A terribly sad situation. On this valid point of oil dependency (even if
Michael exaggerates in claiming 'no investment in the people' etc):
On 2024/07/27 21:25, Michael Roberts wrote:
"Venezuela was not able either before or after Chavez to change this
one-trick pony economy. This was not the case to some extent in other
energy-rich economies like Mexico and Indonesia. Their non-oil export
sectors grew somewhat to compensate for any decline of oil export
revenues, even if those sectors were dominated by multi-nationals from
the US and Japan. Venezuela’s growth rate of non-oil exports is just
one-sixth that of Mexico and one-fourth that of Indonesia.
Venezuela’s participation in non-energy-intensive sectors has not
increased since the early 1990s."... Right-wing pro-capitalist
economists tell us that Venezuela shows that ‘socialism’ does not
work. But the lesson of the history of Venezuela in the 21^st century
is not the failure of ‘socialism’, it is the failure to end the
control of capital in a weak (an increasingly isolated) capitalist
country with apparently only one asset, oil. There was no investment
in the people, their skills, no development of new industries and the
raising of technology – that was left to the capitalist sector. And
there was no involvement of the people through independent
organisations from below to check the government’s corruption and
direct its policies against US sanctions and the disruption of
Venezuela’s elite. As there was no move to socialist investment in the
economy, Venezuelan capitalism was tied only to the profitability of
the energy sector, which was in a death spiral after the collapse of
oil prices and US sanctions.
Michael could have added the massive damage to global climate stability
which comes from Chavez-Maduro's helter-skelter extraction and
combustion (especially Venezuela's dirtier grades of heavy oil).
Over the past couple of decades, the most consistent eco-socialist
articulation of this critique has come from Edgardo Lander, e.g.
http://aidc.org.za/download/lander-venezuela-english.pdf
Marta Harnecker and Michael Lebowitz had encouraged the South African
poet Dennis Brutus (who would have been 100 this year) and me to offer
comradely critiques of fossil addiction - which we fight daily here - in
our several trips to Caracas, e.g. when meeting Chavez in October 2008.
The more we explored the eco-socialist terrain in Latin America, the
more we felt the impact of these tragic contradictions (in
petro-socialist Venezuela, petro-Keynesian Ecuador and petro-indigenous
Bolivia):
https://links.org.au/leaving-oil-soil-durbans-coast-ecuadors-amazon and
http://www.ejolt.org/2013/08/yasuni-itt-is-dead-blame-president-correa/
It seems that the Pink Tide keeps floating along without much
consciousness of the climate catastrophe (notwithstanding enormous flood
destruction in Porto Alegre), if Lula's recent celebrations are any
guide:
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230825-ecuador-banned-amazon-oil-brazil-s-lula-wants-to-drill
and
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazils-plans-drill-oil-amazon-hit-stiff-indigenous-resistance-2024-04-18/
and
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2024/05/23/submerged-by-flooding-porto-alegre-realizes-it-was-unprepared-everything-has-to-be-rebuilt_6672363_114.html
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