American socialists and a bad trip (#17)
The DSA's Venezuela trip shows cracks on the left and quintessentially American blindspots.
Do you identify as a socialist?
Odds are you probably don’t (or maybe you do! who knows, I don’t have the data for these kinds of things) but the mere fact that you’re reading this newsletter tells me you are at least interested in hearing about political drama, no matter its origins (we have this in common).
The latest drama comes from the far-left camp of the Democratic Socialists of America. The organization most famously linked to progressive figureheads like Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT-D) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-D) landed in hot water last month when members of its International Political Committee traveled to Venezuela and met with President Nicolás Maduro. Given Maduro’s controversial presidency — contested since 2013 when he succeeded late President Hugo Chávez following his death — many DSA supporters voiced criticism over the trip, with some critics painting the DSA as naive Americans playing right into the propaganda machine of an authoritarian ruler.
Among critics was Germania Rodriguez Poleo, a Venezuelan American writer who wrote about the trip in her eponymous newsletter. Poleo ripped into the naval-gazing and touristy nature of the trip, describing the delegation as “revolutionary cosplayers”:
They see every failing of socialism through rose-colored glasses. To them, street dogs are “chavista commune dogs”. When the regime shows them a building in construction, they see the promise of communal, free living - if only “the people” started stealing private property. Of course, they fail to mention that in Venezuelan socialism, “the people” means “the rich chavista elite.”
[note: the “Chavista commune dogs” line refers to this cringe tweet posted by one of the DSA reps during the Venezuela trip.]
First thing’s first: what were DSA reps doing in Venezuela? According to a GoFundMe page to fund the Venezuela excursion (plus a separate trip to Lima, Peru), the group went to attend an international summit of socialist organizations called the Congreso Bicentenario de los Pueblos (the Bicentennial Congress of the Peoples) held between June 21 to July 1 in Caracas (the page also notes that a portion of the funds would be for “Aid for the Venezuelan people”). As they only raised $5,200 through their crowdsourcing page, it’s unclear how exactly the organization ended up wholly funding the trip. Poleo’s newsletter suggests the trip was funded by the Maduro administration, though I believe that remains speculation at this point.
What is absolutely certain is that they did meet with Maduro and, separately, with Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza who self-identifies as a “militant socialist” and “Chavista” (a label for Chávez stans who ascribe to the late president’s iron-fist style of ruling). The delegation also toured the country’s public communes, which critics speculate were guided and arranged by Maduro’s government. Most notably perhaps is the fact that the DSA did not meet with the socialist opposition to the government, the Popular Will Party, led by Juan Guaidó who has claimed to be the legitimate president with the backing of the international community.
In any case, the DSA’s public support for Maduro left a bitter taste among some supporters. But public criticism over the trip has opened a larger conversation among socialists on what ~real socialism~ is and what it means when left-wing folks call themselves “internationalists,” an ideology of transnational solidarity with the world’s working class. It reveals factions among the far-left in the U.S., who apparently can’t agree on what being a socialist means: is it aligning with the ruling elite of a country simply because they claim to be “socialists” or does it mean something deeper? And I thought it was only MAGA supporters who were confused about socialism!
Despite popular belief to the contrary, Venezuela isn’t actually a socialist country. According to Merriam-Webster, socialism is an economic or political theory that advocates for “collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.” In other words, a socialist country typically has major sectors, like housing and healthcare, controlled and run by the public or the government, so that these commons can be managed to be used freely for public benefit.
It’s important to realize that just because a country has sectors that are socialized does *not* make it a socialist country. Take the U.S., which has socialized sectors like social security, free public education until grade 12, and partially socialized healthcare (Medicaid). Canada and Britain also have free healthcare systems. Yet, nobody would call any of these nations socialist countries.
This also goes for Nordic nations like Finland and Norway, renowned for their free healthcare and education and relative distribution of wealth; the fact that they have generous welfare systems doesn’t make them socialist countries. Rather, they use a hybrid economic and social system known as the Nordic Model. Evidently, there’s a distinction between “socialist” and “socialized.”
Venezuela’s oil sector, the primary resource which once made it South America’s richest country (according to my partner’s Venezuelan family, gas was so cheap it used to cost just 50 cents to fill up a full car tank) is indeed nationalized and controlled by the government. But the fact that western corporations had been extracting oil from Venezuela with heavy royalties made to the state government throughout the 20th Century, and the corruption and mismanagement within the industry later on after it was nationalized make Venezuela’s oil industry “socialized” only on paper. Maduro’s party may be the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), but the government was always cozy with foreign capitalist interests.
Beyond that, Maduro’s government has been responsible for the imprisonment of leftist worker activists like Rodney Álvarez and others, which runs antithetical to the supposedly socialist ideals of labor rights and democratic justice. As the activist collective Venezuelan Voices noted:
The dictatorial Chavista government of Maduro has nothing to do with socialism. On the contrary, it perpetuates capitalist exploitation in a country where private companies, banks and transnational oil, telecommunications, mining and other sectors extract a gigantic surplus value by paying wages of 3 to 5 dollars. All within the framework of the application of a severe economic adjustment that is now complemented by the approval of the so-called anti-blockade law and the law of special economic zones, which would involve the privatization of companies and assigning geographic areas with tax and tariff benefits. With these laws, the Maduro government offers the country’s wealth to foreign investment and transnational companies, showing its true face of false socialism.
This is the problem with political theory and labels: they don’t necessarily work in the real world. Reality is complex and things don’t always fit into little boxes. Venezuela and the ruckus around the DSA trip is a perfect example — the DSA wants to support the Venezuelan government purely on the basis that it’s a supposedly socialist country (birds of a feather, right?) despite its authoritarianism.
Also because the country is struggling against debilitating U.S. sanctions, showing solidarity to Venezuela is meant to perform the progressive ideal of anti-imperialism, the rejection of influence from colonial western countries like the U.S. (though new burgeoning global powers like China and Russia, both of which have deep holds in Venezuela, could also count as imperialist powers today). But “showing solidarity” while turning a blind eye to the authoritarian crackdown by Maduro’s government, which has killed hundreds of dissenters over the years, rings hollow.
While the DSA seems to cling to the notion that Venezuela’s turmoil is solely attributed to the heavy embargo enacted by the U.S. over decades (read more here but dismiss the parts about U.S. sanctions as ploys for “democracy”), many Venezuelans blame the country’s history of government corruption and incompetence. Just as opinions vary over Hong Kong’s fate among Hong Kongers, there are different takes among Venezuelans: there are pro-government “colectivos” and there are anti-Chavismos. Some support Maduro while others see him as a tyrant. There are even those who argue that U.S. intervention is welcome because the country is in dire need of capital, which Venezuela historically always got from foreign investors thanks to its wealth in oil.
The only thing clear is that Venezuela’s situation is complex, and multiple things can be true at once. This is where the disconnect with (mostly American) socialists arguing about whether to support Venezuela’s government comes from. The lack of awareness shown by the DSA’s trip is a quintessentially American combo of ignorance and arrogance. Honestly, they could’ve skipped the trip until they established a strong unified position about Venezuela.
[Translation: This guy asking Maduro for help with free elections and democracy is like asking Diosdado (Cabello, the corrupt president of Venezuela’s National Assembly) to stop stealing. How funny.]
But as Clifton Ross, a self-described “recovering Chavista” American, wrote for the Caracas Chronicles, a line from the DSA’s proposal ahead of their virtual convention this August, stating the DSA intends to establish relations with socialist governments like Venezuela’s, was removed in the proposal’s recent draft after backlash from the trip, revealing the DSA’s own confusion:
“This debate comes to the fore in the larger question of what real socialism is after ‘real socialism.’ For Bernie Sanders, and presumably, for a significant part of the DSA, it doesn’t mean what it historically meant: the state ownership of the means of production and distribution. We can either go with the real ‘socialisms’ of today — according to The Week, the list is “surprisingly small”: Cuba, China, Vietnam and Laos — or go the hipster route and just use the word as a shibboleth to signal that you’re cool. The DSA takes the middle way between these two routes toward a definition.”
But nuance is no doubt challenging when you live insulated in the great U-S-of-A, having the luxury of touring chaos elsewhere, then leaving it behind thinking you know all about a country’s plight. It has the same vibes as the “savior tourism” of white westerners, who go to poor African countries to build a hut and take photos with skinny Black kids playing dirt football, returning to wherever they came from to become self-appointed “experts” and gab about ~the beauty of Africa. It’s a romanticization of poverty and suffering that folks from developing countries, like me, are used to seeing from westerners, who are so sheltered they lose the capacity to accommodate hard realities.
I think it is this that has mostly irked many of the DSA’s critics, who I’ve noticed either have a real connection to Venezuela or have international backgrounds. People, including Venezuelans, are telling them that the system (or, rather more precisely, Chavismo) isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But the DSA and its hardcore supporters don’t want to hear about it because that disrupts their ideals about faraway countries they see through rose-colored glasses.
BILLIONAIRES HEAD TO SPACE AS EARTHLINGS GROW INCREASINGLY TIRED OF THEM
After news broke that billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson were competing to see who could use their empire of wealth to go to space *just because*, people were understandably upset. Look at these useless billionaires, wasting money on some vanity project! These men with their incessant need for pee-pee measuring contests! But after a while, people began looking for silver linings because it was the only thing they could do. Some warmed up to the idea of Bezos’s and Branson’s space trips, mostly welcoming the thought of launching unwanted billionaires off the planet.
Both Bezos and Branson have returned safely from their separate excursions into space. If you couldn’t be bothered to follow the news about their vanity space trips (which, good for you), here are some of the funny/weird/bizarre things that happened:
🌎 Someone started a Change.org petition titled “DO NOT ALLOW JEFF BEZOS TO RETURN TO EARTH.” The subheader of the tongue-in-cheek petition read like so: “Billionaires should not exist... on earth, or in space, but should they decide the latter, they should stay there.” It got 169,475 signatures from supporters in one month.
🌎 Both Branson and Bezos had very different choices in their travel companions, or who they chose to go to space with. Branson traveled with chosen team members from his company Virgin Galactic. Bezos, meanwhile, went into space with a ragtag team made up of himself, his brother, a rich Dutch teenager, and Wally Funk, a trained astronaut who never got her chance in space and really the only qualified human on that flight.
🌎 Elon Musk, the odd billionaire left out of this ridiculous space race, paid a visit to Branson at his house… at 3 o’clock in the morning ahead of his launch. What for? To wish him good luck on his trip. Is Elon Musk secretly Asian? Because there’s a photo of the two of them from Musk’s impromptu visit showing the Tesla founder barefoot in Branson’s kitchen while the house owner is in his sneakers.
🌎 Bezos’ group took a number of aviation-related mementos with them on their flight, including Amelia Earhart’s aviator goggles that she wore during her famous cross-Atlantic solo flight. I’m not sure what the symbolism was supposed to be here but, as a woman, it reads quite funny to me.
If you wanna know the full details of their trips and what the difference was between the two flights, here’s a good summary of it all.
While this is all very cool I guess for these rich men that they can do that, it’s clear that there was no bigger purpose they had hoped to achieve other than to secure bragging rights. And, as many critics have pointed out, the fact that they have the luxury of pretending to be astronauts while the environment deteriorates and the planet remains ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, serves as a reminder of just how much billionaires are *definitely* *not* just like us. As Shannon Stirone wrote in The Atlantic:
Anyone would want a break from this planet, but the billionaires are virtually the only ones who are able to leave.
Do you have feelings or thoughts about these rich men and their extraterrestrial manhood measuring contest? If not, that’s valid. If you do, sound off in the comments!
TWEET OF THE WEEK
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SOME GOOD READS
🔥 Severe inequalities dug up by the pandemic have radicalized many, including those making a living in one of the most prolific hubs of inequality in the country. Meet the Hollywood socialists. | The Hollywood Reporter
🔥 Teen idol Olivia Rodrigo’s White House visit to promote the government’s vaccination campaign generated tons of buzz last week. It also served as a White House digital blitz to combat online misinformation about the vaccine. | Salon
🔥 Contaminants have seeped into our lives so much without us knowing that a new study found chemicals called PFAS in the breast milk of a test group of new mothers in Seattle. | The Seattle Times
🔥 A culture writer’s jarring account of her first maddening reporting trip post-vaccination to Cannes, where the French continue to, oui, oui, not GAF. | Vulture
🔥 Congratulations to Ireland for finally adding the term “person of color” to their official lexicon as the proper language to refer to people who aren’t white. What were POC called before? The “devil” or “blue people” in Gaelic, apparently. | Guardian
🔥 After historic protests took over Cuba last week, President Miguel Diaz-Canel is now trying to spin the narrative over the Caribbean nation’s unrest. | Al Jazeera
🔥 In the weeks following the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moise, the island country will be functioning without a president as officials work to hold “fresh elections” ASAP. | France 24
🖊️ Asians are bold and diverse. Check out my special project curating the 2021 Power of Diversity: Asian 100 List, featuring the most influential Asian American leaders on the scene in New York politics. | City & State NY
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Stay grounded,
Natasha
EDITORIAL CORRECTION: Previously, I mistakenly wrote that “western corporations were allowed to extract oil without regulation or taxes under Chávez” which is inaccurate. Historically, Venezuela’s oil was heavily extracted by western companies BEFORE Chávez with HIGH ROYALTIES paid to the Venezuelan government up until the 1970s. This edition of the newsletter has been updated to reflect the correction.