The strange tale of the SLP

The Socialist Labor Party was a well known political group in the United States about a century ago. They were involved in the creation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). For a time, they seem to have been the largest socialist party in the nation. Both James Connolly, Morris Hillquit and Jack London had been members at one time. However, little is written about the history of the SLP after 1905, no doubt because the party soon degenerated into a weird sect at the margins of politics. Indeed, they were isolated even from the "far left".

Frank Girard's and Ben Perry's book "The Socialist Labor Party 1876-1991" fills the gap, for those who absolutely want to know. Both authors are disaffected ex-members of the SLP, holding to a less sectarian version of the original message. Despite their political animus against the SLP, they nevertheless manage to write in a neutral, objective and non-judgmental style. The book isn't scholarly and is rather short, but it seems to be the only neutral source about SLP history spanning the entire period 1876 to 1991 (when the book was published).

SLP's leader Daniel De Leon was a sectarian and dogmatic man, who progressively isolated his party from the main stream of the American labour movement. SLP left the established unions, instead creating a string of socialist dual unions, which had a limited membership. Even SLP's involvement in the more revolutionary IWW was short lived. After the death of De Leon, the SLP was taken over by Arnold Petersen, who held the post as national secretary from 1914 to 1969 (!!), and dominated the party until his death in 1976, arguably a world breaking record of some sort. Petersen purged the party from critical members at a semi-regular basis, while subjecting the dead De Leon to a personality cult. He also uncritically supported Stalin's domestic politics in the Soviet Union, but not his foreign policy, a contradictory position finally made untenable in 1939-40, when the party rejected the Soviets en toto. (Of course, the Russian couldn't care less either way.)

At Petersen's death in 1976, the SLP was a sterile political sect. Remarkably, the new national secretary, Nathan Karp, attempted to reform the group and turn it into a more regular left-wing organization. Support to labour unions at home and national liberation movements in the Third World were part of the new line. This aroused the interest of the much larger Socialist Workers Party, which attempted to "regroup" the SLP with itself. Later, Karp abandoned the new politics, once again retreating into complete sectarianism and propaganda for Marxism-DeLeonism (the party actually calls its ideology by this name). Weirdly, the party and its publication The People still exists.

If De Leon was SLP's Lenin, Petersen was Stalin, and Karp was both Khrushchev and Brezhnev. The movement even has its Trotsky: Sam Brandon, expelled in 1927, still heading a dissident movement fifty years later. Will a Gorbachev ever step forward?

"The Socialist Labor Party 1876-1991" also contains a bibliography, information on SLP's language federations (they even published a newspaper in Swedish!), and SLP equivalents abroad. While the book isn't scholarly and may contain a few errors, it could nevertheless be of some interest to those studying the history of the American labour movement.