Repeatedly imprisoned for the cause, Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the leading figures in the struggle for women’s suffrage in Britain. What many don’t know is that Pankhurst also played an important role in the early history of British communism.
On November 2, 1920, Britain’s best-known revolutionary, Sylvia Pankhurst, was found guilty of sedition at London’s Mansion House courtrooms and jailed for six months. She remained unbowed.
“Although I have been a socialist all my life, I have tried to palliate the capitalist system,” she told the court. “But all my experience showed that it was useless trying to palliate an impossible system. This is a wrong system and has got to be smashed. I would give my life to smash it.”
Sylvia was no stranger to state repression. Over the previous decade, she had been jailed numerous times and tortured by force-feeding while imprisoned because of her role as a campaigner for women’s suffrage. Between June 1913 and June 1914 alone, she was arrested ten times, going on hunger and thirst strike each time in protest at the refusal of the British authorities to treat the suffragettes as political prisoners.
This time, she had been jailed not as a suffragette but as a communist revolutionary and staunch defender of Soviet Russia. The story of how she moved toward this position and the role she played in the early history of British communism is an important and neglected episode in the history of radical politics in Britain.
Poor Men and Poorer Women
Born the second daughter of British suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst in 1882, Sylvia was a trained artist who designed the logo of her mother’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), as the suffragettes were formally known. However, her years of activism and experiences of the US trade union movement in 1911–12 led her to advocate for working-class women rather than pursue what she saw as her mother’s narrower orientation to upper-class women.
In October 1912, she founded the East London Federation of the WSPU to unite the fight for women’s suffrage with local trade union struggles. “Behind every poor man is an even poorer woman,” she told a huge audience gathered to support workers involved in the Dublin lockout at London’s Royal Albert Hall in November 1913.
That same month, she founded the “People’s Army,” an embryonic paramilitary organization inspired by James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army. It trained members to use firearms “so that men and women may join to fight for freedom, and in order that they may learn to cope with the repressive methods of the government servants.”
This was too much for the leaders of the WSPU, which expelled her and the East London Federation in February 1914. Unbowed, Sylvia responded by launching and editing a new weekly newspaper, the Woman’s Dreadnought.
When World War I broke out in August 1914, Sylvia and Melvina Walker, wife of an East End docker, led the federation’s opposition to it. Although the Dreadnought was initially wary about openly denouncing the war, it nevertheless stood out against nationalist jingoism. Just two weeks into the war, Walker made the following declaration:
British transport workers — trade union men — are called upon to shoot down German transport workers, and it is not so very long ago, in the time of our industrial war — I mean the great Dock Strike — when we were fighting the large ship owners, we received with joy the news that these same men had sent us £5,000 to help in our fight. . . . Our duty at this time is to impress upon all that the working class do not want war.
Ireland and Russia
The federation also supported the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. The first issue of the Dreadnought following the Rising carried a front-page article with the headline “The Irish Rebellion: Our View.” It began with the following words: “Justice can but make one reply to the Irish rebellion and that is to demand that Ireland shall be allowed to govern herself.” The next week, it became the only left-wing British newspaper to carry an eyewitness report from Dublin, titled “Scenes from the Irish Rebellion,” by Patricia Lynch, an eighteen-year-old federation member who managed to evade military restrictions.
Sylvia continued to campaign for Irish independence throughout the war. In March 1918, the Dreadnought condemned Arthur Henderson, a British Labour politician who had joined the wartime government:
Arthur Henderson was a member of the English cabinet that doomed James Connolly, a wounded prisoner of war, to death. He was in the government that strove to partition Ireland. English Labour must get itself right with Ireland, imitate its zeal and take flame from its devotion.
As it moved further to the left, the East London Federation transformed itself into the Women’s Suffrage Federation (WSF) in 1916. When the February Revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, an editorial in the Dreadnought saw Sylvia explain the situation as follows: “At present there are virtually two governments in Russia — the Provisional Government appointed by the Duma and the Council of Labour Deputies, which is responsible to the elected representatives of the workers and the soldiers.”
By June, the paper was firmly on the side of the Bolsheviks, on the grounds that they wanted to “establish a Socialist system of organisation and industry in Russia, before Russian capitalism, which is as yet in its infancy, gains power and becomes more difficult than at present to overthrow.” At the end of September, Workers’ Dreadnought — as the Woman’s Dreadnought had been renamed in July 1917 — reported that it was “a cause for great satisfaction” that the Bolsheviks had won a majority in the Petrograd Soviet.
Sylvia described the followers of Vladimir Lenin as “the international socialists who recognise that this is a capitalist war and demand an immediate peace, and who desire to establish in Russia not a semi-democratic government and the capitalist system such as we have here in England but a socialist state.” The WSF nailed its colors firmly to the mast of the October Revolution: “Our eager hopes are for the speedy success of the Bolsheviks of Russia: may they open the door which leads to freedom for the people of all lands.”
British Communism
In June 1918, the final links with the suffragettes were abandoned when the Women’s Socialist Federation renamed itself the Workers’ Socialist Federation. By now, it had twenty-two branches across Britain, including Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, and Mid-Rhondda in the heart of the South Wales coalfield.
Sylvia and the WSF were also the instigators of the People’s Russian Information Bureau (PRIB). This brought together Britain’s Marxist parties, the rank-and-file London Workers’ Committee, and railworkers to distribute pamphlets and leaflets countering anti-Soviet propaganda. Its weekly bulletin carried news from the Russian Civil War, reports on developments in Soviet society, and extracts from Russian revolutionary newspapers. It also distributed Vladimir Lenin’s Are You a Trade Unionist? An Appeal to British Workers.
At its first conference in July 1918, the PRIB assembled more than two hundred delegates from a wide variety of organizations. In November 1918, a mass rally at a packed Royal Albert Hall in London saw Labour Party leaders and trade union officials call for British troops to be withdrawn from Russia, where they had intervened in support of the White counterrevolutionaries.
At the start of 1919, the WSF’s Harry Pollitt, the future Communist Party leader, played a key role in setting up the Hands Off Russia committee. In the summer of 1920, this committee would be at the forefront of the mass campaign to stop the export of British military supplies to Poland for its war against the young Soviet Republic.
Pankhurst’s WSF were not the only British Marxists who supported the Bolsheviks. Early in 1918, she had been approached for unity talks by the British Socialist Party, the oldest ostensibly Marxist party in Britain. But Sylvia was opposed to joining the Labour Party and to standing in parliamentary elections, two key planks of the BSP program, and talks broke down.
The formation of the Communist International in March 1919 led to renewed pressure for revolutionary unity in Britain. In July, Sylvia wrote to Lenin asking for his “views of action upon the parliamentary field,” because she felt “the idea of running parliamentary candidates” to be “repugnant to the revolutionary industrial worker.”
Lenin sympathized with her viewpoint but did not share it: “I am personally convinced that to renounce participation in the parliamentary elections is a mistake on the part of the revolutionary workers of Britain.” Anticipating the arguments of his soon-to-be-published pamphlet Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, he told her that an anti-parliamentarian stance showed “a lack of revolutionary experience.”
An Agitator’s Speech
Even with Lenin’s intervention, unity talks eventually broke down. Frustrated, Sylvia refused to participate in the founding conference of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in July 1920. Instead, she changed the name of the WSF to the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International).
There was an attempt to bridge the gap that summer at the Second Congress of the Communist International in Moscow. Sylvia traveled to Russia, hidden on a Norwegian fisherman’s boat, and reached the congress as it was in session. This was “in spite of the precautions of the Norwegian government to intercept her,” as a British intelligence report rather disappointedly noted.
From the congress floor, she spoke against electoral support for or affiliation with the Labour Party. Her contribution, according to veteran French revolutionary Alfred Rosmer, “was suitable for a public meeting rather than a congress; it was an agitator’s speech.”
Lenin’s tactical recommendations, calling for affiliation with the Labour Party and participation in parliamentary elections, won over most of the British delegates who had previously rejected them. Although Sylvia remained opposed, when she returned to Britain, she participated fully in new unity talks, and eventually the WSF merged with the CPGB in January 1921.
The merger didn’t work out. Sylvia distrusted the CPGB leaders, who had little time for her either. In July 1921, the Dreadnought criticized CPGB members on London’s Poplar local council for cutting payments to unemployed workers. The party ordered her to hand over control of the Dreadnought, but she refused, and in September 1921 she was expelled from the CPGB.
She went on to align herself with the ultraleft German Communist Workers’ Party and its call for a new communist international, but became an increasingly isolated figure on the Marxist left. Less than three years later, both the Dreadnought and her organization ceased to exist.
Sylvia abandoned revolutionary politics and dedicated the rest of her life to the fight against fascism and imperialism. In particular, she was a strong advocate for the independence of Ethiopia as it was occupied by Italy and then Britain during the 1930s and ’40s. She died in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa in 1960, where she is buried.
It would be a mistake to view Sylvia Pankhurst’s engagement with revolutionary politics as an aberration. Nor is it correct, as some recent biographers have done, to see her support for Bolshevism as just another episode in her support for progressive causes.
Her fight for women’s liberation and her opposition to World War I led her to the understanding that working-class revolution was the only permanent way to end all injustice. She fought heroically against the British state and uncompromisingly defended the October Revolution. For this, Sylvia Pankhurst should be honored by all those who today are fighting against the tyranny and global oppression of capitalism.