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November, 1917, the working classes of the towns, the soldiers and the peasants, were, owing to a series of special circumstances, exceptionally well prepared for the acceptance of the Soviet regime and the dispersal of the democratic bourgeois parliament, is a quite incontestable and fully-established historical fact. However, the Bolsheviks did not boycott the Constituent Assembly, but took part in the elections before, as well as after, the conquest of political power by the proletariat. That these elections gave very valuable (and for the proletariat highly beneficial, political results—this I hope to have proved in the above-mentioned article, which deals in detail with the data concerning the elections to the Constituent Assembly in Russia.
The inference which follows from this is quite clear; it has been proved that participation in bourgeois-democratic parliaments a few weeks before the victory of the Soviet Republic, and even after that victory, not only has not harmed the revolutionary proletariat, but has actually made it easier to prove to the backward masses why such parliaments should be dispersed, has made it easier to disperse them, and has facilitated the process whereby bourgeois parliaments are actually made “politically outworn.” To pretend to belong to the Communist International, which must work out its tactics internationally (not on narrow national lines), and not to reckon with this experience, is to commit a great blunder, and, while acknowledging internationalism in words, to draw back from it in deeds.
Let us have a look at the arguments of the “Dutch Left” in favor of non-participation in parliaments. Here is the most important of their theses, No. 4:—
When the capitalist system of production is broken down and society is in a state of revolution, parliamentary activity gradually loses its significance as compared with the action of the masses themselves. When then under such conditions Parliament becomes the center and organ of counter-revolution, while on the other hand the working class creates the tools of its power in the shape of Soviets, it may even become necessary to decline all and any participation in parliamentary activity.
