Forwarded from Nestor

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Lou, could you post, please? Thank you...

Vanessa DD stated that

"Land reform in Venezuela is such a mess! There are few things here that
create more turmoil. I personally get to listen to the trouble every day,
from family friends who are worried, from many in the Venezuelan colony in
Miami, etc."

Allow me to place a bitter smile here on the "Venezuelan colony in Miami".
Any Venezuelan who can go and make a colony in Miami is displaying a
distinct class mark, and not precisely that of the poorest classes of
Venezuela...

Then, in a country where most land is unused -and people starve- due to
oligarchic misallotment of land (even from a bourgeois point of view),
Vanessa surprises us by amazingly state that

"The biggest problem here, is that 'squatters rights' are often used by one
big land owner to steal land from another. He will pay a few hundred native
families to go settle on a piece of land, they will build their cardboard
houses in that land, stay for a few years, there will be a legal fight for
the land, they claim squatter's rights, then sell the land to the guy who
gave them the job, and move soemwhere else to do the same thing."

Please look at this outrageous argument closely: the problem does not lie
in the separation of producers from their conditions of existence. There is
a different problem, the _main_ one, which is the usage of poor people
(BTW, please watch carefully that beautiful "natives" embedded in the
sentence!) by one rich man against the other. Typically, this argument
dismisses the human quality of those who are "used" by explaining that
they, the natives, like it that way:

"Many native families are used in this way, and live their whole lives
doing thse 'invasions', as they are called here. I have many students who
tell me of how their mothers do this as a career, and my father tells me of
his friends who fight each other for land in this way.SO, how do we keep
these people from being used thus? They LIKE doing this, because it's
income without any effort: you just have to go sit there for a year or two,
and sell drugs meanwhile."

So that we may rely on the students of Vanessa (through Vanessa) not on the
obviously undemocratic and perverted nature of the patterns of ownership of
land in Venezuela. I would suggest that either the students of Vanessa or
either someone else is a cop here. Let me break some news on you, dear
Vanessa DD: nobody LIKES to live that way. I don´t imagine why do you think
that other human beings will, as a rule, prefer things that you yourself
would not prefer. We are all more or less equal, and if the Venezuelan
citizens you dismiss in a typical colonialist rant as "natives" had an
opportunity, they would certainly choose to till their own plot of land,
take care of their own, solid little house in the countryside, sell their
products in a market and have a dignified life. The problem is that land
distribution in Venezuela, and the rachitism of its industrial development,
make it impossible for most Venezuelans ("natives") to achieve so simple a
goal. Of course, Vanessa has an answer to my objection: that this

"... is a normal part of their native culture. But their lives are pathetic."

And, I guess, only Vanessa realizes that they are pathetic, that is why so
lovingly she _teaches_ their children to be "the leaders of the future"
that "I personally doubt that a law can fix the problem: we have to change
the culture of the people first."

We natives in Latin America despise with all our soul these American
pundits who come to TEACH us how to do things. We despise them and hate
them, because there is not much in their own "culture" that can be taught
to us without our becoming something different than we are. Thank you,
Vanessa, but go home. Particularly with your colonialist rant on the
lazyness of our people, people who -when they get a chance to be paid by a
job- work much, much harder than most people in the First World. In fact,
what you are saying against the Venezuelans, Vanessa, applies perfectly to
the bourgeoisies and petty bourgeoisies of the central countries:

"... this is a country where you are considered STUPID if you cannot find a
way to get around your work, to get paid without doing anything."

Just like stockholders in the NYSE, for instance? Who on Earth is Vanessa
to teach people in Venezuela, or elsewhere, that you must work hard to win
a dime, when most Americans have the opposite dream? And, moreover, Vanessa
quotes God in order to take us to the racist hell of her own consciousness:

" Like Karl said in a manuscript I read last night: it's a constant of
workers trying to cheat their boss and viceversa."

Karl (Marx, I presume) remarks this with a sympathetic view on the workers.
His was a humane view even -and particularly- on slaves who destroyed
machinery in order to reassert themselves as humans. But Vanessa is an
"educator", so she is outraged by the scenario that she cannot see in New
York, that is that

"Here, not doing anything and still getting paid is considered a sign of
INTELLIGENCE."

This is, dear Vanessa, precisely what the imperialist bourgeoisies do. Why
should we consider them STUPID?

Then, she goes on with the usual rant against labor unions. Not that I like
Venezuelan labor particularly: they are survivors of the old regime and,
save for some exceptions, they should be crushed because their leaders are
helping imperialists in Venezuela against Chavez (oil workers, teachers:
these are unions of the "privileged" ones, in fact). But against the
repugnant description by Vanessa, who I am almost sure would rather die
than unionize, I defend even those scoundrels:

 " The labor unions are an excellent example: the leaders care little for
the worker's welfare, but make sure that their friends and themselves get
paid WITHOUT working, or they use the poor and uneducated workers to get
what they want by calling a strike..."

 "Poor and uneducated workers"... With educators like Vanessa, I trust the
wild ideas of the workers.

And, on a similar vein but on a different issue,

"It is also well known that one can buy body parts anywhere in the third
world if you only know how to look for them. I'm sure I could find a few
kidneys here."

Vanessa exposes what I would term a _Jumanji_ view of the oppressed world,
or so it seems: a ruthless jungle where the most horrible things happen
around the corner, full with giant insects, crazy chimps, murderous
hunters, destructive floods and rains that rust even plastic bags. She
reminds me of Leon Sedov, the son to Trotsky who warned him not to go to
Mexico only to be murdered by hired surgeons at delightfully safe --Paris.

Well, I strongly disagree (having almost half a century of experience in
the oppressed World myself). Although imperialism (basically American
imperialism, that is the deformation of our life by the country Vanessa is
a citizen of) has turned our life into a Hell of tragedies, and, yes, it is
sometimes heard of traffic in human organs, I would say that whoever can
"find a few kidneys" is simply a criminal or is associated with criminals.

After these two postings, I would suggest that Vanessa does not belong with
us on Marxmail. But of course, this is a prerrogative of the moderator, not
mine at all. At any rate, I wanted my opinion to remain expressed.

Thank you,

Lic. Néstor M. Gorojovsky 


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/