Lenin’s Three Arguments.

In your opposition to us, Comrade, you use only three arguments, that constantly recur all through your brochure, either separately or combined.

They are the following:

1. The advantages of parliamentary propaganda for winning the workers and the petit bourgeois elements to our side.

2. The advantages of parliamentary action for making use of the “rifts” between the parties, and for compromises with some of them.

3. The example of Russia, where this propaganda and the compromise worked so wonderfully well.

Further arguments you have none; I will answer them in turn.

To begin with the first argument, propaganda in parliament. This argument is only of very slight importance, for the non-communist workers, that is to say the social-democrats the Christian and other bourgeois elements do not, as a rule, read one word in their papers about our parliamentary speeches.

Often these speeches are utterly mutilated. With those, therefore, we achieve nothing We only get at the workers through our meetings, brochures and newspapers.