Left communist who broke from her mother's WSPU to stand with East End working women, buried among Ethiopian patriots
"The Bolsheviks have begun to desert communism." In her 1922 Open Letter to Lenin, Pankhurst broke with Moscow. Expelled from the CPGB for refusing to surrender the Workers' Dreadnought, she chose free debate over party discipline.
British suffragette, left communist and anti-colonial activist. Breaking from her mother Emmeline's WSPU to organise working-class women in the East End, she debated Lenin and turned council communist before devoting her final decades to Ethiopia's anti-fascist struggle.
Career timeline
- 1882Born in Manchester to Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst
- 1903–1914Full-time WSPU organiser — designed logo and banners, witnessed Black Friday 1910, organised nationwide suffrage campaign
- 1914–1918Founded ELFS, launched Woman's Dreadnought — anti-war and anti-conscription agitation, rent strikes and cost-price canteens
- 1918–1920Founded WSF, published Workers' Dreadnought — attended 2nd Comintern Congress, debated Lenin directly
- 1921–1924Expelled from CPGB; published Open Letter to Lenin — turned council communist, formed Communist Workers' Party
- 1935–1956Founded and edited New Times and Ethiopia News — opposed fascist invasion, shaped pan-African and anti-colonial opinion
- 1956–1960Moved to Ethiopia — adviser to Haile Selassie, fundraised for first teaching hospital, wrote Ethiopia: A Cultural History
- 1960Died aged 78 in Addis Ababa — Ethiopian state funeral, buried among patriots at Holy Trinity Cathedral
The Trotskyist theorist who defined the USSR as bureaucratic state capitalism and built Britain's Socialist Workers Party
The slogan the Cliff group raised in 1950, when a handful of supporters brought out Socialist Review: “Neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism.” It was a refusal of both camps of the Cold War, and the sentence that defined this current for the next half century.
Born Yigael Glückstein. Raised in Palestine in a family of Polish-Jewish immigrants, he left the Zionist left in his teens for Trotskyism, served twelve months in a British Mandate prison for anti-war agitation, and moved to Britain in 1947. In The Nature of Stalinist Russia (1948) he defined the USSR not as a degenerated workers'' state but as bureaucratic state capitalism, breaking with Fourth International orthodoxy, and on that base he built the theory of the permanent arms economy, which explained the postwar boom by East-West military spending, and of deflected permanent revolution, in which neither bourgeoisie nor working class but intellectuals and officers carry the revolution out. The organization he started as the Socialist Review Group in 1950 became the International Socialists and, in 1977, the Socialist Workers Party. He left a study of Rosa Luxemburg and four-volume biographies of Lenin and of Trotsky, and, never granted British citizenship, remained stateless all his life.
Career timeline
- 1917Born Yigael Glückstein at Zikhron Ya'akov in Ottoman Palestine, to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents
- 1931–1933Began in the youth section of Mapai, then Poale Zion, inside the Zionist left
- late 1930sBecame a Trotskyist and an anti-Zionist; active in the small Palestinian Trotskyist movement
- 1939Arrested by the British Mandate authorities and held twelve months in Acre prison
- 1945Married the South African socialist Chanie Rosenberg
- 1947Moved to Britain, was refused leave to remain, and worked in Dublin instead
- 1948Published The Nature of Stalinist Russia, defining the USSR as bureaucratic state capitalism
- 1950Founded the Socialist Review Group: neither Washington nor Moscow
- 1952Allowed back into Britain and settled in London
- 1959Published Rosa Luxemburg: A Study, first using the pen name Tony Cliff
- 1962–1963Renamed the group the International Socialists and formulated deflected permanent revolution
- 1977Founded the Socialist Workers Party
- 1975–1993Wrote his four-volume Lenin and four-volume Trotsky
- 2000.04.09Died in London after heart surgery, still a stateless person
