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On 3/6/19 9:36 AM, John Reimann via Marxism wrote:
Yes, comrades can say "well, that's just because of the role of US imperialism." Okay, lets even accept that for the moment. But it's like saying that somebody died after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge just because of the role of gravity. The fact of US (and world) imperialism has to be taken into account. What is the plan to deal with it? Evidently those leaders didn't have a successful one! How many times do we have to go through this without learning some lessons?
I think the lessons are obvious. Unless a socialist revolution is consummated as was the case in Cuba, peripheral or semi-peripheral countries will ultimately succumb to economic or military pressure, or a combination of the two such as happened to Nicaragua.
So, what prevents such countries from "going all the way" as the Jack Barnes sect-cult characterized the FSLN? Missing from this kind of analysis, which includes John Reimann's posts as well, is an understanding of the relationship of forces. If Hugo Chavez had nationalized every last company in Venezuela as rapidly as Fidel Castro had done in Cuba in 1960, the economic and military pressures would have been ten times as great as they have been under Maduro. With the collapse of the USSR, it is much more difficult for such countries to survive. Putin and Xi Jinping view Venezuela as investment opportunities, not like the Soviet bureaucracy viewed Cuba.
More importantly, there is the question of how to build a revolutionary party in a place like Venezuela. There have been people like Stalin (an unfortunate first name bestowed by his parents) Pérez Borges in Venezuela that have been interviewed continuously in the ISO press for the past decade at least. They are ready to "go all the way" but they have never gotten the kind of following that Hugo Chavez got. To some extent, this simply reflects the uneven consciousness of the masses, a problem for which there is no easy solution.
Ultimately, the contradictions of capitalism worldwide will create the subsoil for the construction of a revolutionary international but it will not happen overnight. In my own modest way, I have tried to promote such an effort although in the USA at least the winds are in the sail of the DSA/Jacobin clubs whose most public leader has been featured in 11 Vanity Fair and 7 Vogue articles. What is to be done? I guess just plow forwardly as best we can.
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