Yoshie:
Looking at Nepal and Venezuela is instructive. Today, people on the Left, even those who come from the classically Maoist tradition like the CPN (Maoist), are not trying to change their countries in a classic Marxist revolutionary fashion and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. They appear to think that today revolutionaries should engage, and persuade as many of the rest of their country to engage, in a slow process of transformation. Neither of the revolutionaries have nationalized as much of the economy as the Iranian Revolution, which was not even led by socialists, did in one fell swoop. That says that we live in a different era of politics than in the era of anti-colonial and anti-neo-colonial revolutions of the 20th century.
I don't understand the point here at all. There is no industry in Nepal so what is there to nationalize? That leaves aside the question of the ability of the Maoists to nationalize anything thing since they haven't taken power. The pressing need in Nepal is land reform. The country is extremely backward. We are not talking about Taiwan, for pete's sake. I don't know what Venezuela needs to nationalize since CITGO was state-owned even before Chavez took power. I think the USA is too bogged down in Iraq to meddle in Venezuela's affairs but I guarantee you that if it is forced to withdraw, it will refocus its energies there. This will be especially true if the next president is Barak Obama who will have a feel-good post-Bush mandate to project American power in a more "effective" manner a la Council of Foreign Relations. If the US intervenes in Venezuela, you can be assured that the financial sector will be the main bastion of the counter-revolution. In such a showdown situation, Chavez will be forced to confront the financial bourgeoisie or else lose power. Generally speaking, nationalizations don't take place as a kind of textbook exercise in development economics. The decision to proceed in this fashion is driven by politics. Study the early years of the Cuban revolution if you need more info on that.
