the Party of the Workers? (1907)

From the April 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

[Report of a debate between J. Fitzgerald, S.P.G.B. (affirmative) and E. J. B. Allen, S.L.P. (negative) at the Engineers' Institute, Plumstead, January 20th, 1907.]

Fitzgerald, in opening, said that to decide which was the workers' Party it was necessary to describe the worker's position. To-day he was an article of merchandise, for he had no access to the means of existence save by selling his energy on the labour market. The means of existence and the wealth produced were owned and controlled by the capitalist class, and this economic cleavage between the two classes resulted in an antagonism of interests. The ruling class were numerically small; how then were they able to retain control over the means of existence and the lives of the workers? When the workers showed signs of revolt, police, judicial, military and naval forces were brought against them. But these forces could not exist on air. The supplies necessary to keep and arm these forces are provided for out of revenue and voted for in parliaments. Thus the control of the political machinery enables the capitalist class to retain their position. The Party of the workers must therefore have for its object the control of the means of existence and the capture of political power as chief means to this end.

The ruling class keep employed a specially trained section for this political work and trickery, but the workers have not the wealth, leisure, or opportunity to acquire the same proficiency in trickery (even if it were defensible). Consequently the only method remaining to the workers is an open and above-board organisation for the capture of political power. Fitzgerald then proceeded to examine various political parties such as the Liberal, Tory, and Labour parties and the I.L.P. and S.D.F. from the above basis, and showed how hopeless they were from the point of view of working-class emancipation. He then dealt with the S.L.P., which while claiming to accept the position already laid down, denied this practically by forming their organisation in an underhand way. This organisation, like the S.P.G.B., grew out of the so-called "Impossibilist" movement in the S.D.F. The movement manifested itself at the West Ham and Birmingham conferences of the S.D.F., and at Blackburn the London and Scottish sections agreed to work together. The London section abided this, but just before the next conference news came that instead of working for alteration of the policy of the S.D.F, the Scottish section had been secretly organising a new party. The London section, recognising that the workers must consciously work out their own emancipation, refused to blindly follow either superior persons from Queen Anne's Gate or self-styled geniuses from Scotland, and continuing their work converted so many that after the Burnley conference the S.P.G.B. was formed in an open and straightforward manner. The S.L.P. had a palliative programme when first formed, while the S.P.G.B. ignored these confusing items. The S.L.P. merely adopted parrot-like the actions and phrases of the American S.L.P. without considering whether they were applicable to conditions here.

E. J. B. Allen in reply said that he had attended the meeting of the London "Impossibilists' after the Shoreditch conference, and Fitzgerald had said nothing about having been deceived, but only that he was not going to help form a party with two dozen. Fitzgerald had said that workers must get control of the political machinery, but hah not shown how this was to be done. Marx had shown that it was those who had economic power that controlled in Society, the political and other factors being based in the economic. Engels had pointed out that with the establishment of Socialism politics would be abolished. The workers must have an economic organisation to enforce their expressions on the political field. A political movement without force behind it was a farce. How were they going to get the economic organisation of the working class which would be a real power? One way was to convert the existing class-unconscious organisations. The other ay was to build up a class-conscious organisation themselves.

With regards to the S.L.P. in England adopting methods from America, why did not the S.P.G.B. produce an economic system of its own instead of taking that of Marx? In America the Socialist Trade and Labour Alliance had failed, while in the West there grew up the American Labour Union. This and other organisations met in Chicago in 1905 and formed the "Industrial Workers of the World." This was the union they were endeavouring to establish here. In it the workers would be organised to take and hold the means of existence against the capitalist class. It would furnish the might necessary to enforce the political right, and was therefore the most important. How was the S.P.G.B. going to make the trade unions take up the Socialist position? The S.L.P. intended to form an I.W.W. as soon as they had the strength. They admitted members of various political parties into the Advocates of Industrial Unionism.

He challenged Fitzgerald to show where the S.L.P. had violated the Unity Programme as printed in THE SOCIALIST STANDARD. While preaching the principles of unity the S.P.G.B. denied them for the purpose of keeping their little Party alive. With reference to the straight and above-board position of the S.P.G.B., he had read two pamphlets issued by the Islington Branch, and so far as he could see they had made out their case against the E.C. of the S.P.G.B.

Fitzgerald then said that he had insisted so much on the swindling of the Scotsmen at the "Impossibilist" meeting that one present had tried to minimise Yates' admission that the Scotsmen had been building up a new party during two years.

The workers' greatest difficulty would not be to get a parliamentary majority but to get control of the positions of the permanent officials. Regarding Engels' statement that the political state would die out, Engels had defined the political state as the expression of the ruling class; but so important did he consider the capture of political power that he italicised the sentence "The Proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into state property."

The political machinery was the means whereby the businesses and collective needs of Society were co-ordinated, and which would under Socialism become their co-ordination for the benefit of all. The economic organisation could not take and hold the factories, etc. while the capitalist class controlled the armed forces, for by these the workers could easily be dispossessed.

They accepted any scientific truth or discovery, whether it originated in America or Germany, but a thing was not necessarily correct because it was adopted in America, while we should probably learn as much from the mistakes of other countries as from their truths. From the time of the formation of the S.T. & L.A. right up to 1904 the position of the S.L.P. was that the political arm must dominate the economic: but with the formation of the I.W.W. a complete change occurred, for it is now said that the economic arm must  dominate the political. If this were true why form a political organisation at all? If economic organisation furnishes the might and the method why do not the advocates of I.W.W-ism proclaim themselves the Anarchists they are and give all their attention to the economic organisation? We could not make the trade unions do anything; we could only educate them until sufficient had been converted to make possible the acton we desired. The S.L.P. had violated THE SOCIALIST STANDARD unity programme by their violation of the principle that the workers must consciously emancipate themselves at the very formation of their Party. With reference to the two Islington pamphlets, he had challenged and was prepared to meet Lehane.

Allen then said regarding the economic organisation "taking and holding," the Government were once unable to hold the naval manoeuvres because the South Wales miners were on strike. Under the industrial form of organisation the workers could prevent the transport of troops. If the workers refused to make the weapons, etc., there would be none for the soldiers to use against the workers. Fitzgerald's definition of the political machinery under Socialism was merely the federal council to supervise the economic departments. While he himself and all other Socialists that he knew had been educated from the political side, Allen considered it easier to teach the mass through the economic organisation. They were not Anarchists because the Anarchists denied the need for organisation. The occurrence at Portsmouth showed the shaky position of the capitalist class regarding the armed forces.

The workers had often to migrate for purposes of their employment, and this disenfranchised a large number: he was therefore not sure the workers had a voting majority. Fitzgerald had asked how a man could claim to accept the revolutionary position and yet remain in the I.L.P., but Fitzgerald was not born a member of the S.P.G.B., he had to develop. They of the S.L.P. had never said "We alone are the holy ones. No one can be a Socialist who does not join us." The difference between the S.L.P. and the S.P. was a difference between theorisers and men prepared to join hands with the working class and get them to take united action. No matter what organisation a man belonged to, if he accepted the revolutionary position as laid down by the A.I.U. he was welcomed.

Fitzgerald in his last speech said, as the workers refusing to supply the soldiers with arms and ammunition, that town could give a significant answer. In Woolwich Arsenal seven years' war stores were supposed to be kept, and visitors could see that great stocks were there. Against these years of supply the workers had only empty pockets and empty cupboards. In Italy the places of striking railway men were taken by armed soldiers, by whom such transport as was essential was carried on. He denied that it was easier to teach the workers from the economic side, for there the petty interests arising from the daily struggle hinder the recognition of the class position. We stood upon the correct basis of continuing the education of the workers inside and outside their unions so that the Socialist political and economic organisations may be built up that will accomplish their emancipation.

Allen in his closing speech said the railway strike in Italy was a not a general strike, nor were the men revolutionists, so that what happened there did not disprove his case. If, as Fitzgerald maintained, the capitalists controlled all these stores, how were you going to vote them out? The statement that the political organisation was not concerned with the petty details of the workers affairs showed the error of the position of the S.P.G.B. Such a party degenerated into a side show of word spinners and logic choppers and will inevitably be split into fragments as it was doing now. All the world over Industrial Unionism was growing with Socialism. You must have economic unity before political unity. He knew it was a longer road to organise the workers economically for their emancipation, but they were prepared to face the difficulties and were going on with the work.

The Chairman, H. Stiff (S.P.G.B.), said in closing the meeting it was the first time that revolutionary Socialism had been preached in that hall.

There was a good attendance and the literature of both parties was on sale.

Two Pages of S.L.P. History. (1919)

From the July 1919 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the June issue of the 'Socialist" appears an amusing little skit, the must amusing part of which, however, is the sequel which lack of space compelled our contemporary to leave out. Fortunately, however, we have an odd corner in which to complete the tale.

Three "boozy-looking demobilised scroungers" were leaning against the bar bragging of what they had done in the war, when Mr. Dan Dusty, a well-known member of our contemporary's editorial staff, got the pip, and opened his mouth and spake thusly.

  "You're all three heroes, right enough; that's what you want to show, ain't it? You've all been out in France, dressed up by the capitalists . . . to fight for their interests and spoil yer own. Ain't that clever! . . . Equal to the glory of Julius Cæsar, I calls it. Got about as much sense as a blooming coolie what claps his pretty black hands for joy because his master ain't quite flogged him to death . . . You're demobilised with a quid or two or buried in your khaki, just as you was so gloriously shot by the other working man, labeled German, as big a fool as you . . . "

And this is what, but for us would have been lost to the world:

Beeriest-looking Scrounger: "Yus, matey, we're dam fools, and no mistake about it. But its like your dam cheek to say so, seeing that we only joined up because YOUR paper told us we ought to do so—here, don't go."

A. E. Jacomb

Sylvia Pankhurst and Socialism (2003)

From the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Pankhurst name is mainly associated with the Suffragette Movement, as Christabel Pankhurst and her mother Emmeline ("Mrs Pankhurst") were the most prominent leaders of the Votes for Women movement in the late 19th and early 20th century. Christabel's younger sister, Sylvia (born 1882), was also involved in the suffrage campaigns, but in addition she came to adopt ideas and aims which are of more interest to those who advocate a socialist world.

The Pankhursts' Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), formed in 1903, supported votes for women on the same basis as that which obtained for men at the time, i.e. based on a property qualification. Whatever its intention, given the situation where most property was held in the name of husbands rather than wives, this would have had the effect of enfranchising only a relatively small number of women, and clearly only rich women. Sylvia Pankhurst, however, came to support the more democratic position of general adult suffrage. Along with other suffragettes, she met many women from London's East End while serving time in prison for suffragette activities, and was impressed by the courage these women showed in enduring the appalling prison conditions.

In 1912 she moved to the East End herself and became an early practitioner of a kind of "community politics". Most men living there did not have the vote either, so the standard WSPU demand was of little local relevance. The East London Federation of the WSPU took on wider social concerns than just the vote, but Sylvia was expelled from the WSPU by her mother and sister, who could not tolerate any other source of power in the organisation. In 1914 she set up the East London Federation of the Suffragettes, with its paper the Woman's Dreadnought, which she edited.

The ELFS supported adult suffrage, but also organised nurseries and cheap restaurants during the First World War, as well as defending workers of German origin who were attacked by jingoistic mobs. It was renamed the Workers' Suffrage Federation in 1916, though this new name still failed to reflect its true range of interests, and the following year its paper became the Workers' Dreadnought. The paper's anti-war stance and its coverage of strikes earned it an influence far beyond the East End.

The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had an enormous impact on Pankhurst and the WSF (as on the Left in general), and much of their energy was redirected towards defending the new state and opposing Allied intervention against it. The WSF name was modified to Workers' Socialist Federation, and soviets or councils were now seen as the preferred means of organisation. Pankhurst proposed household soviets, so that "mothers and those who are organisers of the family life of the community" should be represented—a useful reminder that not everyone would be included in work-based bodies.

The WSF has been praised in fulsome terms:

"From 1918 to 1921, the Workers' Socialist Federation was a unique revolutionary organization. It challenged the male domination of socialist politics, for even though its all-female membership changed over time to admit men, women continued to be the major leaders and activists. The WSF campaigned on a whole range of women's issues (such as women's and children's health care, schooling and domestic work) and also participated in workers' struggles in the East End, as well as in struggles nationally and internationally" (Barbara Winslow: Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism).

As the examples show, though, these activities were reformist, not revolutionary.

Along with the Socialist Labour Party and the British Socialist Party, the WSF was one of the groups involved in the unity talks to set up the Communist Party of Great Britain. Having gone over to full-scale admiration for soviets, Pankhurst opposed the pro-parliamentary sections in the unity talks. She argued not just that parliament could not be used for "revolutionary" purposes (which was generally agreed), but that it could not be used by revolutionaries for any purpose. Accordingly, the WSF withdrew from the unity talks to form the strangely-named Communist Party (British Section of the Third International) in 1920. The aim of this move – widely condemned at the time as jumping the gun – was to persuade the British Left to adopt anti-parliamentarism and reject affiliation to the Labour Party.

Pankhurst's stance was attacked by Lenin in the chapter on Britain in his "Left-Wing" Communism, an Infantile Disorder. He quoted Pankhurst as saying that the Communist Party must not compromise. Not so, said Lenin: it was essential to help the Labour leaders defeat the Tories and Liberals, so that workers should see the results of a Labour government. The cause of Communism, he went on, would be furthered, not betrayed, by calls for workers to vote Labour, as a Labour government would soon lead to disillusion. These ideas are purely opportunist and dishonest and, of course, the events foreseen by Lenin failed to materialise. But his views did foreshadow the compromises and lies that have been typical of Bolshevik groups.

Pankhurst and the CP(BSTI) were, however, convinced by Lenin's arguments, and most of the organisation's branches joined the new CPGB soon after it was founded, though she continued to produce the Workers' Dreadnought as a separate paper. The "unified" CP, however, was anything but unified, and when the Dreadnought began publishing the views of oppositionists within Russia as well as arguing the anti-parliamentary line, the CPGB and their Moscow masters objected. In September 1921, once she had been released from a prison sentence for sedition, and had refused to hand the paper over to CP control, Pankhurst was expelled. She now set up the Communist Workers' Party, which had the aim of abolishing the wages system, but this never amounted to anything much and it collapsed by 1924, when the Workers' Dreadnought also ceased publication. Her later career is of little moment – she joined the Labour Party in 1948, and died in Ethiopia in 1960, after exposing Italy's invasion of the country and becoming an admirer of Emperor Haile Selassie.

However, Pankhurst's views for a time during the early twenties were of great interest. She could never be accused of consistency, but she did propagate the view that Socialism/Communism meant a moneyless, classless community, and that what was being built in Russia was capitalism, not any variety of socialism. She explicitly described the New Economic Policy, introduced there in 1921, as "reversion to capitalism". And consider these extracts from her writings:

"Our aim is Communism. Communism is not an affair of party. It is a theory of life and social organisation. It is a life in which property is held in common; in which the community produces, by conscious aim, sufficient to supply the needs of all its members; in which there is no trading, money, wages, or any direct reward for services rendered" (1923).

"The Russian workers remain wage slaves, and very poor ones, working, not from free will, but under compulsion of economic need, and kept in their subordinate position by a State coercion which is more pronounced than in the countries where the workers have not recently shown their capacity to rebel with effect" (1924).

(See also the Socialist Standard for November 1999.)

To the extent that the Left pay attention to Sylvia Pankhurst today, she is usually derided as a sectarian "ultra-leftist" who placed inflexibility and loyalty to her own organisation above the idea of unity. But she is better seen as someone who saw through the unprincipled and dishonest tactics of the Bolsheviks and their British followers, and who realised that Russia was not undergoing a transformation to Socialism. Her opposition to using parliament for revolutionary purposes was a mistake, caused by her overwhelming enthusiasm for the supposed successes of the soviets in Russia. She deserves, however, to be remembered as more than just an object of Lenin's criticism.

Paul Bennett