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Spending a lot of time reading Marxist critiques of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela focused on the problems created by a development model centered on the exploitation of ground rent (i.e., oil). Ironically, they tend to reference a guy named Juan Inigo who was a rather colorful character in the early days of the Marxism list that preceded Marxmail. Inigo was notorious for writing very long messages that contained stilted attempts at sounding like they were written by Marx. This is typical:
"At first, Marx does not present any reason for starting the development of the historical specificity of capitalist society from commodities, other than the fact that he places them there, not even as a subject, but as a mere object. But, as soon as the analysis shows that commodities are the unity of use-value and value, the necessity inherent in the latter starts to be followed in its development. Commodities themselves come into the exposition as they develop their specificity as the materialized general social relation among private independent producers, their value-form; that is, the process in which society allocates its total labor-power among the different concrete modalities of labor by representing the socially necessary abstract labor embodied in the products of the concrete labors carried out by the independent private producers, as the capacity of these products for relating among themselves in exchange. In commodity production, material production produces, at the same time, the general social relation."
I will be writing something for Counterpunch tomorrow about a lot of this but will for now make the point that expecting Venezuela to depart from this mode of development is a lot easier said than done. Of course it is abc, when you are explaining this to fellow professors in a JSTOR journal.
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