Socialist Propaganda League of America

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The Socialist Propaganda League of America was established in 1915, apparently by C.W. Fitzgerald of Beverly, Massachusetts.

As a membership organization within the ranks of the Socialist Party of America, the Socialist Propaganda League was the direct lineal antecedent of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party and its governing National Council - the forerunner of the American Communist movement.

In the fall of 1915, Fitzgerald wrote and sent a leaflet to Vladimir Lenin of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party. Lenin replied, outlining his views on the situation faced by the revolutionary socialist movement.

It was not until November of 1916 that any sort of broad-based organization was established. A November 26, 1916, meeting in Boston approved a first manifesto for the organization and established an official journal, The Internationalist. According to the group's constitutional objectives, "The SPLA declares emphatically and will work uncompromisingly in the economic and political fields for industrial revolution to establish industrial democracy by the mass action of the working class." The initial editor of The Internationalist was Alfred S. Edwards, later an active member and District Organizer in the old Communist Party of America before leaving the organization for good in the Central Caucus split of late 1920.

In May 1917, The Internationalist became The International and Louis C. Fraina became its editor. The publication was terminated by the time the Boston-based and Fraina-edited weekly The Revolutionary Age began being issued in 1918. "The League is still in existence, but its paper is no longer published, since The Revolutionary Age expresses its policy," Fraina wrote in March 1919.

In January 1918, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik victory in Russia and the establishment of a Revolutionary Socialist regime there, the SPLA issue a second manifesto of the organization. The manifesto denounced "bourgeois democracy" as a "fraud" by means of which "Imperialism promotes the most brutal interests," advocated for "the unity of industrial action and Socialist politics," argued that "the revolution of the proletariat annihilates the parliamentary regime and its state" and instead establishes a new form of government based upon workers' councils that combine legislative and executive authority. The SPLA stated in this manifesto that "the organization is formed to work in the Socialist Party as well as independently of the party" -- for "the revolutionary reorganzation of the American Socialist movement" both from within and without the SPA.

The Socialist Propaganda League called for a new revolutionary socialist International and was invited by name to attend the founding Congress of the Communist International in 1919. The organization was unable to send a representative in time to attend the gathering, however.

Prominent members of the SPL joined the new Communist Party of America, which eventually merged with the Communist Labor Party to form first the Workers Party of America and eventually the Communist Party USA.

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[edit] Further reading

  • Buhle, Paul. A Dreamer's Paradise Lost: Louis Fraina/Lewis Corey, 1892-1953. Atlantic Highlands. NJ: Humanities Press, 1995. 192 pages. ISBN 0-391-03849-4.
  • Phelps, Christopher. Out of the Fraina and into the fire. American Quarterly. Volume 50, Number 2, June 1998, pp. 424-431.