Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/333

 emerges definitely into the Socialist Communist society of the organized, self-governing producers.

The Constituent Assembly was an expression of government of all the classes, of the bourgeois regime; it was, accordingly, necessarily and essentially a reaction against the proletarian revolution. Moreover, the Constituent Assembly was a phase of the parliamentary regime of the bourgeois republic. The parliamentary system is not an expression of fundamental democracy, but of the ruling requirements of Capitalism. Parliamentarism, presumably representing all the classes, actually represents the requirements of the ruling class alone,—with due consideration to "concessions" to the subject class. The division of functions in the parliamentary system into legislative and executive has for its direct purpose the indirect smothering of the opposition—the legislature talks and represents "democracy," while the executive acts autocratically. Socalism can not conquer Capitalism by assuming control of and using the parliamentary system: the system must be destroyed; and Socialism, accordingly, actually or potentially, prepares the norms of the proletarian state, the state of the industrually organized producers. The proletarian revolution annhilates the parliamentary system and its division of functions, legislative and executive. being united into one working body,—as in the Soviets of Workers and Peasants. The parliamentary state is purely territorial; the proletarian state, during its period of dictatorship, is territorial and industrial, until it emerges definitely into Socialism, when the state disappears, being replaced by the "administration of things," an industrial "state" functioning through the organized producers.

During its one day's session, the Constituent Assembly adopted a number of resolutions, declaring Russia a Democratic Federated Republic; abolishing "forever … the right to privately own land," placing all land, mines, forests and waters under the control of the Republic, making the use of these "free to all citizens of the Russian Republic, regardless of nationality or creed." Another resolution, "expressing the firm will of the people to immediately discontinue the war and conclude a just and general peace, appeals to the Allied countries proposing to define jointly the exact terms of a democratic peace acceptable to all the belligerent nations, in order to present these terms, in behalf of the Allies, to the Governments fighting against the Russian Republc and her Allies." … "Expressing, in the name of the people of Russia, its regret that the negotiations with Germany, which were started without a prelimi-