LENIN AND PARLIAMENTARIANISM

Il Soviet, July 11, 1920

We perfectly agree with what Lenin wrote in his letter published in issue 17 of Comunismo that the fundamental programme that can and must unite the true revolutionaries of the workers’ spheres is the struggle for the soviet regime. Now it is precisely with reference to this fundamental problem that the question of parliamentarianism must be examined, namely whether and to what extent the participation of communists in parliaments is useful to this struggle.

Lenin cuts short the question and judges definitely and repeatedly non-participation to be a mistake, basing his sharp assertion on two episodes in the Russian movement: the Bolsheviks’ participation in the Constituent Assembly after the fall of tsarism and their participation in the tsarist Duma. For us, these two episodes cannot be considered in the same way.

At the time of the tsarist Duma we were not in a revolutionary period, bourgeois power appeared firmly in place and there were no signs of the proletariat’s possibility of a more or less imminent revolutionary seizure of power. The representatives of the proletariat in it did a work of criticism of the bourgeois system that could not otherwise be done effectively, and they did revolutionary propaganda.

In Russia the parliamentary regime has never functioned in all its development as it has in western countries with all its disastrous consequences. The Bolsheviks participating in the Constituent Assembly brought the same spirit of violent revolutionary opposition that had not been allowed to fade during their tenure in the tsarist Duma. The value as revolutionary experience that parliamentary action during the Constituent Assembly would have had is stated too generically and no one has been able to say what it consisted of. On the other hand, the period of life of the Constituent Assembly was too short for the experiment to yield results of much value. 

To invite the communists in democratic countries to practise propaganda in the parliaments for the Soviets similar to the revolutionary and republican propaganda which the Bolsheviks practised in the Duma, means for us not to want to take into account the different historical period in which the struggle is taking place today in the midst of the revolutionary period and therefore very different from the period of development and strengthening of bourgeois power, characterised precisely by the birth of that parliamentarianism whose normal and complete development was prevented by the precipitous onset of the war and the proletarian revolution.

Lenin says that 'perhaps this (i.e. revolutionary propaganda for the Soviets in parliaments) is not easy to achieve in England or in any country with a parliamentary system’ and adds: ’but that is another question’. No, unfortunately, that is precisely the question. If we discuss parliamentarianism, it is not for the sake of abstract theories, it is solely because for us it is an urgent tactical question, for we are precisely in one of those countries with a parliamentary regime in which bourgeois democracy, as Lenin so aptly put it, 'has learnt to delude the people, to deceive them with a thousand manoeuvres, to designate bourgeois parliamentarianism as true democracy, etc.’. 

In this work of overvaluing the parliamentary function, bourgeois democracy has found and still finds its greatest ally everywhere, in these countries, in the socialist parties, which have tenaciously and insistently used parliamentary action to obtain some benefit for the working masses and have educated these to the most complete trust in the persevering work spent in their interest.

Even now, the Italian socialist party (without taking into account the large social-democratic bloc that it consciously retains within its ranks and which is decidedly opposed to the Soviet regime), while declaring itself in its majority to be maximalist, communist etc., gives the greatest importance to parliamentary action and subordinates all other political action to it. 

In these countries, preparation for the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is so profoundly antithetical to bourgeois democracy, cannot take place without intensive work to destroy all the illusions they harbour about democracy and which have been inoculated in them precisely by the socialist parties; and this work cannot be done without breaking with tradition, by abandoning the methods of democracy itself. The obstacle to the revolutionary preparation and revolutionary spirit of the masses as a result of long democratic education is enormous, and the difficulties in overcoming it are in proportion to the duration of it and require much of the energy that parliamentarianism absorbs to no avail.

Not to mention that abstentionism also serves to free the party from the careerists in good or bad faith who lurk in it and from demagogues. The long and complex experience of countries with a parliamentary regime is all negative about the revolutionary possibility of parliamentary action. The long and complex experience of countries with a parliamentary regime is all negative with regard to the revolutionary possibility of parliamentary action, and positive with regard to the dangers of social-democratic deviation, collaborationism, etc. Against this experience Lenin’s assertion alone, however authoritative, cannot suffice if it is not backed up by experience or convincing arguments.