August 2018 Socialist Standard No.1368


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2 comments:

Boris said...

This is in reference to an earlier comment I made about Debs. He was a courageous individual but equivocal in his participation in the IWW. In connection with my comment an objection was raised regarding De Leon's view of James Connolly's brief stint in the U.S. to the effect that De Leon "through him under the bus". I'd appreciate the author of that remark to elaborate on that contention for the historical record.

ajohnstone said...

De Leon had a number of disagreements with Connolly.

One was about wages where Connolly took exception to a SLP organizer arguing that any wage increase workers won under capitalism would inevitably be offset by price hikes. This, Connolly said, wasn’t true and led the party to a policy of not fighting for the betterment of workers’ lives. In defence of the organiser De Leon presented a Lassallean Iron Law of Wages argument against Connolly.

He also had disputes with De Leon on religion where Connolly said that religion was a private affair - the SLP official position and that De Leon was overly anti-Catholic.

Connolly, morally conservative-minded, also disagreed with the promotion of Bebel's book on women and marriage.

Being editor of the People De Leon controlled the debates to his advantage.

Fred Thompson in his official history, The I.W.W.: Its First Fifty Years, asserts that the feud between De Leon and James Connolly of the SP over economic theory resulted in De Leon's filing charges against Connolly at an IWW General Executive Board Meeting in New York in 1907, and resulted in the failure to recruit dockworkers

By 1910, De Leon accuses Connolly in the People of having a "diseased mind"
https://www.marxists.org/archive/deleon/pdf/1910/jan07b_1910.pdf