7. Should We Participate in Bourgeois Parliaments?

Wellred

Core Argument

Chapter 7: Should We Participate in Bourgeois Parliaments?

Lenin’s polemic against the German ‘Left’ Communists centres on a fundamental error: mistaking a world-historical judgement for a tactical prescription. While the epoch of proletarian dictatorship has opened, rendering bourgeois parliamentarianism obsolete in the grand sweep of history, Lenin insists this does not license abstention from parliamentary struggle in the present. World history, he reminds his comrades, is measured in decades, not days. The ‘Lefts’ cannot explain why their own participation in January 1919—when Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht still sat in parliament—was correct then but supposedly an error now. This failure to analyse their own past reveals them as a sect, not a mass party.

The objective reality, Lenin argues, is that millions of German workers and rural proletarians remain in the thrall of bourgeois parties. Parliament is not politically obsolete while the masses still harbour parliamentary prejudices. Communists must not confuse their own desires with the actual balance of class forces. Drawing on Bolshevik experience, Lenin recalls how participation in the Constituent Assembly in 1917—mere weeks before the Soviet seizure of power—served to expose bourgeois parliament to the backward masses and facilitated its eventual dissolution. Revolutionary tactics cannot be built on mood alone; they require sober appraisal of where the masses actually stand.

Lenin also takes aim at the ‘Lefts’ wholesale negation of ‘leaders’. Developing capable revolutionary leaders under conditions of illegality is arduous, and can only succeed by combining legal and illegal work—including testing cadres in parliament. Criticism should be directed not at parliamentary activity itself, but at leaders who fail to use the platform in a revolutionary manner. Such criticism, combined with replacing incompetents, constitutes useful revolutionary training for both leaders and masses. In a telling note, Lenin distinguishes Bordiga’s Italian faction: wrong to advocate non-participation, but right to attack Turati’s opportunists who remain in the Socialist Party while continuing their old parliamentary policy. Serrati’s tolerance of such figures, Lenin warns, is as dangerous as the Hungarian case where Turati-types sabotaged the Soviet government from within. This spinelessness towards opportunist parliamentarians, he concludes, gives rise to ‘Left-wing’ communism and partly justifies it.