“De Leon was much aided in his plans for the SLP’s written propaganda by the party’s ownership of the New York Labor News Company (NYLN), established in 1887 as the first socialist publishing house in the USA. (Although Charles H. Kerr Co: was founded a year earlier, it did non begin to concentrate on socialist publications until 1900). The possession of a printing press enabled the SLP to respond quickly to developments requiring socialist comment, and to do so without the constraints imposed by commercial printing. Furthermore, the NYLN could retain plates of printed matter, allowing the SLP to reprint successful pamphlets many times. The press was also used to produce the party’s several foreign-language newspapers. English translation of Marx’s major writings were made available for the first time in the USA through the NYLN. De Leon himself translated Marx’s ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon’ and the ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, which he considered to be a work of fundamental strategic insight. The NYLN published Engels’ ‘Socialism: From Utopia to Science’, translated by De Leon and with introduction by Sanial. Also to be found in a list of recommended NYLN books from 1903 are translations by De Leon of Karl Kautsky’s ‘The Working Class’, ‘The Capitalist Class’, ‘The Class Struggle’ and ‘The Socialist Republic’; Sanial’s ‘Socialist Almanac’ as well as books by him on taxation and trusts; Belfort Bax’s ‘Short History of the Paris Commune’; James Connolly’s ‘Erin’s Hope’; William Scholl Mc Clure’s lecture on ‘Socialism’; and speeches by De Leon. One of De Leon’s most interesting translations from German Marxism was of August Bebel’s ‘Woman Under Socialism’, the contents of which were to feature later in the dispute with Connolly” (pag 23-25) [Stephen Coleman, ‘Daniel De Leon’, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1990, ‘Lives of the Left]
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- Articolo pubblicato:29 Dicembre 2019