On Parliamentary Communism: A Correspondance

Dear Pfemfert,

Bacmeister has written and promised that he will deliver you to us healed on December 15. Thank him most warmly on my behalf for the letter—but also for ensuring your healthy delivery. For even though I am a Bolshevik and an authoritarian, I find that you do Germany a great deal of good.

Now, I wanted to write you the article about and for parliamentarism. If all workers were as clever as the two of us, or could be made so within a year through our propaganda, then of course I would never again run for parliament, nor would I ask you to do so in Germany. But this cleverness would have to be so great that the entire proletariat would simply rise up overnight, armed, and depose the rulers.

Unfortunately, however, the proletariat is still hopelessly naive. Through the stupefying effects of the war, it has become even less intelligent than it was before the war. It still expects an improvement in its situation within bourgeois society. It fears us revolutionaries more than the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, it thinks, is bad enough, but the revolution, it says, would only make things worse. The proletarian is not so much too inactive to make the revolution as downright hostile to it. He wants his peace and quiet. Of course, we must rouse him from this calm, and I completely agree with you that the revolutionaries who speak directly of revolution are doing good work. I myself gave a speech for armed uprising in the church in Schaffhausen on May 1.

But there are masses of proletarians who do not understand our words. They must first go through a psychological intermediate phase between their current state and a revolutionary one before they can become revolutionary. Through some means, we must bring them to the maturity of revolutionary sentiment. We must make them take actions that suit their mentality and simultaneously push them into a new mentality. The best means, of course, is the strike for daily demands—wage increases, shorter working hours, and so on. Once they are engaged in the fight for these demands, and the state intervenes with police and military, they become furious, emotionally revolutionary, clash with state power, and the will to dismantle this state power is not far off. That is why we must also fight for reforms alongside the reform-believing proletarians. These reform struggles will increasingly "degenerate" into revolutionary battles.

It is similar with parliamentarism. Of course, during elections, we must tell the workers: "The parliamentarians you elect can do nothing more than present your demands to the ruling class. Your representatives have absolutely no power to enforce them. Only if the bourgeoisie knows that you workers stand behind your demands with armed force will they be realized." Now, the worker may not have the will to stand up for his demands with armed force—but he finds it a convenient means, a kind of political expressionism, to elect someone "who tells it to the bourgeoisie." And we must build on this will of the masses and see if something can be gained from parliamentarism.

But what? We must use parliament as a stage. It is a theater in which the representatives of the dispossessed and the possessors contend with one another. Parliament bears the greatest resemblance to the circus and the circus games of Byzantium. If the direction is good, the whole country should watch parliament. In parliament, the struggle should be fought in miniature and in words, a struggle that should then spread across the entire country. Watching the fight in parliament will inflame the passions of those standing outside, and this heat should be stoked by the press. The gaze of the entire working class should be directed toward this struggle. It should be spurred on to support the words of its representatives through its own activity, through political strikes and demonstrations. Parliament, like the strike, should be merely a means to rouse the masses—who are not yet revolutionary but stand behind the demands that parliamentarians represent—into action for these demands. It is a reformist means for revolutionary ends, for triggering revolutionary movements. Of course, alongside this, propaganda and preparation for mass uprising must continue. Revolutionary activity that is not combined with preparation for armed uprising is meaningless.

You are certainly right that it would be easier to directly launch the uprising that demolishes the entire apparatus of bourgeois state power. But if that is not directly possible due to the mentality of the masses, then we must choose the indirect path, the path of "historically necessary stupidity."

The recently deceased revolutionary syndicalist Griffhueles, who masterfully understood the handling of the masses, once told me: "You must always feel the pulse of the proletariat, observe how much revolutionary medicine it can tolerate, and then prescribe just as many spoonfuls of the medicine as its constitution can handle. That you increase the dose as soon as you see that more or even the full portion of revolution can be tolerated is, of course, obvious."

I hope I have convinced you and can soon greet you as the parliamentary representative of my party in the Reichstag. I will arrive in Berlin on December 23. So hurry up a bit. The outbreak of the revolution in Germany depends on your conversion.

Yours sincerely,
Brupbacher

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Dear Comrade Brupbacher,

I will already be leaving Sanct Blasien on December 10, after three months of bed rest, and traveling to Berlin. Your colleague, Professor Bacmeister, is very satisfied with my condition. I am returning, healed from my lung ailment, but not healed of my revolutionary, anti-parliamentary, anti-centralist, council-communist fighting stance.

Your letter, dear Brupbacher, has not only failed to entice me to the parliamentary circus act; on the contrary, it has proven to me that our agitation against the chatterbox called parliament must become much more energetic, much more thorough, much more brutal, since parliamentarism was even able to confuse the otherwise so critical mind of Fritz Brupbacher.

Today, still hindered in my work by my horizontal position, I want to set a few things, which your letter presents upside down, back on their feet.

You hold the war responsible for the naive, revolution-hostile, peace-loving bourgeois mentality of the exploited proletarians? But the war only came in August 1914, and it found the proletariat of Germany (and most other countries) already as meek, willing cannon fodder—curse the parliamentarism that created lazy voters and venal career politicians! Where, before the murder season, revolutionary class fighters sought to gather the wage slaves for direct action against the genocidal capitalism, there the Social Democracy sabotaged our efforts with their parliamentary swindle. Certainly, the human butcher Wilhelm II could have started his war even if, in August 1914, it had not been just us isolated individuals, but class-conscious, war-hostile masses who were present. But how long would the cowardly deserter have been able to deceive and seduce the people without the unscrupulous activity of the stalwarts Ebert, Scheidemann, Legien, David, Heine, Haenisch, Wendel, Lensch, Parvus, Noske, Heilmann, Stampfer, Köster, and their ilk? Without a worker base corrupted by ballot stupidity and careerism? Not a year long! The war did not dull, but invigorated! You, Fritz Brupbacher, are by no means original with your conditional use of the bourgeois parliament! Even the Social Democracy did not enter the exploiter parliament unconditionally 50 years ago! They too, back then, to appease the anti-parliamentarians, brewed sheep’s milk in the form of good intentions! I recall the Congress of Eisenach, 1873! There it was solemnly sworn:

“The Social Democratic Workers’ Party regards the Reichstag elections only as an agitational tool and a test of the spread of its principles, rejecting any compromise with other parties.”

A year later, 1874, in Coburg, it was affirmed:

“… it persists in its position dictated by party principles and participates in the Reichstag elections and, through its representatives, in the Reichstag proceedings only for agitational purposes.”

The socialists in the Reichstag want—

“never internally, but always externally, among the people, to achieve successes.”

Yet despite all resolutions, parliamentary cretinism spread so rapidly that Marx and Engels (who had once contributed to the disease) in 1878 expressed the hope:

“the Socialist Law would have the one advantage of curing German Social Democracy of parliamentarism!”

This hope was in vain. German Social Democracy went to the dogs and to August 4, 1914, and finally to Noske, because it ventured into the swamp of parliamentarism. From the first Social Democratic ballot to war patriotism and to Kaiser socialism, there is a straight path!

The proletariat stood helpless and betrayed on August 4, 1914, because for decades it had been preached the ballot and never the revolutionary uprising. Parliamentarism bred the worker traitors! Parliamentarism is: Noske, Ebert, Crispien, and Levi! Parliamentarism is masked white terror, is counterrevolution, is Parvus, is political roguery! Without parliamentarism, no Scheidemanns, no Orgesch republic! To conditionally affirm parliamentarism is to deny the social revolution!

That I must, for twelve years with AKTION, repeatedly bring such daily provable facts to mind again and again, is maddening. It is even more boring than a deck chair in a lung sanatorium for those who must spend months, even years, seven slowly creeping hours daily on it. More boring and even more tormenting.

Does it not make you sick, Doctor Fritz Brupbacher, to string together the arguments in favor of the parliamentary circus act, which truly do not become more attractive through repetition? You, a Bakuninist, spent the best time of your brilliant life on our side against the professional Social Democrats! You too have suffered (not only in Ebertia, which should more rightly be called Boschnia) what parliamentarism made of communists! In the regrettable byproducts of the communist movement, in the Levis, Frieslands, Stöckers, Brandlers, Koenens (and whatever other figures there are, past which one can only hurry with a pinched nose), you have the advocates of "revolutionary parliamentary exploitation"! The entire Communist Party of Germany has become a Social Democratic, thus a petty-bourgeois affair, since unscrupulous politicians turned the revolutionary Spartacus League into a "strictly centralized" party, merely to pursue the chase for mandates. And if the proletarian revolution, in which we stand, soon continues its course, it will not only have to overcome the Noske-Levi party, it will also have to overcome the Brandler-Thalheimer clique to win and secure the victory.

What, Fritz Brupbacher, do we council communists want? The overthrow of bourgeois rule, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the rule of the exploited, the productive manual and intellectual workers as a class. This means: the seizure of all political and economic power by the working humanity! The destruction of all institutions of bourgeois rule. Whoever performs socially useful work and does not live off the exploitation of others’ labor—whether intellectual or physical work is regarded as equally valuable—shall help establish the dictatorship of the class in the councils.

To accept even this ABC means rejecting bourgeois parliamentarism! And the current parliamentary communists have also admitted this to us—still two years ago! It was in 1920 when the current parliamentary exploiters agitated with our leaflets against the bourgeois parliaments, roughly as follows:

Are the parliamentary representative bodies a ground where the class struggle can be fought?

No, for the class struggle is not decided in council chambers, but on the streets, not at the green table, but in the factories. There is no substitute for the class struggle in the immediate action of the proletarian masses. To solve the social question, it is not a parliament with the participation of the exploiters, but solely the workers’ council, excluding the bourgeoisie, that is called to shatter their class rule. One cannot proceed hand in hand, one cannot jointly with the exploiting class toward social reorganization, but only in struggle against the bourgeoisie and its power positions.

But aren’t Social Democrats in state offices, doesn’t the social revolution proceed within the limits of “democratic” laws?

The leaders of the Social Democrats have become lightning rods for their coalition brothers and cover the shameless nakedness of bourgeois class rule with the desecrated red flag. The old Social Democrat Wilhelm Liebknecht already pointed us to the way in 1869:

“Revolutions are not made with high official permission; the socialist idea cannot be realized within the current state, it must overthrow it to come into being.”

Is parliamentarism at least capable of securing us a free tribune?

“With our speeches, we cannot throw truths among the masses that we could not spread much better otherwise!” This holds with even greater force in our time.

Every participation in the capitalist parliament, whether as a voter or elected, means (especially for the naive, Fritz Brupbacher!) a commitment to the capitalist state. Parliamentary speech battles distract from the thought of the necessity of self-initiative! Precisely when the “direction” is good, the proletariat is reinforced in the illusion that Fritz Brupbacher and Klara Zetkin “will take care of the capitalists.”

To our joy, the direction is today utterly rotten everywhere. In the desperate struggle that the exploiters wage for their wicked social order, they no longer have time to play theater in parliaments; the decisive battles are fought in the workplaces. Sipo, Schupo, white-guard murder organizations, and Social Democratic emergency courts form the last arguments of the dying capitalist epoch.

Against these arguments, Fritz Brupbacher wants to pit parliamentary circus arts?

My deck chair would be more useful as a barricade against cannonballs!

I await you on December 23 in Berlin, unconverted,

Yours,
Franz Pfemfert