A burlesque Stalinist roar

"Burlesque Bolshevism" is a bizarre pamphlet published in 1934 by the Socialist Labor Party, written by the SLP's leader Arnold Petersen. It contains a number of articles previously published in SLP's house organ Weekly People, attacking the Communist Party.

The articles are teeming with invectives, but are very short on argument. Their titles are typical of Petersen's deranged rhetoric: "Madmen leading the blind", "A prevaricating peddler of perversity" and "The roar of the slum". The fourth article is called "Burlesquing Marx".

Here is a direct quote, to give you the flavour of Petersen's polemical style: "Perusing the recent campaign literature of the Anarcho-Communists (Communist party of America), one is sharply reminded of such a Maison de Santé [French madhouse]. Still, the parallel is not perfect. For in Poe's tale there was pure madness, while in the case of the Anarcho-Communists one is never quite sure where to draw the line between madness and crookedness, not to mention the residuum which includes the element afflicted with hopeless imbecility, as well as the cross sections of the police spy or agent provocateur. It remains true, however, that Anarcho-Communism as a whole presents a fascinating study of amorphic social pathology". The pamphlet reproduces a photo of a young Communist agitator, symbolically chained to a lamp post. Petersen believes that the expression on her face reveals "a warped or under-developed mentality...coarseness and ignorance are stamped on her features...a young savage". He also exclaims: "Witness the female Hitlerite, in embryo, in the picture".

And so it goes on...

Petersen says a few interesting things about a personal meeting with Alexandra Kollontai in New York during World War I, but otherwise "Burlesque Bolshevism" is just a long, weird and cultic screed, obviously written by a man with delusions of grandeur. He attempts to claim Lenin as one of his own, based on second-hand information, while nevertheless implicitly claiming that the SLP is much smarter than the leader of the Russian revolution.

I'm not a Communist, but there is something uncannily humorous about the leader of a small political sect claiming that all sympathetic things about a famous historical character such as V.I. Lenin comes from (surprise surprise) his own sect! Petersen also liked Stalin, something he passes over in silence in this particular text. The National Secretary of the SLP even compared Stalin's purges with his own expulsions of "disrupters", thereby revealing himself to be, shall we say, a burlesque Stalinist. At least until 1939-40, when Old Joe made a deal with Hitler (or Schicklgruber, as Petersen often calls him) and attacked Finland, at which time Petersen disavowed him as another "Anarcho-Communist".

Iossif Vissarionovich, of course, couldn't care less either way.