After introducing the demand for a Constituent Assembly to resolve the question of independence for each republic in the Soviet Union your editorial (SO7) informs us that Yeltsin and his supporters are 'at best supporters of Western-style parliamentary democracy.
What unfortunately is not made clear is that a constituent assembly is, in all essentials, nothing other than a Wester style parliamentary democracy.
Despite this socialists must be support a constituent assembly, but mustbe clear that only a government based on soviets can really achieve the democratic aspirations of the exploited and oppressed in the republics.
Soviets are organisations of the Page 10 Sept. 28, 1991 No. 8 exploited and oppressed structured across local, town and national level that emerge in openly revolutionary periods. They operate not on 'üniversal franchise' but with positive discrimination for the exploited and oppressed and therefore rightly exclude representation of bourgeois elements and bureaucrats.
Soviets represent a qualitatively more participative and democratic form of government than any form of parliamentary 'democracy. Despite illusions held by some socialists, a parliamentary form of government, by excluding the mass of people from any effective participation, essentially only represent the interests of a limited group of rulers.
In the case of the soviet republics it is, for instance, possible that 'national' sections of the bureaucracy that have previousiy appropriated all power can form a bloc of its own internal warring factions (together with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois interest groups) that have sufficient cohesion to ensure that a constituent assembly continues the exclusion of the exploited and oppressed.
It would be wrong today to counterpose soviets to a constituent assembly precisely because the mass of workers has to go through its own experience of finding out the limitations of parliamentary 'democracy' for the superiority soviet democracy to become clear.
However, at the same time as supporting the demand for a constituent assembly it is essential to champion every expression of workers self organisation; factory committees, price committees, independent trade unions, formation of
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