Over and over we have seen the way the politics of the left bifurcates in two directions, as we see here with the leftist liberalism contrasts with explicit socialism. In fact, Venezuela is in limbo because the ‘Bolivarian revolution’ isn’t really socialist. But the point is that the DMNC model shows the way to unite the opposites into one model: we have a liberal system remorphed as socialist. Which implies that the system has expropriated capital in the large. That’s a stark requirement, but without that the result simply struggles against the visible/invisible enemy of global capital and is hard-pressed to find a path beyond muddle.
Isn’t it possible to construct such as system while leaving capital alone? Since these cases are condemned to try we can’t reject the possibility out of hand, but the reality is that our model is and remains a basic liberal system in which capital in the large enters a Commons. But while this is too difficult under most circumstances our model seems up in the air. Indeed, but the reality is that the left has been kicked around in the result of its own compromises. Cuba achieved this, but still fails our definition because it is basically an oligarchic ‘communist’ elite at work, dictatorship of the Marxist bourgeosie, Cuba’s hidden hypocrisy and ‘communism manque’, in our sense of requiring socialist democracy, else it is not democracy. We will one suspects enter a period of revolutionary potential in unstable times: it is important to have a new model beyond the Marxist which has always confused all parties at the crucial moment. But against our view it remains the case that the idea of the Commons as against state ownership requires a legal framework, not so hard to produce, but so far, our abstraction.

With leftist leaders winning back power in Latin America, how will they handle the “Venezuela issue”? Ociel López breaks it down.

Source: Crisis & Critique: Venezuela and the New Latin American Left | MR Online