Introduction to the Interview with Sylvia Pankhurst on the Situation in England

This article was published in Il Soviet, organ of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party, in Naples in year II, number 42 on 20^th October, 1919

The following article, an interview with Sylvia Pankhurst for our journal Il Soviet, not only gives the views of Pankhurst of the situation in England at that time, but also gives the reader the opportunity to compare the communist movements in Britain and Italy. This comparison can be derived also from the reading of the preceding one on the history of the Italian Left.

The interview lists the main organisations involved in the formation of a Communist Party: Socialist Labour Party, British Socialist Party, Workers Socialist Federation and the South Wales Socialist Society. The SLP was the longest existing organisation as a definitive socialist one as far as tradition and agitation was concerned. The BSP, continuing the Hyndman tradition, tended towards conservative policies and chauvinism. Numerically larger through a paper membership, often with a dual membership: some members of the BSP returned to their branches for involvement in elections, whilst also in bodies such as the SLP and WSF for economic struggles. The WSF, originating in the women’s movement (a split off from the Suffragette movement in taking up the interests of working class women, rather than women in general), was now an organisation embracing the interests of working-class men and women. The SWSS was mainly confined to the miners in South Wales.

The two issues which dominated the discussions on the formation of the CP in Britain where that of Parliamentarism and the issue of affiliation to the Labour Party. The intensity of debate and conflict often leads to the taking up of extreme views on such matters. The holding of abstentionist views in Britain at this stage was often a healthy reaction and a disgust for the rotten bourgeois politics which then predominated. Still there were those who held a principled parliamentarism was possible, whereby elections could be used for propaganda purposes, and an elected MP could use Parliament as a Tribune for condemning the bourgeoisie in its own forum. We still wait for a satisfactory use of this “tactic” in the advanced capitalist countries in this century. It is true that use of Parliamentary elections was possible during the earlier stages of the development in the workers movement in various countries. In Britain the old Chartist movement used well the opportunity provided by elections even though most of the working class were not enfranchised. They would hold their own; mock elections and taunt the bourgeoisie by involving those masses of workers, men and women, who were outside the Parliamentary processes. In France and Germany, later Italy, elections were used for propaganda purposes, the strength of the socialist bloc of deputies was an indication of workers organised, support gathered during elections. The Russian experience paralleled those of these earlier proletarian experiences, but did not experience as yet the open, rotten bourgeois corruption in the Duma. The Bolsheviks extinguished the Duma before they could experience the open domination of the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie. How fortunate they were. If they experienced Parliamentarism as it then was in the West their enthusiasm for the use of the “Parliamentary tactic” would no doubt have diminished.

In Pankhurst‘s case it would not have been wise to say she was against the Parliamentary tactic “on principle.” She was a veteran of many election campaigns, never passing up an opportunity to lend support and agitate, and knew the uses and limitations of such work. Ever though by 1918 the WSF took up an abstentionist position against the most reactionary election at that time experienced, Pankhurst still called for a vote for the SLP wherever they stood candidates. If there was an element of her position which was “on principle” it would be over affiliation to the Labour Party, which we will now explain.

The issue of refusal of affiliation to the Labour Party was not one of disdain or a simple reluctance to involve themselves in a mass organisation. The WSF was at that time affiliated to the Labour Party through local Trades Councils, Pankhurst herself having addressed the Labour Party Conference in 1917. The important point was that the Labour Party commenced changes during 1917/18 from being an umbrella organisation for the Trade Unions and Socialist bodies to an open bourgeois party. After these changes the WSF voted to disaffiliate from the Labour Party, at least one branch (Poplar) being expelled for defending revolutionary Russia.

For the BSP the issue of affiliation to the Labour Party was a tactical, organisational one. When the BSP was formed by amalgamation of some organisations in 1912, Hyndman wanted the BSP to replace the Labour Party as the main representative for Britain in the Second International. Kautsky responded that if they wanted this to happen they must apply to join the Labour Party. And so the BSP applied to join the Labour Party in 1914, taking its place in 1916 – the First World War apparently not disturbing this process.

Until the First World War the Independent Labour Party served as the political expression, the parliamentary wing of the trade unions. The ILP took up a pacifist, vacillating position on the war which the trade union leaders found to be not patriotic, defencist enough. Therefore the ILP was ejected from being the political wing of the trade unions, being replaced by the constituency parties of the Labour Party. This was by the enrolment of individual members into constituency parties based upon Parliamentary boundaries. They did not have to come through the trade unions or existing socialist organisations. If it was a way of strengthening the organisation of the working class through bringing in the unorganised then that would have been a step forward. But in reality it was a way of making the Labour Party a multi-class party and not just the political expression of the trade unions. The situation was now reversed: from the Labour Party being the political expression of the trade unions, the trade unions were in effect converted into the economical expression of a political party – a bourgeois party!

The reorganisation of the Labour Party was pioneered by the Fabians, and the motivating force behind this was Sidney Webb. Pankhurst criticised these changes in an article in the Workers’ Dreadnought on October 27^th, 1917 – less than a fortnight from the proletarian revolution in Russia! Pankhurst, after elaborating the organisational restructuring of the Labour Party, quotes Sidney Webb from The Observer:

“Instead of a sectional and somewhat narrow group, what is aimed at now is a national party open to any one of the 16,000,000 electors agreeing with the Party programme, the great majority of married women are not eligible for membership of any trade union. It is too unreasonable to exclude from membership all the men who do not enter through the narrow gate of trade unionism or that of membership of a definitively socialist propaganda body… It is hoped to enrol in the service of the Party not only many hundreds of thousands of the new working class electors, but also to attract many men and women of the shopkeeping, manufacturing and professional classes who are dissatisfied with the old political parties.”

The opinions of Mr Webb are not only that of an individual but also of the ideological spokesman of the newly reorganised Labour Party. And what of the political positions of the new Labour Party? Swept away was even the most woolly-headed versions of “socialism” of the ILP to be replaced by such notions as the (in)famous Clause IV – nationalisation of industries. A flexible approach to “common ownership” would lead to everything from cooperative stores [see the first article in this edition], through nationalisation and ministries of employment to municipal socialism. An Executive circular of the Labour Party says that the organisation should be “definitely widened so as to include the political interests of all producers, whether by hand or brain, without distinction of class or occupation”. The inclusion in Clause IV of the term “the returning to the producer… the fruits of their labour” does not encompass the ending of wage labour, the disappearance of classes along with the state. In fact the Labour Party’s programme for the returning of full fruits of their labour is wages to the worker, rents to the landlord and profits to the capitalist. As Pankhurst pointed out the workers movement had already experienced nationalization:

“The workers are scarcely better off on the whole, and in some respects even worse off, than in private employment.”

Fabian “socialism” was not for the emancipation of the working class but for its continued exploitation. The fake socialism of Fabianism is in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole.