From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Tue Dec 23 2003 - 12:11:02 EST
>Gerry, >You correctly understood my comment in your reflection below. BUT in >asking Mike the question at the end you seem to be forgetting 1 >point. France in 1871 was an Imperial Power , and the workers were >fighting against that power during an inter-imperialist war. > >Venezuela is subject to the predations of imperialism and class >conscious workers have to formulate a different political >programme. By preventing wholesale privatisation of the oil industry >for a start, we see a fundamental difference brought about by the >poor by 'ballot and bullet' . The wretched article, as Mike >correctly says, from the NYT sent by Rakesh aims to cover up this >distinction, one which workers in Argentina would not miss after the >privatisations there of the 90's. > Why not say that Chavez's faux populism is covering up not only his suppression of worker rights (he fired 18,000 ! workers--which seems like a capitalist downsizing to me) but also his defacto privatization of the oil industry, in particular his seemingly having handed over the most profitable parts of the business to foreign investors? Aren't the kinds of royalties that he is trying to impose difficult to assess and easy for foreign investors to manipulate? And what about these preferential taxes and incentives for private investors. It's also difficult for me to understand why Marxists are making the distribution of rent between foreign capitalists and an authoritarian state one of the cutting edges of world revolution. What is the source of the rent that Chavez hopes to capture? Rakesh
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