From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Tue Jun 01 2004 - 19:35:07 EDT
At 1:11 PM +0100 6/1/04, Paul Bullock wrote: >Dear Michael, > >Thanks for your info. I know you were too busy to respond to my >request to provide info. earlier on, but this is very important. >You of course, know that Lenin made the point that in order to >defeat the revolution its enemies would, indeed had, to disguise >themselves as Marxists. Don't forget the disguising of counter-revolutionary regimes and state capitalist ones as proletarian dicatorships. > Much of what passes for the left in the imperialist states mixes >banal liberal platitudes with reactionary attacks on anti >imperialist movements, but your facts are 'stubborn things' that can >help us in our own support for the Venezuelan people and the >Venezuelan Government. Yes resist the platutidinous. The struggle to improve profitability leads (imperialist) industrial capital to attempt to abolish or at least appropriate ground rent. You seem to prefer Chavez appropriating the rent rather than imperialist capital which (you aver) will just use it to subsidize running dog intellectuals or Trotskyist-fascist agents of imperialism (note above about Bolshevism). But there is no reason to believe that the landlord in charge will use most of the rent in a progressive, non-corrupt way or that the successful appropriation of rent (the devil's excrement) will not overall harm the polity and the economy (Dutch disease). As David Spiro shows in The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony (Cornell University Press, 1999), the petrodollars of the 70s were not recycled via the IMF to the poorest countries violently 'contracted' by the rising price of oil but rather into US treasury bills and into the bond markets of the third world counries often richest in...oil. It's hard to root for imperialist or landlord. The global working class does not have a horse in this race. rb > >Paul Bullock. > >----- Original Message ----- >From: <mailto:mlebowit@SFU.CA>michael a. lebowitz >To: <mailto:OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU>OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU >Sent: Monday, May 31, 2004 10:14 PM >Subject: [OPE-L] update on situation in Venezuela > >Following is some of the recent news from venezuela (from both an >opposition and chavist source). Note the reference to the Coca-Cola >workers: I was watching a broadcast on Globovision from the >Electoral Council, and the young reporter on hand suddenly began to >interview a group of these workers who were there to protest. I >thought-- how strange, what's going on with Globovision? No fear, >within 30 seconds, they cut back to the studio to a visibly pained >anchorman who changed the subject and ran an old tape. End of story. > cheers, > michael >PS. Rakesh's new champion Heinz Sonntag is one of those Venezuelan >experts who doesn't think there was a coup in April 2002--- just a >power vacuum because Chavez resigned (and conveniently dismissed the >vp and cabinet so Carmona the Brief could come in and throw out the >Constitution, National Assembly, etc). Ha ha, excrement indeed. etc >etc etc
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