Re: [A-List] Populism or Neoliberalism?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> In today's global capitalism, the range of economic choices (available
> outside the richest capitalist countries) that people have accepted
> seems to be between a populist economy like Iran's and Venezuela's and
> a neoliberal one like Brazil's and Turkey's* (Russia's falls into the
> middle between them), unless the country has a special relation with
> the USA of the sort that East Asian countries such as China have
> (export to the USA, profit, save, and lend a lot of saving to the USA
> so the cycle can continue, while undervaluing the currency).

TINA.

> Expropriating all the expropriators is not on the agenda even in the
> land of Socialism of the 21st Century, and the way it's going, the
> Bolivarian Revolution won't nationalize the means of production as
> much as Iran's Islamic Revolution did.

Thanks for the more precise terminology. Nationalizing the means of 
production does not have much to do with socializing them.

With respect to whether expropriating the expropriators is "on the 
agenda" or not, neither was the abolition of slavery in the 1830s. Why 
Yoshie would want the left to retreat to timid genuflection before the 
status quo is a mystery to me. Even if Wendell Phillips or Frederick 
Douglass were the only abolitionists around in 1840 or so, there was no 
reason for them to tailor their ideas to what American would accept.