There seems to be more and more of these reactionary socialists popping up. They somehow assume the capitalists will just allow them to be democratically elected and take their wealth from them. How can they be this naive, are they controlled opposition?
It seems they’re too scared to move further left because they still believe all the scary things about ML states, but when pressed on how they would defend their new socialist state from capitalists/imperialists, they hand wave it away with vague ideas of cooperation.
What is the best way to deal with them, and how many here were DemSocs before becoming MLs? If so, what convinced you?
I agree that many socialists of the global south are more democratic and are also anti-imperialist, but the case that is worrying to me is that of Allende and Pinochet, Allende was democratic and was ultimately killed and replaced by a Fascist that repudiated democracy. Allende represented the right things, but his death proved, to me at least, that the right has no worry about being undemocratic to achieve their goals and I sorta think the left should be just as willing to betray democracy in favor of the working class. You also made some very good points that I am interested in, you had a good analysis of this tbh
You bring up an interesting example. Allende belongs to a long list of democrats targeted for regime change, like Arbenz, Sukarno and many others. However even revolutionaries fell prey to imperialist aggression, as was the infinitely sad case of the beloved Thomas Sankara.
In the XXth century the only way for a socialist government to survive was to turn into a police state. Just look at how quickly the USSR fell after political reform. But lately regime change attempts by western imperialists are failing more often than not. The coups in Honduras and Bolivia were overturned, and soon the same will happen in Brasil. Color revolution attempts in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Kazhakstan, Belarus and others have failed, as have the attempts to overthrow the Houthis and Al Assad.
IMO the reason for this is simple, neoliberalism has weakened the US and the West as eventually happens with all imperial powers. At the start of the XXth century the British empire missed out on the 2nd Industrial Revolution which took place in the US and Germany. The brightest british minds were devoted to extracting value from their high-margin rentier economy rather than innovating, which led the UK to simply stop being a world power after WWII. The US is currently on the same track, it’s been left out of the 4th Industrial Revolution which is raging in East Asia. Nowadays Asia represents more than half the purchasing power of the world and growing, that’s why the West can’t project power like it once did.
That is true, the coup on Venezuela that was foiled by fishermen was laughably bad. And I totally agree that the East is now becoming the next bastion of infrastructure change. It’s interesting to see the US shoot itself in the foot like this, infrastructure will influence trade so the US should always be fighting to be apart of a new infrastructure project or starting new ones if it wants to compete, but they aren’t and it will definitely affect the US for decades to come