Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/117



(1) The demand for the summoning of a Constituent Assembly formed in the past a perfectly legitimate part of the programme of the revolutionary Social-Democracy, because in a bourgeois republic the Constituent Assembly constitutes the highest form of democracy, and because the imperialist republic, with Kerensky at its head, in creating a parliament, was preparing an adulteration of the elections, accompanied by numerous infractions of democracy.

(2) While putting forward the demand for the summoning of a Constituent Assembly, the revolutionary Social-Democracy repeatedly, since the beginning of the revolution of 1917, emphasized its opinion that a republic of the Soviets is a higher form of democracy than the ordinary bourgeois republic with a Constituent Assembly.

(3) From the point of view of transition from the bourgeois to the Socialist order, from the point of view of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a republic of Soviets is not only a higher form or type of democratic institutions, as compared with the ordinary bourgeois republic crowned with a Constituent Assembly, but also the only form capable of securing the most painless transition to Socialism.

(4) The convocation of a Constituent Assembly in our revolution on the basis of lists drawn up and promulgated at the end of October, 1917, is taking place in conditions which exclude the possibility of a faithful expression of