Socialist Labor Party of America
The Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP) is the oldest socialist political party in the United States and the second oldest socialist party in the world. It is an "impossibilist" party in its doctrines.
The party was founded in Newark, New Jersey, in 1876 as the Workingmen's Party of America. Renamed in 1877, the SLP was a confederation of small Marxist parties from throughout the United States, becoming the first nationwide Socialist party and only the second one of the so-called "third parties" (the Prohibition Party being the first).
In 1890, the SLP came under the leadership of Daniel De Leon, a lawyer who lectured at Columbia Law School until he quit to devote himself full time to the SLP. Since then, the SLP has adhered to the form of Marxism known as DeLeonism. De Leon was famously approvingly referred to by Lenin.
De Leon's opponents, led by Morris Hillquit, left the SLP in 1901 and fused with Eugene V. Debs' Social Democratic Party and formed the Socialist Party of America. In the dispute which wracked the Second International as to the possibility of reforms being won through socialists entering capitalist governments the SLP was firmly on the side of the "impossibilists" which has stuck as a label of sorts applied to it and the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The two parties however are not connected as the latter see's the former as syndicalist in nature.
Always critical of both the Soviet Union and of the Socialist Party's "reformism," the SLP has been isolated from the majority of the American Left, and that isolation seems to be ever-increasing. In 1976, the SLP nominated its last Presidential candidate and has run few campaigns since then. They recently have been having trouble funding their newspaper, The People.
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