Socialist Labor Party (SLP)
The Socialist Labor Party (SLP) is the original party of socialism in America. Organized as the Workingmen's Party in 1876, the Party was renamed in 1877. The Socialist Labor Party, founded in 1874, was a product of the American section of Marx and Engel's International Workingman's Association, or "First International," formed in 1864.
This group attempted in 1895 to form a rival body to the AFL — the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance. As the only nationally organized party of socialism in America until 1900, the SLP attracted Socialists of all tendencies to its ranks. However, the Marxist element became dominant by 1890, when the Party was reorganized on a Marxist basis. The SLP played a prominent role in the economic and political life of the United States. It ran the first socialist presidential campaign in 1892, and fielded national tickets in every presidential campaign through 1976.
Marx, Engels and their disciples were not interested in politics, in the form of political parties. This was natural, since at that time the suffrage was very much restricted in European countries. Change would not be brought about by politics, but by an intensification of the class struggle. Agitation should be carried on to create “class consciousness" among the workers. The intensification of the misery of the workers would be an ally of the agitators. Finally, when class consciousness had become a quality of a large majority of the workers, they would rise in revolution, overthrow the master class and seize political power, which would bring about the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Once in ower, the proletariat would organize industry on a collective basis, all members of society would have to become workers, and class rule would give place to pure Socialism, or Communism. This is the program of the early Marxian Socialists. These were the principles on which was founded the International Workingmen's Association, in Paris, in 1864, and which a few years later was removed to New York in a moribund condition, there to be unobtrusively interred.
In the United States the Socialist Labor Party was organized in 1877. Its chief was Daniel De Leon, a true Marxian, though he believed in political activity for its propaganda value. As the Socialist Labor Party met with little or no success at the polls, it was not tempted to deviate from its Marxian principles, since its chiefs were not elected to office.
With the advent of Daniel De Leon, a powerful intellect and a masterful and commanding personality was brought to bear upon what was at first a decidedly peculiar situation. He a man of broad education, of much experience in life, of great intellectual force, whose active and comprehensive mind rapidly digested the new experience he was gaining through his connection with the Labor movement and, who, thereupon, forcefully reacted upon his environment.
His vast knowledge, made mobile and available by a virile mentality, the purity of his motives engendering a flawless devotion to the movement, his absolute fearlessness and steadfastness in the face of whatever might befall, never wavering, never faltering, never perturbed, no matter what disappointments, setbacks and difficulties the troubled waters of the Labor movement might cast ashore, he was, indeed, a tower of strength.
Sunny of disposition, kindly, vivacious, always ready with an anecdote or a jest, which latter he had to "get out of his system or 'bust'", as he often used to say, Daniel De Leon, the man, certainly was a being far different from the horned and hoofed fiend his enemies used to depict him when, in their incessant assaults, they could find no vulnerable spot in his armor.
During the period 1891-1894, strenuous efforts were made to inocculate the trade unions of the land with Socialist revolutionary principles by means of a method designated in those days as "boring from within." These efforts were made in the local unions, in the local central bodies and, through these, it was sought to carry the revolutionary propaganda into the national conventions of the American Federation of Labor, as well as of the Knights of Labor. But it was found in the end that the whole fabric of the Knights was by then rotten to the core and nothing could be gained by capturing what had been reduced to a nest of crooks.
The attempts at domination by external political radicalism represented by Daniel de Leon and his Socialist-Labor Party were remarkable for their similarity and precise contemporary date with early experiences of Lenin, genius of modern communism and his later Bolshevik Party. It was not a mere historical curiosity that, when Lenin hurriedly assembled his originally ramshackle and improvised First Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in March 1919, it was a delegation from the minuscule Socialist-Labor Party who belatedly turned up to claim title as the true American Bolsheviks.
Samuel Gompers and his AFL associates sharpened their understanding of those who aspired to take over the trade union movement as a tool of their Marxist revolutionary fanaticism in their contest with de Leon's Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance in the 1890's, and were rehearsed and prepared well in advance when Lenin announced his intent to take over the U.S. trade union movement of the AFL, whose principle of voluntarism, to him, was "a rope of sand" against the militarily disciplined and centrally directed Communist forces Lenin proposed to create and put to the task of boring from within established trade union ranks.
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