She wanted an explicitly socialist organisation tackling wider issues than women's suffrage, aligned with the Independent Labour Party, based among working class people in the East End of London.
From the start of 1917, it adopted a new aim: "to secure Human Suffrage, namely, a Vote, for every Woman and Man of full age, and to win Social and Economic Freedom for the People".
[4] The WSF supported the 1916 Irish Rising and became a leading proponent of improved social welfare while continuing agitation for a universal franchise.
[6] As the months went by, the WSF noted in Workers' Dreadnought that a situation of dual power had broken out between the Petrograd Soviet and the Russian Provisional Government,[7] and upon analyzing the attitudes of the various socialist faction, decided to align with the Bolsheviks.
[18] By March 1919, the WSF had moved to a hardline anti-parliamentary position, with Pankhurst arguing socialists needed to choose between "perpetuating the Parliamentary system" or building up "an industrial republic on Soviet lines.
[21] Pankhurst wrote to Vladimir Lenin in July 1919, asking for his support for the party's opposition to standing in elections; but to her disappointment, he argued that renouncing parliamentary action would be a mistake.
[22] While not changing its views, the WSF accordingly deprioritised this policy in the hope of furthering the unity negotiations, a decision criticised by Rose Witcop of the Communist League.
It agreed to form the Communist Party (British Section of the Third International) (CP(BSTI)) and voted to boycott future unity meetings.
Lenin called on other communists to join the new party, and the CP(BSTI) was one of the groups covered in his work Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder.
Although Workers Dreadnaught was openly critical of this pamphlet, Pankhurst attended the Second Congress of the Comintern, where Lenin personally persuaded Sylvia that her objections were less important than unity, and that it would be possible to maintain an anti-Parliamentary opposition within the CPGB.
In particular, she criticised the Communist Party members of the Poplar Board of Guardians for agreeing to reduce outdoor Poor Law relief, which was cited as the reason for her expulsion from the CPGB in September 1921.
While the idea of democratic centralism, newly accepted as the governing principle for the CPGB, would seem to suggest that she was in breach of discipline, Labour Monthly continued as the personal organ of R. P. Dutt and even received subsidies.
[28] In February 1922, the Dreadnought group established the Communist Workers' Party (CWP), with this newly-adopted industrial unionist policy as its foundation.
[29] 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.
[35] 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.
[36] The lack of reception to dual unionism meant that the organisation of the AWRU existed largely within the CWP's literature in Workers' Dreadnought.