-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Jim Devine
Sent: 23 May 2000 05:34
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [PEN-L:19438] Re: Re: Re: Withering away of the state
At 06:54 AM 05/23/2000 +1000, you wrote:
>Nice post, Rod! And I tend to side with Barkley on the SR Constituent
>Assembly, too - which seems to me to have been a more promising midwife for
>the sort of transformations you discuss (especially in light of the
>resolutions they were passing in their last days) than the dictatorship of
>a vanguard -> substitutionalist elite.
I'm not sure that the Constituent Assembly would have dealt well with the
issue of ending WW I the way Lenin did for Russia
Any illusions about the survivability or relevance of the Constituent
Assembly do not survive a reading of the memoirs of its own leaders or of
the S-r's generally. It's collapse may have been occasioned by Lenin but he
was not the cause of the CA's barrenness. See for instance Ziva Galil, The
Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution or Diane Koenker's Strikes and
Revolution in Russia in 1917, or David Mandel's Petrograd Workers and the
Soviet seizure of power; or, best of all, Leopold Haimson's classic: The
Making of 3 Revolutionaries: Voices from the Menshevik Past
Mark Jones
