Extremism and the Pursuit of Utopia

...Anything and anyone standing in the way "will be crushed to dust...

...Daniel Bell, the scholar chiefly associated with this point of view, has written that American Socialists were "in the world but not of it...

...Reviewed by Carl Gershman Executive Director, Social Democrats, USA The failure of socialism in America is most often attributed to the phenomenon called "American excep-tionalism"—a unique set of social, economic and political conditions that prevented the emergence on U.S...

...The American Communists, in true Leninist fashion, were later to pursue a similarly "moderate course...

...In his last major political effort, De-Leon tried to capture the IWW and use it as a "battering ram with which to pound down the fortress of Capitalism...

...As Hillquit once observed, the real importance of DeLeon in the history of American radicalism is that he was "the perfect American prototype of Russian Bolshevism...

...He further suggests that the Socialist leader favored a "more moderate course" toward those unions that had not "descended to that abysmal level...

...Smash!' is the motto...

...Hillquit, my running will not have been in vain...

...Admitting that the impact of the book "was perhaps unconscious," he is not even able to find any direct reference to it in all of DeLeon's writings...

...Seretan goes to extraordinary lengths in his defense of DeLeon...

...Ironically, DeLeon's life does suggest a different "unifying concept" that Seretan does not seem to recognize...

...In this battle, the SLP was to be at "the head of the column," the party composed of the "minority that is so intense in its convictions...

...He even anticipated Lenin (who, incidentally, offered to write an introduction to the Russian edition of one of DeLeon's books) in holding that revolutionary industrial unions—Lenin called them Soviets—should form the basic functional unit of a Socialist state...

...His hostility toward Victor Berger, the Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee, was such that during one six-month period in 1911, the SLP newspaper published no less than 31 editorials denigrating his performance in Washington...

...Seretan portrays his subject as a man of "courageous dedication" and "steadfast commitment" who "voluntarily made the cause of the world's dispossessed his own...

...In fact, DeLeon differed from Lenin, it appears, chiefly in his inability to seize state power...

...instead of building a political movement, they practiced a surrogate religion...

...From this standpoint, no Socialist leader was more zealous or intolerant, and none did more to defeat the cause of American socialism, than Daniel DeLeon...

...This course was "boring from within," the goal being to take over rather than destroy the union in question...

...Therefore," Seretan concludes, "to raze the rotten structure of an Augean stable masquerading as a bona fide union was not union-busting...

...He urged a battle against the unions that would capture "these forts" controlled by "the labor lieutenants of the Capitalist Class...

...Not surprisingly, the theme is mentioned rarely in the book, and then never in a way that illuminates the subject...

...DeLeon was the intellectual radical par excellence, living in a world of abstractions, wedded to ideological pieties, cut off from the real experiences of ordinary people...

...Individuality for him was merely "a fetter to human brotherhood," an anachronism he hoped would soon disappear because it obstructed the effort to weld the proletariat "into one solid mass...

...In his Introduction, Seretan announces that he is adopting "a unifying interpretative concept as a guide to intelligent surmise...

...In 1908 he campaigned against Hillquit in a New York Congressional race, adopting the view "that if I can take away one vote from Mr...

...Socialists, he contended, must demand "unconditional surrender" and "the total extinction of class rule...

...that it carries the masses with it, storms the breastworks and captures the fort...

...This, too, ended in disaster...

...Nor does it account for the horrendous crimes perpetrated in the name of this cause by revolutionaries espousing views very similar to DeLeon's...

...Since the military-like struggle against capitalism required rigid discipline and complete subordination to the will of the vanguard party, DeLeon had no use for what he called "the vagabond freedom of individual minds...

...After trying without success to capture the declining Knights of Labor, he set up the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance as an instrument of "dauntless struggle" against both the Knights and the American Federation of Labor, organizations that he called "a stench in the nostrils of the American proletariat...

...Considering his totalitarian inclinations and his disastrous political career, one can only marvel at DeLeon's continuing appeal to some historians of American radicalism...

...Clear the way...

...As the leader of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) from 1890 until his death in 1914, DeLeon headed one divisive and destructive crusade after another...

...A second interpretation, which doesn't invalidate the first, assigns the failure of socialism to the ideological dogmatism, impracticality and uto-pianism of American Socialist leaders and their followers...

...This "unifying concept" is the Wandering Jew theme...

...These conditions include the open frontier, immigration, social mobility, the rising standard of living, racial and ethnic divisions in the work force, the victory of political democracy before industrialization, and the existence of a two-party system that has discouraged ideological politics...

...soil of a significant Socialist movement...

...There is the basis here for an important book about DeLeon that could shed some light on the role of intellectuals in politics, the matter of ideology and the dangerous consequences of seeking through political means what Max Weber called "the salvation of souls...

...Although DeLeon was familiar with Sue's work and shared his animosity toward the Catholic Church, this hardly seems an adequate basis for developing "a unifying interpretive concept...

...Unfortunately, such sentimentality does not help to assess the career of a man so devoted to fighting others equally dedicated to "the cause of the world's dispossessed...

...He therefore overlooks DeLeon's true significance as a figure in American radical history...

...Moreover, he claims that DeLeon did not want to destroy all unions, just those controlled by the "labor lieutenants" of capitalism...

...Seretan raises these questions, but only inadvertently, without understanding their meaning...

...He contrasted in every respect to the pragmatic trade unionists he scorned, and one would have to be rather biased to argue that he addressed the everyday problem of workers more clearly than Gompers, or did more to advance their cause...

...The Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance was not really dual unionism, he writes, for a very small percentage of the workers were organized at the time and "there was not a great deal to be 'dual' in relation to...

...Again like Lenin, DeLeon despised reformism and considered trade unionists (Samuel Gompers, in particular) "more dangerous" than the capitalist adversary...

...The leaders of the IWW, who were not interested in having the union become a political instrument of the SLP, denounced the "doctrinaire vaporings" of the DeLeonites and asserted that workers "will not allow their throat to be used to 'force down the wisdom' [of] these political fanatics...

...He shared Lenin's view that the struggle against capitalism was a war to the death...

...Morris Hillquit called DeLeon an uncompromising "fanatic" who inevitably divided any arena he was active in into two antagonistic camps: "his devoted admirers and followers and his bitter critics and opponents...

...Seretan declares, without any evidence, that "the key factor" in De-Leon's decision to become a Marxist and in his resolution of "his problem of self-definition" was his reading of Eugene Sue's novel, The Wandering Jew...

...Following that fiasco, DeLeon devoted a good part of his energies to attacking the Socialist Party of America, formed in 1901 by the merger of a dissident SLP faction led by Hillquit and the Social Democratic Party led by Eugene V. Debs...

...They ousted DeLeon from the IWW simply by denying his credentials at the 1908 convention...

...His newest biographer, L. Glen Seretan, is a case in point...