Page:Left-Wing Communism.djvu/84

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experience, and highly profitable to the exploiters—finding it necessary to join their forces for the fight against the Labor Party. Part of the Liberals, like rats deserting a sinking ship, run over to the Labor Party. The Left Communists find it inevitable that the power will fall into the hands of the Labor Party by a majority of working men. From this they draw the strange conclusion which Comrade Sylvia Pankhurst expresses as follows:—

A Communist Party must not enter into compromise. . . . A Communist Party must keep its doctrine pure, and its independence of reformism inviolate; its mission is to lead the way, without stopping or turning, by the direct road to the Communist revolution.

On the contrary, since the majority of the workers in Britain still support the British Scheidemanns and Kerenskys; since they have not yet experienced a government composed of such men, which experience was necessary in Russian and Germany before there was an exodus of the masses towards Communism, it follows without any doubt that the British Communists must participate in Parliament. They must from within Parliament help the workers to see in practice the results of the Henderson and Snowden government; they must help the Hendersons and Snowdens to vanquish Lloyd George and Churchill united. To act otherwise means to hamper the progress of the revolution; because, without an alteration in the views of the majority of the working class, revolution is impossible; and this change can be brought about the political experience of the masses alone, and never through propaganda alone. If an indisputably weak minority of the workers say "Forward, without compromise, without stopping or turning," their slogan is, on the face of it, wrong. They know, or at least they should know, that the majority, in the event of Henderson's and Snowden's victory over Lloyd George and Churchill, will, after a short time, be disappointed in its leaders, and will come over the communism—or at any rate to neutrality and, in most cases, to benevolent neutrality towards the Communists. It is as though ten thousand soldiers were to throw themselves into battle against fifty thou-