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

["rrubinelli" <rrubinelli@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "David McDonald" <dbmcdonald@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition"
<marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2005 12:04 PM
Subject: RE: [Marxism] Chavez embraces socialism (but not the old kind)


> in 1953. He goes back to the Grito de Lares, which happened on my
birthday
> in 1868
______________

Damn, you're looking good for 137 there comrade,  how do you do it?

But seriously-- let's not do from the anti-sectarian the same thing
that's done from the sectarian-- set up straw men just to knock them
down, thinking  that something has actually been accomplished.

So if Yosef misses, or dismisses, the boat by confusing and identifying
Chavez the person, and the Chavez government policies with the ongoing
social, class struggle in Venezuela; if Yosef provides anti-platitudes
about the one true path instead of critical analysis about the
particular driving forces of revolution in Venezuela, forces that
distinguish that struggle from that in Russia 1917 as well as Bolivar's
19th century war for independence, let's not reproduce that error by
offering platitudes about the individual nature of every revolution
while endorsing, uncritically, a supposed continuity between the
initiation of the Cuban revolution in 1868, ( I guess we could extend
that to the ten year's war, the eruption of the struggle against Spain
etc.).

Certainly, continuity exists, but the specific forces, the specific
conflict between the means and relations of production, and just those
exact relations is what distinguishes 1959 from 1868, 2005 from the
first Venezuelan Republic, have dramatically changed in class nature and
content.

The critical element is not Chavez's nationalizaton of enterprises, land
or lack thereof, it is the underlying social struggle and whether or not
independent class organizations are being created that will serve to
extend and defend that struggle.  And in Venezuela such organizations
are being created, with the cooperation, and even initiation of the
Chavez government.  They can be called Bolivarian, they can be called
anything, but their content is most emphatically working class.

rr


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