Paulappaul

[continued] I don't hold that the revolution will be begun due to workers being communist, nor that they will become socialists until it nears its end; the aim of a proletarian Party, of course, must be the political rule of the proletariat, from which socialism follows. Of course, De Leon's ideas were never meant to apply to all countries (he suggested that different courses of action would be necessary elsewhere in 'Syndicalism'), but nonetheless I think that they are still applicable to the US, as well as a significant part of Europe and such.

I don't think that the SLP actually went into decline after the fall of the IWW, their decline began after that. As to De Leonism, I don't think that it's irrelevant, or I wouldn't be a De Leonite. The wax and wane of communist organizations generally doesn't have to do with ideological specificities so much as the strength of the workers' movement and the material conditions underlying them. I think that it's essentially accurate that working class political struggle will be essentially impotent if carried out in the absence of economic organization and the corresponding force, so as to keep the struggle oriented upon proletarian interests, while on the other hand the working class as a whole may only struggle as such politically.

Ultimately, the De Leon SLP had relevance in a growing labour movement, and in the face of a declining workers' movement the SLP ended up responding by becoming a sect based on moral injunction. After the Vietnam War, it came to support the Vietnamese side post factum, leading to some splits, and came to affirm national liberation as such, so that I wouldn't really wish to be associated with it at present.

In actual fact, I don't even live in the US. As for the SLP, while I'm not highly knowledgeable of its post-De Leon history, it seems that it fell into problems during the post-war boom, along with many other socialist organizations, and, due to wastage of funds and conflicts over alleged bureaucracy, has more or less degenerated into a small club at this point. I think that the fall in the frequency of publication of 'The People' (previously 'The Daily People') to monthly or less (and now ostensibly nonexistent) complemented the growing irrelevance of the tendency, as a paper which is not put out regularly ceases to be of much informational relevance to the working class as a whole and ultimately begins to simply preach to the choir; in addition, it also seems to have engaged in an abstentionist policy as regards class struggle for a period during the mid-1900s, which can't have helped.

well at least it's good to know that he's still alive