Pankhurst reorganised her group of supporters around
Workers Dreadnought, and began criticising the admittance of
trade unions to the
Red International of Labour Unions, and warning that they felt the
Bolsheviks were beginning to "slip to the right". The decline in
class conflict that culminated in the dissolution of the
Shop Stewards Movement had reignited debates over
trade unionism within the British socialist movement, which split into two camps: the "
Amalgamationists" that advocated the amalgamation of
existing trade unions into
industrial unions and "
Dual Unionists" that advocated for building new industrial unions from scratch. Where trade unionists aligned with the CPGB largely pursued amalgamation, the
Dreadnought group had moved away from that position towards dual unionism, with Pankhurst writing in an August 1921 article that workers needed to unite into
One Big Union capable of abolishing capitalism. Pankhurst criticised the attempts to reform existing trade unions from within, drawing parallels between the amalgamationists'
tactic of trying to change union leadership from within and earlier socialist experiences with electoralism, arguing that institutional trade unionism needed to be abolished entirely and replaced with
industrial unionism. The
Dreadnought group advocated grouping together
Industrial Unions under the auspices of the "All-Workers Revolutionary Union": intended as "
One Big Union" which would unite all workers in a struggle against capitalism. In February 1922, the
Dreadnought group established the '''Communist Workers' Party''' (CWP), with this newly adopted industrial unionist policy as its foundation. In the party's programme, it stated its aim as such: The CWP had been influenced by the formation of the
General Workers' Union of Germany (AAUD) by the
Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) during the
German Revolution. They intended as such to establish a British counterpart to the AAUD, just as the CWP was intended as the British counterpart to the KAPD. Taking the AAUd's programme as a basis, in September 1922 the CWP established the '''All-Workers' Revolutionary Union''' (AWRU) in order to implement its
revolutionary unionist goals, envisioning the AWRU as the One Big Union that would itself manage the transition to
socialism. The union organized itself along industrial unionist lines, where recallable delegates were elected by workshops, factories, districts, areas and national councils from the bottom-up. The CWP was quickly rendered redundant and was subsequently superseded by the AWRU, as the AWRU adopted the CWP's entire programme as its own and developed it into an even more comprehensive one than the CWP's, with membership of the AWRU being accepted only on the condition of adhering to all six points of the CWP platform: • to spread
communist ideas; •
electoral abstention and anti-parliamentary propaganda; • refusal of affiliation to the
Labour Party or any other reformist organisation; • to emancipate workers from the
existing trade unions; • to organise '
One Revolutionary Union' as the forerunner of the
workers' councils; • and affiliation to the
Communist Workers International (KAI). The foundation of the AWRU was grounded in the CWP's
prefigurative politics, as the AWRU was intended to itself organise the workers' councils which would then seize the
means of production and form the basis of a
council communist society, with the CWP even claiming in 1923 that "Communism and the All-Workers' Revolutionary Union are synonymous." This model stood in contrast to how the Soviets of the
Russian Revolution and the workers' councils of the
German Revolution had formed, largely
spontaneously without their development by pre-existing organisations, but in Britain this kind of organising was no longer possible since the decline of the strike movement. However the model of dual unionism never bore fruit in Britain either, as its material circumstances were far different from that of the United States, where the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had seen success. The lack of reception to dual unionism meant that the organisation of the AWRU existed largely within the CWP's literature in ''Workers' Dreadnought''. When the AWRU announced its campaign to build the "One Big Union" in July 1923, they also admitted that they had no funds and very few people. Despite optimism concerning a rise in revolutionary sentiment, by the end of 1923 the AWRU had dissolved. Despite the failure of the AWRU, by July 1923 the CWP had announced the formation of the
Unemployed Workers' Organisation (UWO), modelled closely on the IWW as an alternative to the CPGB's "reformist"
National Unemployed Workers' Movement (NUWM). Initially, this attracted numerous former members of the NUWM, sometimes even whole branches throughout London. By the start of 1924, it claimed 3,000 members, mostly in London but also with a branch in Leeds. The organisation grew rapidly, which ended up becoming counterintuitive to the UWO's aims of organising an "army of production", given its members were made up of the
unemployed. In the end, no national group was formally constituted, and they later referred to their network as the
Communist Workers Group, although it was by that point a very small party. On 14 June 1924, ''
Workers' Dreadnought'' ceased publication, bringing a definitive end to the CWP. ==Honorary Treasurers==