Left-Communism in the early American SP?!?!?

[Zanthorus]

I was just reading through Loren Goldner's article on Max Eastman and the Bolshevisation of the early American Communist movement and found this little gem:


When a veteran Wisconsin radical asked Pepper how he thought the American revolution would happen, Pepper chilled the room by saying that revolution would come to America not by the actions of American workers but on the bayonets of the Soviet Red Army. Certainly no representative of the Second International had ever shown such contempt for American revolutionaries; indeed, as one counter-example, it is little remembered that the Dutch “ultra-left” (Pannekoek, Gorter, Roland-Holst) after 1908 had a significant following in the left wing of the American SP, especially in immigrant groups such as the Latvians, a following that had to be eradicated in bitter factional struggle in the early years of the CP.http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/eastman.html

I'd be fascinated if anyone had any more info on this.

[Zeus the Moose]

Seems entirely possible, though this is the first I've heard of it.

It's somewhat unfortunate, though, that when the early American socialist movement is discussed, even by scholars, they tends to root it too much in particular American circumstances (a by-product of "American exceptionalism," no doubt.) In addition, the factional conflicts up until the Russian Revolution are looked at solely in an American context, and not as representative of conflicts in the socialist movement elsewhere (thinking especially about the syndicalism versus "partyism," and ministerialism/sewer socialism versus revolutionary socialism.)

If you actually read documents from the period, however, there's a lot of direct references to the European movement and acknowledgement of debts to the European parties. In Debs' famous anti-war speech, he mentioned Wilhelm Liebknecht quite often as a strong anti-war figure.