Source : Today , June , pp. The municipal elections have resulted in a great victory for Socialism. It is not only that in Paris, the number of votes has more than doubled in three years. In , when the party was only in embryo, for no really organised Socialist Movement was possible till the amnesty question had been decided and the vanquished of the Commune were not amnestied till July , it already gave some proof of its existence, our candidates receiving in Paris 17, votes.
At this time there was but a single programme, accepted by all the newly founded groups. In the Socialist vote has risen to 38,, having doubled in three years. But the union that existed in has disappeared, and at the present moment we may look upon the. Socialists as divided into four groups.
First, the Anarchists who make up in sound and fury for the smallness of their numbers and their general paucity of ideas of any sort. Then we have the Blanquists, active, devoted, well-disciplined men, but giving too great importance to the political, as compared with the social question; and finally the Collectivists. These belong to the school of Marx, and believe that the emancipation of the working class can only be accomplished by the nationalization of the instruments of labour, and that this revolution will only be accomplished when the working class has possessed itself of the political powers of the nation.
For reasons of tactics the Collectivists only put forward 6 out of the 80 candidates, but their men made common cause with the Blanquists.
This progress in the Paris election is analogous to what has happened in Berlin, where in the Social Democrats obtained only 1, votes; in , 16,; in , 33,; and in , 56, At Lyons, Roubaix, Rheims, Alais, in all the chief industrial centres the Collectivists have obtained thousands of votes.
