"How is it possible to say that 'parliamentarism is politically worn out' when 'millions' and 'legions' of proletarians not only stand up for parliamentarism generally, but are directly counter-revolutionary?" If this position of participation in parliaments is correct in Germany, it is much more so in America. Here the workers not only stand up for parliaments generally but also are counter-revolutionary. Less than two million of the workers in this country were sufficiently awake at the last election (1920) to break away from the so-called old parties. In the face of this it seems apparent that it is necessary to take a revolutionary use of the bourgeois parliaments in this country. Boycotting of elections appears to be permissible only under unusual circumstances which seldom, if ever, arise in countries where parliamentary institutions are highly developed. Certainly no reasons have been shown for the boycotting of elections in the United States by those advocating such boycott. "It is just because, in Western Europe, the backward masses of the workers and the smaller peasantry are much more strongly imbued with bourgeois-democratic and parliamentary prejudices than they are in Russia, that it is only in the midst of such institutions as bourgeois parliaments that Communists can and should carry on their long and stubborn struggle to expose, disperse and overcome these prejudices, stopping at nothing."
For academicians within our movement in America this book should contain some good food for thought. Communism appears here as a fighting organization full of work, full of life. Within its folds there is no room for those mental eunuchs who can produce no offspring in revolutionary action. The intricate philosophic points of Communism are something more than mental gymnastics with which to exercise one's minds. They are a guide to action! Those that cannot translate Communism into terms of action, that the masses understand and need, have no place in Communism as expounded in this work. Those who academically adhere to the principle of "no compromise" whatever, will no doubt take issue with Lenin in the position that he lays down in this work. This is, of course, permissible. No one, but a fool, would contend that merely because Lenin says something that it is correct.
