Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Eleven Theses on Venezuela There should be at least one additional thesis: class configuration, the inablity of carrying out industrialisation and radical changes.

Venezuela "While the official line was that the uprising was the work of the Venezuelan masses, everything the Trump administration did reinforced the message that it had been made in Washington." Note that the liberals who wrote the article did not put the words "uprising" and "liberation" in inverted commas., and they don't seem to condemn the attempted coup. After all, Western regimes and some others have supported the interim president. That would enough to make a successful coup a "liberation".  1. An "uprising/revolution", if it exists, should be judged by its class or social groupings character. It should be decided by the balance of forces inside a country. 2. An imperialist state is reactionary by its nature. And the American one nowadays is even more reactionary that 5 years ago. A reactionary force cannot by its nature support a radical progressive change. It would an anomaly if it does. 3. The support of Russia ...

My favourite article on Venezuela (so far). Excerpts (an individual or institutional subscription is required to read the full piece) "Beset by five-digit inflation, food shortages and rising poverty and unemployment, the economy contracted by more than a third between 2013 and 2018, and has slid even further since. This has wiped out the real gains made by most of the population between the mid-2000s and the time roughly when Maduro succeeded Hugo Chávez as president in April 2013. There is no doubting, either, that Maduro has failed to address this crisis. Hampered by the razor-thin margin by which he won his mandate in 2013 – 1.5 per cent – he has governed with a combination of bluster and repression. He stuck to a disastrous exchange-rate policy even though it was visibly making things worse for most of the population. The effects of this were made even worse by the US sanctions that started under Obama, who in March 2015 declared Venezuela an ‘extraordinary threat’ t...

"The ease with which parts of the international community have recognised Guaido reflects not principled support for democracy, but a global reconfiguration of power. This includes not only the rise of a multi-polar world - exemplified by Russian and Chinese support for Venezuelan sovereignty - but also a rightward swing across Latin America alongside the warring colonial conceits of the US and Europe."  Some truths in the article, especially that those who defend the Venezuelan leader of the opposition are U.S. subordinates and right and far-right governments, but the author ignores the role of Maduro's government and its mismanagement and mishandling of the situation . He write in defence of the Bolivarian revolution, but with no criticism.  More importantly, there is no mention in the articles I have seen,  and which condemn  imperialism and the oligarchs in Venezuela, of the predicament: that Chavez and Maduro have done little to break the power of capital a...

The tragedy of Venezuela

Louis Proyect: "All me cynical but my take on the middle-class protests in Venezuela is that it is less interested in democracy than it is in ratcheting the Gini coefficient back towards one. I remain a committed Marxist but when it comes to Maduro versus Leopoldo Lopez, the opposition leader who was a key figure in the 2002 coup attempt, I’ll stick with Maduro—warts and all. Or I should say Boligarchs and all."  Yes, but also have to be very critical of Maduro.