An account of the evolution of Sylvia Pankhurst from suffragette to supporter of the Bolshevik regime and then to council communist. It discusses the similarities of her ideas to anarchism as well as her links to the movement. It appeared in Black Flag Anarchist Review Volume 5 Number 3 (Autumn 2025).
Sylvia Pankhurst: Anti-Parliamentarian Communist
“Because I had been a suffragette and had fought for the cause of woman, the women came to me and asked me to help them. I had dying babies brought to me. I had to start clinics and find accommodation for people whose fathers were fighting for the capitalists’ Government of the country. I used to sit up all night writing, begging for money for these people. Then the unemployment. We had good families of people coming to my house without a penny, and with six or seven children, and I opened twopenny restaurants…. But I know it is all palliatives, it will not do any good really; I want to change the system; I am going to fight it if it kills me.”
– Sylvia Pankhurst[1]
Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960) was an English feminist, suffragette and socialist activist and writer. From an anarchist perspective, she is of note as being a leading anti-parliamentarian communist after the First World War, being one of the first to champion the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks before being expelled from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and becoming a leading critic of what she termed “Right-wing” Communism. Attacked by Lenin in “Left-wing” Communism: An Infantile Communism in its sole chapter on Britain, she broke with the Bolsheviks initially over their imposition of parliamentarianism on the International Communist movement but then widened into a negative re-evaluation of their role in the Russian Revolution. In the process, she came to conclusions with obvious links to long-standing anarchist positions.
The Social Situation
First, it is necessary to indicate the situation Pankhurst faced. Needless to say, this is indicative only and much more could be written about this period.
The period 1910-1914 saw a massive wave of industrial action – “the Great Unrest” – in which syndicalists played a significant role[2] along with a militant campaign for women’s suffrage. The outbreak of war stopped these struggles but the industrial struggle soon restarted. As the trade union officialdom supported the war, strikes were unofficial and created various new organisations, most notably the shop steward’s movement. In 1915 the Clyde Workers’ Committee (CWC) was formed from a strike in support of equal pay which saw 25 factories take action. That year also saw the CWC threaten a general strike in support of a rent strike by 25,0000 tenants. The campaign was a success, with the Government passing the Rent Restriction Act. In November 1916, the Sheffield Workers Committee was formed when engineering workers went on strike against the conscription of a local engineer which resulted in the government exempting craft union members from military service. When this policy was reversed in May 1917, a strike involving 200,000 workers began in 48 towns with the Shop Stewards Movement arising from it. The number of working days lost due to strike action rose from 2,953,000 in 1915 to 5,875,000 by 1918.
The industrial and social struggles continued and increased after the war. Days lost to strike action were 34,969,000 in 1919, rising to 85,872,000 in 1921. Significant disputes included the CWC calling a general strike for the 40 hour week in January 1919 which spread from Glasgow to other Scottish cities which involved over 70,000 workers, with simultaneous stoppages in London and Belfast. During a large demonstration in George Square in Glasgow on 31 January 1919 (Bloody Friday), a police baton-charge resulted in many injuries and the Riot Act was read. A soviet was created in Limerick in April while a national railway strike took place between 26 September and 5 October 1919 to prevent the government from reducing negotiated rates of pay and to standardise pay rates. After nine days of strike action, the government agreed to maintain wages. Throughout the year miners took widespread official and unofficial local action. Troops mutinied and police struck. Union membership grew from 4.1 million in 1914 to 6.5 million in 1918, peaking at 8.3 million in 1920.
This is only an inclination of the situation during the war and post-war years. What happened in Britain was reflective of other countries across the world and the possibility of revolution was very real – with many looking to the apparently successful revolution in Russia as an example to follow. Pankhurst was an active participant in this wave of struggle and revolt.
Before Communism
Pankhurst was born in Manchester to Emmeline and Dr. Richard Pankhurst. The family home hosted radical intelligentsia from both Britain and abroad, including Peter Kropotkin and Louise Michel. In 1893, her parents joined Keir Hardie, a family friend, as founding members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). However, the Pankhursts are best known for their role in the fight for female suffrage, with the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) being founded as an independent women’s movement in 1903 at the family’s home after her sister, Christabel, persuaded a group of ILP women that women had to work for their own emancipation free of party affiliation.
Three years later, Pankhurst started to work full-time for WSPU, with Christabel and their mother. Drawing upon her earlier studies as an artist, she devised the WSPU logo and various leaflets, banners, and posters as well as the decoration of its meeting halls. She also contributed articles to the WSPU’s newspaper, Votes for Women and, in 1911, she published a propagandist history of the organisation’s campaign, The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement. She took an active role in the protests for women’s suffrage, enduring 15 arrests and 9 hunger, sleep and thirst strikes.[3] However, she later admitted to being opposed to the direction the WSPU had taken in terms of its window-breaking, arson and other forms of protest:
“I believed, then and always, that the movement required, not more serious militancy by the few, but a stronger appeal to the great masses to join the struggle. Yet it was not in me to criticise or expostulate. I would rather have died at the stake than say one word against the actions of those who were in the throes of the fight.”[4]
As part of her work for the WSPU, Pankhurst toured America in 1911 and 1912 to raise money for the suffragette cause. In New York she spoke at a rally in support of a laundry workers’ strike alongside IWW Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.[5] She also visited Milwaukee twice as it had a socialist mayor and while acknowledging it had made some improvements she was critical of its elitist nature, arguing that “all meetings of the Council and its committees, both Press and Public” should “be present to hear the debates… only thus can the busy populace be kept closely informed as to the doings of their city government and induced to take a vital and constant interest in them.” She argued with the mayor, being “anxious to make him feel that even under socialism it would not be satisfactory to women to leave everything to be managed by men” and noted that it was “strange how few even of the best of men can quite see that we need the power to work out our own salvation as much as they do.”[6] As one biographer suggests:
“Pankhurst advocated a form of workers’ control of the city government, arguing that the scrubwomen and the garbage collectors should control their own departments… It is clear that her socialism was not the top-down state or municipal socialism advocated by the Fabians and Progressives, where middle-class intellectuals and technicians made the world ‘better’ for the poor or working class, but socialism from the bottom up, with workers controlling both industry and government. Similarly, her vision of women’s emancipation came from the power of working women themselves, organising and rebuilding their workplaces, homes and communities on their own terms.”[7]
This perspective was equally applicable to her own organisation. The WSPU was run autocratically by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst who “regarded the WSPU as an army in battle over which they had supreme control. Any questioning of the command of the generals was tantamount to mutiny” and this led to “the High Command’s decision to abolish the democratic constitution of the WSPU, which in turn meant abandoning the annual delegate conference.”[8] Its focus was very much directed at middle and upper class women, with working class women viewed with contempt in spite of their sacrifices being far greater than those suffragettes from “respectable” backgrounds. Pankhurst, in contrast, organised in the working class districts of East London and the East London Federation of the WPSU was renamed the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS). Although it was to remain a women’s emancipatory movement led by women, it was opened to trade unionists and to men, taking up issues wider than just winning adult suffrage. So, for example, in November 1913, Pankhurst spoke at the Albert Hall, alongside James Connolly, in support of the men and women of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union locked-out by Dublin employers.
This new orientation saw the differences within the Pankhurst family became impossible to ignore. Pankhurst’s mother and sister insisted that the struggle for the vote should be a cross-class movement limited to women and just to that issue. In January 1914, the ELFS split from the WPSU as Pankhurst was insistent on supporting popular and labour struggles. The ELFS soon launched a newspaper, The Woman’s Dreadnought and its first issue saw Pankhurst defend their insistence on creating a working-class suffragette campaign:
“Those Suffragists who say that it is the duty of the richer and more fortunate women to win the Vote, and that their poorer sisters need not feel themselves called upon to aid in the struggle appear, in using such arguments, to forget that it is the Vote for which we are fighting. The essential principle of the vote is that each one of us shall have a share of power to help himself or herself and us all. It is in direct opposition to the idea that some few, who are more favoured, shall help and teach and patronize the others.”[9]
She also noted that “every form of government but self-government is tyranny – however kindly its intention”, a position which informed her later communism.
When war broke out in August 1914, Pankhurst opposed it, unlike her mother and sister who supported the Allies, pausing the campaign for the vote and aiding the war effort. Pankhurst’s anti-war position was attacked in the WSPU newspaper, patriotically renamed Britannia. The ELFS strove to provide practical assistance to working women. It organised “cost-price” canteens, a toy-making cooperative, childcare, a home visiting centre, and free medical care and advice. The Dreadnought keep abreast of workers’ revolts and recognised their potential for more radical change:
“though the Clyde workers certainly are in revolt against the Munitions Act, which imposes coercion from without upon them, they are also striving to develop and democratise their own Trade Union organisation from within. They are impatient of leaders who enter into confidential understandings with capitalist Governments and become enmeshed in political compromises. The new Trade Unionism, which is so active on the Clyde, wishes to emancipate the workers from the position of incoherent dependent tools, whether of employers, Governments, or officials sprung from their own ranks. It wishes every worker in the trade to take his or her part in moulding the policy of the union, and each trade union to take its part in making of the nation a co-operative commonwealth, managed in the interests of all.”[10]
The Dreadnought on 18th of March 1916 announced the renaming of the ELFS to the Workers’ Suffrage Federation (WSF), its aim going from winning “Human Suffrage:– a vote for every woman and man of full age” to “To secure a Vote for every Woman and Man of full age, and to win Social and Economic Freedom for the People on the basis of a Socialist Commonwealth.” Internally, the WSF learned the lessons of the WSPU and the trade unions:
“In its democratic structure, the Federation clearly moved away from the autocracy of the national WSPU and Sylvia obviously regarded this as essential to building members’ confidence and autonomy. ‘We must get members to work for themselves’, Sylvia wrote in 1914, ‘and let them feel they are working for their own emancipation.’ The Federation trained members to organise and speak for themselves and held afternoon and evening meetings so all women could attend. It also organised talks and debates on a whole range of issues including sex education, trade unionism, the law and housing. In so doing, it became an organisation that was concerned with more than the vote and one which was interested in raising women’s political consciousness around issues that directly affected their lives.”[11]
The WSF grew and soon spread to other cities and towns across Britain, with 30 branches in Scotland (Glasgow) and across England (including Leeds, Leicester, Manchester, York and Sheffield) by 1917 with a membership between 400 and 500.[12] Its paper had a circulation of around 10,000 and was “one of the most important anti-war, non-sectarian socialist papers in Britain, achieving an influential position by opening its columns to all shades of opinion on the left.”[13] The WSF continued its campaigns, for example organising a demonstration on 8 April 1916 “numbering 20,000, [which] was perhaps the largest of the anti-war protests to date.”[14]
The Russian Revolution
Like the rest of the left, Pankhurst welcomed the February Revolution of 1917 which overthrew the Tsar. Somewhat ironically given later developments, the prospect of a Constituent Assembly elected by adult suffrage was particularly stressed. Reflecting the wider perspective of the paper and organisation, the 28 July 1917 issue of The Woman’s Dreadnought appeared under a new title The Workers’ Dreadnought with a new subheading: “Socialism. Internationalism, Votes for All”. The anti-war agitation led to a police raid on the paper’s offices and its issue of 6 October 1917 advocating a peace referendum among the troops, was destroyed and the type broken up.
An increased awareness of events in Russia and the role played by the soviets (councils elected and recallable from workplaces) saw a corresponding change in the WSF. The support for the Constituent Assembly fell as support for the more democratic soviets increased and when the October revolution occurred, the Dreadnought wholeheartedly welcomed it – likewise with the dissolving of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks in the name of the soviets. In May 1918, the WSF, reflecting the changes in the paper’s politics, was renamed the Workers’ Socialist Federation.
Pankhurst helped to set up the People’s Russia Information Bureau in September 1918 and was involved in the “Hands off Russia” campaign. The Dreadnought expressed her great hopes in the soviets:
“We have heard another voice, the voice of the future, now comes with great inexorable steps, bringing the elements which shall form the social structure of the 20th century. The old husks of the 19th century do not charm us.
“We are waiting for the Soviets, as they are called in Russia, the councils of delegates appointed by the workers in every kind of industry, by the workers on the land, and workers in the home. Through the medium of these workers’ councils the machinery of the coming of the Socialist Commonwealth will be evolved, here, as in Russia.”[15]
This was because of its more democratic nature:
“As a representative body an organization such as the All-Russian Workers’, Soldiers’, Sailors’ and Peasants’ Council is more closely in touch and more directly represents its constituents than the Constituent Assembly or any existing Parliament. The delegates … are constantly reporting back and getting instructions from their constituents; while Members of Parliament are elected for a term of years and only receive anything approaching instructions at election times. Even then it is the candidate who, in the main, sets forth the programme, the electors merely assenting to or dissenting from the program as a whole.”[16]
Pankhurst’s “belief in soviet power was a result of her long-held faith in both workers’ control and a localized or decentralized form of socialism.”[17] She was now arguing that socialists had to embrace a soviet system (being considered as an industrial republic), abandon the Parliamentary regime and, consequently, participation in elections. She also expanded upon the soviet idea by including community soviets, recognising that a purely workplace soviet system disenfranchised working class women who were housewives.[18] In a letter to Lenin written in July 1919 and published in the September issue of The Communist International she argued:
“The Labour movement in England is being ruined under my eyes by parliamentary and municipal politics. Both leaders and masses are only waiting for elections, and, while preparing for the election campaign, quite forgetting the socialist work. Nay, they totally suppress all socialist propaganda in order not to frighten the electors. The BSP [British Socialist Party] takes pride in the election of members to the Municipal Councils; but their election is not a signal for revolutionary agitation therein. They accepted the departmental office and became part of the machinery of capitalism.”[19]
The same issue contained Lenin’s rely, rejecting Pankhurst’s position. This came as a surprise to her as, like many early supporters of the Bolsheviks such as Anton Pannekoek, she had assumed that – given the soviet nature of the Russian revolution – the Bolsheviks would have agreed on the uselessness and redundancy of previous tactics such as Parliamentarianism. Needless to say, the BSP (the main Marxist Party in the UK at the time) gleefully reported Lenin’s position.
So as well as her work in Britain, Pankhurst was becoming increasingly active in the emerging international Communist movement. In 1919 she visited Italy and attended the conference of the Italian Socialist Party in Bologna which declared for the Third, Communist, International (the Comintern). She then travelled to Switzerland and Germany, attending a clandestine Comintern meeting in Frankfurt, before going to Amsterdam in January 1920 where the short-lived Comintern Sub-Bureau was formed. This bureau was firmly anti-parliamentarian with leading figures of the Dutch Marxist movement, Herman Gorter and Pannekoek, taking a prominent role, both notable anti-parliamentarian communists. Moscow declared it closed on 15 May 1920.
In June 1920, the WSF helped form the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International) – the CP(BSTI). Pankhurst travelled to Moscow for the Second Congress of the Comintern in July-August 1920 determined to change Lenin’s mind on the questions of participating in elections and affiliation to the Labour Party, but to no avail – the Bolshevik leader’s policies were accepted by a majority of the Congress and thus binding policies for its member parties. Pankhurst was the focus of the chapter on the British movement in Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, written especially for the Conference to bolster the Bolshevik’s favoured policies. August saw the creation of the CPGB, formed essentially by the BSP with a few pro-Communist Socialist Labour Party members, Guild Socialists, former syndicalists and shop stewards.
After her return to Britain, Pankhurst was arrested on 19 October 1920 for sedition and was sentenced to a six-month prison sentence on 5 January 1920, being released on 30 May. This meant that she was imprisoned during the discussions on the merger of the two Communist Parties. Pankhurst re-accounted how Lenin suggested that the “left-wing” communists could join the CPGB as a faction, working to change the policy on standing for elections and affiliation to the Labour Party. How sincere that recommendation was is moot given that party discipline would mean that any discussion would have been internal and even if successful the party would have still been bound by Comintern policy. The CP(BSTI) now faced a choice between adherence to its principles or continued participation in the Communist International, choosing the latter and entering the CPGB at the Leeds Unity Convention in January 1921.
The Break with Moscow
Pankhurst joined the CPGB with the aim of forming a grouping working to convince the party to take an anti-Parliamentary position. This did not last long with a dispute over the Dreadnought being the cause for her expulsion. The party executive demanded that she hand over control of the paper, which she refused to do as “we believe that only by criticism and discussion can a knowledge and understanding of Communist tactics be hammered out by the Communist Party and communicated to the masses”.[20] The refusal to turn the Dreadnought into a party journal saw Pankhurst expelled by the CPGB executive on 10 September 1921 – so as well as being one of the first to champion the Bolsheviks, she was also amongst the first to be expelled from the CPGB.
Pankhurst argued that the Dreadnought had to remain independent in order to present alternative perspectives and foster debate:
“The Workers’ Dreadnought is the only paper in this country which is alive to the controversies going on in the International Communist movement; it is the only paper through which the rank and file of the movement can even guess that there are such controversies. Such controversies are a sign of healthy development, through them the movement grows onward towards higher aims and broader horizons; by studying them, by taking part in them, the membership will develop in knowledge and political capacity.”[21]
While former Social-Democrats were being welcomed into the Comintern (undoubtedly, to ensure a presence in bourgeois Parliaments favourable to Soviet Russia), the left-wing communists were being purged. As Pankhurst noted:
“Let there be no mistake; I am not expelled for any tendency to compromise with capitalism; I am expelled for desiring freedom of propaganda for the Left Wing Communists, who oppose all compromise and seek to hasten faster and more directly onward to Communism.”[22]
The Dreadnought had “kept its readers in touch with worldwide political developments and had published the views of the most radical international communist groups… after Pankhurst’s expulsion from the CPGB the Dreadnought continued to publish information, analyses and debates about which most workers would have remained unaware had they relied on the pro-Comintern publications for enlightenment.”[23] These included articles and reports on anarchists and syndicalists alongside Rosa Luxemburg’s critical comments on the Bolsheviks[24], Gorter’s reply to Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism[25], Kollantai’s Workers’ Opposition platform[26] as well as articles on and by the Russian Workers’ Group and other left dissidents.
It should be noted that the break with Moscow did not happen overnight and pro-Russia articles did not abruptly stop. However, the path was clear and followed to its logical end.
Anti-Parliamentarian Communism
These developments lead to a wholescale re-evaluation of previous ideas, not least the uncritical support of the Bolshevik regime. After all, politics do not appear from nowhere and reflect the social position and class positions of those advocating them. Thus counter-revolutionary external policies would express, to some degree, counter-revolutionary tendencies internally (although we should not discount the legacy of social democratic orthodoxy on Bolshevik ideology and assumptions).
In terms of the two points of contention as regards the CPGB, namely parliamentarianism and affiliation to the Labour Party, the WSF critique was strong and proven right. The Dreadnought rightly argued that “participation in Parliamentary elections turns the attention of the people to Parliament, which will never emancipate them, away from the workshops where they should build the workers’ councils.”[27] It echoed long-standing anarchist arguments:
“Parliamentary action restricted workers to a subordinate and passive role as voters and left everything up to the ‘leaders’ in Parliament:
“Any attempt to use the Parliamentary system encourages among the workers the delusion that leaders can fight their battles for them. Not leadership but MASS ACTION IS ESSENTIAL… EVERY strike tends to strengthen revolutionary class-consciousness.”[28]
The CPGB use of elections did not see the party grow to a significant force while alternative class organisations like workers councils never appeared.
As regards the Labour Party, the WSF had experience to base its position on. Its federal structure gave considerable autonomy to local branches and individual members which allowed dissenting views to be expressed. This had led to the Poplar WSF affiliating “to the local Labour Party in 1919 and it was expelled when, on 20 July 1919, its members raised Sovietist ideas at a Labour Party mass meeting against Russian intervention.”[29] Thus the WSF’s “experiences belied Lenin’s belief that it would be possible to work as revolutionaries in the Labour Party.”[30]
Given this, Lenin’s position was unconvincing and reflected his distance from events. Likewise, his claims that because the BSP was affiliated to the Labour Party meant that the CPGB would be allowed to do so failed to recognise that if the Labour Party officialdom tolerated the BSP it was because it was social democratic and so limited its revolutionary activity to words whilst pursuing “political action”. Significantly, the CPGB was happy to compromise its own politics to secure affiliation, with the Dreadnought noting how the “Right-Wing Communist Party” has “definitely and in set terms accepted the Labour Party constitution” and had “abandoned the establishment of the Soviets as an essential part of its policy, and has thus gone back to the old BSP attitude in the days prior to Moscow’s intervention in its affairs.”[31] As warned by Pankhurst, affiliation proved to be a source for opportunism.
This allegedly key issue became moot as the Labour Party refused to allow the CPGB to affiliate and this refusal did not produce gains in membership and influence.[32] Lenin’s predictions as to the future of a Communist Party which embraced the lessons of Bolshevism never came to pass. This, of course, does not stop Leninists to this day proclaiming “Left-wing” Communism as a classic of Marxism which should be followed as being proven completely wrong apparently is of no concern.
The Dreadnought serialised Dutch anti-parliamentarian communist Herman Gorter’s reply to Lenin’s arguments. His “Open Letter” stressed the differences in the socio-economic conditions in Tsarist Russia compared to Western Europe, arguing that what may have been valid in the former was not automatically so in the later. The lack of success of Lenin’s recommendations would suggest this basic materialist analysis was right.[33]
The Dreadnought group also echoed long-standing anarchist arguments on the need to organise along the lines of the free society desired: “In the internal organisation of the Party we aim at the immediate application of Soviet principles… [and wish to] adopt the principle of RECALL for all comrades delegated to executive office… we seek to WORK FROM THE BOTTOM UP AND NOT FROM THE TOP DOWNWARDS”.[34] It also rejected nationalisation as an economic goal:
“The bulk of the work is done by hired servants whose status, in essentials, does not differ from those employed in Capitalist enterprises. They have no stake in the concern, no security of tenure, no voice in the management, no power to choose their work or the persons who are appointed to direct it.
“It is not thus that the socialised industries will be administered when Capitalism disappears.”[35]
The Dreadnought group linked up with dissident communists elsewhere, mainly with those who became known as Council Communists. The anti-parliamentarian communists in Germany had created their own party, the Communist Workers Party (KAPD), which was active in the General Workers’ Union (AAUD), an industrial organisation created during the German Revolution of 1918-19 in opposition to the reformist trade unions and inspired in part by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). By the winter of 1920-1921 the AAUD had 150,000 members while the KAPD claimed 40,000.
The Dreadnought group followed this. In October 1921 it announced its adherence to the Fourth International – the Communist Workers’ International (KAI) – which had been formed on the initiative of the KAPD after its expulsion from the Third International. February the following year saw the forming the Communist Workers’ Party (CWP) and the call for an All-Workers Revolutionary Union (AWRU) which was to organise on industrial unionist lines in July 1923. This had long been argued by Pankhurst:
“The workers councils, co-ordinated industrially and nationally along the lines of production and distribution, are the organs which are structurally fitted to give the workers greatest power in the control of industry. If that power is to be used to overthrow the present system, the councils, which together will form a One Big Union of workers’ committees in all industries, should be built, from the first, with the object of taking control.”[36]
She rejected the notion that these bodies had to await a revolutionary situation before being formed:
“Why do we advocate the Soviets of Workers’ Committees in the workshops before the revolution? Because they are a good fighting weapon, and a preparation for the Soviets after and during the revolution…
“The anti-Parliamentary Communist who does not want the Soviets of the workshop until the hour of crisis would leave the Trade Unions as the unchallenged leaders of the workers until the decisive hour when action is demanded. To do that would be fatal.”[37]
Neither the CWP or AWRU outlived 1923 while the AAUD and KAPD nearly disappeared in spite of initially having a mass base the British organisations did not. In this the AWRU repeated the experience of trying to build dual-unions on the IWW model attempted before the war.[38] The Dreadnought also supported the Unemployed Workers’ Organisation, reflecting the economic conditions of its last years.
As can be seen, the WSF (and the KAPD) raised against Lenin within the Third International the same arguments and alternatives that Bakunin and the first revolutionary anarchists had raised against Marx within the First – direct action and organisation on the economic terrain as against “political action” and pre-figuring the desired future society will fighting the current one.
The “Reversion to Capitalism” in Russia
Pankhurst and the WSF also re-evaluated the Russian Revolution. The catalyst for this was the passing of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in March 1921 which Pankhurst denounced as a “reversion” to capitalism. She rightly asked: “But is it not very sad to find the soviet government proceeding on the assumption more can be done by people who are working for their own private gain and employing wage slaves than by free workers coooperating on equal terms to supply common needs?”[39]
Context is needed. Part of the problem facing socialists in the initial years of the revolution was the lack of reliable information from Russia. This led to radicals from different schools seeing the realisation of their ideas in Russia. Thus syndicalists and Guild Socialists saw an industrial republic based on functional democracy being created. This can be seen when Pankhurst wrote in August 1918 that “everything is being Socialised… the most important point to emphasise is that the organisation of affairs is not centralised and that each workshop manages itself… The workshop committees control the industry”.[40] The reality was radically different, with the Bolsheviks imposing “one-man management” and a centralised economic structure based on the Glavki system developed under Tsarism – in short, state-capitalism.[41]
Initially, it was a case of blaming the NEP, viewing it as a “reversion to Capitalism [which] strikes at the root of the Soviet idea and destroys the functional status of the Soviets.”[42] However, this was accompanied by a deeper analysis which recognised that “[i]n Russia, as a matter of fact, the continued existence of the industrial unions is due to the fact that there is antagonism between the workers and those who are administering industry. In a theoretically correct Soviet community the workers, through their Soviets, which are indistinguishable from them, should administer. This has not been achieved in Russia.”[43] The need for workers’ control was seen as essential for a successful socialist revolution:
“The trend of the times supports the view that the Soviet Government made a serious blunder when it decided (and put its decision into practice) that ‘workers’ control of industry’ is only a slogan useful for securing the overthrow of the capitalist, and must be discarded once the workers have turned out the capitalist, in favour of management by an individual or committee appointed by some centralised authority.”[44]
In short, the Dreadnought argued “until the workers are organised industrially on Soviet lines, and are able to hold their own and control industry, a successful Soviet Communist revolution cannot be carried through, nor can Communism exist without that necessary condition”.[45] The rulers in Russia “pose now as the prophets of centralised efficiency, trustification, State control, and the discipline of the proletariat in the interests of increased production … 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 … State coercion.”[46] This was even identified with state-capitalism:
“The term communism was adopted by the Russian revolutionaries because the Fabians and other exponents of State Capitalism had appropriated the term Socialism and distorted its meaning and side-tracked the Socialist movement by drawing the red herrings of reformism across the trail. Now we find the Right-Wing Communists of the C.P.G.B. (Third International) are distorting the meaning of the term Communism in similar fashion.”[47]
“State Socialism”, she came to realise, “with its wages and salaries, its money system, banks and bureaucracy, is not really Socialism at all, but State Capitalism”.[48]
Before the “reversion” to capitalism, Pankhurst had also noted that “there are wages of many grades, still there are graduated food rations. The ‘responsible worker must have an adequate supply of food, or his work will suffer’, therefore if there is a shortage of food the ‘responsible workers’ must have a higher ration than the rest of the people; that is the argument… These are the old injustices, the old criminal errors of capitalism persisting under the reign of the Soviets.”[49] However, she did not delve deeper into this issue at that time to conclude the obvious, namely that capitalistic distribution implies capitalistic productive relationships.
Also of note was a review of Alexander Berkman’s 1921 pamphlet The Kronstadt Revolution which indicated that “the Kronstadt rebellion against the Russian Soviet Government was by no means a White Guard insurrection, but an uprising of sailors, workers, and peasants against Bolshevik bureaucracy, against the suppression of Left propaganda and freedom generally, and against the privileges and economic inequalities which have developed under the Bolshevik regime.” The Kronstadt movement “was not a fully conscious Communist one: it was a movement of the poor oppressed against their oppressor – unfortunately, in this case, the Soviet Government and the Soviet bourgeoisie.” If the rebels “adhered to the principle that no one may hire another for private gain, but apparently they still favoured production for profit on a small scale” then “the Soviet Government has re-established the hiring of labour and production for profit on a large scale.”[50] Yet before the NEP the worker was the hirling of the State and, as a consequence, exploited by the bureaucracy which in turn lead to privileges and economic inequalities.
Given this, the notion of a “revision” to capitalism cannot be maintained. Rather, it was a transformation of a state-capitalist regime to one with more features of market-capitalism. Capitalism had changed its form in Russia before the NEP rather than being abolished, an analysis which would have called into question the wishful thinking previously expressed and was unlikely to be embraced immediately although, as can be seen, this re-evaluation did increasingly take place.
This re-evaluation also extended to the soviets: “In the industrial centres where it might have been expected that the occupational basis of the Soviet would have been adhered to, the structure of the Russian Soviets was irregular from the theoretical standpoint. The Soviets, instead of being formed purely of workers in the various industries and activities of the community, were also of delegates of political parties, political groups formed by foreigners in Russia Trades Councils, Trade Unions and co-operative societies.”[51] This, of course, is part of the issue for it had been the Bolshevik Party leadership which had seized power in Russia, not the soviets. As one Dreadnought contributor suggested:
“The realisation of Communism, i.e., not Communist Partyism, but the common-ownership and use of the means of production, and the common, enjoyment of the products, still remains a problem. which will have to be solved by the creative genius of the people freely organising themselves; or not at all… But the [methods of the] bureaucratic revolutionaries … are doomed to failure by their very nature. The lesson we should learn is to spread the ideal of Communism as widely and clearly as possible, to make Communists, that is, people understanding and imbued with a passion for the attainment of that ideal, not members of parties obsessed before all else with the desire to build up a strong centralised party to whose leadership the masses shall be subordinated. That would only be to erect one more obstacle to be overthrown before the people can really become free economically, and morally.”[52]
In many ways, Pankhurst’s evolution reflected that of Emma Goldman. Like Pankhurst, Goldman supported the Bolsheviks primarily for their consistent anti-war position and because she considered them as applying anarchist tactics.[53] Both had their illusions shattered and both re-evaluated their previous positions, although Goldman had the advantage of spending longer in Russia than Pankhurst making her Soviet Russia As I Saw It far less informed and so far less useful than Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia.
While its analysis of developments in Russia was confused and incomplete, it should not be forgotten that the Dreadnought group “had to form its views on the spot, without any… advantages [of hindsight]. In retrospect it is relatively easy to argue that the Dreadnought group’s view of Russian society during 1917-21, and the policies the group supported during those years, were mistaken; that at no time after 1917 was anything remotely resembling communism established in Russia”.[54] However, that they had recognised that something had gone wrong and linked it to the socio-economic relations the regime had created are significant.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
These developments were facilitated by the fact that Pankhurst “was not and would not claim to be a Marxist theoretician.”[55] This was obscured somewhat by her terminology reflecting the British socialist movement being predominantly Marxist as were the Bolsheviks. Her use of the term “dictatorship of the proletariat” shows this.
Initially, the Bolshevik rule, the “dictatorship of the Communist Party”, was equated to an elected government, as in “the dictatorship of the Liberal, Conservative, or Coalition Party, whichever happens to form the Government in power in the British Parliament” or other “strong Governments with large majorities.” She believed that the Communists had won its position by means of fair elections and that “the Russian people send to their Soviets, as they have doing steadily, a majority of Communist Party delegates, it is natural and inevitable that the Communists should control the Government.”[56] In this she reflected a common, if incorrect, perspective that Bertrand Russell noted at the time:
“Friends of Russia here [in Britain] think of the dictatorship of the proletariat as merely a new form of representative government, in which only working men and women have votes, and the constituencies are partly occupational, not geographical. They think that ‘proletariat’ means ‘proletariat,’ but ‘dictatorship’ does not quite mean ‘dictatorship.’ This is the opposite of the truth. When a Russian Communist speak of a dictatorship, he means the word literally, but when he speaks of the proletariat, he means the word in a Pickwickian sense. He means the ‘class-conscious’ part of the proletariat, i.e. the Communist Party. He includes people by no means proletarian (such as Lenin and Tchicherin) who have the right opinions, and he excludes such wage-earners as have not the right opinions, whom he classifies as lackeys of the bourgeoisie.”[57]
Unlike Russell, who recognised “[n]o conceivable system of free elections would give majorities to the Communists, either in the town or country”[58], it took longer for Pankhurst to reach the same conclusion but it is to her credit that she did as many others did not. Pankhurst also used the term simply to mean the defence of the revolution:
“The dictatorship of the proletariat is a much misused phrase; when Communism is in being there will be no proletariat, as we understand the term today, and no dictatorship.
“The dictatorship, so far as it is genuine and defensible, is the suppression by Workers’ Soviets of capitalism and the attempt to re-establish it. This should be a temporary state of war. Such a period will inevitably occur, we believe, because we do not believe that the possessors of wealth will submit to the overthrow of capitalism without resistance. On the contrary, [we] believe the owners will fight to preserve capitalism by every means in their power.”[59]
Given that her vision of revolution was a social one, in which “the Soviets, or workers’ occupational councils, will form the administrative machinery for supplying the needs of the people in Communist society; they will also make the revolution by seizing control of all the industries and services of the community”[60], there would be no proletariat. Moreover, the former proletariat would hardly be “dictating” to the former capitalists and landlords as these would have no role or position in society necessitating it – refusing to obey the orders of those formerly in power hardly amounts to dictatorship. As she later explained:
“One phrase has crept into the manifesto of the Unemployed Organisation which requires discussion. It is a phrase of which all Communists have made use, both of late and also in the days of Marx, Engels and Bachunin [sic]. We refer to the term ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ This in its original use meant the rigid suppression of the middle and upper classes in so far as they may endeavour to resist the coming of socialism and to combat the popular will.
“Latterly, under the inspiration of Russian bureaucrats, the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ has been used to justify the dictatorship of a party clique of officials over their own party members and over the people at large. So far as the dictatorship has been carried that the parties submitting to it have become utterly sterile as instruments of education and action. In Russia the dictatorship has robbed the revolution of all it fought for; it has banished Communism and workers’ control.
“Liberty is an essential part of the Communist revolution. We must not sacrifice it to the ambitions of would-be dictators.”[61]
Yet Marx and Engels had meant a centralised, indivisible, top-down regime[62] which Bakunin correctly predicted would become a dictatorship of the party leaders. This indeed came to pass in the Bolshevik regime which had become a de facto party dictatorship by mid-1918 – using specialised, traditionally organised armed forces separate from the people (Red Army, Cheka, etc.). This experience was generalised for all revolutions by leading Bolshevik Zinoviev at the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920:
“All questions are, in reality, under the control of the Party. As a matter of fact, men like Kautsky say to us: ‘You have established the dictatorship of the Party instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat.’ If this is said to our discredit, it is entirely off the mark. We have established the dictatorship of the proletariat because the dictatorship of the Communist Party is the expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat… It is evident that the business of the working class should be managed by its best elements. Consequently .the dictatorship of the proletariat is, at the same time, also the dictatorship of the Communist Party.”[63]
Unsurprisingly, given her previous views, Pankhurst rightly rejected this position and the terminology which excused it. The paper showed that this mentality had been exported from Moscow given that “to the officials of the CPGB the Soviets mean dictatorship. They have no conception of a free Communist life in which Soviet workers in the industries will administer the production and distribution of the social product.” [64] One Dreadnought contributor noted the long-standing nature of Pankhurst’s new position:
“We were told that however much we might object to government of any sort, on principle, government in the form of a dictatorship of the proletariat was necessary to bring about the transition from Capitalism to free Communism, and that such a dictatorship, being proletarian, would be shorn of the objectionable qualities of other forms of government. Some of us never assented to this, and the trend of things seems to show we were right when we maintained that the dictatorship of the proletariat could only amount to a dictatorship over the proletariat of an official class, which would partake of the common nature of all officialism, even if some or all of those officials should be drawn from or voted for by the proletariat itself. We maintained that bureaucracy never proved the transition to anything save increased bureaucracy, or towards the revolt of a people which should discover that those aspirations towards free Communism which some have never relinquished, others have newly awakened to, are yet far from realisation.”[65]
Furthermore, when Marx and Engels used the term the proletariat was a minority class in every country bar Britain – the vast majority were peasants and artisans. Bakunin, rightly, also opposed it for this reason. Pankhurst likewise noted this obvious issue:
“In spite of the time-honoured character, we must affirm that, in our view, the use of the term ‘dictatorship’ is responsible for much confusion and misunderstanding…
“No reasonable person believes that what was required in Russia was that the relatively small number of industrial workers in Russia should act as the dictators – in the sense that the Czar and Napoleon were dictators – over the peasant masses of Russia”[66]
As with Bakunin, this opposition to the “dictatorship of the proletariat” did not mean rejecting the defence of a revolution – quite the reverse as it clearly aimed at protecting the revolution from threats from within caused by the dangers of centralised concentrations of power in a few hands.
While Pankhurst initially utilised the term under the influence of the apparently successful revolution in Russia, she was sufficiently critical to see its problems and how its application had hindered and undermined the revolution. In this Pankhurst has the advantage over council communists like Pannekoek who kept to his Marxist heritage and continued to use the term in spite of its ambiguities and contradictions.[67]
The End of the Dreadnought
The socio-economic context the anti-Parliamentarians faced in their last years was difficult and explains the disappearance of the Dreadnought group:
“The number of groups who remained outside the Communist Party and the level of their activity has been, perhaps, underestimated… But the prestige of the Russian Revolution was not with them and this, taken together with a lack of subsidy [from Moscow] and sudden changes in the economic and political situation, was to make their work well nigh impossible. For the post-war boom collapsed suddenly. By the end of 1920 there were three quarters of a million people unemployed; by June 1921, two million. By the end of 1921, wage cuts had been forced on six million workers. There were defensive strikes, bitterly fought. But the mood had changed; people who in 1919 had been shouting for revolution were now looking for work… The slump gave the government its chance to take its revenge — or to “crack down on subversive elements” if that version is preferred…
“Where the government repression could not do the job the economic depression was more effective. Revolutionary morale dropped catastrophically. Willie Gallagher was later to say that whereas in 1918 100,000 people had marched on May Day in Glasgow, in 1924 only 100 could be mustered. The effect of this on the revolutionary left outside the Communist Party was predictable. The Workers’ Dreadnought, for example, which survived the repression and the jailing of Sylvia Pankhurst, quietly folded in 1924”[68]
Unemployment increased from 1.5 per cent in the autumn of 1920 to 18 per cent by December 1921. There was “a decline in engineering workers’ militancy, reflected in the downwards trend in the statistics for strikes in the metal, engineering and shipbuilding industries” with the number of workers striking in 1923 a mere 15% of that in 1919 in these industries, indeed across all industries.[69] This economic context is often ignored when it is claimed that the later Dreadnought did not cover industrial disputes as much as previously.[70]
The Dreadnought finally disappeared in 1924, but its importance is clear. Just as before the break with Moscow it had published articles by leading Bolsheviks (Russian or otherwise), the pages of the paper now published articles by leading anti-Parliamentarian Communists while articles by Anarchists started to appear in increasing numbers. This, along with critiques of the Bolsheviks and articles on developments in Russia (including repression of dissident revolutionaries to the left of the regime), meant that the Dreadnought was the premier source for material on and about what became known as the “ultra-left”.
It also shows that anarchist conclusions can and are drawn from the class struggle even by those who originally aimed at electoral reform and later embraced the Bolshevik Myth.
Pankhurst and Anarchism
The links with Pankhurst’s “free communism” with anarchism are clear as “[t]here shall be no State, Government or Parliament” in the future society while the “organisation of production, distribution and transport shall be by those who do the work, organised on a voluntary autonomous workshop basis.”[71] “The object of the Workers’ Council,” she stressed, “is not to govern a race of slaves, but to supply the needs of free people.”[72]
Likewise her awareness of the need to eliminate economic hierarchies along with political ones: “The Soviet is constructed along the lines of production and distribution; it replaces not merely Parliament and the present local governing bodies, but also the capitalists, managerial staffs and employees of today with all their ramifications.”[73] Her support for anarchist tactics – direct action and extra-parliamentary organisation – has already been shown while she considered anarchists as part of the revolutionary movement:
“When the Revolution comes, it is the revolutionary groups within the workshops which will make it – not the N. U. R., the Workers’ Union, the Dockers’ Union, and the rest, but those spontaneously-gathering workshop groups engineered by the conscious propagandists who maintain the Communist and Anarchist organisations and guided by the Communist and Anarchist organisations themselves, if any of them are strong enough to lead in the crisis.”[74]
When the CPGB declared a boycott of anarchist Guy Aldred’s Bakunin Press, the Dreadnought announced its bookshop would be stocking its publications.[75] It re-printed Dutch anarchist Domela Nieuwenhuis’s 1894 pamphlet Socialism in Danger which had exposed the degeneration of Social-Democracy produced by its tactics of electioneering[76] as well as numerous articles by Kropotkin – including “Revolutionary Essays” (originally Revolutionary Studies from 1892)[77], “The Wage System” [78] and two chapters of Words of a Rebel[79], amongst others. It reported anarchist and syndicalist news, including the resolutions of an International Syndicalist Conference in Berlin.[80] She wrote a two-part review of Proudhon’s General Idea of the Revolution when Freedom Press published it in 1923.[81] The Dreadnought also reprinted “The Truth About Machno” from an IWW pamphlet[82] while Pankhurst spoke at a meeting “in aid of the Russian Anarchists” on 27 July 1923 “[t]o protest against the imprisonment of our comrade NESTOR MACHNO by the Polish Government and against the Russian Government’s demand for his transfer to Russia.”[83] Undoubtedly, the existence of other anarchist papers – such as Freedom – meant that the Dreadnought did not publish more.
Little wonder anarchist historian John Quail noted how the Dreadnought had ended “interestingly enough on a progressively anarchist note.”[84] Another historian likewise summarised that “[t]hough Pankhurst seems never to refer to herself as an anarchist, the libertarian emphasis in the later Dreadnought was strong” and “[n]otable features of the later years of the Dreadnought are the increased approval given to libertarian and/or anarchist enthusiasts for soviet democracy and the early attention given to the rise of fascism. To create a ‘vision of Communism’ in the minds of the average person, no better books could be found, said the paper [on 19 April 1924], than Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread and Morris’s News from Nowhere.”[85] Yet anarchistic elements had existed for some time, with the BSP’s The Call denouncing Pankhurst’s “anarchist views and action” in July 1920.[86]
Clearly Pankhurst had come a long way from her suffragette days and her anti-parliamentarian-communism had made her appreciative of those who had advocated that position for decades beforehand.
Conclusions
After the end of the Dreadnought in 1924, Pankhurst moved away from anti-parliamentarian communism into anti-fascism – she was one of the first to report on the fascist danger in Italy – and anti-imperialism. Given that the evolution of her politics reflected the wider social struggle, with the decline in working class self-activity came a corresponding decline in her perspectives. This situation is not limited to her and inflicts libertarian politics in general – the recurring issue is one of sustaining and growing libertarian organisations and ideas in a climate when its basis of mass struggle is limited.
As with the pre-war syndicalist revolt, Pankhurst advocated two industrial strategies – working within the existing unions to transform them (“boring from within”) and then dual-unionism, the building of new industrial unionism (as the prelude of soviets). Neither approach produced the hoped for results. Her advocacy of community soviets was innovative and clearly drew upon her suffragette activism in the East-End of London, reflecting the fact that not all working class people were employed (housewives, most obviously). While her arguments for these may have taken the current sexual division of labour as a given, this simply reflected the situation she and her comrades faced and was not considered immutable.
What is of interest for anarchists is the evolution of her communism and the break with – and subsequent re-evaluation of – of Bolshevism. Like the rest of the left, Pankhurst had little reliable information on the new regime in Moscow and, like others, projected her own hopes and aspirations upon it. Thus her support for the Bolsheviks – like that of many anarchists – was based on the false assumption that a radical socio-economic self-managed federalist system had been introduced, based on workers’ councils of elected, mandated and recallable delegates as well as workers’ control of production. As more details of the reality of the regime became available, at around the same time as Bolshevik attempts to impose their favoured tactics in the International Communist movement, Pankhurst had a choice – adjust her ideas on communism or stick to her revolutionary principles. She rightly did the latter and, as a consequence, opened her paper to dissident revolutionary ideas – council communism and anarchism. This makes her relevant today as her vision of communism in terms of means and ends remains appealing.
While an early supporter of “Bolshevism”, unlike many on the British left she had not been a Marxist (being associated with the ILP tradition rather than the BSP one). As Herman Gorter suggested, “our Comrade Sylvia Pankhurst, who from temperament, instinct and experience, not so much perhaps from deep study, but by mere chance, was such an excellent champion of Left Wing Communism”[87]. This meant she did not have the ideological legacy of partyism, parliamentarianism and statism which even many of the pre-war syndicalists had. As such, she was able to eventually see the limitations and contradictions of such shibboleths as “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. Hence her re-evaluation of the use of the term after her break with Moscow and the awareness that without workers’ control in the community and workplace then one class system had replaced another. If, as one of her biographer’s suggest, her “grasp of Marxist theory… was weak”[88] this was an advantage as she was unable to rationalise away the counter-revolutionary nature of the Bolsheviks by muttering about dialectics.
Pankhurst must be praised for her willingness to question and reject the Bolshevik position when so many of her contemporaries in the British left did not. She recounted the rationale of the others when she wrote in 1921 that “I was loathe to break with those who had placed the Soviets in power without great consideration. I felt they had been through the fire of battle, they had the courage to rise and had at least achieved something, whereas we were only talking still.”[89] This perspective resulted in thousands of socialists ignoring their own experiences in favour of following Moscow, first under Lenin and then Stalin. The Bolshevik Myth – to use Alexander Berkman’s term – was simply too strong for too many.
Pankhurst is of continued importance as she shows how social struggle radicalises, turning her from a Suffragette, to Socialist, to Anti-Parliamentary Communist. Likewise, her strength of mind to compare the reality of Bolshevism to what initially attracted her to it and reject it as non-communist is inspiring, showing that experience developed politics can be mightier than ideology. Her critique of “Right Wing” Communism in Britain and Russia remain valid, as do her tactics and vision of a future society. As such, anarchists today should ensure Pankhurst is remembered as more than a suffragette or an early supporter of Bolshevism.
End Notes
[1] “Verbatim Report of Sylvia Pankhurst’s Appeal”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 15 January 1921.
[2] Iain McKay, “Tom Mann and British Syndicalism”, Black Flag Anarchist Review Volume 1 Number 3 (Autumn 2021).
[3] Barbara Winslow, Sylvia Pankhurst: sexual politics and political activism (London: UCL Press, 1996), 107.
[4] E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: an intimate account of persons and ideals (London, 1978), 401-2.
[5] Winslow, 20.
[6] Quoted by Winslow, 23.
[7] Winslow, 23-4.
[8] Mary Davis, Sylvia Pankhurst: a life in radical politics (London: Pluto, 1999), 29.
[9] E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our Paper”, The Woman’s Dreadnought, 8 March 1914.
[10] E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The New Order”, The Woman’s Dreadnought, 8 January 1916.
[11] Les Garner, “Suffragism and Socialism: Sylvia Pankhurst 1903-1914”, Sylvia Pankhurst: from artist to anti-fascist (Basingstoke : Macmillan, 1992), edited by Ian Bullock and Richard Pankhurst, 73.
[12] Winslow 78; Davis, 73.
[13] Davis, 55.
[14] Winslow, 85.
[15] E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Parliament Doomed”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 2 November 1918.
[16] E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “What About Russia Now?”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 26 January 1918.
[17] Winslow, 148.
[18] E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “The Soviets of the Street. An Appeal to Working Women”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 27 March 1920.
[19] Quoted by Winslow, 161.
[20] Sylvia Pankhurst, “Watch Your Leaders”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 30 July 1921.
[21] Sylvia Pankhurst, “Freedom of Discussion”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 17 September 1921.
[22] Sylvia Pankhurst, “Freedom of Discussion”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 17 September 1921.
[23] Mark Shipway, Anti-parliamentary Communism: The Movement for Workers’ Councils in Britain, 1917-45 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 107.
[24] Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution: A critical appreciation”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 13 May 1922 to 17 June 1922.
[25] Herman Gorter, “Open Letter to Comrade Lenin”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 12 March 1921 to 11 June 1921.
[26] Alexandra Kollantay, “Russian Workers v. Soviet Government”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 22 April 1922 to 27 May 1922 and “Workers’ Opposition”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 3 June 1922 to 19 August 1922.
[27] “Soviets or Parliament?”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 1 December 1923.
[28] The National Organising Council, “An Open Letter to the Delegates of the Unity Convention”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 31 July 1920.
[29] Shipway, 63-4.
[30] Winslow, 160.
[31] “The Outlook: Right-Wing Communists and Labour Party”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 29 July 1922.
[32] It should be noted that the CPGB acted in an identical manner with regards the anti-parliamentarians as the Labour Party did with it, being unwilling to tolerate an organised faction arguing for ideas at odds with the accepted policies. Why the CPGB thought the Labour Party would act differently than it had is hard to explain but following Bolshevik recommendations clearly took priority.
[33] Of course, this perspective also allows its adherents to maintain that Marxists had been right to pursue parliamentarianism and (reformist) trade unionism in the decades before 1914. Yet this overlooks that this created the very institutions that the new tactics had to combat (for example, in Germany and Italy, the Social Democrats helped undermine the revolutions – in Germany, they worked with the counter-revolutionary forces to crush the rebels.). As such, Gorter was wrong to suggest that it was only the different socio-economic conditions that disproved Lenin’s analysis. In fact, his tactics were inappropriate in Russia as well, just as social democratic tactics were inappropriate after the 1870s because they undermined working-class direct action and solidarity as anarchists had long argued.
[34] The National Organising Council, “An Open Letter to the Delegates of the Unity Convention”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 31 July 1920.
[35] “Our View: Structural Parliament’s Incapacity”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 13 January 1923.
[36] “Communism and its Tactics”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 4 February 1922.
[37] Sylvia Pankhurst, “Industrial Organisation”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 7 July 1923.
[38] A network of militants within a given industry working within and outwith the unions, as suggested in the Dreadnought at other times, is a different matter.
[39] Quoted by Winslow, 175.
[40] E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Socialism in the Making”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 3 August 1918.
[41] Maurice Brinton, “The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control”, For Workers’ Power: The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton (Chico/Edinburgh: AK Press, 2020).
[42] Slyvia Pankhurst, “Communism and Its Tactics”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 24 December 1921.
[43] Sylvia Pankhurst, “Communism and its Tactics”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 21 January 1922.
[44] Sylvia Pankhurst, “Communism and its Tactics”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 4 February 1922.
[45] “An Appeal from the Russian Workers’ Opposition”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 15 July 1922.
[46] “Our View”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 31 May 1924.
[47] “Our View: Communism or State-Capitalism”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 1 February 1923.
[48] “What Socialism is Not”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 11 August 1923.
[49] Sylvia Pankhurst, “Freedom of Discussion”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 17 September 1921.
[50] The Workers’ Dreadnought, 30 December 1922.
[51] Sylvia Pankhurst, “Communism and its Tactics”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 24 December 1921. This, incidentally, echoed the position of Russian Anarcho-Syndicalists. (Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists [Oakland/Edinburgh: AK Press, 2006], 190)
[52] A. Ironie, “How is Communism to be Realised?”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 17 September 1921.
[53] Goldman, like Pankhurst, had also noted before the war the anti-labour nature of mainstream (bourgeois) women’s suffrage movement, although they had differing views on whether pursuing women’s suffrage as a reform was a good use of time, resources and energy.
[54] Shipway, 55.
[55] Davis, 56.
[56] Sylvia Pankhurst, “Soviet Russia as I Saw it in 1920”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 23 April 1921.
[57] Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1949), 26-7.
[58] Russell, 40-1.
[59] Sylvia Pankhurst, “Communism and its Tactics”, The Workers Dreadnought, 10 December 1921.
[60] Sylvia Pankhurst, “Communism and its Tactics”, The Workers Dreadnought, 4 February 1922
[61] “Our View: The Unemployed Workers’ Organisation”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 7 July 1923.
[62] As shown in the “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany”” issued in March 1848 and the “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League” made in 1850, for example.
[63] Communist International, The second congress of the Communist International: proceedings of Petrograd session of July 17th, and of Moscow sessions of July 19th-August 7th, 1920 (America: Publishing Office of the Communist International, 1921), 59.
[64] “The Outlook: Right-Wing Communists and Labour Party”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 29 July 1922.
[65] A. Ironie, “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 17 September 1921.
[66] E. Sylvia Pankhurst, “Third and Fourth Internationals”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 2 February 1924.
[67] Hence the repeated articles by Leninists having to explain what “the dictatorship of the proletariat” really means, namely a workers’ democracy (in the sense of electing their party to government). These articles do not explain why, in that case, the Bolshevik regime and those who equated it with “the dictatorship of the party” should be defended as socialist.
[68] John Quail, The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History of the British Anarchists (London: Freedom Press, 2017), 328-9.
[69] Shipway, 88-9.
[70] Of course, funding from Moscow ensured the survival of the CPGB. As one CPGB functionary later “admitted that, had the Communist Party not received big financial shots in the arm, it would have been reduced and probably gone out of existence within a year or so of formation”. (Winslow, 178).
[71] “Our View”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 6 October 1923.
[72] “What Socialism is Not”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 11 August 1923.
[73] Sylvia Pankhurst, “Communism and its Tactics”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 24 December 1921.
[74] Sylvia Pankhurst, “Our Point of View”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 24 September 1921.
[75] The Workers’ Dreadnought, 17 December 1921.
[76] The Workers’ Dreadnought, 29 January 1921 to 12 March 1921.
[77] The Workers’ Dreadnought, 26 November 1921 to 11 February 1921.
[78] The Workers’ Dreadnought, 25 February to 18 March 1922.
[79] “The Bourgeois Socialist”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 16 June 1923; “The Break-Up of the State”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 18 August 1923.
[80] “International. Syndicalist Conference”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 5 August 1922.
[81] “The Views of Proudhon”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 5 April and 12 April 1924; reprinted in Black Flag Anarchist Review Volume 5 Number 1 (Spring 2025).
[82] The Workers’ Dreadnought, 2 February 1922.
[83] The Workers’ Dreadnought, 28 July 1923; “Save Nestor Makhno”, Freedom, August 1923.
[84] Quail, 329. It is significant that Freedom informed its readers of the Dreadnought’s demise and that “a new and enlarged monthly series” would soon start. (Freedom, July-August 1924)
[85] Ian Bullock, Romancing the revolution: the myth of Soviet democracy and the British Left (Edmonton, AB: AU Press, 2011), 305, 343.
[86] Quoted by Bullock, 229.
[87] Herman Gorter, “Open Letter to Comrade Lenin”, The Workers’ Dreadnought, 23 April 1921.
[88] Davis, 82.
[89] Quoted by Winslow, 158.