Daniel De Leon

Based on Wikipedia: Daniel De Leon

The Revolutionary Who Wanted to Abolish Capitalism Without Firing a Shot

In 1917, Vladimir Lenin made a striking admission. On the fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, he declared that what the Russians had done was essentially adopt the interpretation of Marxism developed by an American—a Caribbean-born, Columbia-educated lawyer named Daniel De Leon who had died three years earlier in relative obscurity.

This would have been gratifying news to De Leon, had he lived to hear it. But perhaps not entirely surprising.

De Leon spent the last quarter of his life convinced he had cracked the code of revolutionary change—that he had figured out how workers could peacefully seize control of the economy without the bloodshed that typically accompanied such transformations. His method? Build industrial unions so powerful and so well-organized that they could simply take over the means of production when the time was right, while a socialist political party dismantled the capitalist state from within through electoral victories.

The sword and the shield, he called it. Political action as the sword to strike down the old order. Industrial unions as the shield to protect workers and provide the organizational framework for the new society.

From the Dutch Caribbean to Lower Manhattan

Daniel De Leon was born on the island of Curaçao in 1852, into a family that embodied the complex cultural crosscurrents of the Caribbean. His father, Salomon, was a surgeon in the Royal Netherlands Army and a colonial official. The family name, De León, points to Spanish origins—specifically to the medieval Kingdom of León in northwestern Spain, from which many Sephardic Jewish families traced their ancestry before the expulsions of 1492.

Though raised Catholic, Daniel came from Dutch Jewish stock of the Spanish and Portuguese community. His father had lived in the Netherlands before receiving his military commission and relocating to Curaçao. When Salomon died in 1865, he became the first person buried in the island's new Jewish cemetery. Daniel was twelve years old.

A year later, the teenage Daniel left the Caribbean for Europe. He studied at a gymnasium—the rigorous classical secondary school system—in Hildesheim, Germany, then enrolled at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands to study medicine. He joined the Amsterdam student corps but never graduated.

What he did acquire was languages. Lots of them.

By his early twenties, De Leon was fluent in German, Dutch, French, English, ancient Greek, and Latin, in addition to his native Spanish. This linguistic facility would later serve him well as a Marxist theoretician, allowing him to engage directly with socialist texts in their original languages and to communicate with the polyglot immigrant communities of New York City.

The Restless Intellectual

Sometime between 1872 and 1874—the exact date is uncertain—De Leon emigrated to New York with his wife and mother. He found work teaching Latin, Greek, and mathematics at a school in Westchester, then entered Columbia College in 1876, earning his law degree with honors two years later.

For the next four years, he practiced law in Brownsville, Texas, about as far from the intellectual ferment of the Northeast as one could get while remaining in the United States. But the frontier legal practice couldn't hold him. By 1882 he was back in New York, maintaining an attorney's office while pursuing what really interested him: an academic career at Columbia.

The university had created a prize lectureship that seemed tailor-made for De Leon's talents. It required the lecturer to deliver twenty original research presentations per year to the School of Political Science. The salary was five hundred dollars annually—roughly equivalent to sixteen thousand dollars today—and the appointment lasted three years.

De Leon devoted his lectures to Latin American diplomacy and European interventions in South American affairs, drawing on his Caribbean background and his facility with multiple languages. He received his first term in 1883 and a renewal in 1886.

But in 1889, Columbia didn't keep him on.

What happened? The accounts differ. Some claimed the university denied him a promised full professorship because of his increasingly radical political activities. Others suggested his subject matter was simply too specialized to become a permanent part of the curriculum. Either way, De Leon's academic career was over at thirty-seven.

It would prove to be capitalism's loss and socialism's gain.

The Conversion

The 1886 New York mayoral campaign of Henry George marks a turning point in American political history that most Americans have never heard of. George, an economist whose book "Progress and Poverty" had become an unlikely bestseller, ran on a platform advocating what he called the "single tax"—a levy on land values that he believed would solve the problem of wealth inequality without requiring the wholesale transformation of the economic system.

De Leon was swept up in the excitement. He became what was called a Georgist socialist—someone who believed George's land tax ideas pointed toward a more just society. But Georgism proved to be only a way station on his intellectual journey.

By the late 1880s, De Leon had become a full-fledged Marxist. In 1890, he joined the Socialist Labor Party of America—the SLP—and became editor of its newspaper, The People. He would remain the dominant figure in the party until his death twenty-four years later.

What attracted De Leon to Marxism? Part of it was intellectual rigor. Marx offered a systematic analysis of capitalism that appealed to De Leon's scholarly temperament—a theory that explained not just what was wrong with the existing system but why it was destined to collapse under its own contradictions.

Part of it was also frustration with half-measures. The land tax proposals of Henry George, however appealing, didn't address the fundamental problem as De Leon came to see it: that capitalism itself, not just inequitable land ownership, was the source of workers' exploitation.

The American Separation of Labor

De Leon quickly developed a reputation as a fierce polemicist. His targets were many, but none received more sustained criticism than the American Federation of Labor.

The AFL, founded in 1886, organized workers by craft—carpenters in one union, plumbers in another, machinists in a third. To De Leon, this was exactly backward. By dividing workers according to their specific trades rather than uniting them as a class, the AFL weakened labor's power and allowed employers to play one craft against another.

He called the organization the "American Separation of Labor." The wordplay captured his contempt.

In the early 1890s, the SLP worked within the Knights of Labor, an older organization that had embraced a more inclusive model of organizing workers across craft lines. But the Knights were in decline, and the SLP was eventually driven out. This led De Leon to help establish the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance in 1895—a new federation of unions under SLP influence.

The problem was that the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance remained a relatively small organization, unable to compete with the AFL's membership numbers or organizational reach. De Leon needed a bigger vehicle for his vision of industrial unionism.

Industrial Unionism: A Different Way of Organizing Workers

To understand what De Leon was proposing, you need to understand the difference between craft unionism and industrial unionism.

Craft unionism organizes workers by their specific skill or trade. All the electricians join the electricians' union, all the plumbers join the plumbers' union, and so on. This approach made sense in an economy dominated by small workshops where skilled artisans practiced specific crafts.

But the rise of large-scale industrial production changed the equation. In a steel mill or an automobile factory, hundreds or thousands of workers with different skills labored under one roof for the same employer. Craft unionism divided these workers into dozens of separate organizations, each negotiating separately, each potentially undermining the others.

Industrial unionism proposed organizing all workers in a given industry—steel, automobiles, textiles, whatever—into a single union, regardless of their specific job within that industry. One big union for each industry. The workers at a Ford plant wouldn't be divided into separate unions for machinists, painters, and janitors. They would all belong to the same organization, united against their common employer.

De Leon took this idea further. He envisioned a time when industrial unions would become so comprehensive and so well-organized that they could essentially take over the management of industry itself. When the capitalist state fell, the unions would be ready to step in and run the economy on behalf of the workers.

This was revolutionary industrial unionism—using unions not just to win better wages and working conditions under capitalism but to build the organizational infrastructure for a post-capitalist society.

The Wobblies

In 1905, De Leon joined with other radical labor leaders to found the Industrial Workers of the World—the IWW, better known as the Wobblies. The organization's founding convention in Chicago brought together an unlikely coalition: Western miners who had experienced violent confrontations with mine owners, socialists of various stripes, and anarchists who rejected political action altogether.

The IWW's preamble declared that "the working class and the employing class have nothing in common" and called for organizing workers into "One Big Union." It was a radical vision of class solidarity that transcended not just craft boundaries but also the divisions of race, ethnicity, and gender that characterized most American unions of the era.

De Leon was an important figure in the IWW's early years. But his participation proved short-lived and, as one historian put it, acrimonious.

The conflict centered on a fundamental strategic disagreement. De Leon believed in what he called "dual organization"—building both a revolutionary political party (the Socialist Labor Party) and revolutionary industrial unions (the IWW), with the two working in tandem. The political party would contest elections and use political power to dismantle the capitalist state. The unions would organize workers and prepare to take over the economy.

Other IWW leaders, including the charismatic Western Federation of Miners leader William "Big Bill" Haywood, disagreed. They favored "direct action"—strikes, slowdowns, and other forms of economic pressure—over political campaigning. Why waste time on elections, they argued, when the real power of the working class lay in its ability to shut down production?

Haywood's faction prevailed. The IWW amended its preamble to preclude "affiliation with any political party." De Leon, feeling that his position had been repudiated, accused the organization of having been taken over by what he disparagingly called "the bummery"—a reference to the itinerant workers and unemployed whom the IWW also sought to organize.

He was formally expelled in 1908 after calling proponents of the Chicago-based IWW "slum proletarians."

The Rival IWW

De Leon's followers didn't simply accept their expulsion. They established a rival organization, also calling itself the Industrial Workers of the World, headquartered in Detroit rather than Chicago. For several years, two organizations claimed the IWW name and battled for the allegiance of radical workers.

The Detroit-based group was renamed the Workers' International Industrial Union in 1915, the year after De Leon's death. It never achieved the membership or the notoriety of its Chicago rival and eventually collapsed in 1925.

The Chicago IWW, meanwhile, went on to play a significant role in American labor history—organizing textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey, fighting for free speech rights in Western towns, and facing fierce government repression during and after World War One. But that organization increasingly embraced the anarchist and syndicalist tendencies that De Leon had opposed, rejecting electoral politics entirely in favor of direct economic action.

The Political Campaigns

De Leon never abandoned his belief in political action. He ran repeatedly for office on the Socialist Labor Party ticket, treating each campaign as an opportunity to spread socialist ideas even when victory was impossible.

In 1891, he ran for governor of New York and received just under fifteen thousand votes. Two years later, running for Secretary of State, he got twenty thousand. His 1902 gubernatorial campaign brought in nearly sixteen thousand votes—his best showing. By 1904, when he ran for governor again, the total had dropped to about nine thousand.

These were not competitive totals in a state the size of New York. But De Leon never expected to win. The purpose of running, in his view, was educational. Each campaign was a chance to explain socialist ideas to workers who might not otherwise encounter them, to demonstrate that an alternative to capitalism existed, and to build the organizational capacity of the Socialist Labor Party.

The ballot, he came to argue, was "a purely destructive weapon"—useful for tearing down the capitalist state but not for building the new society. That constructive work would be done by the industrial unions.

A Life in Two Acts

De Leon's personal life divided into two distinct chapters, separated by tragedy.

His first marriage was to Sarah Lobo, whom he wed in Curaçao when she was just sixteen years old. The Lobos were a prominent Jewish family from Caracas, Venezuela, with connections throughout the Dutch Antilles. After a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony, the couple settled in a Spanish-speaking neighborhood of Manhattan.

Their first son, Solon, was born in 1883. A second child, Grover Cleveland De Leon—named, one assumes, after the Democratic president—arrived around 1885 or 1886 but lived only eighteen months. Then came catastrophe. In April 1887, Sarah died in childbirth while delivering stillborn twins. It was the same year that little Grover had died.

De Leon, now a widower with a young son, left the Lower East Side and moved in with his housekeeper, Mary Redden Maguire.

His second marriage came about through his political work. In 1891, while on a speaking tour for the Socialist Labor Party, De Leon arrived in Independence, Kansas, where a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher named Bertha Canary was head of a local Bellamyite group called the Christian Socialist Club.

The Bellamyites were followers of Edward Bellamy, whose 1888 novel "Looking Backward" had imagined a utopian socialist future and sparked a nationwide movement of "Nationalist Clubs" dedicated to achieving it. Bertha had read De Leon's articles in the movement's press and was apparently captivated when she met him in person.

They married in 1892 and had five children together: Florence, Gertrude, Paul, Donald, and—most memorably named—Genseric. According to Solon De Leon, his father named the boy after Genseric, the king of the Vandals, a medieval ruler remembered for sacking Rome and allegedly forcing the Pope to kiss his toes.

It was a characteristic touch from a man who spent his life challenging authority.

The Ideas Live On

De Leon died on May 11, 1914, of septic endocarditis at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. He was sixty-one years old.

The Socialist Labor Party he led for a quarter century outlived him, continuing to advance his ideas even as it shrank to insignificance in American politics. Today it barely exists as an organization, but De Leon's influence extended far beyond the boundaries of his own small party.

In Britain, his followers established a Socialist Labour Party modeled on the American organization. Similar parties emerged in Canada and Australia. The tradition of revolutionary industrial unionism that De Leon championed—the idea of building unions not just to improve conditions under capitalism but to create the organizational basis for a new society—influenced labor movements around the world.

His notion of peaceful, gradual revolution through dual organization also attracted the attention of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theorist who developed the concept of "passive revolution"—the idea that fundamental social transformations might occur without violent upheaval, through a slow reorganization of economic and cultural institutions.

And then there was Lenin.

The claim that Lenin praised De Leon on the fifth anniversary of the Russian Revolution comes from George Seldes, an American journalist. Some historians have questioned whether the quote is authentic. But even if Lenin never said those exact words, the intellectual connection was real. The Bolsheviks did study De Leon's writings, and the idea of the working class organized into disciplined revolutionary organizations that could take over the functions of the capitalist state resonated with their own theories.

De Leon never lived to see how revolutionary experiments would actually unfold in the twentieth century—how the Russian Revolution would give way to Stalinist dictatorship, how the peaceful path he envisioned would remain mostly untraveled. He died still believing that workers in the advanced industrial countries could achieve socialism through the ballot box and the picket line, without the violence that had characterized earlier revolutionary upheavals.

The Milwaukee Connection

It's worth noting that while De Leon was developing his theories of revolutionary industrial unionism in New York, a very different kind of socialism was taking root in the Midwest. In 1910, four years before De Leon's death, the Socialist Party swept into power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The Milwaukee socialists—practitioners of what came to be called "sewer socialism" for their focus on unglamorous municipal improvements like sanitation and clean water—represented almost everything De Leon opposed. They were reformers, not revolutionaries. They worked within the existing capitalist system to win incremental improvements for workers rather than building toward its overthrow. They cooperated with trade unions that De Leon despised as hopelessly compromised.

And they actually won elections. They actually governed.

By 1936, even Time magazine had to acknowledge that "Milwaukee has become perhaps the best-governed city in the United States" under socialist leadership. The practical reformers had achieved what the revolutionary theorists could not.

De Leon would likely have dismissed the Milwaukee socialists as class collaborators, as people who had abandoned the goal of abolishing capitalism in exchange for modest improvements that left the fundamental system intact. And the Milwaukee socialists would likely have dismissed De Leon as an impractical dreamer whose rigid theorizing produced factional splits and organizational collapse rather than actual gains for workers.

Both criticisms contained elements of truth. The Milwaukee socialists did make their peace with capitalism. And De Leon did spend enormous energy on ideological disputes that fragmented the radical movement.

But both traditions—the revolutionary vision of De Leon and the practical reform agenda of the sewer socialists—emerged from the same fundamental insight: that the economic system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was failing ordinary workers, and that some form of collective action was necessary to address that failure.

They just disagreed, passionately and irreconcilably, about what form that collective action should take.

What Remains

De Leon left behind a substantial body of writing—speeches, pamphlets, translations, and years of editorial work for The People. His 1896 speech "Reform or Revolution?" remains a classic statement of the revolutionary socialist position against incremental reform. His translation of a nineteen-novel series by the French writer Eugène Sue, "The Mysteries of the People," brought radical historical fiction to American readers.

But perhaps his most important legacy is the idea itself: that the working class could be organized in such a way as to make violent revolution unnecessary. That industrial unions, by encompassing all workers in an industry and building toward all workers in a society, could create the institutional framework for democratic control of the economy. That the path from capitalism to socialism could run through the ballot box and the union hall rather than through barricades and firing squads.

It was an optimistic vision, perhaps a naive one. The twentieth century offered far more examples of revolutionary violence than of peaceful socialist transformation. The industrial unions De Leon championed never achieved the comprehensive organization he envisioned. The Socialist Labor Party never came close to winning political power.

Yet the questions De Leon wrestled with—how to organize workers effectively, how to transform economic systems without bloodshed, how to build institutions that could govern a post-capitalist society—remain relevant. They are questions that anyone serious about fundamental economic change eventually has to answer.

Daniel De Leon proposed one set of answers. History has yet to render a final verdict on whether he was wrong, or simply ahead of his time.