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, loc. 348