[Marxism] Chavez embraces socialism (but not the old kind)

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Okay then, what is the real kind of socialism then, Yosef?

It seems to me that you defeat your own argument when you object on the one
hand that Chavez has nationalised only one enterprise, and on the other hand
that "nationalizations in Latin America have gone hand in hand with
continued capitalist rule". All that really shows is that nationalisations
as such cannot by themselves define what socialism is about. And who says
that Venezuelan socialism must necessarily conform to the whims of some kind
of bolshevik-leninist spectator sport?

I while ago I commented on how there were these Marxist-Leninists who had a
prefabricated dogma about what revolutions ought to look like, and how they
could not accept them, if they failed to fit their blueprint. Your latest
missive illustrates the point: because Chavez fails to conform to some
preconceived ideal, he must be wrong, and, meantime you let yourself off the
hook, because you don't specify positively what the "real kind of socialism"
is. That's a standard of debate that really helps nobody.

Recently I translated a book surveying Western Marxist views about the USSR,
and it's interesting to read how most of these Marxists considered that
Russian socialism wasn't socialism, or at any rate not "the real kind of
socialism". But point is almost none of these critics offered any
constructive socialist strategy for the USSR apart from rhetoric about
revolution, democracy and workers' power. It was mainly just impressionistic
analyses from afar by people who didn't really know what they were talking
about. The irony is that an erudite scholar like Paresh Chattopdahyay ends
up pronouncing 65 years after the fact that the October revolution was after
all a bourgeois revolution. With ludicrous schematism of this kind
pretending to be scholarship, no wonder Marxists are left in the lurch
nowadays when it comes to interpreting modern developments.

Jurriaan






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