Page:Lenin - The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade (1920).pdf/121

 Constituent Assembly and the real will of the people on the question of terminating the war is also inevitable.

(16) The combination of the circumstances set out above has for its result the fact that the Constituent Assembly, elected according to party lists previous to the proletarian and peasant revolution under the domination of the bourgeoisie, must inevitably conflict with the will and interests of the laboring and exploited masses who on November 7th began the Socialist revolution against the bourgeoisie. Naturally, the interests of this revolution stand above the formal rights of the Constituent Assembly, even if those formal rights had not been undermined by the absence in the law relating to the Constituent Assembly of a provision giving the people the right to recall and to re-elect its deputies at any moment.

(17) All attempts, direct or indirect, to view the question of the Constituent Assembly from the formal point of view of law, from the point of view of ordinary bourgeois democracy, without reference to the class struggle and civil war, constitute a betrayal of the proletarian cause, and a desertion to the bourgeois camp. It is the absolute duty of revolutionary Social-Democrats to warn all and everybody against this error, to which a few Bolshevik leaders have succumbed, who have not been able to realize the significance of the November rebellion and the problems of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

(18) The only chance for the painless solution of the conflict which has been brought about by the discrepancy between the elections to the Constituent Assembly and the will of the people as well as the interests of the laboring and exploited classes, is the earliest possible grant to the people of an extensive right to re-elect the members of the Constituent Assembly, the adhesion of the Constituent Assembly itself to the law of the Central Executive Committee relating to these re-elections, the unreserved recognition by the Constituent Assembly of the authority of the Soviets, of the Soviet revolution, and of its policy