Yoshie:
Sure you do. We just have to be open-minded about how other people do things in other countries.
Sorry, I am not interested in being open-minded about how Lula or Ahmadinejad do things.
If a dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't command enthusiasm even among Marxists outside the West, let alone among broadly defined leftists inside the West, there is a historical reason for it. While rejecting gross distortions and exaggerations peddled by professional anticommunists, we have to reckon with the record of democracy, or lack thereof, under formerly and actually existing socialist countries. It seems to me that revolutionaries in Venezuela and Nepal are trying to avoid the errors of the past in this respect.
You don't seem to understand what the reference to the dictatorship of the proletariat means. This is not about throwing dissidents in Gulags. It is a technical term for a kind of state as exemplified by the Paris Commune.
Moreover, today in many countries in the world, including Venezuela, regular workers in the formal sector are a smaller, most privileged sector among working people than those who manage to make a living one way or another in the informal sector. And it is those who get by in the informal sector, living in urban slums, that are the most ardent supporters of the Bolivarian Process. That, too, gives the process in Venezuela a special character, different from Nepal and different from most revolutions in the 20th century which were driven by peasant grievances and opposition to colonialism. Given a rapid pace of urbanization and a huge growth of the informal sector in many countries, the Venezuelan experience can tell us more about the wave of the future than classic socialist revolutions in the past or Marxist texts that came out of them.
Again, I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Are you referring to some sort of "third way"?
As I mentioned earlier, Gramsci and Amin, from the Marxist tradition, are probably the most useful theorists who can help us understand the nature of actually existing struggles today.
I have trouble with references to Gramsci, who was forced through prison conditions to be elliptical in ways that Lenin or Trotsky did not have to be. Stuart Hall's Gramsci is not my Gramsci. On Amin, you have to be a bit more specific. Is there some article he wrote that disavows the classical Marxist theory of the state? If so, he is clearly wrong. I am not impressed by big names like this, in case you hadn't noticed.
Not at all, but it's not necessary for a leftist to go on a warpath whenever other leftists have this or that loopy idea either, whether a loopy idea is held by Chavez or anyone else.
Quite right. I happily ignored Chavez's musings on 9/11. If, however, he was subscribed to PEN-L and was bent on promoting some loopy idea 5 times a day for months on end, my attitude would be a bit different.
