Page:Theses Presented to the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920).pdf/70



17. „Antiparliamentarism“, in the sense of an absolute and categorical repudiation of participation in the elections and the parliamentary revolutionary work, cannot therefore bear criticism, and is a naive childish doctrine which is founded sometimes on a healthy disgust of politicians; but which does not understand the possibilities of revolutionary parliamentarism. Besides, very often this doctrine is connected with a quite erroneous representation of the rôle of the Party which In this case is considered not as a fighting, centralised advanced guard of the workers, but as a decentralised system of badly joined revolutionary nuclei!

18. On the other hand, an acknowledgement of the value of parliamentary work does in no wise lead to an absolute, in-all-and-any-case acknowledgement of the necessity of concrete elections and a concrete participation In parliamentary sessions. The matter depends upon a series of specific conditions. In certain combinations it may become necessary to leave the parliament. The Bolsheviks did so when they left the Pre-parliament in order to break it up, to weaken it and to set up against it the Petrograd Soviet, which was then prepared to head the uprising; they acted in the same way in the Constituent Assembly on the day of its dissolution, transferring the meeting to the Third Con-