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Louis Proyect wrote
Introduction by Steve Ellner
For several years, university professor Pasqualina C. Curcio has
presented a wealth of empirical information in order to refute the
notion that market logic, government incompetence and a flawed socialist
model are responsible for the severe problems of shortages and inflation
that afflict Venezuela. In The Visible Hand of the Market: Economic
Warfare in Venezuela, Curcio discards the various explanations put
forward by the Venezuelan opposition and the corporate media and
concludes that the shortages have been induced as has the nation’s
triple-digit inflation. The shortages are the result of hoarding and
contraband, not due to the decline in national production or the failure
of the government to provide the commercial sector with the necessary
foreign currency to pay for imports. In fact, for the years that she
analyzes between 2003 and 2013, the correlations claimed by government
adversaries were not borne out by the facts: declining national
production did not produce shortages nor did the state’s failure to sell
sufficient dollars to finance imports. Furthermore, the types of goods
that are in short supply are those controlled by oligopolistic
companies, as opposed to small-sized businesses. All this demonstrates
that what Curcio calls “planned shortages,” or economic sabotage, are
largely responsible for the pressing economic problems facing the
nation, similar to the case in Chile under Allende and in other
leftist-governing nations throughout history.
full: https://mronline.org/2017/10/23/economic-warfare-in-in-venezuela/
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What is written here raises a lot of questions: This book The Visible
Hand of the Market: Economic Warfare in Venezuela has been written to
correct for pervasive misinformation peddled by global politicians and
media. It purports to detail how national food, medicines and hygiene
products monopolies have contrived to produce disruption, disaffection
and chaos.
Chavez's death and the little-known Maduro's accession, severely
weakened as he narrowly won against all the forces arrayed against him,
presented the oligarchy with their golden opportunity. They haven't
carried it off. The book lists their main weapons: 1) planned shortage
of essential materials; 2) induced inflation; 3) boycott in the supply
of basic goods; 4) covert trade embargo and 5) international financial
blockade, with gigantic transnational corporations and imperial power
behind it all. Add to this bitter, protracted counter-revolutionary
obstruction in the streets.
Despite massive opposition from banking, industry, market forces, the
media and many in the bureaucracy, the wealthy classes and powerful US
imperialist opposition, and of course with the positive support of the
mass of the less well-off and abjectly poor sectors of the country,
could it be of significance that because the military still supports the
Bolivarian project throughout all the opposition's antics (unlike Chile
in 1973) that it is still standing? Few know at close hand the
machinations of corporate power as do the military, Chavez after all was
one of them, and the oligarchy has failed to win them over.
Are the failure of disruptive tactics, street warfare, divisions in
opposition leadership, and elections just completed favorable to the
government (winning 18 of 21 gubernatorial contests), a sign of a
turnaround and the spluttering defeat of the counter-revolution? Are the
essential moral and material resources of the regime and above all of
the people, and course-correction in the design of the revolution going
forward enough? Petrol prices are rising again. What next? As in
pre-revolutionary Russia, people must be hungering for reliable, honest,
resolute leadership, information and a road map. This book, ordered by
Maduros to be distributed massively as part of the new offensive, and
its prompt translation into English, the language of imperial power,
could conceivably have enormous consequences in aid of the revolution.
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