Sylvia Pankhurst (2013)

Book Review from the December 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Socialist and Scourge of Empire. By Katherine Connelly, Pluto Press

Author Katherine Connelly admires Sylvia Pankhurst for her radical but reformist political struggles, her opposition to the First World War and support for the Bolshevik revolution.

Sylvia Pankhurst was brought up in the political world of the SDF, Socialist League and ILP and raised on the radical poetry of Shelley, and A Dream of John Ball by William Morris. Sylvia was much more than a Suffragette, she wanted to link the struggle for women’s suffrage to universal suffrage and to industrial struggles by the organised working class. Whereas Sylvia was a ‘socialist’ in the ILP mould and had a love affair with the married Keir Hardie, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were bourgeois feminists who wanted the vote on the same property qualification as men.

She worked in London’s East End, establishing the East London Federation of the Suffragettes which later became the Workers’ Socialist Federation. She organised and spoke at the solidarity meeting with workers from the Dublin Lockout at the Albert Hall in 1913 at which James Connolly spoke of the common struggle ‘against the domination of nation over nation, class over class, and sex over sex’.

After the First World War there was leftist internecine wrangling over the creation of the Communist Party of Great Britain, in which she took part, becoming a subject of Lenin’s criticism in his book ‘Left Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder. She opposed reformism in November 1920 when she wrote ‘Although I have been a Socialist all my life, I have tried to palliate this capitalist system… but all my experience showed that it was useless trying to palliate an impossible system’. She had no time for the Poplar Labour councillors who went to prison for a rates strike. Author Katherine Connelly writes that she ‘dismissed the councillor’s efforts’ and was expelled from the newly formed CPGB in 1921.

Connelly, as a Leninist, sees Sylvia Pankhurst as a ‘left wing communist’ and says she ‘was not and never claimed to be a socialist theorist’, a way of dismissing anything she wrote about Leninism, the state capitalism in the Soviet Union or socialism. Pankhurst wrote ‘The words Socialism and Communism have the same meaning. They indicate a condition of society in which the wealth of the community: the land and the means of production, distribution and transport are held in common, production being for use and not for profit.’ She drew attention in January 1922 to ‘Russia’s new economic policy of reversion to capitalism’ and in May 1924 remarked that ‘the Russian workers remain wage slaves’ and of ‘the NEP and the advocates of State capitalisation’.

We can appreciate what she wrote about the future society in July 1923 ‘Since production will be for use, not profit, the people will be freely supplied on application. There will be no buying and selling, no money, no barter or exchange of commodities’, and in August 1923: ‘Full and complete Socialism entails the total abolition of money, buying and selling, and the wages system.’

Steve Clayton

Votes for Ladies (1999)

Book Review from the November 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sylvia Pankhurst. A Life in Radical Politics. By Mary Davis, Pluto Press.

Sylvia Pankhurst, one of the daughters of the famous suffragette leader Mrs (Emily) Pankhurst, will have done at least one thing for modern feminists: drawn their attention to the complexity of the votes issue before 1914.

Most people will probably think that the suffragettes who chained themselves to railings, knocked off policemen's hats, etc were demanding universal suffrage, i.e. votes for all adult men and women. Actually—and this was a conscious policy decision by the Women's Social and Political Union to which they belonged—they were campaigning for "Votes for Women on the Same Terms as then obtained for Men". But before 1914 not all men had the vote; owing to a property qualification, admittedly fairly low, only about 70 percent of them did. To have extended the vote to women on these terms would (according to one figure quoted by Mary Davis) have enfranchised less than 8 percent of women. Nearly all married women would have remained voteless as their family's "property" was in the name of their husbands.

The WSPU was aware of this and was prepared to go along with it. This meant that what their militant tactics aimed at was, in the contemporary phrase, "Votes for Ladies", votes for rich women. In other words, they were not democrats who were campaigning for votes for all women but, whether intentionally or not, people whose policy would have strengthened the political power of the propertied class by increasing the proportion of capitalist voters at the expense of working class voters. No wonder the Socialists of the time opposed them, as did many ordinary democrats.

However, not all suffragettes were in the WSPU and not all of those in the WSPU favoured this policy aim, Sylvia Pankhurst among them. In fact she fell out with her mother and elder sister over the issue and was expelled from the WSPU in 1914. Her branch became the independent East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) which pursued a different strategy, of including working class women and demanding universal suffrage.

When the war broke out, the WSPU went super-patriotic. The name of their paper was changed from The Suffragette to Britannia and they began, as Sylvia Pankhurst put it, to hand "the white feather to every young man they encountered wearing civilian dress". She moved in the opposite direction, opposing the war. In 1916 the ELFS changed its name to Workers Suffrage Federation and in 1917 its paper Woman's Dreadnought became Workers' Dreadnought; in 1918 the WSF became the Workers Socialist Federation. The WSF was one of the organisations involved in the founding of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1921. Pankhurst, however, was by this time an anti-parliamentarian (so much for votes, for men as well as women) and was opposed to the new party seeking to be affiliated to Labour. For this she was denounced by Lenin as an "ultra-leftist". She lasted only six months in the CPGB before being expelled.

The Workers' Dreadnought continued to appear until 1924 and was a valuable source of information and documentation on the opposition groups in Russia, including those who argued—as indeed did Pankhurst herself—that Russia was heading for state capitalism not socialism. Mary Davis records that in 1923 Pankhurst set up a rival unemployed organisation to that of the CPGB, "the Unemployed Workers' Organisation (UWO), whose slogan, 'Abolition of the Wages System', was supposed to expose the 'reformist' nature of the demand of its rival—'Work or Full Maintenance'". This could only have been a gesture, but one Socialists can appreciate.

By 1924 Pankhurst had tired of the working class and radical working class politics and reverted to being essentially a single-issue reformist. She remained a feminist (deliberately choosing to become "an unmarried mother") advocating such reforms as the introduction of maternity benefit. In 1948 she joined the Labour Party. But from the 1930s on her main centre of interest became Ethiopia. She championed its cause against fascist Italy and came to be a friend of Emperor Haile Selassie. In 1956 she went to live in Ethiopia where she died four years later at the age of 78 and is buried there.

It has been reported (Times, 18 August) that Gordon Brown is supporting the idea that the vacant plinth at Trafalgar Square should be filled by a statue of Sylvia Pankhurst. Evidently, he is unaware that she once advocated the abolition of the wages system and money. Still, come to think of it, better a statue to someone who held this view however briefly than to some warmonger.

Adam Buick

Parliament or Soviet? A critical examination (1920)

From the April 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

The self-styled left wing of the so-called Socialist and Labour movement of Great Britain has for some time past been debating the topic of the Soviet as opposed to Parliament as the means of securing the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

The Bone of Contention

Just as the right wing of the reformist Labour Party has condemned the Soviet as an anti-Socialist institution, so the left-wing Anarchists (for in practice that is what they are) have gone to the other extreme and proclaimed the Soviet as the only means of realising Socialism! What has the Socialist Party of Great Britain to say on the matter? The answer is implicit in its declaration of principles.

"The working class must organise consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government." 

In the "Communist Manifesto" Marx and Engels clearly stated that the form of application of Communist principles would vary according to the degree of development, industrial and political, reached in various countries. It is equally absurd, therefore, to condemn or uphold the Soviet system irrespective of the conditions out of which it arose.

The Soviet Seed-Bed

In Russia the Soviets arose spontaneously in opposition to the Tsarist (and later the Bourgeois) dictatorship. Parliament has never been the supreme power in the State because the bulk of the population had never been industrially concentrated and politically organised. Local councils acting independently to a large extent, and at most never realising the need for more than federal unity, were, therefore, the natural expression of popular opinion. In adopting the Soviet constitution, therefore, the Bolsheviks did not invent a system: they accepted a fact! Their attempt to convoke a central assembly representative of the mass of the people had failed, as it was bound to fail, in a welter of illiteracy and disorganisation. The point is often missed that is it was not only the Bolshevik Party which was in a minority. The whole of the political parties in the Assembly put together were!

Had that not been the case it is difficult to understand the ease with which the Assembly was suppressed. Contrast this state of affairs with that obtaining in the Western "democracies." For generations the working class has been in the habit of supporting capitalist parties, and for a longer period these parties have been controlling, through Parliament, the machinery of Government. Soviets simply did not exist except in the fevered imaginations of the "left-wingers." Some of the latter indeed appear to regard the Trades Councils, etc., as incipient Soviets, but the value of these bodies for the purpose of establishing Socialism is, to say the least, obscure, and the more "advanced" Soviets are opposed to anything short of industrial unions with a programme of "equal wages." But the central factor of the political situation, i.e., the armed force of society, is not controlled by either trades councils or industrial union. It is controlled by Parliament. Parliament represents the powers of government, and not till it ceases to do so will the necessity for capturing it disappear. This much is obvious.

The Sovietites, of course, trust to a revolt of the army against Parliament; but such a revolt would be unnecessary if revolutionists were in a majority therein, and it would be futile (and in the highest degree unlikely) if they were not. The army cannot establish Socialism. That must be done by the mass of society, the working class, who possess the majority of the votes for the public bodies, national and local, and can therefore convert those bodies into revolutionary agencies whenever they choose to do so. Before the army can come over to the workers it must have something to come over to the to! Some alternative to the existing social order must be immediately practicable. In other words the workers must be consciously and politically organised for Socialism. This requires incessant propaganda effort of the educational character. Not merely inflammatory sentiments but illuminating science is necessary.

But this is not what the Sovietites supply. One surveys the field of their practical activities only to perceive a desperate state of confusion. Thus the B.S.P., alleging its adherence to the "third international," remains part of the Labour Party, which belongs to the second! Declaring for Soviets, it nevertheless continues Parliamentary methods, presumably for self-advertisment sake and to provide scope for its adventurers.

The S.L.P. attacks the B.S.P. theoretically for inconsistency, but in practice never tires of trying to come to a working arrangement with it. Likewise, the W.S.F. which pretends to oppose any form of parliamentary action as anti-Socialist. Opportunists all, they cannot do without their immediate demands, to be realised indiscriminately by legislation or the general strike, they are never cleat or united as to which. Swearing by the Revolution, they yet cannot trust it as the all-sufficient and supreme programme. Like the avowed reformers they denounce, they must be "practical"; must always "talk down" to ignorance. Exactitude they deplore as "pedantry"; consistency they regard as "inadaptability." The Socialist Party, however is prepared to go on with its work, knowing that events will prove its attitude to be the correct one.

Capitalism may develop, but its basis and essential character remains the same. The principles, therefore, which are deduced from that basis and serve as a guide to working-class action remain unchanged. As for the application of those principles, in the words of Marx: "The more highly developed country holds up to the less developed the mirror of its own future." It is not, therefore, a question of us following Russia, but it will be a question of Russia having to follow us. The S.P.G.B. never had to leave the Second International: it was never in it! Representing working-class interests, it is hostile to every other party. Only on such lines can Socialism be realised.

All power to the workers—through the Socialist Party!

Eric Boden

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