Here Guido, is one of the progressive geeks you called out to help you.
The problem is they first-world progressive geeks have WAY too much riding on communism being a success. They will refuse to believe any ill can come from authoritative rule, until you are all dead and your country burning. And then will come up with excuses why your example was “not really communism”. Your life and the lives of your countrymen mean nothing to them, as they would put to question some progressive ideals.
Good luck, but you will find no help from progressive members of the U.S. who are busy making sure no reports from Venezuela appear on the news.
The ironic part is they will end up supporting policies that will never even dare (or even imagine) to back in their respective countries: I will suppose these eager madurista supporters abroad don’t know about the chavista version of SOPA and CISPA, the Venezuelan CESSPA (Centro Estratégico de Seguridad y Protección de la Patria) a government branch that will have ample faculties to spy on citizens, and censorship of information deemed as “vital”.
Oh yeah, I know:
Repression on Left-wing governments like the chavistas: Gooooooooood.
Repression on Right-wing or center governments: Baaaaaaaad.
The “dissent” in Venezuela, such as it is, has been fomenting violence against innocent people and the elected government since Maduro’s election. The right wing, which controls much of the commerce, and which has longstanding assistance from the CIA, has no qualms about killing people to attain its goals.
You can tell a lot about people from who their friends are. The right wing opposition is deeply entwined with the CIA and School of the Americas type fascist groups.
Maduro isn’t perfect by any means, but to pretend that the US govt is not actively helping to destabilize Venezuela both economically and politically, is to deny reality. The US history of overthrow of central and south American popularly elected socialist governments is long and bloody.
Any story that doesn’t discuss these factors and the Venezuelan right’s bloody history is clearly propaganda and is not to be trusted.
It seems like there are exactly zero professional media outlets that can produce an article that acknowledges that the current Venezuelan government has done more to improve the lives of their poor over the last 15 years than any other government on earth while simultaneously acknowledging the fact that there are food shortages and that there is brutal inflation.
It is clear to me that the polarization of english-speaking Venezuelans is absolute. Moreover, I would never, ever, trust the comments on a news and entertainment blog to tell me about what was really happening in my own country, regardless (or perhaps especially) if those comments were made by Americans themselves…
It’s sad to see such a gross lack of trustworthy on the ground reporting. I’d really like to know what percentage of the protesters are poor leftists that want to see competition from the left vs. those who want a return of right-wing government, I want to know how severe the food shortages actually are and to what extent they are caused by government mismanagement versus the capital flight of the aggrieved oligarchy, etc… but it seems there is no institution capable of providing this kind of objective critical analysis.
There really is no difference. Massive capital flight is government mismanagement. If conditions are so hostile to running a business that all the businesses leave or go under, that is mismanagement. There is a difference between trying to get a handle on your oligarchs and stamping out all business activity. Would you want to open up a business in Venezuela?
I think what kills me is that all the economic stuff that Chavez tried had been done before a hundred times with perfectly predictable results. An executive branch that rolls all the power of the government into itself without checks or balances, nationalizes the media and rolls it into the party, and then rapidly implements a bunch of Soviet era relics of economic policy has been tried so many fucking times and the results are always the same. You get a temporary boost in the living of the poor as you cannibalize your infrastructure and accumulated wealth, and then it turns to shit. You never rise out of poverty. At best, you find some tolerable equilibrium of acceptable poverty where no one is starving, but you can’t expect much more than that, state and party power is near absolute, and freedom of speech and association are very low.
There are so many other models for an economic rise out of poverty, it blows my mind to see this model tried so many times in defiance of all reason and logic. There are lots of perfectly leftist models besides this one. Why oh why try this stupid thing again?
I can only laugh at the suggestion that the unrest and the shortages are caused by the Venezuelan Oligarchy. For you know? It’s completely true. What the deluded “progressives” are completely wrong about, is the identity of the Venezuelan Oligarchy.
For the Venezuelan Oligarchy is composed, as of now, of officials in the chavista administration, military officers and their “businessmen” associates. They mismanage and steal the dollars coming from oil revenue. They also re-sell them in the black market, and are the prime beneficiaries of exchange controls. Importation of wares important to life has suffered.
No, dears, Venezuela is in no way Socialist. Virtually every one of the socialist projects (some built on confiscated property) failed or are to fail and be abandoned as soon as oil money stops flowing into them. These have run national production into the ground. Excepted, the businesses owned by the oligarchs of chavismo.
Impunity, lack of institutions, spreading of resentment, and mismanagement, guarantee sky high inflation, impoverishment of the population, and crime. World-class murder rates and world-class drug kingpins who might also be government officials and military officers.
And if anybody comes to me about the spending in health care, educational and social spending, I suggest that they go to Venezuela, and get acquainted with a Venezuelan of modest resources. Then ask them about what they would do were they to fall seriously ill, about the social safety net, about their retirement, the state of schools for their children, etc. … I guarantee it to be an enlightening and unexpected experience, alternatively filled with tears and with sad laughter.
Like many other Third-Worldist and nominally Socialist movements typical of newly independent countries in the 1960s and 1970s, chavismo must content itself with having failed at Socialism. With “governing” a impoverished country as kleptocrats, also, as the Mob uses to govern a run-down slum.
So please, bail out on this one, before you look as ridiculous as people who swore by the democratic character of the Mugabe administration.
The ‘not really communism’ attitude came about because Lenin/Stalin/Trotsky made sure to crush any opposing communist ideologies. Read George Orwells Homage to Catalonia for a left wing eyewitness account of the Stalinists doing just that.
And what was Venezuela like before chavismo? A paradise where the poor were educated, given medicine and housing…
The fact is that nations with little institutional integrity find it very hard to dig themselves out of their corruption, whether the current government is “socialist” or “capitalist”. If Lopez or one of his ilk takes over from Maduro what do you think will actually change? I know what will change. The plutocrats, who still have quite a bit of power even after 15 years of “socialism”, will simply reassert their control over the oil, and all the money being stolen by the “socialist” government will then be stolen by the “capitalist” government. Of course they won’t call it stealing or looting. The right wing is always so much more slick in its corruption. They will simply call it dividend distributions or bonus payments.
So please, bail on this one, before you start looking like a right-wing stooge… nope, that ship has sailed.
“There really is no difference. Massive capital flight is government mismanagement.”
So anything that makes business conditions less profitable for rich people is equivalent to government mismanagement? If you’re used to a country run by oligarchs and all of the sudden a government wants to take half of your money and give it to the poor, clearly the most profitable thing to do is move your money out of the country, but is it ethical, do we care about ethics enough to even ask whether or not it is ethical?
“An executive branch that … nationalizes the media and rolls it into the party”
My understanding is that the majority of Venezuelan media continues to be privately owned and opposed to the current administration. Is that not correct?
“There are lots of perfectly leftist models besides this one. Why oh why try this stupid thing again?”
I think because what you want when you have a popular revolution in a country that was previously run by an oligarchy is economic justice, and you’ll never get it if allow the old aristocracy to retain their economic power, so you take it away. The trick is to create the conditions for a new class of economic actors that owe their success to entrepreneurship rather than connections to the old elite. That’s something that no revolution has really been able to accomplish, but is it because the revolutionary governments are always bad managers, or because international trade alliances and financiers punish political and social revolutions that nationalize private wealth, regardless of how ill-gotten it might be?
To synthesize here, if the Venezuela in this moment was faced with a challenge from the left and was able to continue having a massive tax-funded welfare state, nationalized oil, health and education industries, but with a higher level of civil liberties protection and with more sophisticated socialist economic policy (the scandinavian model), then the history of Venezuela beginning at the point of Chavez taking power would represent the most rapid sustained improvement in quality of life that the world has ever seen.
However, it looks like there will be no challenge from the left and that Venezuelans are stuck with either an aging and increasingly isolated revolutionary government or a neoliberal government that promises a return to aristocracy.
As I already said, there is a difference between getting a handle on your oligarchs and crushing all business activity. Again, would you want to open a business in Venezuela? Now that the oligarchs have been cleared out, people who are never good for an economy, is Venezuela a sound place to invest money in building a new business? No. Of course not. Venezuela isn’t Sweden. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You can go after your oligarchs while still making running a small business something desirable.
Venezuela’s capital flight problem isn’t that the oligarchs are fleeing with their toys. The Venezuelan government can deal with that sort of capital flight by pumping more money out of the ground. Venezuela’s problem is the capital flight of boring old middle class folks moving away or being unable or unwilling to invest their savings in a business.
I think it is pretty safe to say that Venezuela’s recent governments have done fuck all to encourage a middle class person with enough money to start a business to go ahead and start one. You can keep pointing to oligarchs, but that isn’t who is getting screwed. Oligarchs are multinationals that can hide their wealth offshore and can eat a loss when a new government rises. They can even just leave if they don’t like things enough. Your poor middle class SOB that is normally the power in a healthy economic engine that starts new businesses are the one’s getting screwed.
It is a moot point if the reason is because the world is mean, because economics are mean, or revolutionary governments are incompetent. When you see an endless list of failure, maybe the thing to do isn’t follow down exactly the same fucking path as the last few dozen failures. Seriously. Chavez followed exactly the same path as all the other failures before him and wow, shocker, Venezuela has followed exactly the same arc. The only reason why Venezuela didn’t implode quicker was because they are sitting on top of a pile of money.
Seriously, there is literally nothing new that the Chavez government tried. He went through the various leftist handbooks, grabbed one that always results in failure, started at page 1, did everything by the numbers, and by the numbers it played out like it always does.
Wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up first. Chavez never even pointed the ship towards anything scandinavian. He blazed down the traditional path of “how to fail with a revolutionary leftist government” without ever looking up.
There is no left in Venezuela outside of the Chavez movement following its boringly predictable “how to fail at left revolution” playbook. When you consume all political power, roll all that power into the executive, and rewire the government to work for the party, sane leftist are the first to be left out in the cold. Right wing groups can rally against the power of the state, but sane leftist are utterly fucked. There is no air left in the room to breath and they die. The best you can hope for in such a situation is that the right wing opposition doesn’t go too far off the deep end and isn’t totally inhuman and horrible when they eventually regain control. Again, this is all boringly predictable. This always happens when a revolutionary leftist government rolls up all the power of the state into the party. They always kill their sane and more rational counterparts who wonder if maybe running headlong down the same failed path is a bad idea.
The point is simple: the Chavez movement is not even a little bit new. There isn’t a drop of new thinking or originality here. Anyone who is shocked when it fails like every single other movement to tread down this path is willfully sticking their head in the sand. It doesn’t matter if it is the fault of the US, world economic powers, or just boringly old gross incompetence, it always happens. You can just skip to the last page where it reads “your government collapses” or “you retrain brutal anti-liberal control in a single party state and maybe people are not starving, congratulations” Stop trying the same god damn thing over and over again and being surprised when the outcome is always the same.
What I find downright insulting about these kind of statements of the loony-conspiracy-type left is that denies any kind of role whatsoever to the people involved: The Venezuelans. Instead of making them the central characters, it reduce them to the mere puppets. Kind of patronizing and condescending, don’t you think?
By the way, define Venezuelan right wing, and please provide evidence, if any, that the commercial sector is assisting the CIA.
This is another of the delightful example of how the hardcore-left-conspiracy-type mind works. Their way of reasoning is:
a) Some members of the Venezuelan opposition have common policies/ideas with the Republicans, ergo, Venezuelan opposition as a whole is a Venezuelan version of the Republicans (Fallacy of composition)
b) And if they are the Venezuelan Republicans, boy oh boy, they must be in cahoots with the CIA. They must be! (Strawman fallacy)
I’m sorry, those sorts of statements only show two things: a) You definitively don’t know the political and social composition of the Venezuelan opposition (via Fallacy of composition, you assume to know it, judging only one part of it, and attributing their characteristics, real or not, to the rest of the group) and b) You don’t have any idea of what’s going on here. If you knew, you would be aware of the extreme disappointment both opposition and chavismo have with their respective leadership.
Oh, this my favorite. This is the usual way the hard left tries to acknowledge, somehow, that Maduro is a complete failure without actually saying it. As I said, one of the biggest problem of the left, one of the reasons people like me, early voters of Chávez proposals, became disenchanted with the Left: That utter incapacity for self-criticism. That ultra-dogmatic-schematic way to view the world.
Repression is repression, it doesn’t matter whether is from a left-wing government or a right wing one.
From my experience, anyone who tries to change the subject from “Venezuela and its problems” to “Big Bad American Imperialism” is doing a disservice to the affected, namely the Venezuelans.
Sorry, when we are making a cue trying to get some maize flour pack, milk, rice, etc., we are not thinking “American imperialism”. We are thinking “these guys doesn’t know how to run the economy of this country”. We are thinking “the guys that are friend of Maduro, and that are making lots of cash with CADIVI preferential dollars are ruining us, and getting millionaires out of our misery”.
Venezuela was not a paradise before Chavismo, maybe that’s the reason some of us voted for Chávez. But that “change” didn’t materialize in the way it was promised. What has been brought is a system and a model that is not sustainable, without repression and censorship that is.
My dear, what happened in Venezuela is the switch of one elite by another. We now have the boligarchs, businessmen that have made vast fortunes with the exchange control market. The banks also are very happy with chavismo, as they’ve made record earnings during their tenure. Also, one would have to wonder why a tycoon of the size of Gustavo Cisneros (one of the richest man in Venezuela, if not the richest) is supporting Maduro.
You are right. But the devil is in the details: Most of the private media is being “put against the ropes” financially. That was the case of Globovision, that burdened with heavy fines, and continuous administrative processes and sanctions from CONATEL (the body regulating broadcasting in Venezuela) was forced into a sell to a group of boligarchs, businessmen friendly with chavismo. Logically, the editorial line was completely changed.
That is happening everywhere in the traditional media. The last event was the purchase of Cadena Capriles, one of the biggest media corporation in Venezuela…
Every single political revolution in the history of the modern world would suggest that this is unachievably difficult to do in practice. What I’m trying to say is that the transition from a revolutionary government that nationalizes and massively redistributes wealth away from an oligarchic class to a stable government which encourages enough economic growth to sustainably fuel its still-considerable amount of redistribution from top to bottom, is the hard part. It’s not enough to point out that there are long-established redistributive democracies that are able to do this. We would do well to understand and explore the difficulty inherent in this transition.
It is a moot point if the reason is because the world is mean, because economics are mean, or revolutionary governments are incompetent. When you see an endless list of failure, maybe the thing to do isn’t follow down exactly the same fucking path as the last few dozen failures. Seriously.
The last few dozen failures didn’t have the curve-destroying success in relieving poverty that Chavismo has had. If it’s all due to petrodollars, then is the problem that the oil revenue is about to run out? The extent to which the gains are sustainable is the key question. If the “playbook” you talk about has a proven ability to massively relieve poverty in a such short a period of time, given a large initial investment, why isn’t it the ideal solution for the first ten years after a revolution in any country that can make such an investment? Are the policies that are required to enable massive relief of poverty separable from the policies that hinder transition? How do we tease apart that relationship? Do international financial markets and trade alliances make competent domestic economic management impossible where it does not align with the prevailing politics? Is that kind of control being exerted in this case? If so, is it a salient or minor factor in the current strife? These, to me, are crucial questions and the answer isn’t nearly so simplistic as having chosen the wrong “playbook” from the shelf. As far as I can see, a successful playbook for young revolutionary governments doesn’t exist. You either accept the international program and see agonizingly slow improvement for the most vulnerable, or you choose an alternative strategy and meet a predictable fate. Why is this so? Why do young governments seemingly have to choose between poverty reduction and a sustainable economy, even if they have an inexhaustible pile of money?
When you consume all political power, roll all that power into the executive, and rewire the government to work for the party, sane leftist are the first to be left out in the cold. Right wing groups can rally against the power of the state, but sane leftist are utterly fucked. There is no air left in the room to breath and they die. The best you can hope for in such a situation is that the right wing opposition doesn’t go too far off the deep end and isn’t totally inhuman and horrible when they eventually regain control. Again, this is all boringly predictable
It may be boringly predictable, but is there any evidence of anyone anywhere ever doing a better job from the same starting point? To what extent is the outcome actually dependent on the strategy and to what extent is it determined by the rules of the game? Are these rules culturally determined or do they maintain across time and culture? Perhaps it’s the inevitable outcome of popular revolutions within this contemporary global economic culture that’s boringly predictable to you, regardless of the strategy employed by the revolutionaries. Maybe it is actually possible to do well, I’d sure love to help make it happen.
Now it is noticeably worse. Very. What it was not: Authoritarian. There were strong constitutional provisions that effectively prevented any President from staying more than 5 years continuously. Chavez changed this (and the Constitution), stayed 14 years, and planned to stay for life. He did rule for life. Maybe there is a God with a wonderful sense of humor. Nah, there was just a voluntarist egomaniac who was informed that he had serious illness, chose to go on as before, and succeeded… in ending himself, painfully too.
Chavismo has destroyed what little institutional integrity there was before. Authoritarianism, left or right tends to do this. What would actually change is that there would be a plurality of parties instead of a single party system. The PSUV does enough stealing for any number of parties, what with its free use of State resources (and armed thugs at times) to ensure its enjoyment of Executive, Legislative, Judicial, Electoral Hegemony ad infinitum.
I am only a stooge for there being a republic and limited governmental power over persons, and for not accepting authoritarianism come from where it may come. I call that civil liberties. I am absolutely for it. I am mad about having it for myself, and for you having as much as I like to have.
You might have wanted to bail out. Good luck believing that Castro is not a dictator too, and that Cuba is democratic.
“Lack of trustworthy reporting”? So it isn’t trustworthy unless it agrees with you? If everybody says it sucks, then it means there must be a huge conspiracy behind it? This is some conspiracy nut logic.
If you care about the people of Venezuela and hate American hegemony, stop using American politics and the American right as a compass for your opinion of Venezuela.
