******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
Maduro is the "counter-revolution." Today's "choice is between several imperialisms — the U.S. and Guaidó, Russian and China with Maduro." What shit!! But thanks for reminding us, Lou, what an ignoramus Gonzalez is. -----Original Message----- From: Marxism [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Louis Proyect via Marxism Sent: Friday, February 22, 2019 7:33 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Marxism] What Happened to the Struggle for Socialism in Latin America? ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. ***************************************************************** 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." _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/rfidler%40ncf.ca _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
