Invoking Vaclav Havel, he said it was time to stop pretending that what the western powers called a rules-based order was not a self-serving sham.
“Great powers can afford, for now, to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating,” he said
“Being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else,” he said.
“If you back down now, you’re going to lose your dignity, and that’s probably the most precious thing you can have in a democracy, it’s your dignity.”
Then how come every single time a country has attempted to adopt a heavily socialist model it fails to maintain its infrastructure and starts to see constant decay in productivity and wealth after a couple of decades?
It never seems to be able to maintain its initial momentum of a boom in improving living conditions and wealth inequality reduction, and eventually major infrastructure projects and even entire industries start falling into disrepair or cutting down due to lack of maintenance.
You say it’s not a big issue, but ask anyone who lived in the USSR between 1970-1990 or in Venezuela or in Cuba, and they’ll all say the socialist revolution brought some very needed structural changes at first, but then started letting the infrastructure and services they themselves built decay quickly and by the end almost nothing seemed to work well, everything was poorly maintained and major industries had become small, inefficient and slow.
I’m not advocating for capitalism, I understand what our lives look like and where their shortcomings are, but it doesn’t feel like the push for socialism is ever able to address the problems that precisely have turned people away from socialist models in the past. At some point surely it makes sense to learn from the mistakes of others, so, what implementation of a socialist model prevents us from slowly letting everything decay?
I personally think the European and Northern European models of regulated capitalism are preferable over any example I’ve seen of a socialist model. And I also think it’s way better than the bullshit they have in the US. Arguably all those European countries still have far too much concentrated wealth, and it makes sense to redistribute that.
dude both cuba and venezuela got massive trade embargos. that’s what caused issues, not because cubans and venezuelans don’t give a shit about their communities, come on man you gotta do some more reading or something
Ehem… I’m from Venezuela but my family escaped and moved to Colombia when I was like 15-16
Trust me, I know exactly how the entire shit collapsed, my family saw it first hand.
Trade embargoes or not even ignoring the rampant corruption, the entire government was far too inefficient and bloated. Nothing was managed properly, there was a bunch of waste and eventually not enough administrative oversight. Oil production went to the gutter not just because of trade embargoes but also because PDVSA was just terribly mismanaged. People stopped trying to get into the business and studies on oil and management became less and less common, there were far fewer qualified workers than there were during the initial boom.
I know pro-Socialists from first world countries love to imagine Venezuela went to shit because of US imperialism, and the US absolutely didn’t help, but it was bound to happen either way.
I compare Venezuela to Colombia consistently. Colombia has a lot of the same social and cultural issues and structures as Venezuela, but in Colombia if you don’t bust your ass working, you’re royally fucked. It’s brutal, and arguably it means being really poor in Colombia is worse than Venezuela to this day, but also I know Colombians who have found a professional niche and grown into their professions because their work is equivalently rewarded. That is not possible with Venezuela, and it’s not because we can’t trade with this or that country, it’s because there is no infrastructure to push our local economy, there are no mechanisms to protect up and coming businesses, there is no legal recourse to sustain anything viable. The government never managed to redistribute resources or use them to create more wealth. Instead they slowly let our institutions and infrastructure erode, failed to reinvest in education or new infrastructure and let corruption take hold of most official positions. At some point they were just trying to save themselves and the military cúpula.
I really want to believe something like socialism is viable, but I have seen absolutely no proof of it ever managing to be sustainable in the long term. Humans need some degree of incentive to push themselves to improve and to improve their own communities. The belief that humans are inherently motivated to innovation and creativity when they have their basic needs met is just not something I fully believe. Some people are like that, but I don’t think it’s enough of them to sustain a functional society.
Y si quieres hasta lo podemos hablar en español para que veas que no estoy aquí para hacer propaganda barata ni soy ningún bot ruso ni gringo ni nada.
what’s your opinion on Trump’s regime change in Venezuela?
I’m not a fan, but I’m also highly skeptical it’ll change anything for better or worse.
The chavista regime is still there untouched, and also the Americans have zero interest in making the Venezuelan people’s lives any better.
The chavistas had to go and everyone hated them. Literally I’ve never met anyone that liked Maduro and the chavista regime. But replacing one regime with another is just pure silliness. I wish the Venezuelan people had been the ones to get rid of them, but that was also wishful thinking.