and of bourgeois rule made them the very opposite of obsolete. Lenin continues:
"We Bolsheviks participated in the most counter-revolutionary parliaments, and experence has shown that participation was not only useful but indispensable to the party of the revolutionary proletariat...If a parliament becomes an organ and a "centre"....of counterrevolution...then it follows that the workers must prepare-ideologically, politically and technically-for the struggle of the Soviets against parliament...But it does not at all follow that this dispersal [of parliament] is hindered, or is not facilitated, by the presence of a Soviet opposition within the counter-revolutionary parliament...We know perfectly well that the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly on January 5, 1918 was not hampered but was actually facilitated by the fact that, within the counter-revolutionary Constituent Assembly which was about to be dispersed, there was a consistent Bolshevik, as well as an inconsistent Left Socialist-Revolutionary, opposition."
THE ENTRY TACTIC Quite aside from the need to use the traditional bourgeois forms as a means of making and maintaining contact with the mass of workers on the one hand and of forming a sort of revolutionary fifth column on the other, Lenin saw the need to make careful distinctions in the nature of what was being opposed. Within the bourgeoisie there are differences of approach, differences of direction and control, all of which must be exploited; and that is not something we can do by heroic withdrawal from the scene of battle. Moreover there is the very important tactic of temporary collaboration. Lenin used as his example the situation in Britain during the struggle between the Labour Party and Lloyd George's hoped-for LiberalConservative axis. Lloyd George's purpose was the defeat of the Labour Party which had become a real threat to the divided right. It was Lenin's thesis that even though a Labour parliament would go the way of the continental social democrats and betray the cause of the working class, what was important was to give the working class some experience of parliamentary power, to demonstrate the impossibility of achieving revolution through the left liberalism of the British Labour Party and to further the principle of attacking the adopted by the Bolsheviks in the years before and through the revolution of no immediate value.
NEO-CAPITALISM Capitalism has changed into a very different beast from that of the 1920s. Its expansionist, profit-orientated and exploitative nature has not changed, except possibly for the worse; but its methods, its priorities, its organisations, its controls and, particularly, its power have all changed, sharpened and expanded. It has developed the tactic of reform as a means of self-preservation to an extraordinary degree. In a way not yet fully analysed by the left, it has even reduced the role of its own bourgeois parliamentary system and shifted the locus of power more completely to the apparatus of government and to the large capital amalgams. The extent to which the official unions have sold out and the degree to which the TUC is now a mere instrument of governmental appeasement is a matter of common knowledge. The Labour governments forecast by Lenin have come and gone the way of the corrupt social democrats- Harold (Noske) Wilson is the consensus symbol.
"Left-Wing"' Communism still has much to say to us. We must of course conduct the fight as part of the masses (we must, incidentally, reject the bourgeois sneer that to be an intellectual or to be a member of a small Socialist group is somehow not to be a worker). But the workers who are prepared to fight are often not in the leadership of the Trades Unions or members of the Labour Party. They are to be found somewhere else- they are supporting their shop-stewards in the face of official union disapproval, they are squatting in empty houses, they are banding into tenants' groups, they are demonstrating for Vietnam. To continue to