In the second part of our interview, Steve Ellner, Associate Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives and a retired professor of the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela, speaks to Federico Fuentes about opposition to United States imperialism and the left’s appraisal of the Nicolás Maduro government in Venezuela.
Steve Ellner
Steve Ellner, Associate Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives and a retired professor of the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela, speaks to Federico Fuentes about the need to prioritise the struggle against United States imperialism and the challenges for international solidarity.
The issue that has generated most heat on the left is not whether Russia's invasion is justifiable, writes Steve Ellner, but whether raising NATO distracts from the atrocity of the invasion.
United States president Joe Biden's administration is urging the Venezuelan opposition to participate in the state and local elections slated for November 21, writes Steve Ellner. However, Washington’s change of tack doesn't mean it won't continue meddling.
A reporter recently told US President Donald Trump he had a moral responsibility to help Iran as it is hit by the new coronavirus. No mention was made about Venezuela. Why Iran and not Venezuela? Steve Ellner explains why.
Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi’s decision to oppose impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump is motivated by fear of the rise of a leftist pole within or from outside the Democratic Party, writes Steve Ellner.
Since its outset, the Donald Trump administration has ratcheted up pressure on Venezuela and radicalised its positions, writes Steve Ellner.
There is a growing body of pro-establishment statements in the United States opposing the possibility of US military intervention in Venezuela, writes Steve Ellner.
The latest expression of this position is a New York Times editorial titled “Stay Out of Venezuela, Mr. Trump”, published on September 11.
At first glance the editorial is a welcome statement that counters the careless war-mongering declarations coming from the ilk of Marco Rubio and a number of high-ranking Trump administration officials, as well as Donald Trump himself.
The refusal by presidential candidate Henri Falcón to recognise the results bodes poorly for Nicolas Maduro’s new term as president. The consolidation of a moderate bloc within the opposition that Falcón represented — which recognises the government’s legitimacy — would have significantly cut into the strength of the more intransigent or radical parties on the right and provided Venezuelan politics with much needed stability.
Plebeian Power: Collective Action & Indigenous, Working-Class & Popular Identities in Bolivia
By Alvaro Garcia Linera
Haymarket Books, 2014
345 pp, US$28.00
Alvaro Garcia Linera, twice-elected vice-president of Bolivia, is the continent’s most prominent theoretician-politician to place 21st century Latin American left thought in a Marxist framework.
Venezuela is again grabbing headlines in the media, amid allegations of lack of democracy and exaggerated accounts of nonetheless very real economic problems.
Much commentary puts the problems facing the country down to the alleged “failed populism” of Venezuela’s pro-poor Bolivarian Revolution. Last month, the New York Times even compared Donald Trump to Venezuela’s late socialist president Hugo Chavez in an article titled “What Hugo Chavez can teach us about Donald Trump”.
“Oil didn’t wreck Venezuela’s economy, socialism did.” That’s what Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, of the Washington-based conservative think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote earlier this year in his reflection on Venezuela’s deepening economic crisis.
Gobry, a prolific writer for Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, criticised Venezuelan analysts who scapegoat oil, even though he recognised that declining oil prices have aggravated the nation’s difficulties.
“The culprit is clear and obvious,” Golbry contends. “The problem is Venezuela's authoritarian socialism.”
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