Title: Socialist Labor Party of America

URL: http://www.slp.org/

Collection: Tamiment-Wagner: Communism, Socialism, Trotskyism

Description: The Socialist Labor Party (SLP) is the original party of socialism in America. Organized as the Workingmen's Party in 1876, the Party was renamed in 1877.Its longtime leader was Daniel De Leon (1852-1914), Marxist author and editor of The People, the SLP newspaper. As the only nationally organized party of socialism in America until 1900, the SLP attracted Socialists of all tendencies to its ranks. However, the Marxist element became dominant by 1890, when the Party was reorganized on a Marxist basis. The SLP has played a prominent role in the economic and political life of the United States. It ran the first socialist presidential campaign in 1892, and fielded national tickets in every presidential campaign through 1976. The SLP's goal is a classless society based on collective ownership and control of the industries and social services, these to be administered in the interests of all society through a Socialist Industrial Union government composed of democratically elected representatives from all the industries and services of the land. Production would be carried on for use instead of profit. The SLP program for achieving this revolutionary change from capitalism to socialism is based on the Marxist tenet that socialism can be achieved only through the classconscious action "of the working class itself." The Socialist Industrial Union program, as the SLP program is known, developed by Daniel De Leon (1852-1914), is a continuation of Karl Marx's ideas on a workers' government. In all essentials--political and economic classwide organization, the breakup of the state, workers' democracy, the seizure of social power by the organized producers and their socialist reorganization of the economy--the SIU program of the SLP conforms to the democratic premises underlying Marx's concept of socialism.

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Subject:   Socialist Labor Party of America. ,  Socialism--United States. ,  De Leon, Daniel, 1852-1914.