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From: Louis Proyect wrote
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/>
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."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yes. And "circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the
past" includes the supersession as the primary aggregate unit of
analysis of the nation-state and corresponding relationships and moving
on to the transnational corporate structure and its emerging
relationships as that primary unit of analysis, and its implications for
class struggle and the working class as the agent of change. That shift
in analysis is nascent right now, but in process at best. Without it, we
get not a farthing further, with exceptions, two of which I am reading
and recommend, e.g., "Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the
World Economy" 7th edition by Peter Dicken (a non-Marxist geographer)
and "Into the Tempest:Essays on the New Global Capitalism"by William I.
Robinson <https://www.haymarketbooks.org/authors/835-william-i-robinson>
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1229-into-the-tempest (Marxist).
Robinson's book is 50% off at Haymarket for the next 7 days, with an
e-book included.
Maybe people here would look at and at least consider critically what
these writers are getting at, and what it means in the context of what
Lou writes here. Many otherwise knowledgeable people whom I respect in
many ways are walking right by, generally misinterpreting, ignoring or
otherwise dismissing what's on offer here.
Dicken has some rich analysis and description but only gets so far in
developing it. Unlike Robinson as would be expected in the case of a
non-Marxist, he misses the dialectical analysis necessary to fully
engage what he's getting at. He has a new edition of his book due soon.
I can only hope that he has the objectivity to carefully and objectively
consider the content of Robinson's book and that he will have taken it
into account. The two need to get on the same page; I think Robinson is
there.
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