The following theses, drafted and introduced by Bukharin, were adopted by the Second Comintern Congress in August 1920. They were directed both against parliamentarians who became part of the bourgeois state machine and against the anarchists and syndicalists who opposed parliamentary activities on principle. 1. THE NEW EPOCH AND THE NEW PARLIAMENTARIANISM From the very first, at the time of the First International, the attitude of socialist parties towards parliament was to utilise bourgeois parliaments for purposes of agitation. Participation in parliament was viewed from the standpoint of developing class consciousness, that is, of awakening the class hostility of the proletariat towards the ruling class. This attitude changed under the influence not of theory but of political developments...
The attitude of the Communist International towards parliament is determined not by any new theory, but by a change in the role of parliaments themselves. In the preceding epoch parliament, as an instrument of developing capitalism, accomplished work which was to a certain extent historically progressive. In present conditions of unbridled imperialism, however, parliament has become an instrument of falsehood, deception, and violence, an enervating talkshop. In the face of the devastation, looting, violence, robberies and destriction committed by imperialism, parliamentary reforms lacking system, durability and order, lose all practical significance for the working masses.
Socialists who, while inclined towards communism, point out that the moment for revolution has not yet come in their country, and refuse to break away from the parliamentary opportunists, are in fact arguing from a conscious or semi-conscious assessment of the approaching epoch as one of relative stability of imperialist society, and assuming, on this basis, that practical results can be obtained by a coalition with the Turatis and Longuets in the fight for reform. But communism must start from a clear theoretical analysis of the character of the present epoch (the culmination of capitalism, imperialist self-negation and self-destruction, uninterrupted spread of civil war, etc.). The forms of political relations and groupings may be different in different countries, but their essential nature is the same everywhere. For us the question is the immediate political and technological preparation of the insurrection of the proletariat for the destruction of bourgeois power and the establishment of the new proletarian power.
For communists, parliament today can in no circumstances serve as the centre of the struggle for reforms, for improving the lot of the working class, as it did at certain times in the preceding epoch. The centre of gravity of political life has now been completely and finally removed beyond the confines of parliament. On the other hand the bourgeoisie are compelled, in virtue not only of their relation to the working masses, but also of the involved inter-relationships within the bourgeois classes, to put some of their measures into effect, in one way or another, through parliament, where the various cliques bargain for power, display their strength and betray their weakness, show themselves up as they really are, etc.
Therefore it is the immediate historical task of the working class to wrench this machine from the hands of the ruling classes, to destroy and annihilate it, and to put in its place new proletarian organs of power. At the same time COMINTERN THESES parliamentarians... The disgusting traditions of the old parliamentary tactics have however impelled some revolutionary elements into the camp of opponents of parliament in principle (the IWW, the revolutionary syndicalists, KAPD). The second congress therefore puts forward the following theses:
2. COMMUNISM, THE FIGHT FOR THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT AND THE UTILISATION OF BOURGEOIS PARLIAMENTS 1) Parliamentarianism as a State system became a "democratic" form of the rule of the bourgeoisie who, at a certain stage of development, needed the fiction of a popular representative body, which from the outside seems to be an organisation of the "popular will" standing outside classes, but is in essence an instrument of oppression and subjection in the control of ruling capital.
2) Parliamentarianism is a particular form of the State order; hence it cannot be the form of communist society, in which there are neither classes nor class struggle, nor any State power.
3) Nor can parliament serve as the form of proletarian State administration in the transition period from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie to the dictatorship of the proletariat. When the class struggle has come to a head in the civil war, the proletariat must build up its State organisation as a fighting organisation to which representatives of the former ruling classes are not admitted. At this stage the fiction of the "popular will" is directly harmful to the proletariat. The proletariat needs no parliamentary division of powers, which is harmful to it. The form taken by the proletarian dictatorship is the Soviet republic.
4) Bourgeois parliaments, one of the most important pieces of machinery in the bourgeois State apparatus, cannot as such be won permanently, just as the proletariat cannot win the bourgeois State. The task of the proletariat is to shatter the bourgeois state machine, to destroy it, and to destroy with it parliamentary institutions, whether republican or deriving from a constitutional monarchy...
6) Consequently, communism repudiates parliamentarianism as the form of the future. society, as the form of the class dictatorship of the proletariat. It denies the possibility of winning parliament over permanently; its object is to destroy parliamentarianism. It follows that communism can be concerned only with exploiting bourgeois State institutions with the object of destroying them. In this way, and only in this way, can the question be conceived.
7) Every class struggle is a political struggle, for in the final analysis it is a struggle for power. Any strike which spreads over the whole country endangers the bourgeois State and therefore assumes a political character...
o) Consequently the question of political struggle is by no means identical with the question of the attitude to parliament. The first is a general question of the proletarian class struggle, in which small and partial struggles mount up to the general struggle for the overthrow of the canitalict order ac a whole consists chiefly in revolutionary agitation from the parliamentary tribune, in exposing enemies, in the ideological mobilisation of the masses, who, particularly in the backward areas, are still encumbered with democratic illusions and look to the parliamentary rostrum, must be wholly and completely subordinate to the aims and tasks of the mass struggle outside parliament.
Participation in the electoral struggle and revolutionary propaganda from inside parliament are particularly important in the political approach to those sections of the working class, such as the agricultural working masses, who have up to now been remote from political life...
16) "Anti-parliamentarianism" on principle, that is, the absolute and categorical rejection of participation in elections and in revolutionary parliamentary activity, is therefore a naive and childish doctrine which is beneath criticism, a doctrine which is occasionally founded on healthy disgust with paltry parliamentary politicians, but which is at the same time blind to the possibility of revolutionary parliamentarianism. Moreover, this doctrine is frequently connected with a wholly false idea of the role of the party, which pictures it not as the centralised vanguard of the workers, but as a decentralised system of loosely-connected groups. sation...
8) Every communist member of parliame must bear in mind that he is not a legislat seeking agreement with other legislators, party agitator sent into the enerny camp execute party decisions. The communist is responsible not to the loose mass of the electors, but to his communist party, lega illegal.
9) The speeches of communist deputies ir parliament must be readily understandabl every ordinary worker, every peasant, eve washerwoman, every shepherd, so that the can issue his speeches as leaflets for distril in every corner of the country...
11) Communist deputies must use the par mentary rostrum to expose not only the bourgeoisie and their avowed followers, bi the social-patriots and reformists, to expo indecisiveness of the "centrist" politicians other opponents of communism, and to conduct propaganda for the ideas of the Communist International.
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