He tries to prove that for the working class it is
always expedient, in the long run, to preserve the essential elements of
the democratic order. This is, of course, true as a general rule. But
Kautsky has reduced this historical truth to professorial banality. If,
in the final analysis, it is to the advantage of the proletariat to
introduce its class struggle and even its dictatorship, through the
channels of democratic institutions, it does not at all follow that
history always affords it the opportunity for attaining this happy
consummation. There is nothing in the Marxian theory to warrant the
deduction that history always creates such conditions as are most
"favorable" to the proletariat.
It is difficult to tell now how the course of the Revolution would have
run if the Constituent Assembly had been convoked in its second or third
month. It is quite probable that the then dominant Social Revolutionary
and Menshevik parties would have compromised themselves, together with
the Constituent Assembly, in the eyes of not only the more active
elements supporting the Soviets, but also of the more backward
democratic masses, who might have been attached, through their
expectations not to the side of the Soviets, but to that of the
Constituent Assembly. Under such circumstances the dissolution of the
Constituent Assembly might have led to new elections, in which the party
of the Left could have secured a majority.
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