Petersen covering his tracks

"Marxism versus Soviet Despotism" is a pamphlet by Arnold Petersen, the long time leader of the Socialist Labor Party. The first edition seems to have been published in 1958.

Despite its quasi-syndicalist program (known as De Leonism) and its refusal to join the Communist International, the SLP nevertheless supported the domestic policies of both Lenin and Stalin. Petersen had an obvious soft spot for Lenin, since the Russian leader had at various times expressed admiration for Daniel De Leon, who developed SLP's rather peculiar brand of Marxism. As for Stalin, Petersen at one point compared the great purges in the Soviet Union with his own purges of SLP dissidents! Petersen's pamphlet "Soviet Russia: Promise or Menace" quotes Moscow News and other Soviet sources in an attempt to prove that the USSR was much better than, and very different from, Nazi Germany. However, Petersen and his weird party turned 180 degrees after Stalin's pact of non-aggression with Hitler, and the subsequent Soviet attacks on Poland and Finland.

"Marxism versus Soviet Despotism" contains the new line, but there is no self-criticism or even acknowledgement of the old, pro-Stalinist line. Instead, citizen Petersen simply declares that while Lenin was honestly striving to build the material prerequisites for socialism in Russia, Stalin was a despotic bureaucrat and ersatz pharaoh already from the start. The economic successes of the Soviets Union, so admired by the SLP twenty years earlier, are now written off as the accomplishments of a new slave society, and Petersen explicitly compares the USSR to ancient Egypt and its pyramids. The rest of the pamphlet contains the usual esoteric ideological criticism of Soviet Communism, now directed mostly at Lenin rather than at Stalin, although Petersen still has a soft spot for Vladimir Ilich, due to the man's real or perceived acknowledgments of De Leon's greatness. Petersen, of course, considered himself the master custodian of De Leon's legacy, which presumably means that some of Lenin's aura fell on him, too. Judging by some of his other oeuvres, Petersen was something of a megalomaniacal, egotistic cultist. But that's another show.

"Marxism versus Soviet Despotism" might be interesting for those who, for reasons best known to themselves, care about the SLP and its history. For the general reader, I don't think Petersen covering his Stalinistic tracks is particularly relevant.