The Socialist Labor Party of America
(1876-1930)
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“Platform of the Socialistic Labor Party of North America: Adopted at the 5th National Convention of the SLP, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 5-8, 1885.” The program of the SLP, which states that given the endemic transgressions resulting from capitalist production, socialism is essential for the preservation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Includes a list of “Demands for the Immediate Amelioration of the Condition of the Working People,” both social and political. Among these demands is one for the abolitiion of the institutions of President, Vice-President, and Senate and the substitution of an “Executive Board” selected by and serving at the pleasure of a unicameral House of Representatives. “And to realize our demands, we strive by all proper means to gain control of the political power,” the platform notes.
“Constitution of the Socialistic Labor Party: Adopted at the 5th National Convention of the SLP, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 5-8, 1885.” Organizational regulations of the SLP, which bases the structure of the organization around the parallel institutions of a nine member National Executive Committee in one Section (which itself selects Secretaries for domestic and international affairs, Financial and Recording Secretaries, and two auditors) and a nine member Board of Supervisors in another Section, with tasks of supervision of the NEC and handling of appeals of the decisions of that and lower bodies. Of note is the lack of a National Executive Secretary under this particular variant of the SLP’s conception of dual power.
1886
“Socialism and Anarchism: Antagonistic Opposites.” Text of a pamphlet published in English in New York by the National Executive Committee of the Socialistic Labor Party differentiating Marxian Social Democracy from the Anarchist movement. Anarchism was characterized as a utopian antipode of Marxism founded upon the notion of extreme individualism; Social Democracy portrayed as a byproduct of the scientific study of the evolution of the family into the tribe into the modern exploitative state. This modern capitalist state was said to be inevitably proceeding towards its own doom in the form of ever-worsening financial crises and the growing immiseration of the dispossessed majority. It was Capitalism and its unregulated production and inequitable distribution that was anarchic, not Socialism, this pamphlet charged. While there was little hope for an entirely peaceful renewal of society under collectivism, “that war must be forced upon us” and the change might well be brought about “without very violent and bloody convulsions” in a democratic society with freedoms of speech, press, assembly, organization, and universal suffrage assured. “...We shall be revolutionists only when forced into being such by legislation and persecution withholding from us the means of a peaceable propaganda,” it was asserted.
“The Socialistic Labor Party in 1886.” by Edward Bibbins Aveling and his wife Eleanor Marx Aveling. This snippet was first published in 1891 as part of a book called The Working-Class Movement in America, published in London by Sonn Sonnenschein & Co., a prominent left-wing publisher. Eleanor Aveling was the daughter of Karl Marx. The speaking tour around America which she and her husband undertood proved something of a fiasco, but the pair did nevertheless get a glimps of the state of the American situation.
1894
“Why Workman Are Unemployed? An Answer to a Burning Question,” by Alexander Jonas.” [March 1894] Jonas, a co-founder of the New Yorker Volkszeitung and one of the leading figures in the pre-DeLeon period of the SLP, here offers his workingman audience the reason for their misery in the then-current economic crisis—private ownership, the parasitic profit system, and systemic underconsumption that resulted from workers being paid insufficient wages to purchase all the products which they produced. The political elite of the country—lawyers, capitalists, and rich farmers—had neither an understanding of the needs of labor nor a willingness to ameliorate the unemployment crisis through public works. Only a movement of the workers to unite behind the Socialist Labor Party could spur this out-of-touch elite into action, Jonas stated, “for there is no other means whereby emancipation from industrial slavery can be achieved, but political action.”
1899
“The Situation in New York City.” [Published May 1, 1899] First statement of the Socialist Labor Party’s National Executive Committee to the membership of the SLP on the factional fight brewing in New York between party regulars surrounding the English weekly The People and German weekly Vorwaerts (on the one hand) and an insurgent SLP Right connected with the New Yorker Volkszeitung and its publisher, the Socialistic Cooperative Publishing Association (on the other). This conflict had its root in the SLP’s turn to dual unionism in 1896—with related themes of party discipline and centralized control of the party press. This fight would rage throughout 1899, ending in a permanent split of the SLP. (The SLP Right would later become one of the main components of a faction of the Social Democratic Party in 1900 and subsequently of the new Socialist Party of America in 1901).
“Correspondence Between the SLP and SCPA, May 1899.” These three letters exchanged between ths National Executive Committee of the Socialist Labor Party and the Board of Directors of the Socialistic Cooperative Publishing Association detail the issues of press centralization and party discipline that were part and parcel of the 1899 SLP split. This exchange outlines the situation from the perspective of the SCPA, who answers specific complaints of the National Executive Committee with a historical overview of the relationship between the Association and its publicatons with the party.
“To the Membership of the SLP from its NEC.” [June 6, 1899]. This is the Natonal Executive Committee’s reply to the late May letter of the Socialistic Cooperative Publishing Association. The NEC argued that the SCPA was misrepresenting its true relationship to the party in its assertion of ownership and control over the content of The People and Vorwaerts. The May 1899 Correspondence between the SLP and the SCPA (document above) and this reply were sent to the sections and members of the party as background information along with a call for the membership to decide the issue with a vote.
“Chronological Recapitulation of the Volkszeitung Conflict.” [Aug. 20, 1899] Published in the SLP official organ, The People, this is a highly tendentious blow-by-blow account of the battle between the SLP regulars loyal to Daniel DeLeon (including Henry Kuhn and Lucien Sanial, among others) and the SLP Right faction around the New Yorker Volkszeitung and its publisher, the Socialistic Cooperative Publishing Association. Interesting for its tone and useful for its provision of the critical dates in the conflict.
“Daniel DeLeon and the 1899 Split of the SLP,” by Morris Hillquit. This is a section from Morris Hillquit’s 1934 memoir, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life. Hillquit, a member of the SLP from 1888, was a leader of the so-called “Kangaroos” associated with the New Yorker Volkszeitung, a group which broke with the SLP over the issues of dual unionism and the perception of a dictatorial internal regime within the SLP. This insurgent SLP Right fought a pitched battle for the name and property of the party before losing in court to party regulars loyal to Daniel DeLeon.
1900
“Report of the National Executive Committee to the 10th (Regular) Convention of the SLP,” by Henry Kuhn. [June 1900] The full text (37 pages, 292 k.) of the report of SLP National Secretary Henry Kuhn to the (regular) 10th Convention of the Socialist Labor Party, held in New York from June 2 to 8, 1900. Kuhn recounts the 1899 split with the SLP Right in exhaustive detail, including a state-by-state rundown of the party situation. The definitive account of the 1899 SLP split from the point of view of the SLP “regular” faction associated with the New York City NEC and the English language party organ, The People, edited by Daniel DeLeon.
1896 and 1900 Constitutions of the Socialist Labor Party.” Parallel texts of the 1896 and 1900 national constitutions of the SLP, illustrating organizational structure before and after the 1899 split of the SLP Right (the so-called “Kangaroos”). Useful for assessing the legality (or lack thereof) of various tactics employed by the New York-based “regular” NEC in the bitter 1899 factional struggle and the structural changes which it deemed necessary in the aftermath.
1901
“Territorial Expansion,” by Lucien Sanial [1901]. Full text of a pamphlet published in 1901 by the New York Labor News Co. This is an early Marxist analysis of the phenomenon of imperialism written by one of the leading figures in the Socialist Labor Party of America. Sanial states that “the time comes when the capitalists of such a country as the United States, where this capitalistic phenomenon of a rapidly growing difference between Product and Wages is most accentuated, are confronted on all sides by an accumulation of commodities, which, ever so small as compared with the stupendous but unused forces of production at their command, challenges their power of exchange or waste.They are actually, then, ‘smothering in their own grease.’” In response, Sanial notes, “they must expand abroad or burst.” At first the capitalists seek only commercial expansion, Sanial states, but at a certain point “other means” are inevitably devised “to enlarge the foreign outlet”—territorial expansion. In the United States, the growth of surplus value production had grown by an incredible rate through the implementation of new labor-saving production technology and “American capitalism has reached that point of ‘suffocation by wealth,’” Sanial states.
1915
The Socialist Movement: Brief Outline of its Development and Differences in This Country.” Text of a 1915 three cent pamphlet published by the Socialist Labor Party detailing that organization’s differences with the Socialist Party of America. Five specific areas of difference are identified: Trade Union policy, Party Press Ownership, State Party Autonomy from the Center, Taxation Policy, and Immigration Policy. The SLP’s vision of “industrial government” is outlined and contrasted to the program of the SPA, which is characterized as “anti-Socialist and bourgeois.”
1921
Letter from Arnold Petersen to N. Lenin.” January 15, 1921. Text of a massive (26 page) letter from the National Secretary of the Socialist Labor Party to V.I. Ulianov (N. Lenin) in Russia from a copy in the Comintern archive. As might be expected, Petersen is harshly critical of all other groups in the American left—the Socialist Party of America (reformist practitioners of a “species of fraud”), the Communist Parties (“Burlesque Bolsheviki” with a “predilection for repeating meaningless and undefined phrases because of their ‘revolutionary’ sound”), the IWW (“infested with police spies” and “in a state of decay”), and the AF of L (“officered by agents of the bourgeoisie”). Petersen defiantly defends the SLP’s dual unionism and militant hostility against the AF of L (“there is not the slightest reason to believe that any outside influence, however powerful, is going to make the SLP throw away the fruits of its toil of a quarter of a century”) as well as the use of the ballot as the main mechanism for revolutionary change (“not everything that has arisen during capitalism is a sham and a delusion”). Regardless of these differences, Petersen calls the existence of the Soviet Republic an “inspiration” and pledges that the SLP will do its utmost to bring about a revolutionary industrial republic in the United States.
1925
The Workers Party vs. The Socialist Labor Party,” by Joseph Brandon. Article from the Aug. 1, 1925, Weekly People that was reproduced as a five cent pamphlet. In this work Brandon contrasts the “ridiculous” principles and tactics of the Workers Party of America with the “100 percent perfect, all down the line” position of the SLP. Divergences noted by Brandon include the blind advocacy of the WPA to a Soviet-style “transition program” to socialism via the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (regarded as ahistorical and unnecessary in developed capitalist society); a refusal of the WPA to endorse new revolutionary industrial unions in favor of exclusive use of the tactic of “boring from within” existing unions (regarded as an impossible tactic that in practice meant little more than kowtowing to established labor leaders); and the WPA’s celebration of general labor political success abroad from its partners in the “united front” (gains characterized as reformist and anti-revolutionary by Brandon). Finally, the Workers Party’s advocacy of violence is depicted as playing right into the hands of the capitalist class, a policy advocated only by one who is “either a lunatic or a police spy.”
The Party’s Work,” by Verne L. Reynolds. Text of a pamphlet written by the Socialist Labor Party’s 1924 Vice Presidential candidate, published and distributed for free to the entire party membership in 1925 as a pocket guidebook to organization. Extensive discussion of how to promote speakers, to generate publication subscriptions and new party members, to delegate work within party sections, and to develop the speaking abilities of party members. Particular attention is paid to the handling of new party members—building party discipline and keeping expectations for organizational growth reasonable without dampening the enthusiasm of the new convert.