On 11/3/06, Leigh Meyers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> I interviewed Tariq Ali the other week for my radio show, and finally
> got to broadcast it last night; it'll be up on my web archive today.
> Tariq speaks with Chavez fairly often, and says that Chavez regularly
> says that we are not living in a revolutionary epoch, and all we can
> accomplish now is a left social democratic set of reforms. "We cannot
> leap" beyond history, he says - and Castro reportedly agrees. This is
> what Chavez means when he talks about 21st century socialism.
Hugo Chavez, Lula et al, have no reason to 'leap beyond history' to
revolution, because the 'revolution' has already happened, is happening,
and when you are in the middle of the whirlwind, the air is quite still,
and refreshing.
All Chavez is saying is that the Venezuelans are not jumping to
building a communist society overnight, as some Western leftists want
him to do. That is obvious from the name that the Venezuelans gave to
their revolution: the Bolivarian Revolution, named after Simon
Bolivar, the republican hero of the Latin American struggle for
independence, not a socialist revolutionary. What is the project that
Bolivar left unfinished? The integration of Latin America. One of
the significances of the Bolivarian Revolution is its attempt to
integrate Latin America and make it republican and democratic.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
