Demise of the De Leonist SLP?
Dec 12 2008 14:19
While I do not know this as a fact, it appears (appears) to me that the De Leonist SLP has run its course. After more than 100 years it appears they have stopped publishing The People and, perhaps, other public activities.
This came to my attention recently. I've subscribed on and off to the SLP press over the years. Even attended a few educationals in the 1970s. You could see it coming. They haven't published since April 2008. A recent literature order I sent to them came back with a reply, something like, "NY Labor News has stopped filing orders in April."
Their website is still up: http://www.slp.org/index.html
Some decent folks have actually come into the libertarian movement out of the SLP over the years. In particular, folks from former-Philadelphia Solidarity, Frank Girard (of the "Discussion Bulletin") and others.
Well, if they have quietly ended their almost 110 years of existance, farewell.
Dec 13 2008 01:50
#2
Why do you say trauma of Arnold Peterson? I've a few pamphlets of his, but I always enjoy some historical controversy.
Dec 13 2008 02:11
#3
The internal life of the SLP was always rather authoritarian - until the 1980s. Peterson was the National Secretary for 47 years - from DeLeon's death to his own in the 1960s. Peterson was a tyrant and was always expelling members with any sort of individual capabilities or support in the SLP.
For example he expelled the most capable organizer for the WIIU (the Detroit IWW) during a very successful organizing campaign amongst Textile workers in NJ. Again, he expelled most of the Bronx Section - one of the largest and most active in the Party. Also expelled was probably 40% of the party in the 1970s when the membership actually wanted to participate in the class struggle - gasp! This is when the folks Syndicalist mentions left the Party.
Like many organizations, the SLP has never really faced up to some serious problems in it's internal organization. Peterson identified with Lenin as well as Stalin, and saw the USSR as a workers' state. Until 1940 he would send advice to stalin on how to better organize the USSR.
Today the SLP won't admit they supported the USSR until the USSR/Finnish war- look at their website. But they did.
Todays SLP was able to get over some of the sectarianism it held through the cold war era. But it's never faced up to the root ideological problems (and their practical organizational outgrowths). To the SLP, socialism is seen as a change in administrations to be led by a workers' party. Thus the USSR could be socialist. IT also means the working class (and the class' political party) needs leaders, even petty-tyrant leaders for life like Peterson.
Dec 13 2008 04:15
#4
i subscribed to The People for a few years until last fall. well writen and impeccably edited, even if the politics didn't convince. around the end of the year i even got a call from a member asking for a renewal and a donation maybe? there is a book on the web by a 70s/80s member in which he disects the peterson business; it sounds pretty ugly. can get the link, if anyone is interested.
Dec 13 2008 04:19
#5
It's by Frank Girrard whom syndicalist mentions above. He was a solid comrade who died a couple years ago. His publication "Discussion Bulletin" helped all us small anarcho/IWW/Deleonist/left-communists/libertarian socialist groupings stay in touch during the 1980s. Oh the dark days before the internet!
Dec 13 2008 16:19
#6
no, it's by someone else. i'm not at home now and can't dig through my files. i know of girrard and the DB.
Dec 13 2008 16:20
#7
petey wrote:
no, it's by someone else. i'm not at home now and can't dig through my files. i know of girrard and the DB.
cool, bring it on
Dec 13 2008 18:09
#8
i originally found the link to that book at deleonism.org, an independent website - but it's also been suspended!
Dec 14 2008 05:03
#9
hey petey, this is by the guy who used to work in the slp mailroom, right? he traveled to the west coast coast when the slp moved from brooklyn to ca. i've read some of it. the guy sort of droned on for a long time about things, very insecure. but the slp treated him like shit.
Dec 14 2008 05:05
#10
yes that's him. long book, maybe 300 pp, maybe more iirc,
Dec 14 2008 06:03
#11
Ballard? I do remember it vaguely.
Dec 14 2008 13:08
#12
This is a minor historic tragedy. I once signed something for them, a ballot petition I think, and gave them a couple of bucks and got the paper for several years. They struck me as decent folks. I also used to read the DB, which would be worth reviving. I know we have libcom and other online discussion forums, but something in print would be nice.
Dec 14 2008 16:32
#13
I think the World in Common folks print something similar.
Dec 14 2008 17:02
#14
That was one of the first left publications I read, before I even read the Industrial Worker, and I am sure I was influenced by their writings on the scientific administration of society through industrial unionism. They have suspended publication of the People from time to time over the last decade. I would love to get their donor base, which was rather free with the money! Their administrative expenses, I recall, were on par if not exceeding that of the IWW, even though they only had about 100 members.
Dec 15 2008 14:14
#15
here 'tis:
http://www.geocities.com/kenellis2020/lwlindex.html
Quote:
The program and theories of the American Socialist Labor Party
are analyzed in depth in this eight part book:
Left-Wing Lies
What a Worker Found in his Quest for a Definition of SocialismA worker's first-hand discovery of how the Socialist Labor Party altered the theories and quotes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in order to mislead the lower classes into adopting an anarchist program that had already been rejected by Marx and Engels. The details of which theories were falsified, how quotes from the founders of socialism were altered, and what purposes the alterations served. How SLP leaders squelched dissent and civilized discussion through censorship, secrecy, and a bureaucratic Party structure; and how it provides less freedom of speech for its members than the government which they claim to want to abolish. How alienation makes people susceptible to sectarian movements. The organizational structure of the SLP is contrasted with that of the First International Workingmen's Association. The Marxist theory of the state and the Paris Commune are compared to state socialist and anarchist theories. What Marx envisioned for monarchies, republics, and the future. What hasn't worked in Marxism and Leninism. What the lower classes can do before machine labor completely replaces human labor, and lots more.
This book hopefully contains the proof that socialism as practiced today by a myriad number of sects, groups and parties, is little better than a pack of lies, and, for that reason, are all worthless to the working classes.
by Ken Ellis
Dec 15 2008 15:40
#16
That's it petey!
But the guy (even reading some of the stuff in his book) is, well, odd.
This is where he wound up promoting:
Created in September of 2000, this web resource is designed to help progressive activists find a program that makes sense for modern democracies. Expropriatory ideologies have faded, leaving an ideological vacuum. But, hope for fundamental change should not be abandoned: Reducing the length of the work day and week, as necessitated by on-going improvements in technology and productivity, will reduce the income gap between rich and poor, and eventually bring workers up to the level of freedom enjoyed by the idle rich. Reducing labor time is compatible with democracy and private property, and comprises the primary methodology of Liberation Capitalism.
Dec 15 2008 16:38
#17
oh i'm not pushing his line or anything, but he gives a uniquely detailed account of life inside the SLP. if he's bitter, he seems to have reason.
Dec 16 2008 03:54
#18
Via the SPGB discussion forum when i raised the issue . The SLP , Not quite dead but moribund
Quote:
> Date: Monday, December 15, 2008, 7:23 PMThe SLP has not died, but it has bent under the weight of the so-called recession, which, as we are now told, dates from December 2007. The Party's working class and largely older membership could not keep up with the economic pressures on them. Consequently, it became necessary to suspend publication of THE PEOPLE with its March-April issue, abandon the national offices in San Jose, Calif., and drop the two-member staff from the payroll. To stand the SLP up straight again, and to resume publication of THE PEOPLE, we have launched a $20,000 "Resumption Fund."
Sincerely yours,
ROBERT BILLS
National Secretary
Dec 16 2008 05:43
#19
Thank you ajohnstone.
Petey, yeah, I understood youy weren;t pushing his line. Even when I read parts of his book way back, I thought there was an oddness to the guy. But I found his accounts of internal SLP life of interest.
Dec 16 2008 14:41
#20
thanks ajj.
i know little about the internal doings of the SLP, but i somehow had the impression that the only paid people were bills and his wife. is this a modest way of referring to themselves? or maybe i'm just totally wrong.
Dec 16 2008 15:24
#21
Pretty funny...
Dec 16 2008 18:31
#22
I'm, pretty sure you're right. It's Bills and his wife.
Dec 17 2008 15:49
#23
From a completely out view looking in ..... even if it was only the two bills', it takes a tremendous amount of work to run a national office; edit/print a paper and fill literature orders. i have no idea how the slp internally works, but i can only imagine that the two bills were probably working at it many hours a days. But I have no dogs in this race. Merely a "student"of radical hstory and groups.
Dec 18 2008 22:51
#24
finbrill stated that "Like many organizations, the SLP has never really faced up to some serious problems in it's internal organization. Peterson identified with Lenin as well as Stalin, and saw the USSR as a workers' state. Until 1940 he would send advice to Stalin on how to better organize the USSR."
Well fin, just where in hell did you come up with this fallacy?! What a load of SHIT! There's no doubt that Peterson was not a lamb to get along with but he sure as hell never sent advice to Stalin! His pamphlet on the Soviet Union, "Proletarian Democracy vs Dictatorships and Despotism" was an attack on the Soviet Union. This was an address he delivered on December 13, 1931!
If you want to criticize the SLP for its shortcomings you must at least stick to historical facts! Making up fantasiies doesn't cut it!
ByronD
Dec 19 2008 00:57
#25
Either way, Byron, the SLP is an anachronism in both principles and organization.
Dec 19 2008 01:00
#26
syndicalist wrote:
Pretty funny...
"The SLP is immortal." *Chuckles 
Dec 19 2008 08:38
#27
ByronD wrote:
Well fin, just where in hell did you come up with this fallacy?! What a load of SHIT! There's no doubt that Peterson was not a lamb to get along with but he sure as hell never sent advice to Stalin!
I need to apologize. I misremembered that Petersen said:
AP in a letter (16 March 1932) to Soviet academic L.G.Raisky wrote:
“Leninism, if it means anything, means Marxism applied to Russia, that is, to a country economically backward. DeLeonism means Marxism applied to the United States, that is, to a country the most economically advanced to date. It is from the United States that revolutionary directions, and eventually instructions, will proceed. Eventually you in Russia will do what we, the DeLeon-Marxists in the U.S., tell you to do.”
So you're right, he never offered advice, just threatened, what? Dictatorship?
ByronD wrote:
His pamphlet on the Soviet Union, "Proletarian Democracy vs Dictatorships and Despotism" was an attack on the Soviet Union. This was an address he delivered on December 13, 1931!
I skimmed the article. Strange that an "attack" on the USSR never mentions the USSR nor Stalin.
But I did find other evidence of SLP support for the USSR, Stalin's policies, etc. The most lurid is the following from Petersen who compares the Stalinist show trials to the internal purges within the SLP!
Arnold Petersen wrote:
“The SLP is not unduly impressed with the fact, deplorable as it is, of some of the most prominent men in Russia having turned traitors. In our Party we have had similar experiences, yet the SLP has has no qualms in dealing properly and effectively with traitors and disruptors… And in our ability to maintain discipline, and dispense SLP justice, with complete Party, i.e., rank and file, democracy and publicity we have found proof of our strength, our ‘indestructibility.’ And so too Soviet Russia.“That men go wrong in great causes is a fact too well known to require proof. The Russians who have paid with their lives for their errors (whether these resulted from serious disagreement with principles or from baser errors) serve as a warning that revolutions are not to be trifled with, even though the revolutionists in command are themselves far from being spotless or correct in all details.”
Soviet Russia: Promise or Menace?, (New York Labor News), 1939
or this gem from the March 26, 1938 Weekly People
Quote:
What the bourgeois scribes don't understand, or will not in honesty acknowledge, is that, through these [Stalin's show-fnb] trials, Soviet Russia is proclaiming to the capitalist powers and their supporters everywhere: "We are growing so powerful that you must resort to the most despicable means to weaken us. You send spies, saboteurs and wreckers to disrupt our government and our economy... all for the purpose of partitioning among yourselves this land we call the socialist fatherland"
Other highlights of the SLP's criticism of the USSR:
Weekly People Nov. 20, 1937 wrote:
But despite all the tinkering with bourgeois external policies, despite all the encouragement given to freaks and frauds in the revolutionary movements, Russia's own achievements, the abolition of private property of the means of production, hence of the capitalist profit system based on the exploitation of labor, place her in diametrical opposition to the capitalist world and force her to stand as an advance guard of Socialism."
and
Quote:
As late as 1936, in a resolution adopted at its National Convention, the SLP reaffirmed “its often expressed approbation and admiration of the great work of socialist reconstruction in Russia, the gigantic steps taken in lifting that vast country of erstwhile reaction and degradation out of the feudo-capitalist darkness toward socialist enlightenment…"
So the SLP under Petersen:
* Thought the USSR was a "workers' republic" on the road to socialism
* was a "vanguard of socialism"
* identified with both Stalinist industrialization policies as well as the Purge trials
* and if they had the power would tell the USSR would do "what we, the DeLeon-Marxists in the U.S., tell you to do."
I just don't know how I came up with the "load of shit" that Petersen identified with Stalin. My apologies.
Dec 20 2008 08:29
#28
.
Dec 23 2008 21:39
#29
Greetings, I see that some of you are already familiar with my association with the SLP in the 70's. Most recently, I was engaged in a very mild-mannered discussion with Dave Searles on the deleonism-list when I found my posts being blocked a few days ago, presumably by moderator Mike Lepore, who now refuses to answer my inquiries. By now, I've been censored off many a forum, such as the now seemingly defunct SLP-Houston, the ongoing WSM, and others, all for trying to shed a little light on the anarcho-syndicalist scam run by the SLP. One SLP pamphlet attributed a 'proletarian dictatorship over the peasantry' (rather than 'over the capitalists') to Marx, so they cannot honestly explain that position without also having to admit that they've been pulling the wool over a lot of eyes for over a century. When the SLP National Office staff I once worked with ventured opinions on what to do about that admittedly 'terrible' pamphlet entitled "Proletarian Democracy vs. Dictatorships and Despotism", they also regretted the fact that they didn't have anything better with which to replace Petersen's outrageous pamphlet. Anyway, anyone not familiar with these subjects is welcome to google Liberation Capitalism for many more reasons for newbies to socialism to be awfully wary, and to do their own research. My site is at the top of the list of google hits for Liberation Capitalism. I'll be happy to answer any questions anyone might have in this forum, which I'll check every day, but I recognized the name of at least one contributor who will no doubt get down on his hands and knees and beg the moderator to kick me off. So, if this is my first and last posting, you'll know why. -KE
Dec 24 2008 03:07
#30
hi there, thanks for your coments. the SLP was the first left organiztion i followed closely at all, so your book was a very interesting read.
can you expand on this?
Quote:
the anarcho-syndicalist scam run by the SLP
yes, I think they are gone. I'll check in with a friend (who's 55) whom I tease as being the SLP's "Youth Organization". They never really got over the trauma of Arnold Peterson.