On the vital question—­that is to say on the economic question of property—­conservatives, progressives and radicals are all individualists.  On this point they are all, in their essential nature of the same social class and, in spite of certain sentimental sympathies, the adversaries of the working class and of those who, although born on the other shore, have embraced the political programme of that class, a programme necessarily corresponding to the primordial economic necessity—­that is to say, the socialization of the land and the means of production with all the innumerable and radical moral, juridical and political transformations, which this socialization will inevitably bring to pass in the social world.

This is why contemporary political life cannot but degenerate into the most sterile bysantinisme and the most corrupt strife for bribes and spoils, when it is confined to the superficial skirmishes between individualist parties, which differ only by a shade and in their formal names, but whose ideas are so similar that one often sees radicals and progressives less modern than many conservatives.

There will be a new birth of political life only with the development of the socialist party, because, after the disappearance from the political stage of the historical figures of the patriots (the founders of modern Italy) and of the personal reasons which split up the representatives into different political groups, the formation of one single individualist party will become necessary, as I declared in the Italian Chamber on the 20th of December, 1893.

The historical duel will then be begun, and the Class Struggle will then display on the field of politics all its beneficent influence.  Beneficent, I say, because the class struggle must be understood not in the contemptible sense of a Saturnalia of fist-fights and outrages, of malevolence and personal violence, but must be worthily conceived as a great social drama.  With all my heart I hope that this conflict may be settled, for the progress of civilization, without bloody convulsions, but historical destiny has decreed the conflict, and it is not given to us or to others to avert or postpone it.

It follows from all that we have just said that these ideas of political socialism, because they are scientific, dispose their partisans both to personal tolerance and to theoretical inflexibility.[83] This is also a conclusion reached by experimental psychology in the domain of philosophy.  However great our personal sympathies may be for such or such a representative of the radical faction of the individualist party (as well as for every honorable and sincere representative of any scientific, religious or political opinion whatsoever), we are bound to recognize that there are on the side of socialism no partiti affini.[84] It is necessary to be on one side or the other—­individualist or socialist.  There is no middle ground.  And I am constantly growing more and more convinced that the only serviceable tactics for the formation of a socialist party likely to live, is precisely that policy of theoretical inflexibility and of refusing to enter into any “alliance” with partiti affini, as such an alliance is for socialism only a “false placenta” for a fetus that is unlikely to live.