Page:Lenin - The State and Revolution.pdf/38

 more and more to Anarcho-Syndicalism, in spite of the fact that it is but the twin brother of Opportunism.

But to Marx revolutionary dialectics was never the empty fashionable phrase, the toy rattle, which Plekhanoff, Kautsky, and the others have made of it. Marx knew how to castigate Anarchism pitilessly for its inability to make use at least of the "sty" of capitalist parliamentarism when the situation is not revolutionary, but at the same time, he knew how to subject parliamentarism to a really revolutionary proletarian criticism.

To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and oppress the people through parliament—this is the real essence of middle class parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary and constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic Republics.

But if, in connection with the question of the State, parliamentarism is to be regarded as one of its institutions, what, from the point of view of those tasks which the proletariat has to face in this field, is to be the way out of parliamentarism? How can we do without it?

Again and again we must repeat: The teaching of Marx, based on the study of the Commune, has been so completely forgotten that any criticism of parliamentarism other than Anarchist or reactionary is quite unintelligible to the "Social-Democrats" (read—traitors to Socialism) of to-day.

The way out of parliamentarism is to be found, of course, not in the abolition of the representative institutions and the elective principle, but in the conversion of the representative institutions from mere "talking shops" into working bodies: "The Commune was to have been not a parliamentary institution, but a working corporation, legislative and executive at one and the same time."

"Not parliamentary, but a working" institution—this is directly aimed, as it were, at present-day parliamentarians and at the parliamentary Social-Democratic "lap-dogs." Take any parliamentary country, from America to Switzerland, from France to England, Norway and so forth; the actual work of the State is done behind the scenes and is carried out by the departments, the chancellories and the staffs. Parliament itself is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the "common people." This is so true that even in the Russian Republic, in our middle-class democratic Republic, parliamentarism has already revealed its real purpose, though a real parliament has not yet come into existence. Such heroes of putrid philistinism as the Skobeleffs and the Tseretellis, Tchernoffs and Avksentieffs, have managed