It is true that they stood for election, they fought in the streets, they demonstrated: all of this was as important as being, in themselves, the living expression of what they wanted to build. The socialist and social democratic parties did not intend to constitute themselves as mere electoral machines, but as the expression of a cause that wanted India Phone Number List to "win hearts and minds." Christophe Prochasson points out that, at least at this stage, socialism must be understood as a culture6. Let's remember: the spirit of democratic socialism resided India Phone Number List in being a life project rather than an electoral project.

In a socialism that was "a set of beliefs in search of its scientific foundation", as India Phone Number List  Horacio Tarcus has defined it, Marxism fit like a glove. Given that from its inception this tended to present itself as a scientific explanation based on class antagonism and a critical reading of political economy, socialists were no longer able to argue that India Phone Number List  socialism was ethically superior to capitalism, but that, through of the Marxist instrumentality, could also "scientifically" prove its necessity. Socialist organizations predominantly adopted this perspective, but never abandoned the ethical and moral dimensions that guided them.

As the British historian and writer Tony Judt affirms, the Marxism of those democratic socialists was, rather than an absolutely closed system, a set of self-imposed neo-Kantian norms and rules about what is India Phone Number List  wrong and what should be, but within a scientific penumbra for the purpose of explaining – to themselves and to others – how to get from here to there with the confidence that history was on his side. (…) Strictly speaking, from the version of capitalism that Marx gives, one cannot extract a reason why socialism  India Phone Number List  should (in a moral sense) exist.7 According to Judt's position, democratic socialists needed Marxism not so much to claim the socialization of the means of production as to give a scientific halo to an eminently ethical-political position.