This is just sad.
The post-Chavez Maduro government is trying to control whatever in order to keep power and presumably still claim the high moral ground of its unrealizable socialist-populist ideals, having taken over a series of electronics stores:
‘As the economic situation rapidly worsens in Venezuela, the government is growing increasingly authoritarian and is now actively undermining the foundations of the country’s already deteriorated social fabric’
A timeline and a discussion of how soaring inflation is being caused by political factors.
Take it from a bright Venezuelan:
‘Chavez is actually not an orthodox Marxist in the sense that Marx would have recognized (which was why I linked to the sort of Marxist ‘prophecy’ of people like Chavez from the ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’). Chavez is more along the lines of what traditional Marxists referred to as ‘Bonapartist’ (borrowing from the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte). The whole theory on which Chavez based his political life was that the working class (or what passed for it, in a country like Venezuela) *could not* make a revolution on its own, and that someone else (the military and the Socialist Party, led by him) needed to make the revolution for them. ‘
Christopher Hitchens at Slate-Hugo Boss:
‘The boss loves to talk and has clocked up speeches of Castro-like length. Bolívar is the theme of which he never tires. His early uniformed movement of mutineers—which failed to bring off a military coup in 1992—was named for Bolívar.’
Maybe people shouldn’t be getting their political advice from Sean Penn:
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…Peter Singer discusses Hegel and Marx…On Mario Vargas Llosa-Adam Kirsch At The City Journal: ‘The Dream Of The Peruvian’