Image depicts Bolivian trade unionists on strike in La Paz, Bolivia.
Long preamble/summary below of recent news events.
summary
The Iran ceasefire is grinding on. After a brief period over the weekend of heightened activity where it seemed that US strikes might be resuming, Trump announced a “Memorandum of Understanding” with Iran, which initially appeared to be an agreement along Iran’s demands.
For those not following along with the diplomatic minutia, Iran’s position for several weeks has been that the nuclear issue must be discussed separately - because, well, last time they started discussing the nuclear issue with the US, they got fucking bombed - and so have proposed a two-stage negotiation where the war is first officially ended with certain preconditions (e.g. the US has to end sanctions and unfreeze assets and presumably withdraw at least some military assets), and then the second stage will begin in which the nuclear issue is handled.
The reason why a deal has still not been signed after all this time is because the US disagrees with doing it this way, and wants the nuclear issue to be handled right away (and obviously also objects with things like Iran retaining control of the Strait). Therefore, Trump’s announcement appeared to be him finally accepting reality, but it quickly became apparent that this was just another market manipulation. I’m definitely in the camp among several other analysts that believes another round of war is going to happen barring some very sudden circumstances (e.g. Trump being forced out of power one way or another, or Iran obtaining a nuke) because the US still seems agreement-incapable. And in Lebanon, consternation for the Zionists against Hezbollah’s attacks continues as the FPV drone threat only continues to increase despite them desperately seeking countermeasures.
As I’ve been perhaps too focussed on Iran lately, here’s a brief roundup of big news events from the last month or so.
-
Orban losing power: Pretty cool, though his replacement being Neoliberal #2980329891 means that big changes seem unlikely.
-
Strikes in Bolivia against that dipshit Paz: Very nice to see, as it appears that Bolivia has among the best widespread on-the-ground popular support for worker-centric policies and politicians in Latin America that makes it so they can genuinely pressure power (already, the Labor Minister has resigned).
-
Situation in the Sahel: “Mysterious” third parties sponsored a big offensive against the AES which they largely repelled with help from Russia. The situation there is still a little tenuous as I understand it with a greater focus by anti-government forces on blockades of cities to cause internal revolts. This tactic is currently broadly failing as armed convoys are getting fuel and food into the cities, but figures like Traore are aware that more needs to be done.
-
Ukraine War: Aside from the usual grinding advance by Russia on the front, there have been back-and-forth missile and drone strikes as Ukraine hit some targets in the outskirts of Moscow with drones and then Russia fired a shitload of missiles, including the iconic Oreshnik, directly at Kiev, as Simplicius and others have covered in greater detail.
I could go on and on with the recent aggressions against Cuba, Modi’s recent victories in India and the AI/chip tech war between China and the US but this preamble has to end at some point due to the character limit.
Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists’ destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Lots of op-eds coming out of Orinoco Tribune, significant Bolivarian news outlet, on the state of Chavismo in the wake of Alex Saab’s illegal extradition to the US. There’s a wide variety of takes here, ranging from sympathetic and supportive to what is best described as the @InexplicableLunchFiend@hexbear.net revolutionary defeat position. I’m going to post a bunch - the headlines alone say a lot, but they’re all worth reading and all raise valid points to support their analysis. Clearly, even among supporters of Rodriguez, confidence is shaken. Some of them are obviously responding to each other.
Delcy Has Overthrown Chavismo
Chavismo Has Not Been Overthrown; It Is Wounded
The Silence Has Been Broken in Venezuela
The Return of the Repentant Dog: How the Purist Left Judges Venezuela From Afar
On ‘Betrayals’ and January 3: A Non-Linear Reading
Alex Saab and the Fragility of the Solidarity Movement
Venezuela and the Perils of Ceding Sovereignty
Betrayal in Venezuela
The Post-January 3 Minefield in Venezuela
I strongly encourage all comrades to read this collection of pieces with an open and dialectical mind to develop the best understanding of the state of the Bolivarian Revolution, the PSUV, and Venezuelan sovereignty.
If anything Venezuela as once one of the best examples of socialism through the ballot (only achievable via the communes and militant working class), kinda failing and stumbling right now, only further hammers down the point that electoralism and bourgeois legalism will eventually disrupt and bring down even the most entrenched and materialist workers party.
absolutely. In the future, we will all agree that the greatest victory of the Venezuelan revolutionary electoralists was that they developed the commune system to the point that it could challenge and overthrow the state that created them.
Bolivia and Ecuador also fall on this spectrum; though the dialectic is obviously still in motion, the pink tide has basically proven why you need to go Red
I would argue that the Pink Tide laid the groundwork for a greater wave of socialist victories that is about to begin, as we see in Bolivia. The material and organizational gains of the Venezuelan, Bolivian, and Ecuadorian projects substantially developed the capacity of the people to fight for greater sovereignty and socialism. Colombia is now undergoing that process and will hopefully be able to synthesize the lessons of its neighbors to avoid a reactionary backslide.
Even the French Revolution didn’t start out with people wanting to cut off the head of the King.
Yes, it’s a necessary step, but necessary to prove its insufficiency. Correa can be popular and Evo can make massive gains, but at the end of the day, the empire will find an opening
Maybe even viewing it as a step or laying the groundwork is too simplifying and undialectical. It is more like a box drawn arbitrarily around one part of a process that has no clearly defined beginning or end in the long Latin American struggle towards sovereignty and independence from the demonic Amerikkkan empire. Left wing electoral victories never stopped; mass popular mobilizations were never squashed; right wing retrenchment in elections and through corporate consolidation have been ongoing throughout. The revolutionary process is long and complicated and the Pink Tide was just a way to contain and in some ways downplay the genuine victories of the Latin American peoples. Those presidents may have been displaced, but the people never were. All the people of the Andeans have become substantially more capable at asserting their power through a combination of electoral and non-electoral means, and the latter are coming more into focus at this exact moment. A few revolutionary victories will lead to a bigger wave of moderate leftist electoral victories, some portion of which will fall, and a decade from now we’ll be talking about how the Pink Tide was impressive for securing socialist governments across half the continent and building up ALBA into a force that successfully repelled the US from Cuba, but it simply laid the groundwork for the unification of South American states about to begin circa 2036.
It’s as if people don’t understand that the masses of millions of people in the countries they are talking about are individual people who are the agents of their social movements.
“When all these Indigenous people got together and took over their government for the first time since colonization and ran their country for decades while making massive gains despite being under siege from all sides, it was a failure actually, it’s only use was to show how ineffective their methods were.”
Was the horse drawn carriage just an example of failure that needed to exist to prove how much better a train is? Or do things exist within a historical and cultural context, changing over time until they become something else? I don’t see a lot of horse drawn carriages these days and I see more cars than trains… I’m beginning to think the conditions we exist in are having some sort of influence on the available choices people can make, despite my unlimited imagination assuring me that the things I think should be happening are correct.
Did I ever say it was “just” that and that the “only” use of these governments was as an example of failure? I was clearly painting with too broad a brush but this doesn’t seem like an accurate representation of my position either: that 21st century socialism, while an important result of struggle, has vulnerabilities that the left movements must address to remain in power
to be extra dialectical, @Jabril@hexbear.net were both overreacting and underreacting to your comment
Adding the extra context like you are here makes it easier to take seriously but without it, to me, feels very silly to a degree that feels almost outrageous at this point.
I just can’t imagine thinking and saying the things people do about what is effectively millions of people actively building socialism. Something almost no one here is doing or has even been marginally a part of.
Many comments are literally conspiracy theories and speculation about something the commenters almost always have hardly a surface level of information about. I think there are ways to talk about that kind of stuff with sensitivity and humility but people can be very sure their conspiracy is correct despite no real evidence and somehow think that is a scientific approach.
Capitalism laid the groundwork for socialism. That doesn’t mean that we go around making pro-capitalism arguments and defending the forces of capitalism do we?
it’s not that, it’s that you have to fucking socialize means of production, you don’t have to reinvent management from first principles each time and listen to institutionalists, you have to make support for porky structural impossibility. and your only opposition party should be to your left and/or anarchists
and then you look at your imports and start eliminating hard dependencies, food most of all, energy imports if you have them, and then go up maslow pyramid according to the size of your economy
obviously small countries can’t produce phones or anything complicated, they can however eliminate windows licenses payments in government
i do find it very questionable, for example, that cuba (god bless them) don’t make their own paracetamol or simpler antibiotics, those are not hard things to make
Do you know enough about pharmaceutical manufacturing chain to assert that?
I recall hearing a long long time ago that Brazil was manufacturing its own drugs in house when the price was very inflated by patent-holders. Dont know what goes into making any given drug easy or difficult to make.
deleted by creator
Do you think there could be factors you are not aware of that make the decisions that you imagine you would make inaccessible for the people who are actually forced to make them in reality ?
That seems unlikely, I read the news mega
If they had just maxed their tech tree and followed the build meta they would have made it to diamond league
Just get modern pharma industrial process get via institutional spread!!!
Couldn’t have put it better myself, glad other people are seeing the obvious. Pro-Delcy arguments boil down to “we’re just a smol country that cannot ever do anything against the US, we have no choice but to prostrate ourselves and hand over everything” which just ignores the decades of struggles and victories the Venezuelan people endured and earned, which were all handed over in exchange for nothing. Then they have the gall to call us defeatists for saying no, you should not do that. You should continue to struggle, or at the very least admit to yourself you’ve given up to revanchism and are no longer an ongoing socialist project.
The thing is that “you should continue to struggle” is a meaningless prescription and you haven’t been able to describe what Venezuelan leadership should have done in response to having 100% of oil exports by sea being intercepted and having the president kidnapped.
If you were Delcy, the elected person who constitutionally is now the president, what would you have done differently? If you were PSUV leadership or a commune leader, what would you have done differently?
Without any clear plan that you can lay out with concrete tactics towards strategic goals, “if they were really about it they would have just struggled,” is literally saying nothing.
You need to be able to suggest even any action that manifests that struggle and explain how it could lead to some other outcome or else it’s 100% vibes, tea leaf reading, superstition. If you could explain how workers in Venezuela doing a strike in Venezuela would have stopped their entire oil exports being blockaded by the US, or whatever else you think the struggle they should have done would have been, it would be beginning of actually trying to have a take grounded in reality. Venezuela has no Hormuz, no Shahed manufacturing, no underground missile cities or even much anti-air. What should they have done?
I would have defied the American demand to hand over the oil to a Qatari controlled fund and break solidarity with Cuba, and probably been killed. I do not say this lightly, but this is what revolutionary leaders must do and must risk. Look at Iran, how they do not give in with a single decapitation but continue on in struggle. Then I expect others after me do the same, as the situation escalates into a war against the decaying dying empire further spreading it thin. Such a war would be dirty, asymmetrical, costly- but it could never cost more than the sovereignty and freedom of the people and their right to their own land and resources.
The USSR went into a total war that wiped out millions of its citizens to protect the socialist project from the fascists and invaders. Vietnam struggled for decades against multiple colonizers. It’s never easy to have a socialist project and be free from imperialists but what none of them did was surrender their entire nations resources without a fight after a single decapitation strike.
Ok so it keeps happening, the country gets bombed, thousands of dead civilians, infrastructure destroyed which won’t be able to be rebuilt, and still there aren’t any weapons on hand to strike the US so…the plan is just to die and have Venezuelans die and the economy be fully destroyed? How does it escalate to a war without any significant air force or navy or military generally? Venezuela can’t invade by land, where is the war fought?
Those are examples of a nation fighting other nations next to it and a nation expelling a colonizing force from a physical occupation of their land. Venezuela isn’t in either situation, so how does this concept apply?
How did Afghanistan win? How did Iraq win? The USA doesn’t win wars, it inflicts pain and then leaves. The pain inflicted will never exceed total vassalage to the pedophile epstein empire and cutting off solidarity to your cuban brothers and sisters. It will never exceed giving up all the oil to pedophile capitalist Trump and Israel. The victory handed to Trump was greater than anything accomplished in Iraq or Afghanistan in 20 years, in a single strike! It was handed on a silver platter. The wealth and future of an entire nation signed over to the most evil people on the planet.
Afghanistan didn’t win, it was plundered and sent into the dark ages. Iraq was plundered and is still under US influence to this day, although that is waning because it is on the opposite side of the planet from the US and closer to stronger poles.
unlike Venezuela which can be bombed endlessly with a direct supply line from a pretty short distance. Just still unclear how getting more dead Venezuelans and destroyed infrastructure leads to a Venezuela that is capable of fighting a hot war with the US on US soil. Since they aren’t on Venezuelan soil to be expelled like your Vietnam example, it seems like they would have to literally find a way to invade the US or get thousands of long range drones and missiles to do what you are suggesting which means that it was never an option and is literally a fantasy
Everyone within bombing range surrender. Communism is hopeless. That’s the end of your logic. Holy shit, you call me the defeatist. Those Bolivians might get bombed you know, they better surrender to Paz!
There are all kinds of ways to fight war. There are all kinds of ways to struggle. I can’t say legally all of them out loud but there’s a lot of options you are not considering and are downplaying as useless. Venezuela has the knowledge, resources and manpower to mass produce drones. Any medium sized nation does. There is all kinds of asymmetrical warfare tricks to inflict economic and psychological pain on the imperialists and cling to the gains of their revolution instead of handing them over, force very high costs and become a porcupine.
This is a baseless suggestion to make. If you think this is the logic behind what I said it really proves that you aren’t even trying to understand the positions of the people you engage with here, which has been said over and over at this point. Why can’t you engage with what people say instead of just doing the vibes wish casting bit? I think its obvious why but I feel like its something that needs to be asked out loud to help other people catch up.
Look at a map look at where Bolivia is versus Venezuela. Look at where US military assets are. If you think that every situation is always the same thing, as you imply by constantly harkening back to other things that have happened in other places and suggesting this is evidence to support your ideas, it is clear where the holes are. When your entire perspective is “there are things that could be done thst I can’t say, and they didn’t do them so they must have surrendered which proves chavismo is defeated,” it really seems that you aren’t going to say anything of substance at all. Yes, everyone should have done something different to be better and win more. They could have done that, whatever it is, but didn’t, because they aren’t communist enough, like me.
Not all (most?) of them are Chavistas though. I do find it very telling that for all the talk about betrayal, the Chavistas haven’t risen up to overthrow Rodriquez. Unarmed Bolivians have shut down the country and are on the cusp of overthrowing the neoliberal regime while armed Venezuelans, armed by Maduro no less, can’t even muster an angry protest against Rodriquez? Trump has faced, what, his 5th assassination attempt, but not one Chavista has made a serious attempt to put a bullet into her head for her betrayal?
The only protests I’ve seen so far that are explicitly anti-Rodriquez are those led by the PCV, but the PCV have split from Chavismo since Maduro. I would say that most members either never truly supported Chavismo but saw it as a compromise or think it was Maduro who betrayed Chavismo. I don’t think there’s a lot who would specifically point to Rodriquez as when the PSUV jumped the shark.
Nobody in the CCCP rebelled against Kruschev, Gorbachev or Yeltsin (until the last moment) either for being right-revisionists and Liberals. They all sat there for decades, quietly and meekly following the party, as unprincipled revisionists destroyed the USSR, and destroyed it was.
There were protests after Khrushchev gave his secret speech and started taking down statues of Stalin. Liberals like highlighting the one in Georgia to push some dumb ethnonationalist talking point about how the Georgians only did that because they liked Stalin for being Georgian. They obviously liked to ignore the other protests because it completely goes against their anticommunist “Stalin was an ebil dictator” talking point. Khrushchev himself got pushed out of power by people within the CPSU who thought he dropped the ball on Cuba. People didn’t just sit there and take it while Khrushchev shat the bed. By the time of Gorbachev, the rot in Soviet society was too great with an entrenched apparatchik class and an intellectual class who wished they were Westerners instead. There’s a gradual process where you can see that Soviet society coming off the years of Stalin was vibrant enough to reflexively fend off against Khrushchev while Soviet society coming off the years of Brezhnev no longer had that spark.
If we’re using the same analogy, then you’re essentially following the party line of the PCV who thought Maduro sucked, so if anything, it would be Maduro who betrayed Chavismo, not Rodriquez. Rodriquez would just be continuing what Maduro started. Just like how there can’t be Gorbachev without Khrushchev, there can’t be Rodriquez without Maduro.
that’s where we are at with Venezuelan leadership too, is the point. You can’t simultaneously say “Socialist nations need our uncritical support and they have more info than us so we need to shut up and do what they say” and also say “the rot set in so deep that nothing could be done”. These are antithetical statements. The rot was so deep because nobody did anything about it! Nobody adequately pressured the state and criticized it! They let it rot in meek subservience!
So let’s imagine it’s the 80s and I’m criticizing Gorbachev for being a revisionist. Your argument boils down to essentially “well Kruschev was also a revisionist, but all of the sudden now you’re mad!”. It doesn’t actually address the rot, it’s word games and excuses.
I don’t agree with this at all. A reasonable analysis should be able to pinpoint to Khrushchev instead of waiting until Gorbachev. Like, to continue using the analogy, even Brezhnev wasn’t that great either. The qualitative shifts are Stalin to Khrushchev and Gorbachev to Yeltsin. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev are largely cut from the same cloth. It’s fine to start out with critiques of Gorbachev as a concerned Soviet citizen living during the 80s wondering what’s going on, but more in-depth research and study should lead to an a-ha moment where one recognizes Gorbachev as representing a rot that started with Khrushchev.
I don’t really get what your distinction or point is. We are both seemingly in agreement that Venezuela is in a similar state of rot and falling apart and revisionism as late era-USSR was, but quibbling over who to place blame on? It’s apparently OK for a soviet citizen to criticize Gorbachev’s revisionism, but Marxists outside of the USSR have to keep their mouth shut? That shit is stupid and anti-scientific positionalist nonsense, and we all know it.
I don’t care about the blame game or pointing fingers, I care about accepting the current state of reality and doing something about it instead of all lining up to defend Gorbachev 2.0 on a communist forum where the users here should know better. It really proves to me that there is a huge chunk of “communists” who know very little about Marxist theory and don’t know how to recognize or criticize revisionism, and will defend it when it comes to ruin any project we ever happen to succeed with (if we ever do).
My point is that you’re not being dialectical. You speak of “taking action,” but if you don’t know when to actually take action, then it’s not meaningful advice. If you only took action towards something when it’s literally happening right in front of your face, you’re going to constantly fail because you won’t be able to nip disasters at the bud nor seize opportunities. Even the metaphor of “rot” is subject to this: you don’t need to sniff at milk that’s left out in the sun before throwing it away. Milk being left out in the sun is sufficient enough to throw it away. I don’t need to put milk left out in the sun back in the fridge, wait for the few hours when it reeks and stinks up the fridge, go, “yep, this milk is spoiled,” and dump the milk down the drain when I could’ve just dumped it much earlier.
When Mao said that a single spark can start a prairie fire, he meant it within the context of revolutionary praxis, but it can easily apply to revisionism or balkanization or the lack of maintenance that almost caused a tank of toxic chemicals to explode or the literal observation of a literal spark starting a literal fire.
As far as personnel and cadre are considered, I do not see any qualitative shift from Maduro to Rodriquez. Going from Maduro to Rodriquez is going from large prairie fire to slightly larger prairie fire. She didn’t liquidate Maduristas and staffed the upper echelon of the party with Rodriquez loyalists after seizing power through a coup. I don’t think there was a single person who got purged. This strongly suggests to me that Maduro would’ve eventually capitulated too even if the kidnapping failed. Or more accurately, the party would’ve eventually capitulated too even if Maduro was still around because Maduro is still an individual in the end. He is no more a king than Rodriquez is a queen.
The US was bombing random Venezuelans with no real response from Venezuela, the rest of Latin America, Russia, China, or Iran. They only had Cuba for help. In a way, saying that Rodriquez betrayed Venezuela is cope that Maduro wouldn’t have done the same or eventually capitulated through similarly humiliating terms. I was honestly surprised that Maduro would willingly turn himself in instead of going down fighting taking a bunch of US goons with him. Sometimes countries get outmaneuvered and have to eat the shit sandwich.
Of course strict adherence to this discrepancy is undialectical.
However, I’d still advise western marxists to be more cautious in their approach and condemnation. We live in a complete and total propaganda sphere, and that does not disinclude propaganda aimed at influencing what we think about these events and decisions.
What is there to be gained from being vocal on our souring on Delcy Rodriguez? What useful advice are we capable of giving Chavistas? Would genuinely solid advice even be accepted by the Chavistas or dismissed out of hand as most western marxist cries of revisionism?
This is trivially the case.
Internet posters are not a vanguard party, nor are most people willing to be well-read enough to be capable of adapting theory to the current material conditions of Venezuela.
Most internet Marxists are trying to scrape together a coherent world view, but operating mostly on tweets, headlines, and shitposts…same as everyone else. The average hamsic display name profile is simply operating under the same “go team!” politics, but for team socialism.
Vanguardism and demcent would not be necessary if the average person was chewing through theory and actively, coherently synthesizing it with current events.
The most useful thing any of us can reasonably do is provide support to the people of Venezuela and actively try to frustrate efforts in our own countries to fuck with Venezuela.
This is not an “average person” forum. It’s a communist one ostensibly. The people here should be educated on revisionism and breaking international solidarity. I’m not chastising chavistas, i’m chastising other western marxists who are objectively wrong. Chavistas aren’t reading this, my posts aren’t for them. They are for the royal you, the reader, and the people here who bend over backwards to obfuscate revisionism. Those who are extremely hostile to me when I make any type of pessimistic analysis, who attempt to drive out any critical kind of thought from a marxist forum based on fallacious and unscientific appeals to authority instead of the principles of socialism and materialist analysis.
Our role here is not to be cheerleaders, and just attacking me by calling me a “western ultra” over and over isn’t doing it for me. Provide materialist arguments about the actual quantifiable state of things and I will engage in good faith. I support Venezuela, I support the workers of Venezuela, and in public I of course have solidarity against any imperialist incursion. That very fact is why I must call out the pro-imperialist relationship of wealth transfer that is occurring, and will not remain silent as the people of Venezuela are being robbed blind. Now the people of Venezuela don’t only have to struggle against the military and economy of the USA to gain control of their resources, they must also overcome their own government. That is a huge fucking problem and contradiction that is not being addressed, the “socialist” government of Venezuela is operating in the de facto position of a comprador puppet state, facilitating the ongoing transfers. This action was turning guns around, facing them towards the workers with the US at their back instead of vice versa. That is the underlying power dynamic with respects to the oil, which is the plurality of the entire economy. It is claimed this is temporary, I see no evidence of this - all of the exploitative relationships are only building and deepening. This isn’t a one-time tribute demand, it’s a permanent vassalage demand.
The most dramatic - “Delcy Has Overthrown Chavismo” - is from a Canadian, but he’s not exactly a random Venezuela hater. His opinion clearly changed post-1/3; in the immediate aftermath his writing was defending the continuity of Bolivarian power with Rodriguez inheriting office according to constitutional procedure and being a trustworthy figure. The response piece - “Chavismo has not been overthrown; it is wounded” is by the EOC of Anticonquista, who claim to be a diasporic anti-imperialist organizaton, so I don’t think on-the-ground Chavistas. It’s worth looking at who each of the writers are, because I think the trend you’re noting is generally true - criticism is harsher from the outside.
I appreciate the “dynamism of historical processes” perspective of the fifth article (On ‘Betrayals’).
History is not “ingredients in, results out,” it’s a process in time, with twists and turns. If you want to explain a chess game, you look at the moves, you don’t say “Player A won because they are the kind of person who wins.” Sure, you can talk about how Player A makes their decisions – maybe they have a particularly effective “doctrine” or “style” that helps them win. But that only goes so far to explain the course of any particular game. So I like the “how exactly did we get here” angle of the author of that article.
(I’m not a chess nerd I just think it’s a good analogy)