– As established by Lenin and the Third International

”The bourgeois parliament, even the most democratic in the most democratic republic, in which the property and rule of the capitalists are preserved, is a machine for the suppression of the working millions by small groups of exploiters. The socialists, the fighters for the emancipation of the working people from exploitation, had to utilise the bourgeois parliaments as a platform, as a base, for propaganda, agitation and organisation as long as our struggle was confined to the framework of the bourgeois system. Now that world history has brought up the question of destroying the whole of that system, of overthrowing and suppressing the exploiters, of passing from capitalism to socialism, it would be a shameful betrayal of the proletariat, deserting to its class enemy, the bourgeoisie, and being a traitor and a renegade to confine oneself to bourgeois parliamentarism, to bourgeois democracy, to present it as “democracy” in general, to obscure its bourgeois character, to forget that as long as capitalist property exists universal suffrage is an instrument of the bourgeois state”.

Lenin, Letter to the Workers of Europe and America, January 24, 1919

In the two writings by Zinoviev and Trotsky that open this chapter, the issue of parliamentarism and the struggle for the Soviets is brought into sharp relief against the backdrop of the class struggles of 1919. That year had begun with great revolutionary promise. On January 1, the Spartacists had announced the formation of the German Communist Party, of which Lenin would say: “The moment the Spartacus League took the name of the Communist Party of Germany, the founding of the Communist International became a fact”. But the year 1919 also marks the high point of the German Revolution; the victories, albeit fleeting, of the Soviets in Hungary and Bavaria; the most powerful waves of postwar strikes in Italy; and finally, the beginning of foreign intervention against Russia and the first successes of the young Soviet Republic against the White armies backed by “democratic” England and France.

Thus history inscribed in letters of blood the irreducible opposition between parliamentary democracy and proletarian dictatorship. But would the proletariat have been able to decipher its meaning? For 1919 was also a “great election year.” In Germany, the January elections brought to power the “socialist” executioners of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. In Italy as in France, the reformists’ election campaigns openly posed the dilemma: either elections or revolution. But the masses rarely know how to read the history they make. When the German National Assembly convened in Weimar on February 6, 1919, the Central Council of the Soviets of All Germany decided to hand over its powers to it. Later, in his Memoirs, Prince Max von Baden wrote of the events of late 1918 and early 1919: “I said to myself: the revolution will triumph; we cannot defeat it, but perhaps we could stifle it… If the streets present Ebert to me as the tribune of the people, it will be the republic; if they designate Liebknecht, it will be Bolshevism. But if the Kaiser abdicates and appoints Ebert as chancellor for the monarchy, there will still be a small hope. Perhaps it will be possible to divert the revolutionary energy into the legal framework of an election campaign”.

This was the situation as seen by an old defender of the Empire. Lenin’s International conceived of the role of the masses on the one hand and parliament on the other in the European revolution in no other way. Zinoviev in his circular and Trotsky in his letter on Longuet point out what must be overthrown: not only the parliamentary practice of the heroes of the Second International, but parliament itself, this mill of words churning out democratic illusions; not only the socialist deputies who had betrayed most openly, but the entire policy of social democracy—patriotic, pacifist, and parliamentary. Who does not recognize in the masterful portrait of the centrist Longuet the characteristic traits of the “communists” Cachin and Thorez, Togliatti and Longo, and the favorite themes of the parliamentary performances of which the PCF or the PCI later gave us such a wretched spectacle?

Zinoviev’s circular—whose critical analysis by “Soviet” we publish below—vigorously raises the issue that would be debated a year later at the Second Congress of the Communist International. It demonstrates the necessity of destroying the bourgeois parliamentary machine, and opposes the vain hopes of “organizing new, more democratic parliaments” with a single slogan: Down with parliament! Long live the power of the Soviets! Zinoviev further emphasizes that there is no logical connection between this principled position and the Communist International’s “parliamentary” tactics, which advocate using the parliamentary platform and election campaigns for revolutionary agitation, for the organization of the masses, and for the call to open struggle against the bourgeois state, up to and including armed insurrection. Undermining the edifice from within while waiting to hand it over to the assault of the masses—this, and nothing but this, was the “revolutionary parliamentarism” of Lenin and Liebknecht.

Finally, Zinoviev makes an important observation: “Neither in France, nor in America, nor in England”—the most advanced capitalist countries, where the democratic mechanism has been functioning for many decades now—“have there been communist parliamentarians among the workers”. From this observation, the Italian abstentionist faction had concluded even then that there was a “theoretical and practical incompatibility between revolutionary preparation and electoral preparation” in countries with established democracies (see below, “Revolutionary Preparation or Electoral Preparation,” and also *Storia della Sinistra Comunista*, vol. 1, pp. 406–7).

As Zinoviev’s circular shows, the Communist International believed in the possibility of revolutionary parliamentarism if the proletariat succeeded in creating solid revolutionary parties. “If such a party exists, everything can change,” says Zinoviev. This, then, was the aim, in that year of 1919, of the Communist International’s tactical flexibility on this issue. Under the irresistible pressure of the revolutionary crisis, one could legitimately hope that strong communist parties would emerge in Western Europe, as in the Germany of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, capable not only of setting great examples of revolutionary parliamentarism, but of “doing as in Russia”: disperse all bourgeois constituent assemblies, all the parliamentary fetishes of the petty-bourgeois socialists, and erect the dictatorship of the proletariat upon their ruins.