>that's my particular context at the moment. as for the discussion on the
>US constitution, i wonder why the US left has never argued for the
>abolition of the bill of rights.
Quite the contrary - except for a few oddballs like my friend Dan Lazare, the Bill of Rights is a sacred text to most American leftists. Dan argues, among other things, that the BoR and the rest of the U.S. constitutional structure has effectively demobilized popular struggle: between the guarantee of "rights" bestowed by The Founders and the obstacles to any troublemaking guaranteed by the machinery of governance (the Senate, the mutually limiting three branches of federal government, the whole structure of federalism and localism), the status quo is given enormous powers to reproduce itself. But it's never seen as such; most liberals, and even gun-worshipping neo-libertarians like Alexander Cockburn, see the BoR as the only bulwark against oppressive, centralizing state power.
Doug