Im open to various voices on Venezuela, as I try to make sense of what is going on there and what can be learned from it. Of course the right wing has been saying that Chavez (and now Maduro) is leading the country to Castro style Communism. Some voices on the left hail the chavista government as genuinely leading the country to a new kind of socialism, and ascribe its failures and setbacks to the severe opposition it faces from internal and external forces. There are some on the left who are generally sympathetic, and, though they caution that there is a danger that the state could water down or subvert the grassroots social movements, they think that these movements continue to maintain a meaningful voice of their own that the Venezuelan government must listen to. Below is a quite a different point of view that is not often heard - a scathing critique of chavismo FROM THE LEFT, which considers that the grassroots social movements have been largely co-opted and manipulated by the Venezuelan state into supporting Chavezs agenda, and that that agenda promotes a variant of capitalism dressed up as socialist. This dovetails, it seems to me, with the analysis of some that say that global capitalism is increasingly being run for and by a TRANSNATIONAL elite of capitalists, whose interests are not aligned with traditional wealthy interests from within the countries, and that the transnational capitalists favor a smoother kind of progressive government as more effective in serving their interests than the old authoritarian regimes that relied primarily on brutal repression of revolutionary movements. What follows describes HOW this can work, and I would love to hear what others may think of this... Rafael Uzcátegui, in his book Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle, argues that the Bolivarian process led by the late Hugo Chávez has co-opted and neutralized genuine revolutionary opposition to capitalism and has furthered the integration of the Venezuelan economy into the global capitalist order, and all the more effectively for acting in the name of socialism. He ends his book with a discussion of another writer, Raúl Zibechi, whose thoughts coincide. Uzcátegui writes:
Posted on: Sun, 02 Mar 2014 04:48:37 +0000
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