violence
(see the _International Socialist Review_, February, 1912).

The French and Italian advocates of revolutionary unionism also assign
to the party a very secondary part, though they are by no means, like
the anarchists, opposed to all political action. They do not as a rule
oppose the Socialist parties, but they protest against the view that
Socialist activities should be chiefly political. Their best-known
spokesman in Italy, Arturo Labriola, one of the most brilliant orators
in the country, and a professor in the University of Naples, writes:--

"The Social Democracy will prove to have been the last capitalistic
party to which the defense of capitalistic society will have been
intrusted. The syndicalists [revolutionary unionists] ought to get
that firmly into their heads and draw conclusions from it in their
_necessary_ relations with the official Socialist Party. _The
latter ought to resign itself to being no more than a simple party
of the legal demands of the proletariat [i.e. the unions,] on the
basis of existing society, and not an anti-capitalist party._"[262]

This is strong language and brings up some large questions. Far from
being displeased with the moderate and non-revolutionary character of
the Socialist Party, Labriola, himself a revolutionist, is so
indifferent to the party as a direct means to revolution, as to hope
that it will drop its revolutionary claims altogether and become a
humble and modest but more useful tool of the unions. He even admitted
in conversation with the writer that, attaching no value to political
advance as such, he was not even anxious at this time that the
illiterate South Italians should be given a vote, since they would long
remain under the tutelage of the Catholic Church.

One of the founders of the present French movement, its earliest and
chief theorist, Pelloutier, who has many followers among the present
officials of the French Federation of Labor, went even further, denying
to the government, and therefore to all political parties, any vital
function whatever. To Pelloutier the State is built exclusively upon
"superfluous and obnoxious political interests." The unions are expected
to work towards a Socialist society without much, if any, political
support. They are to use non-political means: "The general strike as a
purely economic means that _excludes the cooeperation_ of parliamentary
Socialists and demands only