In honour of International Women’s Day 1925, LALKAR continues with its series on important women of the revolutionary movement, this year Sylvia Pankhurst
Sylvia Pankhurst was born in 1882 into a very progressive Manchester family. One great grandfather had been at Peterloo and nearly got himself killed. One grandfather was active in the Chartist movement. Her father, Richard, was a strong advocate of Irish Home Rule, Indian independence, the abolition of the House of Lords, the disestablishment of the Church of England and other progressive causes. Her mother was a leading campaigner for women’s suffrage, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst née Goulden, who with her husband set up the Women’s Franchise League, in 1889. At the same time, Mr Pankhurst was a successful lawyer with important political connections and influential friends such as George Bernard Shaw, Annie Besant, William Morris, Tom Mann, Eleanor Marx, Keir Hardie, and others, and the family enjoyed a very much upper middle class lifestyle.
The whole family were very anti-war and her parents were members of Liberal Party at a time when it expressed opposition to the wars being waged by British imperialism in Afghanistan and South Africa. Out of office the Liberals also supported women’s suffrage and the abolition of the House of Lords as well as Home Rule for Ireland. The Liberals’ progressive causes, including opposition to war, however, did not last long, causing Richard Pankhurst to leave the Liberal Party in 1883. Subsequently he and Emmeline joined with Keir Hardie to form the Independent Labour Party. Sylvia grew up in the midst of all this.
Sylvia, along with her siblings, was taken by her parents to the various political meetings that were the centre of their lives, and learnt very young of the need to struggle in society for what you believed to be right. The meetings she attended with her parents, included those backing the causes of women’s franchise and anti-coverture (i.e., the laws passing ownership of all property owned by women to their husband upon marriage). The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, which her father was involved in drafting, abolished coverture. Franchise, however, continued to be denied.
Her father, standing for parliament in Manchester in 1883 as an Independent, openly espoused the causes his party had abandoned, but was heavily defeated. However, Sylvia as a young teenager canvassed in Manchester for her father, thus coming into contact with working class people which brought home to her their dire conditions of existence, while instilling respect for their courage, humour and ingenuity in the face of adversity, as well as community spirit.
Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst’s father, Mr Goulden, was a rich businessman based in Manchester. The anti-establishment positions taken by his daughter and son-in-law caused him to lose business, bringing about a rift between him and them, following which the Pankhursts in 1886 moved away from Manchester to London, and Emmeline never spoke to her father again. It was a trait of the Pankhursts that Principles had to come first, no matter what the cost.
The Independent Labour Party
The 1880s saw the rise in Britain of new unionism, a movement which encouraged the formation of unions to protect the rights of all workers rather than simply the skilled workers who formed the backbone of existing craft unions. The new unions were very militant and conducted many successful strikes, including the London Matchgirls strike of 1888 and the great Dock Strike of 1889. Eleanor Marx was famously a strong supporter of new unionism, as, of course was Engels. However, in 1890 the capitalists intensified their fight back against new unionism which had initially been very successful in improving the wages and conditions of workers. They starved them back to work, forcing them to accept wage cuts.
In 1893, the Pankhursts joined the Independent Labour Party formed by Keir Hardie as founder members and returned to Manchester where Richard Pankhurst died in 1898, when Sylvia was just 16, which she felt as a devastating loss. The Independent Labour Party was formed on the basis of reformism. It disapproved of the strike actions of new unionism, believing that what was important was to bring about reform through parliament.
Sylvia was very moved by the suffering of the working class, starting with her reading of the works of Charles Dickens, such as Oliver Twist.
Art school
She was brought up to expect to have to work for a living, rather than aiming simply for marriage. She had a great talent for art, and her talent was soon co-opted by her family in pursuit of their political objectives. However, her experience as an Art student certainly encouraged her to pursue the question of women’s rights. At art school in Manchester she won many prizes and entered to win a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, coming out top of the list. When she enrolled, however, she found women artists were very much treated as second class, it being assumed that they would never become artists, only teachers.
1899 proved to be a watershed for the Pankhurst family because they opposed the Boer War, while the Liberal Party, the Fabian Society and virtually everybody else supported it. Emmeline left the Fabian Society and the whole family was subjected to ostracism and abuse, some even physically attacked.
In 1900 the TUC set up the Labour Representation Committee, supported by the ILP. In 1906 the LRC became the Labour Party.
Under the aegis of the ILP, land in Manchester was acquired and a building commissioned, named Pankhurst Hall, after Sylvia’s father, opening in 1900. Sylvia had been commissioned to decorate the hall appropriately, which she did in fine style. It then turned out, to the absolute amazement of the remaining Pankhursts, that the hall would not admit women.
Women’s Social and Political Union
From the mid 19th century, women across the country had begun to campaign for the right to vote. In 1897 the local societies united to form the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (the NUWSS), under the leadership of Millicent Fawcett. The NUWSS grew to 50,000 members by 1913. However, the NUWSS members, known as the Suffragists, were always wedded to the path of peaceful and constitutional means of achieving their ends, such as petitions to Parliament, lobbying their MPs and peaceful protests. It had a predominantly middle-class and lower middle-class membership.
The Pankhurst women’s fury following the debacle of the Pankhurst Hall, caused Emmeline to form a new, and more radical, women’s organisation, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WPSU) in 1903, to campaign for votes for women and for equal pay. Its members were to become known as ‘the Suffragettes’, to distinguish them from the more moderate Suffragists. Sylvia produced the WSPU’s ‘Votes for Women’ posters and banners, designed the organisation’s membership card and was secretary of the national committee, which was based in London. It mobilised women to harass Liberals on the question of women’s suffrage and to make a nuisance of themselves so that they were arrested (a bit like Extinction Rebellion). In 1906 Sylvia attended a Liberal Party election rally addressed by Churchill who was then a member of that party. She asked whether a Liberal government would give women the vote. She was manhandled and forced out of the room, while Churchill answered “Nothing would induce me to vote for giving women the franchise”.
In 1906 also, Sylvia experienced her first imprisonment: “On October 23rd a group of suffragettes led by Mrs Pankhurst herself infiltrated into the lobby of the House of Commons and started a protest meeting. They were bundled out into the street by policemen, there was what Sylvia Pankhurst called ‘a scrimmage’ and ten of the women were arrested. When they came up in Cannon Street police court the next day, the magistrate refused to listen to them and peremptorily ordered them to be bound over to be of good behaviour for six months or go to prison for six weeks. They protested and demanded the right to be heard in their own defence, but the magistrate had them removed by the police.
“At this point Sylvia walked into the courtroom and complained that women who wanted to give evidence in the case had not been allowed in. Promptly dragged out into the street by force, she tried to make a speech to an interested crowd, but was hauled back into the court again, charged with obstruction and sentenced to pay a pound fine or go to prison for fourteen days. Choosing prison, she was taken to the women’s jail at Holloway with the others in a Black Maria” (Richard Cavendish, ‘Sylvia Pankhurst is sent to jail’, History Today, 10 October 2006). She was to face jail seven more times.
Although Sylvia supported the campaign for women’s suffrage, she was more focussed on the general socialist movement at that time, rather than specifically women’s franchise. Her family nevertheless sent to her promote the WPSU and use tactics that had been successful in agitation against unemployment – open air meetings, processions at the opening of parliament, all of which attracted repressive measures.
Sylvia teamed up with women activists in the unemployment movement. A meeting took place in Caxton Hall attracting hundreds of working-class women waving red flags.
Nevertheless, the WPSU was always reformist in orientation, believing that when women had the vote they would be able to get such things as nurseries and laundries. Therefore the Labour Party was happy to help the WPSU to develop.
Sylvia, however, was interested in a more working-class orientation and she resigned as secretary in favour of her sister Christabel, with whom she did not see eye to eye as Christabel was interested exclusively in women’s suffrage, to the point of breaking ties with the general labour movement and was happy to turn to the Conservatives to see if they would support the cause of women’s suffrage, as nothing else mattered to her.
Many in the labour movement denied support to the women’s suffrage movement because they thought it detracted from the demand that the suffrage be extended to all men (without a property qualification). Sylvia considered both causes were just and should be pursued together and that their advocates should work together.
Sylvia’s campaigns were peaceful but nevertheless courted severe repression by the police. She was thrown in jail on several occasions and like her mother went on hunger strike when this happened. She campaigned against the appalling conditions prevalent in prisons, helping to establish the Prison Reform Union.
At this time Sylvia was close to the Labour Party and had a long-term covert relationship with Keir Hardie (who was married and much older than her).
She challenged both those in the labour movement who gave no importance to women as well as those in the women’s movement who did not see it as part of the general working class movement.
The WPSU was essentially a middle class organisation focused on acts of heroism by individuals, which did gain them a considerable sympathy following. But Sylvia thought that mass action by working class women was more important. She rather cut herself of from WPSU activity and her family put her in charge of caring for her dying brother, commissioning her to write a history of the women’s movement, keeping her out of the way of working-class activism.
US tour
Nevertheless she was sent to the US on a 3-month tour to promote the book. There she found she was always being asked about class and racial oppression. Her audiences were in the 1000s. She did not restrict herself to fundraising but also made contact with women workers. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire on 25 March 1911 saw 146 workers killed when they couldn’t escape the conflagration because they had been locked in. Sylvia joined a protest procession. She was disgusted by racism, and the treatment of Indians in the reservations. She admired the traditional artwork of the Indians. She addressed a black audience at the Tennessee Negro University for which she was universally condemned in the press. As far as she was concerned, the fight for women’s rights was a fight that should identify with all oppressed groups.
She was interested in how socialism might work in practice. She objected to the idea that a few could bring socialism for the benefit of the rest. When faced with the argument that the fight for votes was irrelevant but rather one should fight for socialism that would solve these problems, she countered that we need votes because we need to be part of the fight for socialism. Her view was that socialism should be fought for from below by the people who benefited from it.
The suffragette years
She returned to the UK in time for the April 1912 dock strike. The WPSU denounced the strike as causing wives to suffer; that men should be pressing for them to be able to vote to improve their conditions rather than striking. However, wives were also going out in sympathy with the men, and joined the National Federation of Women Workers in their thousands. The strikes and the support they got were successful in gaining wage increases. Sylvia went to a demonstration in favour of the strikers in Bermondsey not to preach but to listen.
In the meantime the government was playing fast and loose with the WPSU. In return for the latter toning down its militancy, a Conciliation Bill in 1912 was proposed to give the vote to a small minority of women, but this was then dropped in favour of a Reform Bill which only extended the male vote. The letdown forced the WPSU back to militancy that famously took the form of a march down Oxford Street smashing the shop windows (4 March 1912). Large numbers were arrested, were imprisoned, went on hunger strike, were force fed and tortured. Sylvia was more than ever convinced that what was needed was mass action by women workers who could defend each other, rather than heroics by relatively well-off women. She explained: “I wanted to use these women of the submerged class, not merely to the argument of more fortunate people, but to be fighters on their own account … demanding for themselves and their families a full share of the benefits of civilisation and progress” (The Suffragette Movement, p.416).
With Christabel having fled to France to avoid arrest, Sylvia organised a demonstration in Hyde Park on 14 July 1912 to protest against the sentences handed out to militants. Thousands participated.
She arranged speeches at multiple union branches as well as street meetings where she often met with a hostile reception and physical violence. By including the voices of working-class women in the articles in her newspaper, Sylvia helped break their perception that women’s suffrage was an issue only for well-off women and so she was able to mobilise working-class women in the East End.
Christabel on her return from France was anxious to mobilise against the Labour Party on EVERY ISSUE if they didn’t support women’s suffrage. She even wanted the Labour Party to vote against home rule for Ireland, while Sylvia understood that the Irish were allies. The WPSU refused to support Labour and Labour refused to support the WPSU by supplying them with a list of voters.
The militant suffragettes saw many of their number imprisoned. They went on hunger and thirst strikes and were agonisingly force fed. This gave them a lot of publicity and sympathy. Sylvia too got herself arrested and was force fed. She organised mass defence groups to hamper re-arrests under the Cat and Mouse legislation. She proposed a People’s Army be formed in emulation of the Irish freedom struggle.
A meeting took place in 1913 at the Albert Hall that Sylvia addressed along with James Connolly in support of James Larkin, the General Secretary of the ITGWU who had been arrested as a result of his role in the Dublin Lockout (in which some 20,000 workers had been locked out for having joined a union). It was a solidarity meeting called by the Daily Herald. Christabel was there supporting the Ulster Unionists solely on the ground that they had promised to grant votes for women (a promise quickly forgotten). Sylvia was one hundred percent behind the locked out workers and attended the meeting even though the police were after her. “Behind every poor man is an even poorer woman,” she told a huge audience.
The split with WPSU
In January 1914 Christabel ordered Sylvia to remove the East London branch from the WPSU. It was renamed the East London Federation of the Suffragettes and introduced a new newspaper The Woman’s Dreadnought that brought out 20,000 copies a week and was launched in March 1914, with Sylvia as the editor.
Meanwhile Christabel got hung up on STDs, for which she blamed men. Sylvia wasn’t so worried about men using prostitutes as about employers who paid starvation wages thus forcing women into prostitution.
Sylvia used the weapon of the hunger and thirst strike to force Asquith to meet a delegation of women workers. She was so weak from hunger and thirst she had to be carried to the meeting on a stretcher. The delegation managed to persuade Asquith to take their concerns seriously. It was working class women, not the heroic ladies, who changed Asquith’s mind.
The war
Sylvia opposed the First World War that encouraged workers to fight each other for the material gain of their rulers. Emmeline and Christabel were pro-war, as was most of the Labour Party, with Arthur Henderson joining a coalition government (Keir Hardie, however, did oppose it). The Labour Party got the unions cooperating with it, encouraging members into a frenzy of ‘patriotism’. In these conditions the East London suffragettes adopted a position of official neutrality focussing on maintaining the struggle for votes for women (that the WPSU had abandoned for the duration), on organising to help women in hardship and resisting attempts to pass on the cost of the war to the poor. Women’s Dreadnought, however, was fervently anti-war: “How strange! British transport workers, trade union men, are called up to shoot down German transport workers and it is not so very long ago, in the line of our industrial war, during the great Dock Strike, when we were fighting the large ship owners, we received with joy the news that these same men had sent in £5,000 to help us in our fight for better conditions. We said we would never forget their kindness …”
The East London suffragettes worked during the war to bring alleviation to the poor helping them to claim their rights. They organised free milk for malnourished babies and set up a cost price communal restaurant. But Sylvia did not like charity. She insisted on paying the women working at these tasks at least the minimum wage that men were entitled to.
She supported the Etaples mutiny: the Dreadnought reported on it; it supported strikes of workers in the East End in companies that supplied army clothing. Dreadnought published letters of an East London Jewish boy who was shot for desertion while suffering from PTSD.
The East London suffragettes, while during the war other organisations suspended their Votes for Women activity, on the contrary extended it to demand the vote for all men and all women over 21. In the NUWSS Sylvia asked for support but met with all-round opposition and ‘amazement and disgust’, whereupon she turned on them calling them ‘comfortable middle class women’. In 1916 the East London Suffragettes changed their name to the Women’s Socialist Federation (WSF).
Sylvia also participated in the Women’s International League based in the Hague, set up by women who were anti-war. It opposed the idea that its name should be the Women’s International Peace League (as advocated by women who opposed the war but believed in being ‘patriotic’ for the duration). Sylvia, however, insisted that the war was being driven by imperialism and did not deserve ‘patriotic’ support.
On 26 September 1915 her close friend Keir Hardie died. He had been opposed to the war on moral grounds while Sylvia opposed in purely on grounds that it was against the interests of the working class.
People were losing their early enthusiasm for the war, as was shown by the fact that in 1916 conscription was introduced. Dreadnought reported that one woman objecting to being urged to do everything to help ‘our boys’ had said: ‘Don’t mention the soldiers. England at 2½ d an hour is not worth fighting for’. Very many strikes were taking place. Sylvia felt that the change in popular consciousness warranted more explicit anti-war campaigning: “Peace, and the popular government of the world to end this capitalist system of ruthless materialism, stood out for me as the two great needs of the hour”.
Melvina Walker in February 1917 was arrested and fined after a meeting in Hyde Park for asking “Why should we send mothers’ sons to murder other mothers’ sons? … It is up to us workers to end the war”. Sylvia countered arguments in support of the arms industry supplying arms and thus ‘safeguarding our boys’. She said the more guns you send, the more men will be killed.
The WSF disrupted recruitment rallies. The Woman’s Dreadnought was renamed the Workers’ Dreadnought and the Workers’ Suffrage Federation became the Workers’ Socialist Federation.
Revolution in Russia
In March 1917 the February revolution took place in Russia. Women textile workers went on strike in St Petersburg and called on male workers to support them, which they did. They demanded bread but soon moved on to ‘Down with aristocracy, down with war’. Massive militant demonstrations took place. Troops mutinied and joined the rebellion. The Tsar was overthrown. Even The Times supported the February revolution.
Soviets set up in the 1905 revolt leapt into activity in St Petersburg, meeting every day. The new provisional government was still pro-war, while the mass of ordinary people were against it. Sylvia identified with the Soviets. She described the situation as one of dual power.
The British government supported the warmongering Provisional government in Russia. Jews who had fled Russia because of anti-semitism did not want to fight for Russia but the British government actually stopped a ship carrying Jews to America forcing them to go back to Russia to fight. A great protest mobilisation took place in the East End.
Before October the Anglo-Russian Alliance had been joined by a lot of Labourites, some entirely opportunistically. All were very happy to have the Tsar overthrown as it was embarrassing when you were claiming to be fighting for freedom to have the Tsar as an ally. In November 1918, a mass rally 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.
Sylvia, however, noted that the February revolution was not bringing relief to workers and foresaw that there had to be a second revolution, which in fact occurred in October.
The October Revolution, in which the workers’ Soviets seized control and pulled Russia out of the war, was greeted with joy by East End Jews.
This caused the Labourite ‘friends’ of the Russian revolution to adjust their priorities in favour of overthrowing Bolshevism. In face of unbridled opposition, Sylvia put her full weight behind support for the October Revolution. There was a vitriolic imperialist propaganda campaign against the Bolsheviks which the WSF sought to counter by setting up the People’s Russian Information Bureau in July 1918. This was supported by the Socialist Labour Party, the BSP, the NUR, and Shapurji Saklatvala of the ILP. It had to print its material secretly to avoid arrests under the Defence of the Realm Act. They published for instance Lenin’s ‘Appeal to the Toiling Masses’ calling on workers to strike against any military intervention in Russia. Sylvia kept activists continuously supplied with such material.
In January 1919, Sylvia was elected to the Committee of Hands Off Russia, in which the BSP, the SLP and the Industrial Workers of the World participated. The following year, in May, dockers refused to load guns for Poland on the Jolly George and the action quickly spread. Coalies refused to supply coal for the interventionist war.
Aftermath of WW1
After the end of WW1 in November 1918 there was a storm of hatred against the warmongers who profited while the people suffered. During the war there had already been the Easter Rising in Ireland, the Russian revolution, a British army mutiny, a French army mutiny and a German navy mutiny. In November 1918 the Kaiser was overthrown. In Britain 6 million days were lost to strikes in 1918. This militancy forced concessions, e.g. with regard to suffrage it was extended to all men over 21 and to women over 30.
British soldiers were not keen to be sent to intervene in Russia. There were 100,000 people on strike on every working day of 1919. On 3 January 10,000 soldiers in Folkestone refused to be sent for service abroad and thousands more mutinied. Sailors mutinied at Milford Haven, raising the red flag on HMS Kilbride. In Glasgow a workers’ demonstration was attacked by 6 tanks and its leaders were arrested.
A battleship and two destroyers were sent up the Mersey to Liverpool.
The struggle to form a Communist Party
All the strikes and demonstrations though highly militant were reactive and uncentralised. There was no strong unifying force. In 1919 the 3rd International urged the British left to form Communist Parties, and the WSF was the first British organisation to do so, but suspended use of the name while unity was being discussed with BSP, SLP and SWSS. These parties were disunited by their approach to Labour. Labour was pro state over working class; supported the war and had joined coalition government; and the German social democrats had crushed the working-class uprising in that country. Sylvia therefore was opposed to any application to join Labour, though the other organisations were prepared to do so.
Lenin intervened to say Sylvia was correct in her assessment of the reactionary nature of the Labour Party, but, given that the mass of workers had faith in it, it was right to affiliate in order to have access to them, and parliament should be used as a platform. The important and urgent thing was to form a party to help unify the mass struggles. Nevertheless Sylvia refused over this question to participate in the founding conference of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in July 1920.
Sylvia liked the Soviets and enthused about Russia in the Dreadnought, but felt she had to stick to her abstentionist guns. This determination may have been strengthened by her connections with the European communist movement.
She had met the anarcho-syndicalist Silvio Corio in late 1917 with whom she entered into a relationship. This brought her into debates taking place in the European communist movement. She visited Italy during its biennio rosso, when workers and peasants were rising up throughout the country. In Germany the workers’ government was ousted by the Freikorps. The influence from Europe was overwhelmingly anti-parliamentarian.
The result was that she worked to transform the WSF into a Communist Party, to be called the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International). An inaugural meeting of this party was held in June 1920 at which Sylvia presented a proposed manifesto, previously published in the Workers’ Dreadnought. Her proposals were anarcho-syndicalist, rejecting a planned economy in favour of workers’ control. Nevertheless, the WSF started in August 1920 to call itself the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International). It had a membership of 150. It was the British Socialist Party, however, that gained Moscow’s approval.
The WSF broke off negotiations for unity with other parties on the basis of Sylvia’s insistence on abstentionism, a policy that was by no means shared by all members. She was invited to discuss this issue at the Second Congress of the Third International in Russia in 1920. Having had her passport confiscated she had to be smuggled out. Lenin insisted it was necessary to engage with the Labour Party because to accept communist propaganda the masses must have their own political experience. British workers needed to experience the Labour Party betrayal. He said the CP should affiliate to the Labour Party on condition of being able to maintain complete freedom of speech. The British delegation was persuaded to compromise and Sylvia went along with it, and finally merged the WSF into the CPGB.
After the CPGB
Unfortunately, the union was not to last very long. She was expelled from the party in September 1921, having become extremely critical of the Russian leadership, views she was airing in the Workers’ Dreadnought. The CPGB were insisting that she hand over control of the paper to them, and she refused, so she clearly could not continue in membership.
She wrote an ‘Open Letter to Lenin’ in November, asserting that the Bolsheviks had begun to “desert communism” and were opening Europe to path taken by fascists in Italy. She had serialised Rosa Luxemburg’s 1918 critique of Bolshevik policy, Rosa Luxemburg being totally opposed to the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and had herself repeated Luxemburg’s charge that in sanctioning the division of the land into small peasant holdings, the Bolsheviks had betrayed the revolution. She expressed support for The Workers’ Opposition, that railed against ‘Soviet bureaucracy’, and publicised appeals from anarchists held in Bolshevik prisons. She had clearly badly lost her way.
Although she was becoming increasingly anti-communist she nevertheless remained supportive of certain progressive causes, in particular the fight against racism and the fight against fascism. She started focusing very much on anti-fascism. The bienno rosso climaxed in 1920 when 400,000 engineering workers occupied hundreds of factories after Alfa Romeo locked out their workforce in Milan. The whole of Italy was in turmoil and its terrified bourgeoisie mobilised the fascists to impose terror. 74% of fascist funding came from banks. The workers resisted but did not achieve sufficient unity because of the weakness of social democracy which expected the state to put down the fascists! The PCI was too sectarian to try to work with the parliamentary illusioned brigade. All bourgeois governments greeted Mussolini as a hero. He was invited to dinner with the English king George V. Churchill sang his praises.
Sylvia was one of the first people in Britain to warn of the fascist threat, as a creation of capitalism. The Dreadnought front page of April 1923 drew attention to German fascism. George Bernard Shaw was soft on fascism causing Sylvia to tell him that had he been working in Italy he would have been a victim of fascism. She understood that fascism was even more of a threat than social democracy, so she was willing to contemplate forming an anti-fascist alliance.
In 1924 she closed down the Workers’ Dreadnought, and in 1926 she moved out of Bow where she had lived for so long with her partner Silvio, and moved to rural Woodford Green (as it was then). A year later, at the age of 45, she gave birth to their son Richard, the experience of giving birth setting her off on a crusade to make better maternity provision for working class women.
She maintained her support for countries fighting against imperialism and colonialism, and published a book advocating freedom for India. Her special interest was Ethiopia which, having seen off an attempt by Italy to capture it during the scramble for Africa in the 1880s and 1890s, found itself invaded by Mussolini’s troops in 1935, while Ethiopia’s ‘allies’ in the League of Nations did nothing to help. Of course Italy lost Ethiopia because it was on the losing side in the Second World War, and Ethiopia was lucky enough to retrieve its independence. In 1956 Sylvia moved to Ethiopia and devoted herself to helping its development, being active in founding a modern hospital in Addis Ababa. Her efforts were greatly appreciated and when she died in 1960 she was buried at the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa in an area reserved for Ethiopian patriots.
Conclusion
Notwithstanding having lost her way on the question of how a socialist country should be organised, Sylvia was a remarkable woman with a big heart who devoted herself heart and soul, and at whatever cost, to the cause of the downtrodden and oppressed masses. She recognised the working class as the ruling class of a future society, even if she did not understand the form that rule would take in its early days or the compromises that might need to be made in a country where the working class was only the minority of the population. She was fearless, she was a great orator, she was a great organiser. She espoused every progressive cause with enthusiasm and flair. But what her example teaches us is that to serve the working class properly what is needed is not only courage, dedication, self-sacrifice and deep love of the people, but also the scientific understanding that comes from a deep knowledge of Marxism. Nobody who is familiar with the classics of Marxism-Leninism could imagine that ‘workers’ control’ of their places of work could eliminate the anarchy of production that prevails under capitalism, which is the reason why socialism replaces that anarchy with centrally-planned production. What the workers as a whole, rather than workers in hundreds of isolated plants, control is the whole economy rather than just the plant in which they happen to work. Nor would a person trained in Marxism shy away from organisation, on the assumption organisation is necessarily exploitative as it tends to be in societies where one class exploits another but cannot be where exploitation has been eliminated. It is not enough to react with a big heart spontaneously to defend the interests of the working class. One needs to know how to work out a strategy for victory. As Mao Zedong advised, in any situation it is necessary to identify the primary contradiction and distinguish it from secondary contradictions. To achieve victory, all forces need to be rallied to deal with the primary contradiction, after which the secondary ones can be dealt with appropriately. One needs to be able to act counter-intuitively if that is likely to produce a better result. For instance, Sylvia Pankhurst in her hatred of fascism condemned the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Yet it is only too likely that had that Pact not been made, Hitlerite fascism would never have been defeated. The big-hearted spontaneous reaction is often not the best.
Nor should we forget, however, that very many people who thought of themselves as socialists and even communists and were well versed in Marxism, but who lacked Sylvia’s deep empathy with the interests of the working class, found themselves supporting their imperialist fatherlands in the First World War. Being well versed in Marxism is very necessary to be an effective servant of the people, but that too is not enough.
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