Some comments on Sylvia Pankhurst, council communism and other forms of anti-Leninism

My colleagues at the Socialist Planning website, co-editors Bruce Lerro and Barbara Maclean, have already pointed out in the preceding article, with admirable lucidity, many of Sylvia Pankhurst's personal virtues as well as political quirks and flaws, so there is no need to repeat that criticism here, except, when needed, as contextual quotes. What follows, therefore, is my own personal observations about Pankhurst' politics, her attitude toward the Soviet Union, her overall place in the firmament of socialism, and her embrace of ultra-leftism in the form of council communism, an ideology I disagree with for reasons I try to explain below.

Pankhurst, however well-intentioned, was not (nor she probably aspired to be recognised as) a leading socialist revolutionary. In fact, for a variety of reasons I note below, it is rather clear Pankhurst was a Fabian operating by temperament in many ways as an old-fashioned utopian socialist, not much different than Robert Owen, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Saint-Simon, and Charles Fourier. Fourier, like his fellow utopians, patiently pieced together various idealistic social models of society (i.e., his non-industrial Phalansteries) and constantly sought the support of the powerful to turn such visions into reality. Like Pankhurst, he wrote numerous letters to government and highly-placed social and political figures, entreating them to participate and aid in such projects of social renewal, with little to show for the effort. The very act of writing letters to people deeply invested in the status quo betrays an innocence unbecoming a serious revolutionist. It is worth noting that Fourier, like other idealist political thinkers of the time entertained interesting but technically unscientific views of society, and, in particular the process of revolution. Fourier was an early feminist, but some of his other views, while attractive to many, lacked a clear and dispassionate understanding of the political mechanics determining the acquisition and distribution of power in society, not to mention that a number of his opinions, perhaps logical given his origin as the son of a wealthy petit-bourgeois, and probably his natural gallic excentricity, would rapidly make him a pariah in today's "Woke cancel culture":

trade, which he associated with Jews, to be the "source of all evil" and advocated that Jews be forced to perform farm work in the phalansteries.^[11] By the end of his life, Fourier advocated the return of Jews to Palestine with the assistance of the Rothschilds.^[12] John K. Roth and Richard L. Rubenstein have seen Fourier as motivated by economic and religious antisemitism, rather than the racial antisemitism that would emerge later in the century.^[13]

Fourier characterized poverty (not inequality) as the principal cause of disorder in society, and he proposed to eradicate it by sufficiently high wages and by a "decent minimum" for those who were not able to work.^[14]

(Source: Wikipedia, Charles Fourier)

I have made a slight detour into Fourier and his fellow utopians to remind our readers that Pankhurst, despite her emotional commitment to social change, was far more a bourgeois dilettantish utopian than a serious activist, a point also suggested by Lerro and Maclean themselves (red bold mine):

While she supported the working and lower classes, she did not spend time systematically organizing the entire working class, not just women. Even though she knew socialists like Eleanor Marx, Karl Liebknecht, Alexandra Kollontai, Rosa Luxemburg, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, she never committed fully to being part of a socialist organization after she lost interest in the Russian Revolution. Instead, she wasted her time dogging the likes of Winston Churchill, writing letters, and sending petitions for change in parliament. What does this have to do with socialism? Britain has consistently proven itself to be extremely conservative and reactionary. Why couldn’t she understand that?

The above begs the question of why she deserves such spotlight as an exemplary radical among so many other deserving figures. That said, the portrait of Pankhurst is nonetheless interesting because it opens the door to a discussion of some positions she embraced that continue to divide and confuse the socialist movement.

After the Russian revolution, she devoted herself strictly to socialism and supported the Russian Revolution for the first four years. However, she ultimately split with Lenin over his reinstitution of a partly capitalist economy. Sylvia became associated with the soviets, or workers’ councils, and advocated for them as political bodies over parliaments. She opposed fascism in both the 1920s and 1930s and supported Ethiopia against both Italian and English imperialism.

A case of premature desertion?
This paragraph contains several assertions that require further attention. For one thing, Sylvia supported the Russian revolution for only the first four years, breaking with Lenin over what she considered the reintroduction of capitalism, a conceptual error that drove her further into the arms of anarcho-Marxism and other ultra-left ideologies. (Below we elaborate on this topic at some length). Second, her opposition to fascism, per se, doesn't certify her as a socialist revolutionist because a multitude of liberals also opposed fascism in the 1930s, and socialists/communists and many liberals also stood together against imperialism.

None of the above is terribly surprising. Sylvia Pankhurst, by acculturation and temperament was irrevocably bourgeois. But why would this matter? For the simple reason that very few individuals brought up bourgeois ever transcend their upbringing, and that usually impacts negatively on their revolutionary work. (People like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Castro, Chou en Lai, and Allende, all definitely overcame their class formation, but they were the exception.) More often, would-be middle class and upper-class revolutionists tend to drop out, or become—despite having a sound educational background—"disappointed in the revolution". Basically, they fail to deepen their understanding of history and revolutionary processes. This makes them subject to faulty and inadequate knowledge, and, equally damaging, emotional and largely impulsive decisions. These "tendencies" include:

1. Impatience and intolerance with "violations" to the pace and "purity" of the visualised revolution. The inherent unpredictability and "messiness" of true revolutionary processes disheartens, infuriates, and confuses many would-be revolutionists (this phenomenon can also be observed among some working-class participants). This makes many bourgeois activists and intellectuals abandon prematurely their commitment to the class struggle along vanguardist lines. Some will objectively cross over to the counterrevolutionary camp by providing "left" criticism of vanguardist formations that fail to follow their expectations. (More on this later). 
2. Retreat to reformist positions: "centrist Marxism" (an oxymoron) / social democracy / Bernstein/Kautsky "gradualist" socialism, etc., etc.
3. Flirting and/or involvement with ultra-leftism  (Council Communism, anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, etc.)

Foreshortening the perspective of the revolution
By now it should be clear that making genuine revolution is extremely difficult. Class struggle does not end with the conquest of political power. It continues throughout the painfully long, usually unpredictable and complicated stage of "socialist construction", the transition to full communism. Still, many would-be revolutionists often miscalculate what the class struggle will impose on their supposedly well-conceived plans. This severely foreshortens the way they perceive the whole process. Anarchists are indeed rather notorious in this regard, and therefore superficial in their scientific examination of the underlying forces determining revolutionary advance or retreat.

Pankhurst"broke" with the Soviet experiment after Lenin introduced the NEP.  Since the Soviet revolution was extremely young and severely lacking in good and comfortable options (which abounded in industrially mature imperialist nations), I regard this abandonment as typically premature, and something that the chief ideological lights of council communists (Pannekoek, Gorter et al), are also in many ways guilty of.

This was sad, even tragic, because Pannekoek, for example, was indeed a sophisticated and sincere thinker who had only a few years before hailed the Soviet Revolution and Lenin himself as the most promising vehicles for world revolution. And yet all these otherwise intelligent and sensitive people had now passed on to the objective counter-revolutionary front. In any case, doctrinal questions aside on how to proceed in Western Europe, it's evident the ultra-left, turning ever more utopian, seriously underestimated the challenges posed by the class struggle, especially so in Russia, a vast and largely backward country wracked with every conceivable type of social plague, deficit, and disorder: famines, civil wars in various points, incessant sabotage, party rebellions instigated by opportunists of all stripes, czarist mobilisations, and the threat of constant foreign intervention and outright war.  It's fair to say that for most of the 1920s and much of the 1930s the leaders of the Soviet Union faced policy constraints unrivaled by any other nation on the globe. (Only the Chinese revolution, from the late 1930s onward, would match that degree of poverty of choices, which testifies to their great political endurance and ability).

Was Lenin a State-Capitalist? (The NEP explained)
Jul 2, 2019

Meantime, Stalin, for perfectly logical reasons quickly cancelled the NEP capitalist experiment to focus on national central planning and "forced march industrialisation".

Despite Lenin’s opinion that the NEP should last several decades at least until universal literacy was accomplished, it was only four years after his death that the NEP was altogether abandoned by Joseph Stalin who had become the new leader of communist Russia. Stalin introduced full central planning, re-nationalized much of the economy, and from the late 1920s onwards introduced a policy of rapid industrialization. To this end, he enacted a system of collectivization and saw the need to quickly accumulate capital for the vast industrial programme that would form the basis of the Five Year Plan.

The Five Year Plan would first begin in 1928. Stalin was of the opinion that the NEP was insufficient to industrialise the Soviet Union at the pace it required. He felt only collectivised agricultural farms, instead of the original individual (micro-capitalist) holdings specified under the NEP, would increase the pace of industrialisation at the level of the western nations. (SOURCE: https://byjus.com/free-ias-prep/new-economy-policy-lenin-1921/)

So, in the Soviet revolutionary arc, the NEP constituted a very short episode. Unfortunately, neither Sylvia nor her comrades could see that because the Soviet experiment was novel and unique, and its complex life —in constant struggle—would take most of the 20th century.

Stalin's impatience with the pace of development of core economic resources and his push for an autarkic model had complex but indisputable origins. The Soviet Union was surrounded by enemies across the globe and literally crawling with enemies at home. Numerous reports filed by Soviet diplomats, spies and external and internal experts pointed to a continued growth of the Western threat to the Soviet Union (a threat that included Japan). In fact, it was no secret that Britain, the US, Germany, and France —the "Big Four" victors in WWI—had played —and still played—a key role in the USSR's internal sabotage operations, and that the West's sanctions and "cordon sanitaire" (originally designed by President Wilson in Jan. 1919) were directly aimed at wrecking the Soviet economy and defeating "the Bolshevik menace" in its cradle. Stalin was scarcely paranoid (as many have claimed in the decades-long campaign of vilification).  The capitalist West waged a nonstop war of all types—hybrid, diplomatic, economic, and kinetic—against the first workers' state from its inception to its final days, that is 75 years. This horrific, protracted assault, which included proxy wars and a huge, coordinated outburst of violence under Nazi auspices—cost the Soviet Union 27 million lives, the equivalent of the US losing the entire populations of California, New York and Texas—plus incalculable losses in her agricultural and industrial infrastructure. No other nation paid as high a price to rid the world of the capitalist-abetted Nazi plague.

So this is the backdrop to Lenin's momentary embrace of the NEP, a historical context that the council communists and other ultra-lefts dismissed or gave little weight to at the time, while also deepening their distrust of Bolshevik rule in general, and the character of Lenin's leadership. But things got quickly worse. In the midst of these doctrinal disputes with Moscow, the ultra-left would soon proclaim that the Soviet Union was no longer an alternative to capitalism, but a new type of capitalism. Their error—because that's what it was—would be unfortunately repeated decades later (causing the dangerous Sino-Soviet rift), and still more recently in the case of China, triggering accusations that Beijing is nothing but a state capitalist regime nakedly exploiting and oppressing untold millions. Indeed, there are many people on the so-called left today that denounce not just China as a "fake" socialist nation with imperialist aspirations, but Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Iran, and even Cuba and the DRPK as well. (The latter is simply demonised as a "brutal dictatorship"). That they are playing a clear objective pro-imperialist role on the world stage does not seem to concern them.

Show me the error: "State Capitalism or "Socialism with special characteristics"?
An astrophysicist of considerable merit, Antonie “Anton” Pannekoek, was certainly no lightweight. One of the first conceptualisers of "workers councils" and worker coops, Pannekoek was a sharp critic of anarchism, social democracy, and Vladimir Lenin and Leninism. He also detested much of established trade unionism. And yet this brilliant man fell into a rather common error: he confused the appearance of an isolated and carefully controlled area of capitalist operations (NEP, as visualised by Lenin) with a full restoration of capitalism. But, as history would soon show, and both Marx and Engels had already clarified and Lenin affirmed, that is NOT the way to determine whether a society is capitalist or socialist.

Basically, under capitalism, all production is conducted for the benefit of capitalists, "profits are in command", as Mao reminded us. They control the nation's priorities and policies, both domestic and foreign, and above all, the aggregate social product's distribution. Under socialism, however, all production is conducted for the benefit of society as a whole, the people are in command. The state—ruled by people's representatives, usually the most politically sophisticated and demonstrably dedicated members of the vanguard party, becomes a tool of the proletariat—it is they who now control all the "commanding heights of the economy": banking, public utilities, natural resources, healthcare, war industries, the media, and sectors relating to foreign and domestic trade, plus science and technology.

The preceding does not mean that either type of society cannot have operations that seem to contradict the general self-definition of society. Thus, even in perhaps the most libertarian and savage capitalist nation on earth, the United States, we still have "islands" of public service:  public colleges, libraries, fire departments, some ambulance services, police, a very paltry social security system, and so on. More advanced forms of "public goods" exist in social democracy-ruled nations, such as in "socialist Scandinavia", which are in reality merely welfare capitalist versions of global capitalism. By the same token, the existence of "capitalist billionaires" and industry in China, while always a matter for concern, does not cancel the way China is organised, according to the principle of socialist control of the economy via national planning, as dictated by the ruling communist party, which also regulates the behaviour of its "capitalist units". This, incidentally, explains why China remains impervious to typical capitalist crises of overproduction, the vast scale of corruption we see throughout "the West", the intractable social and political problems of advanced and peripheral capitalist countries, and why China continues to flourish while the bourgeois-ruled nations continue to decay

Ver 1.0 / 17 Feb 2022