From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Tue Dec 23 2003 - 16:56:25 EST
> >P.S. I'd love to know your sources. Eg., the 'fired' workers were the >managers and white collar workers (i.e., highly trained technicians) of the >state-owned oil company, PDVSA, who went out at the beginning of last >December in a political strike in conjunction with the Business >Federation's attempt to bring down the government. ok, michael, so all these 18,000 workers--nay the white collar labor aristocracy--were all the stooges of foreign investors? Yet we find that under Chavez whom you claim is renationalizing the oil industry the percentage of oil exported by the PDVSA is declining dramatically? I am wondering whether the land reform is just as revolutionary. > The coup having failed, >this was the next try--- an attempt to cut off all government revenue and >to bring the government down (something assumed to take a few weeks, ie a >Christmas present for the capitalist opposition); blue collar workers kept >working, and now have representatives on the board of directors and are >organising workers councils throughout PDVSA operations. As for Chavez's >'defacto privatization of the oil industry', every bit of information I've >seen is that PDVSA was effectively privatised (see, eg. Bernard Mommer's >chapter, 'Subversive Oil' in Steve Ellner's book on Venezuelan Politics and >Juan Carlos Boue's Oxford thesis from 1997), and that it is now under >Chavez in the process of renationalisation (with the criticisms from a few >people on the left-- who are friends-- being that it is not happening fast >enough). But you obviously have different sources of information. > well you did not say that NYT article was incorrect that foreign investors have been handed the refining and transport business with incentives to boot? But I am not one to fetishize the Absolute General Secretary whether he be Stalin, Castro or Chavez. Bettelheim makes sense to me here. And by the way I should say-- having read only the first couple hundred pages of three volume An Introduction to Marx's Capital by Ranganayakamma it is the most meticulous and penetrating analysis of the value form that I have ever read. We know that Sweezy ignored it in Theory of Capitalist Development though Blake spend a few excellent chapters on it. Ranganayakamma's careful analysis is even better. Her analysis is bound to be undervalued by those who have found the holy grail in simultaneous equations or who forget that Marx aimed above all else to make his analysis comprehensible to the working class. Yours, Rakesh
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