lution. To attempt to "circumvent" this difficulty, by "jumping over" the hard task of utilizing reactionary parliaments for revolutionary purposes, is absolute childishness. You wish to create a new society? And yet you fear the difficulties entailed in forming, in a reactionary Parliament, a sound group composed of convinced, devoted, heroic Communists! Is not this childishness? Karl Liebknecht in Germany and Z. Hoglund in Sweden succeeded, even without the support of the masses from below, in giving examples of a truly revolutionary utilization of reactionary parliaments. Why, then, should a rapidly-growing revolutionary mass party, under conditions of post-war disappointment and exasperation of the masses, be unable to hammer-out for itself a Communist faction in the worst of parliaments? It is just because, in Western Europe, the backward masses of the workers and the smaller peasantry are much more strongly imbued with bourgeois-democratic and parliamentary prejudices than they are in Russia, that it is only in the midst of such institutions as bourgeois parliaments that Communists can and should carry on their long and stubborn struggle to expose, disperse, and overcome these prejudices, stopping at nothing.
The German "Left" complain of bad "leaders" in their party and give way to despair, going to the length of a laughable "repudiation" of the said "leaders." But when conditions are such that it is often necessary to hide the "leaders" underground, the preparation of good, reliable, experienced and authoritative "leaders" is an especially hard task, and these difficulties cannot be successfully overcome without co-ordinating legal with illegal work, without testing the "leaders" in the parliamentary arena, among others. The most merciless, cutting, uncompromising criticism must be directed, not against parliamentarism or parliamentary action, but against those leaders who are unable—and still more against those who do not wish—to utilize parliamentary elections and the parliamentary platform as revolutionaries and Communists should. Only such criticism—added, of course, to the expulsion of worthless leaders and their replacement by capable ones—will constitute useful and fruitful revolutionary work. Thus will both the leaders themselves
