CHAPTER VII.
SHOULD WE PARTICIPATE IN BOURGEOIS PARLIAMENTS?
The German Left Communists with the greatest contempt—and the greatest lightmindedness—reply to this question in the negative. Their arguments. In the quotation cited above we saw:—"to refuse most decisively any return to the historically and politically worn-out forms of struggle of parliamentarism."
This is said with absurd pretentiousness, and is obviously incorrect. "Return" to parliamentarism! Does that mean that the Soviet Republic already exists in Germany? It does not look as though such were the case. How is it possible, then, to speak of "returning"? Is not this an empty phrase?
Historically, "Parliament has become worn-out"; this is correct as regards propaganda. But everyone knows that it still very far from being threadbare when the practical question of eliminating Parliament is under consideration. Capitalism could, and very rightly, have been described as "historically worn-out" many decades ago, but this in no way removes the necessity of a very long and very hard struggle against capitalism at the present day. Parliamentarism is "historically worn-out" in a world-historical sense; that is to say, the epoch of bourgeois parliaments has come to-an end, the epoch of the proletarian dictatorship has begun. This is incontestably true. But the scale of the world's history is reckoned by decades. Ten or twenty years sooner or later—this from the point of view of the world-historical scale makes no difference, from the point of view of world-history it is a trifle, which cannot be even approximately reckoned. But this is just why it is a crying theoretical mistake to refer, in questions of practical politics, to the world-historical scale.
