Now, as to the merits of the controversy. The I. W. W. set out in 1905, somewhat on the order of the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, proposing to wage war on the capitalist, primarily on the "economic field," _viz._, in the shop, "on the job"; by strikes and boycotts, _etc._, but expecting to go forward, as DeLeon put it, "under the protecting guns of a labor political party." No particular party was endorsed, however, and any desire for the endorsement of any political party was specifically disclaimed. The words, "without endorsing or desiring the endorsement of any political party," were inserted at the close of the preamble in 1906, but stricken out in 1908 (or possibly 1907). The Detroit I. W. W. at first carried in its preamble the words, "without endorsing any political party," but later struck them out.[452] The western membership was especially bitter in its hostility to the Socialist party as well as the Socialist Labor party, and felt convinced that the I. W. W. was mortgaging its future in allowing itself to get into any entangling political alliances, formal or informal. The western I. W. W.s had not borrowed any theoretical criticism of the state from the French syndicalists, but the actual concrete experiences of the lower grades of workers in the western states had developed in their minds a conception of the political party (reactionary or socialistic) very similar to that of the revolutionary syndicalists of France.
Félicien Challaye, one of the intellectuals among the French syndicalists, expresses this common idea very concisely. He says that, "... le parti politique est un agrégat d'éléments hétérogènes, réunis par le lieu artificiel d'une opinion analogue: des hommes venus de toutes les couches sociales s'y condoient, échangent leurs obscurs et stériles bavardages, cherchent à associer par de louches compromis leurs intérêts antagonistes."[453]
Indeed, the Western American Wobblies looked upon the whole modern system of congressional or parliamentary government in much the same way. Parliaments, they say, are little more than clearing-houses for the exchange of "vague and sterile platitudes." In so far as they do more than this, they merely further the designs of the big business groups whom they serve as retainers. In this regard the I. W. W.s are sufficiently Marxian and they would accent with italics Marx's strictures on the "disease of parliamentarism." The Industrial Workers' _feeling_ toward parliamentary government cannot be better described that in the words of the great Socialist. In a letter written to the _New York Tribune_ in 1852 Karl Marx describes