Reddit reviews We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution

Venezuela likely has the most mobilized and organized population in the world aside from perhaps Rojava. Each group within this kaleidoscope of social movements maintains varying degrees of autonomy from the state.

We should seek out and support those leftist organizations which advocate keeping the revolution independent from the government. We can be critical of the Chavez/Maduro-run state without throwing away all the legitimate progress made by millions of people there. And of course we must totally oppose US imperialism.

A great book on this subject (though a bit dated now) is We Created Chavez. Another good one is Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots.

I'm not so interested in trying to go back and forth on whether the major political party leadership is socialist or not. What I'm more interested, and what I think socialists should be more interested in, is the underlying social and political movements that produced and is producing "Bolivarian Socialism". These movements are diverse and multi-faceted--they can include everybody from liberal-progressives to members of the old military dictatorships to revolutionary communists.

Judging from books like We Created Chavez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution, revolutionary communists and socialists do have a very strong presence in Latin America, so I'm hopeful for the future. I'm also hoping that infrastructure gets developed to import their movements into North America.

https://www.amazon.com/We-Created-Ch%C3%A1vez-Venezuelan-Revolution/dp/0822354527

ignore the low stars rating, its from the various times GCM ended up in the news for saying shit like kill whitey fuck the troops

It's amusing to hear the pro-Chavez moustache guy explaining that businesses close because they don't want to sell at lower regulated prices, as if it is the fault of the businesses.

Of course they don't want to operate if if it involves losing money. Businesses are created to make money. Similarily to him writing a book and then selling it. He is not giving it away, is he? Would he be ok if I post a link here with a pirated PDF of the book?

Do these guys intentionally blind themselves to these very simple concepts?

You don't know enough about Venezuela, comrade. Here's where to start.

Always watch critically, and I doubt their coverage of Syria will be all that great, but there is some serious horseshit going on in the US about Venezuela. Fucking nobody knows anything and the state supports the violent reactionaries.

I don't think we can agree. The most radical democratic, libertarian projects in the world we/are being carried out in Venezuela. 99.9% of the stuff you read about the country is misleading, at best. Even the liberal/progressive press is guilty of this; one libertarian socialist, Michael Albert, has recently written about it. ( I would point out that since his article, progressive news outlets have been much better)

One good book from a Libertarian left perspective, which goes ino the positives and negatives of the socialist party in Venezuela is We created Chavez: a people's history of the Venezuelan Revolution by George Ciccarello-Maher