ABSTRACT
In 1918, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, several American correspondents reported that Lenin had expressed his warm admiration of Daniel De Leon’s writings. If De Leon denounced the conservative labor leaders, he despised the pragmatic socialists who invoked Marx without adhering to his doctrines. De Leon’s major contribution to the theory of socialism lay in his development of the tactics by which capitalism was to be replaced by a socialist republic. Members of the Socialist Labor party, animated by De Leon’s vision of an industrial union which would ultimately grow strong enough to establish the socialist republic, propagated the idea in shops and factories, at meetings and in their writings. The Industrial Workers of the World did not of course measure up to De Leon’s concept of the revolutionary industrial union which was to destroy capitalism and usher in the socialist republic.
