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 3 The Labour Party
Despite the limitations imposed by their relatively small numbers, the anti-parliamentary communist groups made every effort to involve themselves actively in the struggles of their fellow workers. This forced them to take up positions with regard to organisations and ideas which were dominant within the working class and through which workers’ struggles were channelled. In terms of their numerical support and entrenchment within the working class, the most important of these organisations were the Labour Party and trade unions. The two remaining chapters of Part I are devoted to an examination of the anti-parliamentarians’ attitudes towards these organisations.  

GUY ALDRED AND THE LABOUR PARTY

  
Guy Aldred’s account of his ‘conversion’ to revolutionary politics in 1906 hints at the basic elements of the anti-parliamentary communist attitude towards the Labour Party : ‘My Anti-Parliamentarian and Socialist Revolt against Labourism dates from the elevation of John Burns to Cabinet rank, and the definite emergence of the Labour Party as a factor in British politics.’ [1] A significant point is the connection drawn between the rise of the Labour Party and Aldred’s opposition to parliamentarism. The anti-parliamentary communists believed that parliamentary action inevitably led to reformism, careerism and responsibility for the administration of capitalism. Aldred argued, for example, that ‘Parliamentarism is careerism and the betrayal of Socialism’, [2] and that ‘all parliamentarism is reformism and opportunism’. [3] In 1906 30 of the Labour Party’s 51 general election candidates were elected to Parliament. Thereafter, according to the anti-parliamentary point of view, the Labour Party could not avoid being anything but a careerist, reformist and opportunist organisation. 1. G. Aldred, Dogmas Discarded: An Autobiography of Thought, Part II (Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1940). p. 39.

2. G. Aldred, No Traitor's Gait!, vol. I no. 1 - vol. III no. 1 (Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1955-63), p. 113.

3. G. Aldred, No Traitor's Gait!, vol. I no. 1 - vol. III no. 1 (Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1955-63), p. 260.
Every criticism which the anti-parliamentary communists made of parliamentary action in general was also applicable to the Labour Party in particular. When Labour candidates stood for election, like all other candidates they had to seek votes from ‘an electorate anxious for some immediate reform’; consequently, ‘the need for social emancipation’ was set aside ‘in order to pander to some passing bias for urgent useless amelioration’. [4] Labour’s pursuit of electoral success could thus be said to be at the root of its reformism. 4. G. Aldred, Socialism And Parliament (Glasgow/London: Bakunin Press, 1923), p. 3.
Aldred also argued that parliamentarians were primarily professional politicians whose own careers took precedence over the need for social change :  
the Labour movement is regarded as carrion by the parliamentary birds of prey, who start in the gutter, risk nothing, and rise to place in class society . . . the emotions of the careerist belong to the moment and express only one concern : how to exploit human wrong in order to secure power. 
 
The careerist exploits grievances. He never feels them. He never comes to grips with them. He never attempts to remove them. He uses grievances as stepping stones to office and then mocks those who have suffered. [5]
5. G. Aldred, Rex V. Aldred: London Trial, 1909, Indian Sedition, Glasgow Sedition Trial, 1921 (Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1948), p. 33.
Thus a second significant point in Aldred’s explanation of his arrival at the anti-parliamentary position is his reference to John Burns’ career. Burns -- one of fourteen children in a working-class family -- was originally a member of the Social Democratic Federation and one of the 1889 dockers’ strike leaders. In 1892 he was elected to Parliament on the Labour ticket, but tended to favour an alliance with progressive Liberals and did not look favourably on attempts to form an independent labour party. At the conference in 1900 which established the Labour Representation Committee, he declared himself ‘tired of working class boots, working class houses, working class trains and working class margarine’. [6] By 1906 he had become President of the Local Government Board in the Liberal government. From the anti-parliamentary point of view Burns’ career was seen as typical of the parliamentarians whose elevation from ‘the gutter’ to ‘place in class society’ was invariably accompanied by a steady rightwards evolution in political outlook. 6. Quoted in Aldred, Socialism And Parliament Part I Socialism Or Parliament: The Burning Question of Today (Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1942), p. 15.
The anti-parliamentarians also argued that by participating in Parliament the Labour Party upheld the class state and the capitalist system. Believing that the working class’s revolutionary interests could not be expressed through Parliament, Aldred stated : ‘The Labour Party is not a class party. It does not express the interests of the working class. It is the last hope of the capitalist system, the final bulwark of class-society . . . The entire outlook of the Labour Party is a capitalist outlook.’ [7] In 1924 Aldred made explicit his belief that Labour’s reformism, careerism and capitalist outlook were the inevitable outcome of its parliamentarism. Referring to Ramsay MacDonald, he wrote that ‘High Finance has, among its political adepts, no more devoted servant than the Labour Premier of Great Britain’, and explained that ‘MacDonald’s record . . . is the natural and consistent expression of parliamentarism. The remedy is not the passing of MacDonald, but the destruction of parliamentarism.’ [8] 7. Commune, September 1923.

8. Commune, August 1924.
This outline of Guy Aldred’s attitude towards the Labour Party has been drawn from sources covering a period stretching from 1906 to the mid-1950s. As this suggests, Aldred was consistently opposed to the Labour Party throughout the period discussed in this book. The same could not be said of the Dreadnought group. As was the case with the issue of parliamentary action, the early history of the WSF was one of gradual advance towards a position already held by Aldred and his comrades.  

THE WSF AND THE LABOUR PARTY

  
Far from being ‘categorically opposed to any form of contact with the Labour Party’ as one historian has claimed, [9] before 1920 the WSF was closely involved with the Labour Party in a variety of ways. In March 1917, for example, the WSF Executive Committee heard that Sylvia Pankhurst had attended the recent Labour Party conference as a Hackney Trades and Labour Council delegate. [10] The Dreadnought usually published detailed reports of Labour Party conference proceedings, and WSF members attended these conferences in order to distribute their newspaper. In April 1918 a WSF general meeting was informed that Sylvia Pankhurst had been elected to Poplar Trades Council and local Labour Party. In Pankhurst’s opinion ‘it was well for the WSF to be on the local Labour Party to start with’, although ‘the time might come when we could not continue in the Party’. [11] Accepting this view, the WSF Finance Committee agreed in September 1918 that the WSF should remain affiliated to Hackney Labour Party. At the same time Sylvia Pankhurst and Melvina Walker were appointed as delegates to the first Labour Party Women’s Section conference, a report of which appeared afterwards in the Dreadnought. [12] 9. J. Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, vol. 1 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968), p. 20.

10. Minutes of WSF Executive Committee meeting 22 March 1917, Pankhurst Papers.

11. Minutes of WSF General Meeting 15 April 1918, Pankhurst Papers.

12. Minutes of WSF Finance Committee meeting 12 September 1918, Pankhurst Papers; Workers' Dreadnought, 2 November 1918.
Although it was working within the Labour Party during these years, the WSF was certainly not an uncritical supporter of everything Labour did or stood for. One of the WSF’s principal disagreements concerned the Labour Party’s support for the war. The target for much of this criticism was Labour MP Arthur Henderson, who had joined the Coalition government in May 1915 as President of the Board of Education, before becoming a member of the new War Cabinet in December 1916. In Sylvia Pankhurst’s view Henderson had ‘sacrificed the interests of Socialism and the workers for the opportunity to co-operate with the capitalist parties in carrying on the War’. [13] Although Henderson resigned from the government in August 1917, in his letter of resignation addressed to Prime Minister Lloyd George he stated : ‘I continue to share your desire that the war should be carried to a successful conclusion.’ [14] Henderson’s membership of the War Cabinet made him a widely detested figure since it implicated him in the imprisonment of socialists and the suppression of socialist propaganda, the execution of James Connolly, the introduction of industrial conscription tinder the Defence of the Realm Act, and the deportation of Clydeside labour leaders. Henderson was not alone in coming in for criticism, however, as the WSF levelled its attacks against the entire Labour leadership. In April 1918, for example, the Dreadnought stated : ‘We shrink from the prospect of a Labour government manned by the Labour leaders who have co-operated in the prosecution of the War and its iniquities and who have been but the echo of the capitalist politicians with whom they have associated.’ [15] Likewise, during the 1918 general election campaign the WSF criticised the Labour Party for the way it had ‘crawled at the heels of the capitalist Government throughout the War’. [16] 13. Workers' Dreadnought, 28 July 1917.

14. Quoted in G. Aldred, Socialism And Parliament Part II Government By Labour: A Record of Facts (Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1942), p. 47.

15. Workers' Dreadnought, 13 April 1918.

16. Workers' Dreadnought, 30 November 1918.
The WSF’s other main criticism concerned the programme and membership of the Labour Party. In December 1917 Sylvia Pankhurst complained that the agenda for the forthcoming Labour conference was ‘loaded with palliatives, without a hint of Socialism, which alone can emancipate the workers !’ [17] In March 1918 she argued that Labour’s programme for ‘A New Social Order’ was ‘mainly a poor patchwork of feeble palliatives and envisages no new order, but the perpetuation of the present one . . . Nowhere in the programme is the demand for Socialism expressed’. [18] 17. Workers' Dreadnought, 15 December 1917.

18. Workers' Dreadnought, 9 March 1918.
If the Labour Party’s political programme did little to inspire Pankhurst’s enthusiasm the new party constitution, published for discussion in October 1917, aroused her fears about the party’s membership. Among the new constitution’s proposals was the enrolment of individual members who had not passed through what Pankhurst called the ‘narrow gate’ of trade union membership, or membership of organisations such as the BSP or ILP. Pankhurst argued that ‘the enrolment of individual members from the non-industrial classes . . . might prove a drag on the proletarian elements in the Party during the critical years which are ahead’. It would also attract self-seeking elements -- ‘people of no settled or deep convictions may find membership of the Labour Party a convenient method of attaining to the management of people and affairs’ -- while the rank and file working-class members would tend to be pushed even further into the background in the organisation and conduct of the party. [19] 19. Workers' Dreadnought, 27 October 1917 and 2 March 1918.
The WSF put forward several proposals designed to put right the problems it had identified. When Sylvia Pankhurst attended the Labour Party conference in June 1918 she spoke in favour of Labour withdrawing from the Coalition government and ending the wartime ‘political truce’. A resolution advocating the latter was passed, but Pankhurst’s attempt to move an amendment to the motion adding that Labour Party members should resign from the government was ruled out on procedural grounds. [20] 20. Workers' Dreadnought, 6 July 1918.
The WSF’s solution to the problem of Labour’s war collaborationist leadership was to elect new leaders who opposed the war. The alternative to a party under the leadership of those who had co-operated in the prosecution of the war was to ‘secure International Socialist leadership in the Labour movement’. [21] 21. Workers' Dreadnought, 13 April 1918.
The WSF also advocated changes in the Labour Party’s programme; in October 1917 Sylvia Pankhurst wrote : ‘The Labour Party should set itself to draw up a strong working-class socialist programme, and should act upon it vigorously and continuously.’ [22] The WSF expected this to bring four main benefits. First, an uncompromising socialist programme would deter self-seeking elements. Secondly, all the various smaller Socialist organisations and unattached members will gradually be pooled within [the Labour Party’s] ranks’. [23] Thirdly, insistence on agreement with a socialist programme as a condition of membership would have the educational effect of raising the political consciousness of the ‘large masses of people who are vaguely revolutionary in their tendencies and always ready to criticise those in power, but who have never mastered any economic or political theory’. [24] Fourthly, the adoption of a socialist programme would keep the party leaders under control. If the party was rebuilt ‘on a clearly defined basis, uncorrupted by considerations of temporary political expediency’, there would be no scope for the leadership to engage in reformist or opportunist manoeuvres. [25] 22. Workers' Dreadnought, 27 October 1917.

23. Workers' Dreadnought, 27 October 1917.

24. Workers' Dreadnought, 17 November 1917.

25. Workers' Dreadnought, 28 July 1917.
These proposals were all formulated in the context of working from within to transform the Labour Party into a genuine socialist organisation. During 1919, however, the WSF abandoned this approach and began to advocate a regroupment of revolutionaries outside and against the Labour Party.  
A major cause of the WSF’s change of view was the group’s perception of the role played by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), when it came to power in November 1918 in the midst of the revolutionary upheaval at the end of the war. One of the SPD’s leaders, Gustave Noske, organised an alliance with the right wing paramilitary Freikorps to suppress and butcher the insurrectionary workers. In Guy Aldred’s words, the SPD ‘slaughtered to preserve the tottering power of Capitalism’. [26] For the WSF, the lesson of the SPD’s leading part in crushing the German revolution was that ‘when the social patriotic reformists come into power, they fight to stave off the workers’ revolution with as strong a determination as that displayed by the capitalists’. [27] 26. G. Aldred, Socialism And Parliament (Glasgow/London: Bakunin Press, 1923), p. 11.

27. Workers' Dreadnought, 21 February 1920.
A second important influence on the WSF’s change of attitude towards the Labour Party was the formation of the Third International on the Bolsheviks’ initiative in March 1919. Until the end of 1918 the WSF had hoped to see the social democratic Second International reconstituted, but when a definite attempt to revive the Second International was initiated at the beginning of 1919, Sylvia Pankhurst argued that it could no longer be considered ‘a genuine International, because those who are today leading the Socialist movement -- the Russian Bolsheviki and the Sparticists of Germany -- will be absent from its councils’. [28] Subsequently the resolutions adopted by the conference in Berne in February 1919, which re-established the Second International, were criticised strongly in the Workers’ Dreadnought, and the WSF Annual Conference in June 1919 instructed the WSF Executive Committee to link up with the new Third International. 28. Workers' Dreadnought, 18 January 1919.
This had important implications for the WSF’s attitude towards the Labour Party. The invitation to the First Congress of the Communist International issued by the Bolsheviks in January 1919 had stated :  
Towards the social-chauvinists, who everywhere at critical moments come out in arms against the proletarian revolution, no other attitude but unrelenting struggle is possible. As to the ‘centre’ -- the tactics of splitting off the revolutionary elements and unsparing criticism and exposure of the leaders. Organisational separation from the centrists is at a certain stage of development absolutely necessary. [29]
29. J. Degras (ed.), The Communist International 1919-43: Documents, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 3.
These views were reaffirmed by a resolution ‘On The Berne Conference Of The Parties Of The Second International’, adopted by the First Congress of the Third International in March 1919. [30] Since groups seeking to affiliate to the new International would have to adopt the same stance, the WSF’s support for the Third International was obviously an important factor contributing to the group’s split with the Labour Party. 30. J. Degras (ed.), The Communist International 1919-43: Documents, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 25-6.
The changes wrought by these factors could be seen unfolding in the WSF’s internal life during 1919. In May the WSF’s Bow branch was informed that three of its members (Melvina Walker, Norah Smyth and L. Watts) had been elected to Poplar Trades Council and Central Labour Party. [31] Soon afterwards the question of affiliation to Poplar Labour Party was raised at a WSF Executive Committee meeting, which accepted the view that local branches should have ‘free autonomy to affiliate to Local Labour Parties’. [32] At the WSF Annual Conference in June, however, a resolution was passed instructing all branches affiliated to the Labour Party to disaffiliate. [33] The Executive Committee was instructed to begin talks with other organisations to form a communist party in Britain, and it mandated WSF delegates to ‘stand fast’ on the principle of ‘No Affiliation to the Labour Party’. [34] A subsequent WSF membership ballot revealed that an overwhelming majority approved the Executive Committee’s instructions. [35] Yet despite these decisions nearly two months elapsed before the Executive Committee learnt of Poplar WSF’s expulsion from Poplar Trades Council, Melvina Walker’s removal from the Executive Committee of Poplar Labour Party, and the revocation of Walker’s mandate as a delegate to the Central Labour Party and London Trades Council. [36] On 20 July 1919 Poplar WSF members had 31. Minutes of WSF Bow branch meeting 19 May 1919, Pankhurst Papers.

32. Minutes of WSF Executive Committee meeting 22 May 1919, Pankhurst Papers.

33. Workers' Dreadnought, 14 June 1919.

34. Minutes of WSF Executive Committee meeting 12 June 1919, Pankhurst Papers.

35. Workers' Dreadnought, 21 February 1920.

36. Minutes of WSF Executive Committee meeting 7 August 1919, Pankhurst Papers.
unintentionally provoked a crisis by making an unscheduled appearance at the Labour Party’s meeting against Russian intervention, commandeering a trades council lorry as a platform, and haranguing the crowds on the virtues of Sovietism. The following week Norah Smyth received a curt letter from Poplar Labour Party informing her that the WSF had been expelled. [37]
37. J. Bush, Behind The Lines: East London Labour 1914-19 (London: Merlin Press, 1984), p. 231.
The fact that Poplar WSF had been expelled from the Labour Party, rather than resign voluntarily in line with the resolutions of the 1919 Annual Conference, indicates that some WSF members may still have been in favour of involvement with the Labour Party. The WSF’s federal structure, which gave considerable autonomy to local branches and individual members, easily enabled such dissenting views to be expressed. Melvina Walker, for example, was an Executive Committee member of Poplar Labour Party and the WSF, despite the latter’s declared opposition to the former.  
By the end of 1919, however, any lingering support for WSF involvement with the Labour Party had disappeared. The Annual Conference, the Executive Committee and a ballot of the full membership had all come out against affiliation, and in February 1920 this first unequivocal statement of opposition to the Labour Party was published in the Dreadnought, encouraging other groups to follow the WSF’s example :  
We urge our Communist comrades to come out of the Labour Party and build up a strong opposition to it in order to secure the emancipation of Labour and the establishment of Communism in our time. Comrades, do not give your precious energies to building up the Labour Party which has already betrayed you, and which will shortly join the capitalists in forming a Government of the Noske type. [38]
38. Workers' Dreadnought, 14 February 1920.
The final event which had led the Dreadnought group to make this open and unambiguous break with the Labour Party had been the first conference of the Third International’s Western European Sub-Bureau, which began in Amsterdam on 3 February 1920. A resolution on trade unions adopted by the conference stated that Labourism (the pursuit of trade union interests by parliamentary means) was ‘the final bulwark of defence of Capitalism against the oncoming proletarian revolution; accordingly. a merciless struggle against Labourism is imperative’. This point of view was elaborated by a resolution on ‘The Communist Party and Separation of Communists from the Social Patriotic Parties’, which described ‘social-patriots’ (that is, ‘socialists’ who supported the war) as ‘a most dangerous enemy of the proletarian revolution’, and insisted that rigorous separation of the Communists from the Social Patriots is absolutely necessary’. [39] During the debate about this resolution the conference chairman made it clear that the resolution precluded any member party of the Third International affiliating to the British Labour Party. When a vote was taken the only delegates against the resolution were Hodgson and Willis of the British Socialist Party; all the other delegates, including Sylvia Pankhurst and the British shop stewards’ movement representative J. T. Murphy, voted in favour. 39. See Workers' Dreadnought, 20 March 1920 for the full text of both resolutions and an account of the proceedings.
This set the final seal on the WSF’s opposition to the Labour Party by appearing to lend the authority of the Third International to the WSF’s position. The Dreadnought’s first open statement of opposition to the Labour Party appeared immediately after the Amsterdam conference, and during a discussion about the issue of affiliation to the Labour Party at a communist unity meeting on 13 March 1920, ‘Pankhurst quoted the Amsterdam resolution in support of her position.’ [40] 40. W. Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-21 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969)., p. 208.


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