Strange socialists I have known

“Recent Changes in the Socialist Labor Party of America” is an internal document published by the Socialist Labor Party of Canada (now defunct). The document is probably unavailable at the present time, unless you happen to be on a very friendly basis with some elderly ex-member of the SLP. I recently found it in my private stash in perfect Xeroxed condition. It comes with a warning label not to spread it outside the ranks of the SLP, well, clearly somebody broke that promise. (I´m not sure if I got the copy from the De Leonist Society of Canada or the Discussion Bulletin.)

The SLP is a small left-wing group in the United States, and used to have an even smaller subsidiary in Canada. From 1914 to 1969, a man named Arnold Petersen was the SLP´s National Secretary. Indeed, he dominated the party until his death in 1976. During Petersen´s almost impossibly long tenure as party leader (yes, you read that right – 1914 to 1969), the SLP was a strongly sectarian organization the sole activity of which was abstract propaganda for socialism. Even this wasn´t carried out in a very flexible or clever way – quite the contrary. SLP members weren´t allowed to join unions, except when their jobs depended on it, and they were prohibited from holding even lowly union positions. Unions were “capitalist” in Petersen´s estimation. All minimum reform demands were rejected, “socialism” being the only demand of the SLP. The party also stayed away from “free universities” and similar New Left forums where they could have easily spread their propaganda. Nor did they participate in protest marches, except to leaflet them with SLP propaganda, and even this was often made impossible by the inflexible party rules – the party members were to avoid the staging areas, making it difficult to see how they could possibly have leafleted the march participants? Often, they simply stayed away completely. In effect, the Petersenite SLP boycotted most of the important venues for left-wing politics during the 1960´s: the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the New Left, and so on. SLP´s newspaper, the Weekly People, was filled with long excerpts from Daniel De Leon´s articles on various subjects (De Leon, who died in 1914, had been the party´s foremost theoretician) and ditto from Petersen´s own pamphlets. Not to be too polite, the SLP was a kind of “Jehovah´s Witnesses of the left”, but apparently without the promotional acumen of the Watchtower Society…

After Petersen´s death, his erstwhile protégé Nathan Karp tried to change the policy of the party, making it more similar to a normal left-wing group. This was opposed by the Petersenite old guard, which apparently controlled the small SLP franchise in Canada. “Recent Changes in the Socialist Labor Party” documents Karp´s changes and argues against them in favor of the super-sectarian verities of yesteryear. The material is extremely tedious and only of interest to SLP-watchers (I was one back in the 1990´s). It was interesting to read Petersen´s internal letters to various party dissidents – they are just as dogmatic, unyielding and frankly insulting as the man´s public pronouncements. It´s also intriguing that the far-reaching changes in SLP´s tactics, and in some cases actual political positions, happened so fast after the old man´s death – it´s almost as if the other party leaders had waited for Petersen to die, then launched their coup immediately after the funeral! I also wonder what kind of people the super-orthodox super-socialist SLP really attracted. Thus, Petersen´s National Office had to issue instructions that, of course, no SLP member can be a volunteer soldier in the US military, or serve as a police officer at an industrial plant! Apparently, some SLP members had applied for such positions?! It´s almost as if SLP´s strong sectarianism made them attractive only to confused people with a very low level of political consciousness… People with solid leftist sympathies went to the regular leftists.

 As far as I understand, Karp expelled the old guard when they refused to bow to the new order. Ironically, however, he then began to backslide and once again turned the SLP into a small and sectarian group at the outskirts of the left. I´m not sure why – maybe he feared that there wasn´t much political space for a “soft” version of the SLP on the American left, that space already being filled by the DSA, the libertarian socialists or even the “softer” Trotskyists. The only way to keep the little apparat going was to retreat once more into sectarian isolation. The Petersenites regrouped in two “De Leonist Societies”, one in Canada and the other one (I think) in New York City. They only published Xeroxed bulletins, but where kind enough to copy some Petersen pamphlets for me when politely asked. After a quixotic split (I think the American society had revised De Leon´s program on a single point – whether or not the future socialist society should have industrial constituencies only, or also territorial constituencies), it seems both societies disappeared around 2000. I think their members were by then over 90 years old!

With this, I close my little review of this very, very obscure publication.