Wages, prices and Catholicism

A review of "Connolly-De Leon Debate: On Wages, Marriage and the Church".

The Connolly-De Leon controversy took place in 1904, and might be of some interest to those interested in the works of the Irish socialist James Connolly.

Daniel De Leon was the de facto leader of the Socialist Labor Party, a Marxist party in the United States which Connolly had joined upon his arrival to that country. Connolly quickly found himself in opposition to De Leon on three points: wages and prices, marriage and religion. De Leon printed and answered a critical letter from Connolly in the SLP's main organ Weekly People, but then stopped Connolly from responding, while printing a string of letters supporting his own position. Connolly eventually left the SLP and later returned to Ireland, where he became one of the leaders of the famed Easter Rising.

The point of contention between De Leon and Connolly which the latter considered the most important was the SLP's view of wages and prices. Apparently, the SLP held to a version of the "iron law of wages", claiming that a fight for higher wages was useless, since it would be almost immediately cancelled out by an equal rise in prices. Connolly denied this, citing Marx, and also pointed out that the SLP's labour union ST&LA would be rendered useless if the iron law of wages was indeed true. De Leon's response on this point isn't particularly convincing. Interestingly, the SLP abandoned all labour union work during the 1920's, presumably taking their position on wages and prices to its logical extreme. (De Leon died already in 1914.)

Connolly further objected to the Weekly People serializing August Bebels famous work "Woman and socialism". Both Connolly and De Leon supported monogamous marriage, which Bebel did not, but De Leon nevertheless felt that the book was useful in other ways. Connolly considered it indecent and a boon to the religious enemies of socialism. On this point, Connolly sounds decidedly old fashioned and prudish. He also believed that the socialist movement should be neutral on the woman question, since socialism wouldn't solve the problem of gender relations anyway. De Leon, by contrast, held the opinion that the socialization of the means of production would emancipate women and also strengthen monogamy.

On the question of religion, Connolly believed that the socialist movement should be neutral towards both religion as a creed and the Catholic Church as a church, and he strongly objected to the SLP's newspaper printing an anti-Catholic article by Belgian socialist Emile Vandervelde. He also accused the SLP of having a general tendency to attack theology, something De Leon hotly denied. It's clear that Connolly had a much broader definition of "theology" than De Leon. For instance, De Leon had claimed that many anarchist terrorists (including Leon Czolgosz) were somehow inspired by Catholic doctrines. He also constantly exposed Ultramontanism. To De Leon, this wasn't an attack on "theology", but rather a criticism of the Catholic Church on those points where its message had political consequences. After all, De Leon wasn't attacking the immaculate conception or the finer points of Neo-Thomism. Connolly's position is probably an adaptation to the Catholicism of his homeland. (The SLP would later accuse Connolly of actually being a Catholic!)

Today, the debate between Connolly and De Leon is probably of little interest, except perhaps for Irish labour historians, and this pamphlet is published by the Cork Workers' Club, apparently an Irish socialist group of some kind. The text of this hard to find pamphlet is also available on the web.