Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/118

 the will of the people in general, and of the laboring masses in particular, by the elections of teh Constituent Assembly.

(5) First, the proportional system of elections yields a faithful reflection of the will of the people only when the party lists correspond to the real division of the people in actual accordance with those party groupings which are reflected in those lists. But with us, as is well-known, the party wihch between May and October had the largest number of adherents among the people and especially among the peasantry, that is the party of Social Revolutionaries, presented united lists for the Constituent Assembly at the end of October, 1917, but split into two after the elections to, but before the meeting of the Constituent Assembly; hence, there is not and could not be even any formal correspondence between the will of the majority of the electors and the composition of the Constituent Assembly.

(6) Second, a still more important, not formal nor legal, but social and economic source of the discrepancy between the will of the people and, especially, of the laboring class, on the one hand, and the composition of the Constituent Assembly, on the other, is the circumstance that the elections to the Constituent Assembly took place at a time when the overwhelming majority of the people could hot yet know the whole extent and significance of the Soviet proletarian and peasants' revolution, which began on November 7th, 1917, that is, after the promulgation of the lists of candidates for the Constituent Assembly.

(7) The November revolution, which has handed over authority to the Soviets, and which has wrested the political predominance from the hands of the bourgeoisie and transferred it into the hands of the proletariat and poorer peasantry, is passing under our eyes through successive stages of development.

(8) It began with the victory of November 6–7th, in the capital, when the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the advance guard of the proletarians and of,