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268 VIOLENCE AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT
the employer as an institution, because the employer is
the effect, the result of capitalist property. As soon as
capitalist property will have disappeared, the employer
will disappear, and not before. It is in the socialist party
— because it is a political party
— that one fights against
the employer class, and that is why the socialist party is
truly an economic party, tending to transform social and
political economy. At the present moment words have
their importance. And I should like to urge the comrades
strongly never to allow it to be believed that tradeunion
action is economic action. No this latter
;
action is
taken only by the political organization of the working
class. It is the party of the working class which leads
it— — that is to say, the socialist party because property
is
a social institution which cannot be transformed except
by the exploited class making use of political power for
this purpose.
. . .
"I realize," he continued, "that the direct-actionists attempt
to identify political action with parliamentary action.
No electoral
;
action as well as parliamentary action
may be forms; pieces of political action. They
are not
political action as a whole, which is the effort to seize
— public powers the Government. Political action is the
people of Paris taking possession of the Hotel de Ville in
1871. It is the Parisian workers marching upon the
National Assembly in 1848.
. . . To those who go
about claiming that political action, as extolled by the
party, reduces itself to the production of public officials,
you will oppose a flat denial. Political action is, moreover,
not the production of laws. It is the grasping by
the working class of the manufactory of laws; it is
the political expropriation of the employer class, which
alone permits its economic expropriation. ... I
wish that someone would explain to me how the break-