Teoría y práctica del ‘primer diputado socialista de América’: La acción de Alfredo Palacios en el Parlamento argentino y sus repercusiones en la prensa socialista, 1904-1908

In 1904, the Argentine Socialist Party managed to consecrate the young lawyer Alfredo Palacios as national deputy representing the working-class district of La Boca, a southern neighborhood of the city of Buenos Aires. Under Socialist eyes, Palacios’ election confirmed the correctness of a strategy oriented towards “political action” and electoral participation, the axis of differentiation with the anarchists since the previous decade. The objective of this article is to reconstruct the great lines of strategic and political argumentation put forward in his parliamentary discourses, in order to compare them with the more general proposals that guided the activity of the Socialist Party. The intention is to determine the relationship between Palacios’ legislative practice and the strategic orientation of Argentine socialism, and the way in which they influenced each other. The article shows that, while since previous years the concern for political action and the strategic option for the electoral and parliamentary tactics had occupied an incontestable place in the political preaching of the PS, after 1904 this doctrine was finally put in practice.