Italian Socialists treated elections as instruments, not ends, toward revolution

Evidence

More dramatically, the Socialist Party also rejected any form of parliamentarism. It fought fi ghts in electoral terms and with a cleareyed revolutionary set of objectives. Th is most intense dissemination of communist principles was meant to “facilitate the abolition of the institutions of bourgeois domination” (Tasca 1965, 95). Elections were thus understood as a barometer to measure the shift of power toward labor and as a powerful means of cultivating class consciousness. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 348

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the revolutionary electoral stance that elites were reacting against — an essential context for why austerity was deployed as class counter-weapon.
• XREF: connects to: Italian Socialists rejected parliamentarism while using elections to cultivate class consciousness — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 348