only be brought about through spontaneous direct action by the working class itself, which would eventually result in the dissolution and replacement of institutions (including parliament) with a network of workers' councils. In an issue of the Commune, the APCF declared that "the parliamentary runner seeks not to emancipate the workers but to elevate himself" and warned that participation in parliamentary politics would inevitably lead to the participant gravitating towards reformism, careerism and opportunism. They also argued that parliamentarism was a distraction, in which working class voters were dealt with "the impossible task of discovering honest representatives to play at capitalist legislation, instead of addressing itself to the Socialist education of the masses". To the APCF, parliamentary political activity meant delegating tasks to leaders, where anti-parliamentary political activity meant the working classes themselves directly taking on those tasks, thus parliamentarism had to be opposed as it "empties the proletariat of all power, all authority, all initiative". The APCF therefore rejected the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) assertion of revolutionary parliamentarism, as they believed it would disempower workers by delegating their own tasks to the individuals that ran for election, and labelled all left-wing advocates of parliamentarism as "counter-revolutionaries". Position on Totalitarianism The APCF analyzed totalitarianism to be a product of capitalism's boom and bust cycles, as when capitalism tended towards monopoly, democracy became incompatible with the new monopolistic economy, leading to the institution of dictatorship and the outbreak of war as a means to pacify the working classes. A member of the APCF furthered the position that totalitarianism was a means for capitalism to preserve itself through a period of crisis, stating that "capitalism in crisis cannot afford to indulge in democracy". The APCF considered that the warring states were all equally capitalist and equally totalitarian, arguing that the needs of wartime were accelerating the development of the democratic powers towards totalitarianism, a position summed up in their statement that "Democratic capitalism can only fight fascist capitalism by itself becoming fascist." This view was supported by Ernst Schneider, a seaman and veteran of the German Revolution that had joined the group following his departure from Nazi Germany, who stated in 1944 that "under the smokescreen of freeing Europe from "totalitarianism", this very form of monopoly capitalism is developing everywhere." Schneider went on to predict that nationalisation was inevitable and that what had previously happened in the Axis states was