Campbell and Davis render chavismo banal, reducing it to the recklessness of Chavez’s charisma and people’s adoration of a now dead leader. Foreign Correspondent disappoints with ‘Venezuela Undercover’. A good-looking but trivial piece of ‘investigative journalism’. The 30-minute documentary by reporter Eric Campbell and producer Mike Davis, begins by asserting that Venezuela is, today, a ‘disaster’. Though very little in the documentary is offered that might allow the viewer to understand why ‘Venezuela is a disaster’. The imagery of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, looks colourful and striking on screen, but the material accompanies a formulaic narration. Caracas is either manic and dangerous or a stagnant and politically depressed city. The assumption that Campbell or Davis are capable of reporting on Venezuela is naïve. That they should report on Venezuela is arrogant. Beyond Campbell’s statements on ‘populism’, ‘socialism’ and ‘oil wealth’, very little is said beyond a reference t...
It's already quite hard to be Left in Venezuela given that much of what is debated strictly follows what Chávez' Government/Party puts forward. But something that makes it even harder to back, support, criticise and debate with peers and compañeros within our Left Government, is the quantity of entirely apologetic stuff put forward and written by supporters within the country and beyond its borders. Solidarity is a tricky thing. On this point, see the latest in the 'solidarity genre' by the likes of Federico Fuentes in the Australian Green Left Weekly here . To respond to this would involve articulating the logic and limits of solidarity. How does one do solidarity? Solidarity with whom? How does your solidarity 'over there' engage with our struggles over here... The point is that so much that would have to be acknowledged and questioned, is simply too intricate to be voiced in the work of solidarity, due to the way in which we usually carry out th...
The theft of wood and the 'origins' of Marx's critique of political eocnomy. Barbara Harriss-White writes: 'At the age of 24 and soon after completing his doctoral thesis, Marx wrote the Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood (1842), in which he recognized private property as theft, the interests embodied in it as antithetical to those represented in customary law and the state as the guardian of private property. Arguably, the seed of his later political economy was germinated by this early analysis of wood theft which he wrote for the Rheinische Zeitung' (p. 102). Let us then now read such Debates. More later.
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