Permanent Revolution in Latin America

now the book is entitled permanent revolution in Latin America but then it has a subtitle which says Cuba Nicaragua and Venezuela when John originally proposed this book this book was to cover much wider scope and we had an idea of having chapters or dealing with permanent revolution in other countries where it is important and have an important history of revolutionary struggle in which the theory of permanent revolution played an important role for instance Bolivia and others but in the end as the different chapters were growing in size and number of pages we had to limit ourselves to these three countries which I think relevant for the continent as a whole and they also provide very good examples and indications of a positive confirmation of the permanent revolution and a negative confirmation of the the the permanent revolution now first question we need to answer me to ask ourselves is what is the theory of permanent revolution the theory of german revolution was first explained by Trotsky in his conclusions from the 1905 revolution in in Russia and then it was systematized or crystallized in in the form of a proper theory in the early 1920s in debates in the in the soviet union between Trotsky and the Stalinists who were inventing an attack against Trotsky on this question of the permanent revolution and that's when Trotsky wrote the book permanent revolution which we advise everyone to read but if you want to know the the the center or the real meaning of permanent revolution this can be explained in this quote from Trotsky what it says in his thesis on permanent revolution at the end of the book he says with regard to countries of belay of a with a belated bourgeois development especially the colonial and semi colonial countries the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation above it above all of its peasant masses so basically saying that in countries which arrived late to the capitalist development that capitalism was developed when imperialism was already dominating the wall even though in some of these countries national and democratic tasks are the tasks of the bourgeois revolution are still pending in one degree or another this cannot be carried out by the National bourgeois the National bourgeois by virtue of having arrived late at the scene of history is now linked and tied by a thousand threats to imperialism to the land owners and therefore no genuine progress on the national and democratic revolution can take place neither on the question of agrarian reform or genuine national independence genuine struggle against imperialism if these revolutions are led by by the bourgeois class in this countries not only this it also says that therefore this task now falls onto the shoulders of the working class however small in numbers it might be in these countries but remember that in Russia the 1917 the working class was also very small in numbers it is the working class the only class in this type of countries that can carry out these tasks by taking power in its own hands not only this but once having taken power it will this class will not stop purely at the National Democratic demands but it will start to infringe on two bourgeois property rights it will start to move in the direction against capitalism and the theory parent revolution also says that these tasks cannot be fully completed on the national arena we have to be linked with the International Revolution this is a very summarised explanation of what the theory of tournament revolution means now in the book we argue that this applies to Latin America completely no not only today still applies today applies in Latin America for the last 100 or 200 years since these countries won independence that is that the National bourgeois was too backward to linked with imperialism too linked with the land owners to carry out any genuine progressive role or to carry out any genuine national liberation and the undemocratic struggle now as we know as I said just a minute ago this theory was then contested by the Stalinists who in reality recovered the Menshevik theory of two stages and made it their theory and they implemented it throughout the communist international in the mid to late 1920s and this had an impact also in in Latin America the two-stage theory of revolution in backward countries means that because that main tasks in these countries are national democratic of Buju tasks therefore the leadership of the revolution shall fall on the shoulders of the bourgeois or the progressive sections of the bourgeois liberals in this countries and working-class will play an auxilary role and only later after a period of capitalist genuine capitalist development will the tasks of the socialist revolution be post this is not just theory which had been disproven by the experience of 1917 in Russia there is also a theory that led to major disasters for the working class revolutionary move in a series of countries chiefly in China in the nineteen in the nineteen twenties now Latin America there's been always a big debate about the character of the socio-economic formation of Latin America under the Spanish colonization and later after independence in the nineteenth century there are some particularly Stalinist authors who argue that Latin America was feudal in its socio-economic formation not only it was feudal under the Spanish colony but it was feudal all the way up to whatever the 1950s the 1960s the 1970s although there was still a semi-feudal regime in many of these countries and from this they drew the conclusion that therefore that the revolution had to be an anti feudal or anti oligarchic revolution as separate from from a socialist revolution in a completely different stage now this is this is not the case if you actually look even under the Spanish colony the situation in Latin America was very particular because it is true that in fifteen hundred's spain was a feudal country feudal country in which the few that the feudal institutions were already very weakened but and obviously this country is a country that colonized latin america the socio-economic formation in latin america was never really feudal in the strict sense of the of the world because this was large plantations large states mines and so on which were not producing fall for their own limits they were producing for the world market which started to rise at that time and in fact they were not even they were integrated in a world system which was starting to set the basis for the primitive accumulation of capital and as Marx explained the exfoliation of Latin America played an important role in the primitive accumulation of capital so even at that time Latin America was not really feudal as such feudal economy is basically a closed economy within the constraints of the domains of of a feudal lord and that's not the case that was not the case in Latin America but clearly after 1810 1820s when the main countries in Latin America achieved independence the new socio-economic formations were extremely dependent on imperialism extremely dependent on him on imperialism first off of British and to a certain degree American US imperialism but then mainly dependent on US imperialism but you couldn't say that this the form the socio-economic formation was feudal at all you had at the top of these societies a very reactionary bloc of different classes that United the industrialists which did exist in a nation form at that time the land owners which were mainly producing for a capitalist market and the bankers so that the land owners had the money deposited in the banks the banks had investment in the land the industrialists had the investments in in in the land as well so it was a what we sometimes call an oligarchy a block of different classes and this this block was completely linked and dependent on imperialism through many different ways but mainly through the domination of the world market and their inability of creating a national national economy national internal market and what what best describes this socio-economic formation is not feudalism or semi feudalism but capitalism in conditions of combined and uneven development which is what Trotsky described the Soviet Russia before the Revolution as being and this is the best way to understand Latin America from a Marxist point of view yes there were remains of previous social formations in some cases the Spanish colony was grafted on top of the Asiatic mode of production of the Inka Inka Empire and so on but nevertheless the dominant feature was one of the dependency on the on imperialism and imperialism is clearly a feature of advanced capital capitalism another feature of feudalism so that is what in our opinion makes it the the theory of parent evolution is completely applicable to Latin America in fact the first Latin American Marxists in the 1920s even though they were not aware of trotsky's permanent revolution they adopted the same strategy or one that was very very close for instance Marietta he say Carlos Marietta he who was the founder of the Peruvian Socialist Party which was an effective communist party also the founder of the Peruvian trade union confederation and a major figure in Latin American Marxism he had some shortcomings he didn't really understand some of the international debates that were going on in the in the communist movement at that time but in relation to Peru he had a very sharp understand which was exactly the same as trois his patron revolution he said for instance in his famous seven essays on on Peru on the economic formation of Peru he said there is in Peru that is not and there has never been a progressive bourgeois only the prolly the action of the proletariat can stimulate first and realize later the tasks of the Democratic bourgeois revolution which the bourgeois regime is incompetent to develop or fulfil and once fulfilled these Democratic bourgeois tasks the revolution becomes in its aims and in its doctrine a proletarian revolution the revolution in Latin America will be nothing more nothing less than one stage one phase in the world revolution it will be simply and purely a socialist revolution I think it's quite clear and I'm stressing this point because Mariotti has been completely distorted by everyone by reformists by Stalinist and so on and they have tried to present maria degli as someone who somehow invented a new type of latin-american Marxism and this is not correct he was just applying Marxist theory to the concrete conditions of of Peru Julio Antonio Millia the founder of the of the Cuban Communist Party and a very important figure in the revolutionary movement in Cuba who was also the founder of the Students Federation in Cuba he also had the same the same approach and he said in its struggle against imperialism the foreign thief the bourgeois the local thief's unite to the proletariat to use it as cannon fodder but the in the end they understand that it is better to allow themselves with imperialism which at the end of the day go through a similar interest and from progressive they become reactionary the concessions which they used to make to proletariat in order to have it to its site are betrayed once in its advance becomes a danger both for the falling thief as well as for the national thief and here they start to shout and scream against communism to speak concretely now the full national liberation can only be obtained by the proletariat and it will carry it out Ulric achieved through workers revolution so he was also very clear in his position and I'm stressing this because then when the Communist international degenerated in a Stalinist way and the two-stage theory was promoted and adopted through in post really throughout the communist parties including in Latin America to the opposition of many of these people for instance maria degli was supposed to go to the 1929 conference of communist parties in argentina and he was written a thesis which was against the two-stage theory he was unable to attend in the end and the leader of the of the latin-american Stalinist Vittorio Koehler Villa basically destroyed that thesis and he was voted down and the two-stage study was imposed to to disastrous effects we had later on particularly in also in the 1930s but particularly in the 1940s in the context of the second world war which according to Stalinism was a war between democracy and fascism you had the communist parties in Latin America supporting democracy in the form of the right-wing reactionary dictatorships in the in those countries we just happen to be on the side of the United States during the during the Second World War so in effect these communist parties ended up supporting u.s. imperialist interests in their own countries for instance in Nicaragua where the Communist Party supported Somoza in 1944 in Cuba where the communist party joined the Batista government in 1942 with two ministers in Argentina where in 1946 the Communist Party supported the candidate proposed the bourgeois candidate proposed by the US Embassy against Peron in the 1956 elections just to give some some examples this was a complete disaster in in general now as I said the book deals mainly with three revolutions the Cuban Revolution the Nicaraguan revolution and the Venezuelan revolution the Cuban Revolution is a very good example of permanent revolution Cuba was the last country in the Spanish America to achieve its independence and by because of this reason when it achieved independence at the end in 1898 it already had a developed working class and this made the Cuban bourgeoisie more reactionary even than others in in the continent though only as a matter of degree but because they were very they were very afraid of the revolutionary potential of this working class if they were to mobilize the masses in any in an insidious way against imperialism they will be mobilizing the working class which was a threat to their own interest and so from the very beginning of the national liberation struggle in Cuba and the National question and the social question became very very closely linked you can see that even in 1868 when when the beginning of the of the war for independence when Manuel de Cespedes issued his first call for a Revolutionary War he was he was a land owner and a slave owner and the first thing he did was he liberated his own slaves and he therefore linked clearly the the cause of the liberation or the struggle against slavery with the cause of the struggle against national slavery then later on for instance Marti at the end of the 19th century Jose Marti one of the main leaders of the struggle for independence when he set up his revolutionary Cuban party his main base of support was amongst the cigar workers both in Cuba and also in Florida where there was a large colony of cuban of Cuban workers so you can see that the two things became very closely linked that can also be seen for instance in the 1933 Revolution the 1933 Revolution which also showed the the treacherous role of the Communists of the Communist Party which first advocated an alliance with bourgeois and then shifted towards an ultra left position of creating Soviets everywhere where conditions were not present so so you see that at every single stage of development of the Cuban Revolution as a matter of fact the Stalinists we're in the wrong side of the argument and in the wrong side of the of the battle as I said in 1940 in 1942 they joined the Batista government they had two ministers one Maranello and Carlos and Carlos Fernandez and this meant that for many of the revolutionary Cuban youth who wanted to fight against the Batista regime and against imperialism the two things were very closely linked the communist party was not an attractive proposition and so you had the rise of the movement around Fidel Castro and his unease companions who in 1953 launched the assault on the Moncada barracks in an attempt to act as a spark for a revolutionary uprising that will bring down the dictators you know this these people what program did they have what was the aim of the struggle the the program that they had was the classic program of the national democratic revolution you can you can read it it's in it's in a text called history will absolve me which is Fidel Castro's speech on the on the dock and you can see that he says when we speak of the people in in relation to the revolutionary struggle we speak of the workers the peasants the poor but he also mentions the small businessman the petty bourgeois the medium-sized entrepreneurs industrialists and so on and when he mentions the aims of their struggle the main focus of the start was the restoration of the 19 of the 1940 Constitution I am Aquatics rights for everyone and he had some some degree of agrarian reform the national independence and some measures to improve the lot of the workers but within the limits of the capitalist system for instance the workers should share in the profits of the companies they work for and things like this things like this which are now coming back onto the onto the agenda even in this in this country but that's that's a different matter so it was clearly a national and national democratic program within the limits of capitalism now the important question is that on the basis of this program the problem wasn't so much the most important thing that the question was they launched the revolutionary struggle in the in in their case through means of this an expedition to disembark in Cuba and again provoke a revolutionary spark and amass massive insurrection that didn't didn't go according to plan but in a very short space of time between December 56 and January 59 of which 60 years are coming up this January they had overthrown the Batista dictatorship and this you cannot just explained on the basis of the guerrilla war you have to explain on the basis of the rottenness of the regime they were fighting against and in the mass support the death struggle and sympathy that the struggle created not only in the countryside which was the main base of the guerrilla struggle where they basically distribute a line to the peasants and so on but also on the on in in the cities where they had large underground networks of support and it is not generally known or highlighted the fact that in the end when Batista fled the country on the eve of January 1st 1959 the gorillas were still miles away from the capital and the only way that they managed to actually win the revolution and take over the country was through a revolutionary general strike the day declared particularly in Havana which lasted for a week before the any guerrilla troops were able to enter so the working class did play a key role but not an independent role it only came as at the end of the revolution and it was not part of the main strategy of the revolutionary movement but the most interesting thing is what happened between 1959 and 1962 here is a movement which you can describe as a national democratic movement led by petty bourgeois revolutionary youth which did not have a socialist program but nevertheless in the space of three years they abolished capitalism in Cuba and this is quite clearly in in our opinion a demonstration of the validity of permanent revolution if they wanted to carry out a genuine agrarian reform genuine national independence they had no other alternatives and to expropriate capitalism and on the basis of the expropriation of capitalism is that all the conquests of the Cuban rest and now there is a debate in Cuba today about opening up to the market basically section of the leadership in Cuba dominant section of the leadership of the revolution in Cuba is thinking along the lines of implementing the Chinese model let's put it that way I the slow and gradual restoration of capitalism under the leadership of the same people who are currently at the Communist Party this is very dangerous very dangerous for the conquest of the Cuban Revolution because the the minute capitalist productive relations dominant in Cuba all the conquest of revolution will go with it free housing for all free education for all free healthcare for all and all the living living conditions and living standards that have been won as a result of the Cuban Revolution will be destroyed if capitalism is restored and that's the way the revolution is going now but the most important thing is to understand that even though the Cubans did not the Cuban Revolution a leadership did not have a program of abolishing capitalism they were pushed into that by the objective conditions because they were consequent and consistent in applying their own program which was a national democratic problem Pro program and this puts Cuba in contrast with the two other revolutions that we are discussing in in the book with with Nicaraguan and under Venezuelan and the Venezuelan revolution in in Nicaragua I won't have time to go into any into any little but Nicaragua as you know is in Central America Central America is one of the areas in Latin America this had the most crushing domination of US imperialism and this started back in the 1820s with the destruction of the attempt to set up united Republic throughout Central America South America was split up into many different in non-viable in the past so-called independent countries they were completely under the boot and the domination of US imperialism which constant military interventions military presence for years on end and brutal dictatorships this is the history of Honduras Guatemala Nicaragua all the countries in the region suffered from from from that and they have been El Salvador and have been a number of revolutionary uprisings in all these countries this the struggle of Augusto Sandino in the 1920s and 30s in Nicaragua the uprising of faragonda Marti who was a communist in 1932 in Salvador who drowned in blood ten thousand people were massacred and so on Nicaragua lived for many decades from 1937 up until 1979 and brutal dictatorship of the Somoza family Somoza family well not only a bourgeois capitalist family with close links with imperialism but they basically dominated a large part of the country's economy maybe 40% of the economy was in the hands the land industries and so on and because of the treacherous role played by the Communist Party which in Nicaragua was going under the name of the of the Socialist Party of Nicaragua again we see a situation where revolutionary youth who want to struggle against this dictatorship repelled in fact many of them came out of the of the Socialist Party the Stalinist Party partly as a result of the influence of the Cuban Revolution and they set up a new organization named the Sandinista front of national liberation which was set up in the nineteen in the 1960s work by Carlos Fonseca Tomas Borgia and all the leaders this organization his organization carried out again a guerrilla struggle which was mostly ineffectual for many years he was smashed almost any time they reared the head and attempted a new campaign and progressively the Sandinista front was split into three different factions and one of the debates was precisely around this question or the main debate I would say was around this question of the role of the bourgeois in the anti somos struggle and the attitude that the revolutionaries had to have towards that even though there were some people at the beginning who had against that and Carlos Fonseca himself had a more critical attitude but in the end by 1978-79 when the Sandinista front reunited in one single organization the stage east tendency had won the debate and everyone was defending the idea that they had to make an alliance with the progressive bourgeois and the west some bourgeois who were against Somoza at that time only they didn't want its revolutionary his revolutionary overthrow but they they had differences with with him and that the revolution in power should limit itself to national democratic test the socialism was not only on the agenda the Sandinista revolution takes the name from from the Sandinista front but as a matter of fact most of the uprising took place outside of the of the FSL official and formal structures the people in cities like leon in neighborhoods like moaning boy and all the places that they just rose up in a spontaneous uprising led by very young people most of them secondary school students and they took the name of the only organization that seemed to be consequent in fighting the dictatorship but in most cases the gorillas arrived only when the uprising had already taken place in 19th of July 1979 the dictatorship fell and the Sandinistas came to power but from the very beginning they the leadership of the Sandinista front carried out policy which was to stop any attempt at the revolution going beyond the formal limits of the bourgeois of the bourgeois democratic revolution they had first the coalition government which collapsed because the bourgeois withdrew from from it similar to what had happened in Cuba but instead of taking advantage of this to move forward and expropriate capitalism the leaders particularly Daniele and Humberto Ortega who the leaders of the right wing of the Sandinista front insisted that no property should be touched and carried out the most conservative possible policy in relation to the question of the economy by 1980 in 1981 as we know Regan Russell was elected president in the United States and immediately launched campaign against the Sandinista revolution with the full support of the bourgeois in in Nicaragua and they launched the Contra war a campaign of insurgency really reactionary gang of cutthroats and the worst elements in society were recruited into this contra army were armed and financed by the CIA and they were neighbouring countries we used as bases for attacking attacking a Nicaraguan revolution that is not a surprise there's a revolution counter-revolution organizes itself with the support of imperialism but what was really scandalous in Nicaragua was the fact that while the bourgeois was all on the side of count open counter-revolution they were still allowed to operate legally in the country the properties were untouched and so they could use the mass media they influenced through the Catholic Church the political parties and above all the economic power that they still had to sabotage the actions of the Sandinista government so the Sandinistas were fighting against counter-revolution with not one but two arms tied to the back by this theory of respecting bourgeois private property and they all the time the whole policy was to please Scandinavian social democracy Spanish Socialist Party try to prove to them that they were not communist they were not socialist they were they were committed to what they call a mixed economy I an economy that's dominated by the capitalist sector and this led eventually to the defeat of the Nicaraguan revolution the attempt to make a revolution halfway and progressively even some of the conquest of the revolution were being rolled back by nineteen by 1990 there was an election which the Sandinistas lost at that time the economy was in complete collapse there was hyperinflation and and it was complete disaster and many people thought well if we get rid of the Sandinistas at least we'll have an economic stability we put an end to the - this a never-ending war and so on I'd like to mention that both the Cubans the Cuban leadership and the Russians the Soviet leadership advised the Nicaraguan leadership not to follow the same path as the Cuban Revolution ie the Cuban leadership had come to power on the basis of a national democratic program and then had abolished capitalism but they insisted that this is not what shall happen in Nicaragua and they obviously had a lot of political authority yes Umberto and Daniel Ortega were already committed to such a policy but the advice that they were getting from the Cubans was do not do like we've done and it was a completely disaster whose advice which played a disasterous role in the defeat of the of the Revolution and the consequences of that we see today in Nicaragua we have a Sandinista government which has nothing to do with the conquest of the gains of the Revolution which were genuine gains gains in terms of agrarian reform although limited education health care and so on this is a Sandinista government that has ruled the country for for two mandates in agreement with concept the capitalist Confederation in agreement with owners of the industries in the maquiladora sector with agreement with a hierarchy of the Catholic Church which came to power on the basis of voting to criminalize abortion we were discussing abortion rights in in the previous session and through the book we explain how abortion rights and women's rights in general are one one aspect that allows us to to see how progressive or in which direction a particular regime is going and in the case of Nicaragua abortion to a certain extent was already legal from the 19th century but then was criminalized was even alive by the votes of the Sandinista party just before they came to power this last this last time on the basis of an agreement with a liberal party the party of the contracts the party that had been carried out carrying out the counter revolutionary war against the against the Nicaraguan revolution and now finally we come to the situation in Venezuela because the situation in Venezuela has many parallels with the situation in Nicaragua there are also obviously differences the the Venezuelan revolution came to power through an election 20 years ago on 6th of December 1998 it's now nearly 20 years Shabet was elected for the first time and he his election represented entry of the masses onto the scene of politics after a whole series of events that had happened before and a complete discrediting of the previous regime at the beginning sabbith also had a program he even said his program was the Third Way during his election campaign in 98 he came to Britain he went to Oxford gave a speech met with Tony Blair and he said I like his idea of a third way something that's not capitalism and not socialism and basically his idea was to democratize the political process in Venezuela and to a certain extent use the oil wealth for the benefit of the majority of the population that's very limited program but the program which in the conditions of Venezuela the ruling class will not accept that it will be carried out fully and so in 2002 we saw how the ruling class organized the military uprising coup against this Roman a government that was not communist was not socialist by any stretch of imagination was just proposing some minor progressive reforms that we fully support but just that just demonstrates the reactionary character the reactionary character of the of the ruling class the bourgeoisie in this countries I mean the whole of the bourgeois carried out this coup against Chavez in fact they were so full of themselves so confident that when they appointed the new president after the coup in April 2002 they had a meeting in a room bit bigger than this with four hundred people and they signed an attendance sheet and in this attendance list you can see the who's who of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie if Sabbath had expropriated the properties of the people in that room and he had ample reason for doing that capitalism will have been abolished in in Venezuela overnight but he did not do that and every single Junction he attempted to again compromise with the bourgeois appeal to the bourgeois to invest and so on by 2005 and this is also an interesting point Sabbath changed this line he said while he had previously talked about the Third Way he now said the only way to achieve the aims of the Bolivarian revolution is by abolishing capitalism overcoming capitalism can only be done through socialism now we fully agree with that and that is again a demonstration of the permanent revolution the problem is that these words were never fully taken into practice and Venezuela all the way up to 2013 when Sabbath died continued to be a capitalist country we have to say that this confusion existed within the whole Bolivarian movement but also within Chavez yourself one day he will be talking about socialism so the supporting workers taking over factories you will be talking about workers control and encouraging workers to take over the factories which they did the next day he will be appealing to the bourgeois to be productive and invest and so on so there was a lot of confusion in his in his own political thinking but I think it's still very significant that he moved from a position of saying no we not socialist we want a third way or whatever the opposition was said what he said the leader of a revolutionary movement involving millions of people is said the only way forward is socialism and that really opened the debate in Venezuela and Beyond about that question by the time Sabbath died in 2013 in his last election he he made a speech called turn under rather golpe that Iman and in this speech he basically expressed his frustration at the lack of progress of the revolution he said there's two things that not been solved one that the economy is still a capitalist economy and and the state is still a bourgeois state the economy must become a socialist economy and the state Boudreaux State must be pulverized we must create to create a worker state based on the on the communes which at that time were starting to be created but nothing of that was then carried out into practice and Maduro if anything when he was elected in 2013 turned further to the right further to was compromise with a capitalist and the capitalists were in no mood to compromise they were sabotaging the economy well above all the attempt to combine elements of state control and regulation of the economy without creating a nationalized and planned economy completely disrupted the Venezuelan economy and that is the reason for the current economic crisis now the Bulls you are all shouting or situation in Venezuela is terrible yes the situation in Venezuela is terrible this is one of the worst economic crisis in recent history 40% of GDP has been knocked out there is hyperinflation in other know the IMF says the inflation will reach 1 million percent this year I think that's that's probably an exaggeration but it's not far from the from the tools and the living conditions of the masses collapsed but that's not the result of socialism because there's no socialism in Venezuela that's precisely the result of the failure to nationalize the economy and plan the economy under a democratic plan of the of the economy with the participation of the workers so obviously III don't have the time to go into detail into each one of these countries but you can see that the the common there are maybe one or two common threads in these three revolutions that we want to bring out in this book because this book is not just about history is about revolutionary strategy for Latin America today and these main threads are one they can be no genuine advance even on national democratic and imperialist demands of agrarian reform which still has to be covered in many countries of genuine liberation from imperialism and so on without the abolition of capitalism and without the workers really taking power and number two this requires this requires a revolutionary leadership equipped with a Marxist program this cannot be improvised and in all of these three cases including in the case of Cuba where the revolution then acquired the number of bureaucratic features came under the influence of the Soviet Union and there was never a genuine regime of workers democracy a revolutionary leadership equipped with the clear Marxist problem is required for the revolution to be successful and to and to follow the correct the correct path and without that the road to hell is paved with good intentions we're not here judging where the chariot was honest in his speeches the problem is that his shortcomings in carrying out even what he was talking about has led to the disaster now and and this is a lesson for all of these revolutions the case of Nicaragua is particularly is particularly striking a situation where you have now an extremely repressive regime 200 or more people have been killed in protests since since April in alliance with the bourgeois and the most reactionary elements of the Catholic Church and so on and this regime still calls itself Sandinista it claims the legacy of the Sandinista revolution which had nothing to do with with this and in Venezuela we're moving very very rapidly to a situation like that whether it's a regime that calls itself Bolivarian but has nothing to do with the revolutionary traditions as smashed workers control is compromising with with bourgeois is opening up the country for foreign multinational investment only this time not from the US but from China Russia and other countries Iran Turkey and it's a complete disaster so therefore studying theory and studying the spirits having the experience of previous revolutions is absolutely required is an absolute requirement for preparing the forces for the new revolutionary events that are gonna take place end up in a victory for our class in one country or another which will then open the floodgates throughout Latin America will have an impact beyond the continent

Channel: Socialist Appeal

Views: 3,686

Keywords: latin america, bolivarian revolution, sandinistas, hugo chavez, venezuela, cuban revolution, nicaragua, fidel castro, che guevara, socialism, marxism, revolution

Id: kbuc0PUGnd8

Length: 47min 28sec (2848 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 29 2018