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57 The first sentence is obviously wrong, since the action of the masses—a big strike for instance—is more important always than parliamentary activity, and not merely during a revolution or in a revolutionary situation. This obviously meaningless argument, historically and politically incorrect, only shows, with particular clearness, that the authors absolutely ignore both the general European experience (the French experience before the revolutions of 1848 and 1870; the German from 1878 to 1890, etc.), and the Russian, cited above, with regard to the importance of unifying legal and illegal forms of the struggle. This question has immense significance generally as well as specially. In all civilized and advanced countries, the time is coming speedily—it may, in fact, be said already to have come—when such unification becomes more and more—and, to an extent, has already become—obligatory for the party of the revolutionary proletariat. It is necessitated by the development and approach of the civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoise, by the furious persecution of Communists by republican and all bourgeois governments generally, breaking the law in innumerable ways (the American example alone is invaluable). This most important question has not been at all understood by these Dutch "Left Communists" or by the "Left" generally.

The second phrase of the thesis is, in the first place, historically untrue. We bolsheviks took part in the most counter-revolutionary Parliaments. Experience showed that such participation was not only useful, but necessary to the party of the revolutionary proletariat, directly after the first bourgeois revolution in Russia (in 1905), to prepare the way for the second bourgeois revolution (February, 1917), and then for the Socialist revolution (November, 1917). In the second place, this phrase is strikingly illogical. If Parliament becomes an organ and a "center" (by the way it never has been in reality, and never can be, a "center") of counter-revolution, and the workmen create the tools of their power in the form of Soviets, it follows that the workers must prepare themselves—ideologically, politically, technically—for the struggle of the Soviets against parliament, for the dispersion of parliament by the Soviets. But it does not at all follow that such a dispersion