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58 is made more difficult, or is not facilitated, by the presence of a Soviet opposition within the counter-revolutionary parliament. In the course of our victorious fight against Denikin and Koltchak, it never occurred to us that the existence in their rear of a Soviet, proletarian opposition, was immaterial to our victories. We know perfectly well that the dispersion of the Constituent Assembly on January 5, 1918, was not made more difficult, but was facilitated by the fact that, within the dispersed counter-revolutionary Constituent Assembly, there was a consistent Bolshevik, as well as an inconsistent Left-Social Revolutionary, Soviet opposition. The authors of the theses got into a muddle; they forgot the experience of many, if not all, revolutions, which proved how particularly useful during a revolution is the co-ordination of mass action outside a reactionary parliament with an opposition inside the parliament which sympathizes with—or better still, directly supports—revolution.

These Dutchmen (and the “Left” in general) altogether argue here as doctrinaires of revolution, who never took part in a real one, or never deeply reflected on the history of the revolution, or naively mistake the subjective “denial” of a certain reactionary institution for its destruction in reality by the united forces of a whole series of objective factors. The surest way of discrediting a new political (and not only political) idea, and to cause it harm, is, under pretext of defending it, to reduce it to an absurdity. For every truth, as Dietzgen senior said, if it be “carried to excess,” if it be exaggerated, if it be carried beyond the limits of actual application, can be reduced to an absurdity; and, under the conditions mentioned, is even bound to fall into an absurdity. In their very zeal to help, the Dutch and German “Left” did unwitting harm to the new idea of the superiority of Soviet power over bourgeois-democratic parliaments. Of course, anyone who should say, in the old sweeping way, that refusal to particpateparticipate [sic] in bourgeois parliaments can under no circumstances be permissible, would be wrong. I cannot attempt here to formulate the conditions under which a boycott is useful, for the scope of my article is more limited; here I only want to estimate all the possibilities of Russian experience in connection with