January 07, 2007
The most business-friendly socialism ever devised
James Surowiecki in The New Yorker:
To people on both the left and the right, Hugo Chávez is a kind of modern-day Castro, a virulently anti-American leader who has positioned himself as the spearhead of Latin America’s “Bolivarian revolution.” He calls for a “socialism of the twenty-first century,” and regularly floats radical economic ideas; during his recent campaign for reëlection, he suggested he might move Venezuela to a barter system. When he spoke in front of the United Nations General Assembly in September, a day after President Bush, he said, “The devil came here yesterday.” And, just last month, after he was overwhelmingly reëlected to the Presidency, he dedicated the victory to Castro and proclaimed it “another defeat for the devil who tries to dominate the world.”
Chávez’s rhetoric might not be out of place in “The Little Red Book,” yet everyday life for many Venezuelans today looks more like the Neiman-Marcus catalogue. Thanks to the boom in the price of oil, many Venezuelans have been indulging in rampant consumerism that might give even an American pause. In the past year, auto sales have doubled, property prices have soared (mortgage loans are up three hundred per cent), and, thanks to this buying frenzy, credit-card loans have nearly doubled. And while Chávez has done a good job of redistributing oil revenue to the Venezuelan poor, via so-called misiones, designed to improve education, health care, and housing, and has forced oil companies to renegotiate contracts, there has been no nationalization of industry, relatively little interference with markets, and only small gestures toward land reform. If this is socialism, it’s the most business-friendly socialism ever devised.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 03:35 PM | Permalink
Comments
Well then I guess it is of no concern that the leder in that country is a socialist and calls our president names...so long as trade and oil are ok and he is nto a real socialist.
Posted by: fred lapides | Jan 7, 2007 4:43:54 PM
I have a hard time understanding the first comment posted here. Are you being genuine Fred, or sarcastic? Because it certainly matters little that an elected leader is a socialist, so long as he's fairly elected. There is this idea in America, now nearly inherent in our worldview, that capitalism and democracy are one and the same. Sorry to break the bad news to you, but capitalism is not democratic, despite all the arguments you might hear about people being able to vote with their money. As far as I know, the only truly democratic economic system is anarcho-syndicalism, or one of its cousins, in which workers control the means of production and consumers still enjoy a competitive and open marketplace in which they can speak with their wallets. In our system, the consumers for the most part enjoy a competitive and open marketplace, and for the most part are able to speak uncoerced with their wallets, but the workforce of this system is far from democratic. It is more dictatorial. It simply does not vibe with true democratic ideals. So tell me: what is it you find disturbing about a fairly-elected socialist? And as for calling our president names, well, I agree to an extent, but perhaps for a different reason. Chavez knows the intellectual and political arguments against Bush, and he only hurts his image (at least here in the States) when he engages in name-calling. He should stick with the substantive attacks. But really, he's no worse than Bush himself, who insists on calling Chavez a dictator, a tyrant, an authoritarian, a cheater, etc. My point is not that Chavez is right to call Bush names, because I think it's all very stupid and a waste of time and influence. But Chavez is certainly not doing anything Bush isn't doing himself. Chavez is just doing it more creatively, more flamboyantly.
The economic arguments this article puts forth (even if they lead to shallow conclusions) are important in dispelling the crazy myth that Chavez is the next Castro. The two leaders may be close and share sympathies, but Venezuela will never become like Cuba. For one thing, most Venezuelans (from what I could gather when I was there, as well as from my reading) despise the modern Cuban model. They are excitedly consumeristic, even the poorest ones, and Chavez wouldn't last in power long if he gets too socialist (read: communistic). In addition, highly contrary to what the US mainstream media reports, the press in Venezuela is free and vociferous. The most vociferous in the hemisphere, possibly. My own prediction is that Venezuela becomes more like Sweden.
Incidentally, I attended the World Social Forum mentioned in this article. The idea of which economic system is best was barely discussed. Of more interest to participants were information systems and media, freedom, health, water, equality, etc. Neoliberalism and US hegemony (as mentioned in this article) were certainly buzzwords at the Forum, and you couldn't walk anywhere without seeing street vendors hawking anti-American merchandise, but in most formal discussions neoliberalism and hegemony were approached from a standpoint of social decency, not socialism. There is a key difference.
Finally, some food for thought, building on an idea I first came across in a Cuban newspaper: what if Castro, before he dies, works out a system with Chavez to unite Cuba and Venezuela, thus satisfying both Chavez's Bolivarian desire to unite the Southern Hemisphere, as well as the international demands for open democracy in Cuba? A political fairy story, perhaps, but not entirely impossible. I only hope that if something of this nature were to take place, it would involve the direct participation of the voters of both nations.
Posted by: ghostman | Jan 7, 2007 7:17:34 PM
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