By Chris Gilbert
Today, in the face of the almost decade-long Thermidor in Venezuela, I
think we should be asking the same question: Where is socialism?
Certainly, it has little presence in the government’s main plans and
programs, which represent at best a grim realism and the spirit of
pragmatism. Rather socialism in Venezuela is to be found in those points
of rebellion against the existing capitalist order: the few and always
embattled communes, the campesinos who continue to seize and occupy
land, the Pobladores movement that fosters self-organized housing
projects, trying to reconceive and reconfigure urban life beyond the
logic of capital.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/07/02/where-is-socialism-in-venezuela-lessons-from-the-cultural-revolution/
I dealt with Gilbert's hope for a socialist Venezuela in a CounterPunch
article 4 years ago:
Whatever mistakes were made in Venezuela, the adroit initiatives taken
by the country’s left, especially Causa R, in becoming an important wing
of the Chavista movement are much more worthy of study than any
Trotskyist tract.
Instead the revolutions have come to weak, peripheral nations such as
Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua and even to Venezuela in an embryonic form. In
the case of Venezuela, there is a strong temptation for someone like
Chris Gilbert to call for a “forceful rupture” but such a rupture would
mark Venezuela as a threat to the global capitalist order and worthy of
boycotts, CIA subversion much greater than anything the country is
facing today, as well as counter-revolutionary armies that would have an
all-too-willing host in Colombia.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/26/92966/
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