As to Politics Author:Daniel DeLeon Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FOURTH LETTER By ARTURO GIOVANNITTI New York I have read very attentively the articles by Comrades Wagner and Vasilio in The People of Tuesday, and the ... more »few remarks by Comrade De Leon, and, as a result, I should like to give my humble opinion and try to answer the still unanswered questions of The People's Editor. It seems to me that both Sandgren and De Leon have given a wrong definition of what they term "the political activity of the working class," an error which has been but partly redressed when they drew a line between ballot and agitation. Yet although Sandgren and his followers want no politics, they want a revolution, and whilst De Leon excommunicates the ballot, he still persists in having an S. L. P. ticket on the very same ballot. The first forgets that a revolution must be essentially political before it can be anything else, the latter is a little afraid to reconduct the revolutionary method on the straight road of the "outside political action," to wit, the general strike and the revolt. The question is not whether we should bother about politics or not, but how we should conduct our political fight; should we remain even temporarily within the orbit of legality, or should we get out of it altogether and enforce our rights and will with new means and weapons adequate to the opportunity of the historical moment which we cross? In Europe, to define this legal fight, for to bepeaceful it must be legal, we have coined a new word: Parliamentarism—and all the question, according to me, lies in that word, that is to say, the political struggle of the working class within the capitalist state machine. Does then Comrade De Leon mean parliamentarism when he speaks of a peaceful method of solving the Social Question? If not, where is then the necessity of hav...« less