Daniel De Leon

A socialist who grew with the movement

Ernie Lane was an active fighter for revolutionary socialist politics - as he understood them, in different ways over the years - in Brisbane, Australia, from the late 1880s through to 1954, a model of persistence and tenacity though not always of acuity. Jeff Rickertt, author of a recently-published biography of Ernie, The Conscientious Communist, talked with Solidarity about Ernie and about the book. I was interested in pre-Bolshevik socialism in Australia, and even the better books written about that don't have much in them about Queensland. Another reason for writing about Ernie was his...

Connolly, the USA, and the Wobblies

In June 1905, the American workers’ movement took a huge leap forward, with the establishment of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Chicago. Its roots lay in the militancy of mine workers in the mid-western states, where for a decade the Western Federation of Miners had been fighting intense class battles with the employers, uniting skilled and unskilled workers and relying on workers’ own strength and solidarity to defeat the bosses. The need for an organisation like the IWW (known commonly as the “Wobblies”), emphasising class struggle and solidarity, and organising the unorganised...

Connolly, Millerand, and De Leon

In 1900, the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP) scored a victory when the Paris Congress of the Second International recognised its delegates, E.W. Stewart and Tom Lyng, as representing a separate national group from the British socialist organisations. Amongst the delegates supporting this stance — against the British SDF — were those from Daniel De Leon’s American Socialist Labour Party (SLP), whose struggle against reformism and opportunism in the socialist movement was admired by the Irish socialists. One major issue of controversy at the 1900 conference was the decision in 1899 by...

Two Pages From Roman History: Lecture 2, part 2

Lecture 1: Plebs leaders and labor leaders. Part 1. -- --. Part 2 Lecture 2. The Warning of the Gracchi. Part 1. -- --. Part 2 The Proletarian Revolution Abhors Forms It was a blunder of the Gracchian Movement to devote time and energy to the changing of the forms of the suffrage. The characteristic weakness of the proletariat renders it prone to lures. It, the least favored of all historic revolutionary classes, is called upon to carry out a revolution that is pivoted upon the most complicated synthesis, and one withal that is easiest to be obscured by the dust that its very foe, the...

Two Pages of Roman History: Lecture 2, Part 1

Lecture 1: Plebs leaders and labor leaders. Part 1. -- --. Part 2 Lecture 2. The Warning of the Gracchi. Part 1. -- --. Part 2 Comrades of Section New York: The purpose of this second page from Roman history, "The Warning of the Gracchi," is in a measure supplementary to the first. The first page, "Plebs Leaders and Labor Leaders," was strategic, this one is tactical. The first pointed out a peculiar danger that threatens the Socialist or Labor Movement from without; this one is to point out an inherent weakness of our forces under fire. As the first was intended for aggression, this one is...

Two Pages From Roman History: Lecture 1, Part 2.

Lecture 1: Plebs leaders and labor leaders. Part 1. -- --. Part 2 Lecture 2. The Warning of the Gracchi. Part 1. -- --. Part 2 I have a mass of documents upon the subject. It will be impossible to go through all of them. I shall take from this mass mainly the facts furnished by the Labor Leader in political office. In many cases, facts as striking are furnished by the Labor Leader outside of public office - the same as Plebs Leaders out of office rendered material aid to their confreres in office. I shall even omit any that come under the category of the official political conduct of the Labor...

Two Pages From Roman History: 1

Click here to download whole text as pdf Introduction The "Two Pages from Roman History" are two lectures delivered in Manhattan Lyceum, New York City, on Wednesday evening, April 2, and "Wednesday evening, April 16, 1902, under the auspices of Section Greater New York, Socialist Labor Party. There Is nothing better calculated to put upon a class a worthy and deeply moral stamp, than the consciousness that it is destined to become the ruling one, that it Is called upon to raise the underlying principle of its own rank to the dignity of the principle of the age. to make the Idea that animates...

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