Page:Lenin - The Collapse of the Second International - tr. Sirnis (1919).pdf/63

 Not only in time of war, but each time the political situation becomes strained—quite apart from any revolutionary action on the part of the masses—the government of the freest bourgeois country will not fail to threaten the dissolution of legal organisations, seizure of funds, arrest of leaders and other "practical consequences" of the kind. What is to be done? Should we acquit the opportunists on that account, as Kautsky does? That would mean giving one's blessing to the transformation of S.D. parties into National Liberal-Labour parties.

For the Socialist there can be but one inference: action of a purely legal kind as practised by the European parties, has outlived its time and has become the foundation of a bourgeois-Labour policy, in consequence of capitalist development having reached the imperialist stage. It is necessary to supplement this action by the creation of an illegal foundation, an illegal organisation, illegal S.D. work without the surrender of a single legal position. Just how this is to be done experience will show; would that there were the readiness to enter upon this path and the consciousness of its need! The revolutionary Social-Democrats of Russia demonstrated in the years 1912–1914 that this problem can be solved. Muranov, the Labour deputy, whose bearing in court was better than that of all the others, and whom Tsardom sent to Siberia, showed clearly that apart from ministerial parliamentarism there is also illegal and revolutionary parliamentarism. (Henderson, Sembat, Vandervelde, down to Suedekum and Scheidemann, believe themselves to be quite fit to occupy "ministerial posts" though they are not given a chance to enter further than the anteroom!) Let the Kosovskys and Potresovs go into raptures over the "European" parliamentarism of flunkeys or grow reconciled to it. We shall never cease to repeat to the workers that legal action of that kind and the Social-Democracy of the Legiens, Kautskys and Scheidemanns deserve only our contempt.