There was no objection from those MPs to the passing of the Munitions Act which outlawed strikes on war work (accepted by the TUC) or the various additions to the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) which gave the state almost unlimited power against anything it interpreted as a possible threat to the “war effort”. In 1915 Ramsay MacDonald, a pacifist, resigned the leadership (though not his seat in parliament), not in order to protest at his party’s endorsement of war, but so that he could have an easy conscience about Labour MPs joining the wartime coalition governments. Apart from a few token demonstrations called by the pacifists in the ILP as war was declared, Labour gave full support to the War. As with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany, the Labour Party promised to support the war effort. With the notable exception of Russia and Serbia, Socialist Parties in all the warring countries abandoned any pretence that they would oppose workers killing each other for the sake of the national interests of their own capitalist class. ![]() For the working class throughout Europe the reformist scenario of socialism evolving naturally and peaceably out of capitalism was shattered. As well as shaking the very foundations of the existing political and social order, the war undermined bourgeois self-confidence in its ‘civilising mission’ and automatic right to rule. The World War itself - the barbaric culmination of imperialist competition - brought the biggest human carnage the world had ever seen. The years immediately preceding the 1st World War were distinguished by intense class struggle which in Britain presented the capitalist class with the biggest challenge to its rule since Chartism. ![]() ![]() War and Revolution: The End of the Old World Order As it happens Pankhurst’s time in the East End (1912-24) spanned some of the most traumatic years of capitalism’s existence, a period which even bourgeois historians have come to recognise as an historical watershed. Unfortunately, as the book’s title suggests, the author herself is not really aware that this is what she has elected to do in recording Pankhurst’s years of “political work in the East End of London”. A review article of Sylvia Pankhurst: Sexual Politics and Political Activism by Barbara Winslow (published by UCL Press).įor anyone espousing communist politics today the appearance of a book which deals seriously with Sylvia Pankhurst’s political progression from militant reformist (suffragette) to revolutionary and left-wing communist is of more than passing interest.
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