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Mike Gonzalez interview:
"Chávez was anti-capitalist in his discourse, but never had an
anti-capitalist strategy. Expropriations were purchases and often in
reaction to the disinvestment or flight of a specific capitalist."
https://truthout.org/articles/what-happened-to-latin-americas-socialism/
As if a strategy could have guaranteed success. Gonzalez, like his
ideological partner Sam Farber, never consider the question of the
relationship of class forces. If Venezuela had carried out the
wide-scale nationalizations of the Cuban revolution, it would have faced
sanctions, subversion and even military intervention that make the last
5 years look small-scale by comparison. Cuba was able to survive because
it had the backing of the USSR.
The simple truth is that Venezuela, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and any other
peripheral society cannot survive on their own in a world where
capitalist property relations prevail
The only way a "socialist strategy" might have worked in Latin America
was if if it had been continent-wide in the same way Simon Bolivar had
led. That would have required a different kind of leadership in Brazil
than the Workers Party that was spineless.
It is easy for people like Gonzalez, Farber, et al to review what
happened in Venezuela or Cuba like they were reviewing a movie. Let them
go out and make their own. It ain't easy. I say that as someone who was
deeply involved with Nicaraguan solidarity in the 80s and saw a country
incapable of resolving contradictions of the kind that Marx referred to
in the 18th Brumaire:
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under
circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The
tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains
of the living."
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