Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Daniel De Leon was born on the island of Curaçao on December 14, 1852 and was educated in Germany and the Netherlands. He arrived in the United States in 1874, settling in New York as a student and later teacher at Columbia University. De Leon was influenced by the writings of Edward Bellamy and later converted to socialism. He joined the Knights of Labor and worked for the campaign to elect Henry George mayor of New York City in 1886. In 1890 he joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), becoming the editor of its newspaper, The People. As his influence grew De Leon, along with Laurence Gronlund, Morris Hillquit, and Abraham Cahan, became a central leader of the SLP and began arguing for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. De Leon became especially critical of the trade union movement under the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which later resulted in the formation of the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (STLA) in 1895, as a revolutionary alternative. De Leon believed in an “industrial form of government” that would replace the political form with one possessing only economic responsibilities. This philosophy was more in line with the anarchists in that it called for not only a classless society but a stateless one as well. However, De Leon went further by suggesting that if the working classes were to abolish the state they must first control it. This, De Leon argued, ... log in or subscribe to read full text