I wonder if the CPUSA has an ongoing communication with the Iraqi Communist Party. . . .
At 3:45 PM -0700 9/21/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>You may say, well, I will not do anything but participate in a
>constitutional convention. Well, fine, if one occurs, I am sure
>people will be glad of your partucipation. If the radical impulse is
>a litle leess formalistic, you will be left on the sidelines. That
>is OK with me too, not that anyone cares what I think.
A constitutional convention isn't an alternative to radical upheaval anyway. Take Venezuela for instance. Radical upheaval preceded and followed the Constitutional Assembly that created a new constitution: <http://www.nd.edu/~kellogg/WPS/294.pdf>, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/528014.stm>, & <http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25505.shtml>.
At 3:45 PM -0700 9/21/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>I'm a bourgeois liberal myself, but one who remembers that we too
>have a revolutionary tradition -- 1776, 1789, 1848 -- indeed, closer
>to home, 1863-77.
In any case, without radical upheaval of the Revolutionary War that preceding it, in which "a greater percentage of the American population perished . . . than in World War I, World War II, or the Vietnam War" as Ray Raphael reminds us in _A People's History of the American Revolution_(Perennial 2002, p. 7), the Constitutional Convention could not have happened.
Also, no historian would deny that economic turmoils that led to -- and radical upheavals threatened by -- Shay's Rebellion and other armed uprisings of indebted farmers became a recurring topic at the Constitutional Convention and motivated the creation of the strong national government.
At 3:45 PM -0700 9/21/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>To get some sense of how out-of-anyone's control these things are,
>read Alfred Doeblin's great November 1918, a nevel of the German
>revolution, in which he depicts, in histprically accurate (far as I
>can tell) terms, how the German revolution not only blindsided the
>mainstream SD who opposed it and ukltimately destroyed it, killing
>its leaders, but also surprised and ran over those
>soon-to-be-martyred leaders, Luxemburg and Leibknecht, who found
>themselves helplessly following
>from the front. You might as well fight see the sea with a
>pitchfork. In the end, the only way to dovert it into other courses
>was with bayonets and bullets. That is what the SDPD chose.
Never read it -- sounds fascinating! -- Yoshie
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