De Leon: a revolutionary pioneer

Submitted by AWL on 11 November, 2014 - 6:05 Author: Michéal MacEoin

Daniel De Leon (1852-1914) was a pioneer of the American socialist movement, educating a generation in the basics of class-struggle revolutionary politics.

Born in the Dutch colony of Curacao, off the coast of Venezuela, on 14 December 1852, he was educated in law in Germany and the Netherlands. He moved to the United States in 1874, finding work as a lecturer.

Settling in New York, De Leon became influenced by the writings of the socialist novelist Edward Bellamy. He joined the Knights of Labour, a fraternal organisation which nevertheless began to act as a trade union, organising railroad strikes and demanding the eight-hour day.

Despite his well-off background as the son of a colonial official, De Leon threw himself into left-wing political life. His enthusiastic support for Henry George, United Labor Party candidate in the 1886 New York mayoral election, may well have cost him his part-time teaching job at Colombia University.

In 1890, De Leon joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), becoming the editor of its newspaper, The People, and its candidate for governor of New York the following year. He soon established himself as a prominent figure in the party, advocating a form of revolutionary Marxism.

De Leon was a vociferous critic of the shortcomings in existing American trade union movement — especially the American Federation of Labor (AFL), dubbed by some radicals as the "American Separation of Labor" on account of organising workers along narrowly-defined craft lines.

In 1895, the SLP set up the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (STLA) after the party was ejected from the Knights of Labour. Although the new union was never much more than an extension of the SLP, it was a precursor for an altogether more important development in US labour history.

On 27 June 1905, De Leon took part in a convention of militant trade union activists in Chicago. The meeting was also attended by Eugene V. Debs and Bill Haywood, and agreed to set up a new labour organisation — the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

In its scope and aims, the IWW was far beyond any of the unions in the US at the time — and in many ways, since.

As the American Trotskyist James P. Cannon wrote: “The men who founded the IWW were pioneer industrial unionists, and the great industrial unions of today stem directly from them. But they aimed far beyond industrial unionism as a bargaining agency recognizing the private ownership of industry as right and unchangeable. They saw the relations of capital and labor as a state of war.”

The idea of class war and the irreconcilability of class interests was at the heart of the IWW, as enshrined in its famous preamble: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”

As well as fighting the class struggle on the economic front and popularising the idea of industrial unionism — that all workers in a given industry should be united together against their employers — the IWW was also, in effect, a revolutionary political organisation, making propaganda for the overthrow of capitalism.

However, as Cannon wrote: “One of the most important contradictions of the IWW, implanted at its first convention and never resolved, was the dual role it assigned to itself. Not the least of the reasons for the eventual failure of the IWW — as an organization — was its attempt to be both a union of all workers and a propaganda society of selected revolutionists — in essence a revolutionary party. Two different tasks and functions, which, at a certain stage of development, require separate and distinct organizations, were assumed by the IWW alone; and this duality hampered its effectiveness in both fields.”

Indeed, it soon suffered a number of splits on an explicitly political basis which shattered its industrial unity. The 1905 version of the IWW constitution mentioned that the working class should “come together on the political as well as the industrial field”. Almost immediately, however, there were some who wished to remove the reference to the political field and focus instead on strikes, boycotts and direct action.

De Leon and the SLP were amongst those who continued to advocate political action. As he wrote in Reform or Revolution: “The capitalist is organised on both lines. You must attack him on both.”

The SLP then split from the IWW in 1908, and formed its own Workers International Industrial Union. It never made much of an impact and the SLP continued as a propagandist sect.

De Leon's attempts to combine industrial and political action count in his favour, though they were not without problems either. His brand of “Marxist-syndicalism” contained a conception of politics that was narrow and overly legalistic and schematic, with the main constructive element residing in the industrial organisation.

In his reckoning, workers would use the ballot-box for the purposes of attaining and then destroying political power; at the same time, their unions would “take and hold” the economy at a workplace, and power would be simply transferred to a new “industrial form of government.”

In reality, the dynamics of revolution (as in Russia in 1917) proved more fluid, with new structures (such as soviets) emerging in the course of struggle. This required a revolutionary party with a more expansive conception of politics than simply the ballot box, organising the most advanced workers around a programme which could see the working-class navigate its way to power.

Nevertheless, those like De Leon and the IWW, were revolutionary pioneers, operating at a time when the US labour movement was in its relative infancy. That the subsequent generation saw further was because the IWW had already laid much of the important groundwork.

De Leon died in New York on 11 May 1914. His politics contained many of the necessary elements – class struggle, revolutionary political organisation, and the unity of the working-class on the industrial front. Yet they were arranged awkwardly, like a Cubist portrait, and it was for his successors to render a clearer and more coherent picture.

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