Parliamentary cretinism
의회 백치증
A Marxist term of abuse for the belief that votes and procedures inside parliament are the whole of politics, a belief that blinds its holders to the balance of class forces outside. Marx coined it in chapter V of The Eighteenth Brumaire about the Party of Order deputies who confronted Louis Bonaparte in 1851, and Engels and later Marxists used it against socialist politics that relied exclusively on parliamentary means.
In depth
Marx coined the phrase for a scene in January 1851. When Bonaparte dismissed Changarnier, commander of the Paris army, the Legislative National Assembly, dominated by the Party of Order, passed a vote of no confidence in the ministry and took it for a victory. Yet the Party of Order had already destroyed the conditions of parliamentary power with its own hands, above all by abolishing universal suffrage. Marx wrote: "And it took that peculiar malady which since 1848 has raged all over the Continent, parliamentary cretinism, which holds those infected by it fast in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rude external world."
Marx singled out Thiers as the man most deeply afflicted. Thiers, the parliamentary hero, suffered from the incurable disease of parliamentary cretinism more than anyone; even after parliament was in effect dead he hatched a new parliamentary intrigue with the Council of State, a responsibility law meant to keep the president within the limits of the constitution. The Assembly believed that by striking the president's ministers it had struck the president, but it had merely given Bonaparte another chance to humiliate it before the nation.
Marx's view was that parliaments represent class interests only indirectly and resolve problems superficially, their politics displaced and abstracted from social conditions. Parliamentary cretinism therefore creates an imaginary world without sense, memory or understanding of the real one, and in the name of defending parliamentarism it ended by destroying parliament itself and strengthening the executive.
Engels used the phrase too. He described parliamentary cretinism as an incurable disease whose victims are convinced that the whole world, its history and its future are determined by a majority vote of the very representative body of which they have the honour to be members. Marx and Engels held that a socialist movement relying only on parliamentary means would waste time and let reactionary forces grow stronger, and the phrase was later widely used within Marxism against an exclusively parliamentary line.