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owners and rich peasants (grossbauern), it inevitably means that parliamentarism in Germany is not politically outworn as yet; hence participation in parliamentary elections and the struggle on the parliamentary platform is obligatory for the party of the revolutionary proletariat, just for the purpose of educating the backward masses of its own class, just in order to awaken and enlighten the undeveloped, down-trodden, ignorant masses. Just so long as you are unable to disperse the bourgeois parliament and other reactionary institutions, you are bound to work inside them, and for the very reason that there are still workmen within them made fools of by priests or by the remoteness of village life. Otherwise you run the risk of becoming mere babblers.
Thirdly, the “Left” Communists have a great deal to say in praise of us Bolsheviks. One sometimes feels like telling them that it were better to praise us less, and go more thoroughly into the tactics of the Bolsheviks, to get better acquainted with them. We participated in the elections to the Russian bourgeois parliament, the Constituent Assembly, in September-November, 1917. Were our tactics right or not? If not, this should be clearly stated and proved; this is essential for the working out of the right tactics for international Communism. If, on the other hand, we were right, certain inferences should be drawn. Of course, there can be no question of approximating Russian conditions to the conditions of Western Europe. But where the special question of the phrase “parliamentarism has become politically outworn” is concerned, it is necessary by all means to gauge our experience; since, without a proper estimate of concrete experiences, such conceptions too easily resolve themselves into empty phrases. Had not we Russian Bolsheviks, in September and November, 1917, more right than any Western Communist to consider that parliamentarism in Russia had become politically outworn? Undoubtedly we had, for the point is not whether bourgeois parliamentarism has existed for a long or a short period, but to what extent the laboring masses are prepared, spiritually, politically and practically to accept the Soviet regime and to disperse (or allow to be dispersed) the bourgeois democratic parliament. That in Russia, in September-
