--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> But, at the same
> time, it has to be admitted that the man is popular
> among a majority
> of working-class Venezuelans and has a lot of
> supporters in the rest
> of Latin America, the Middle East, and beyond.
I do not have a strong opinion one way or the other on Chavez. I would definitely not condemn him and polemicize against him the way Chuck does. I think figures like Chavez, Morales, and Castro are a post-modern form of classical bourgeois revolutionaries, not calling into question the value-form or the state, but engaging in redistributive acts while remaining firmly within the categorical forms of commodity society.
Nonetheless, I will never quite understand the point with the sort of "argument from the existing" of the type that Yoshie makes above. This seems rather similar to me to Chris Doss's argument that Putin is also admired in Russia, and that the standard of living there is improving.
These twin arguments (popularity of a statesman plus standard of living in a nation) seem to me arguments which could be used to justify almost any existing state. Merkel's Germany, Bush's U.S., CPC China, Blair's England, etc. etc.
ex-NSDAP member Adenauer's Germany also experienced the Wirtschaftswunder. Why is the popularity of a leader and the standard of living in a country an argument for supporting a particular nation-state?
Incidentally, to Mr. Chris Doss, the next time you attribute a position to me that I have never actually advocated, such as your canard about "all bourgeois nation-states being the same," I will start in kind to attribute positions to you. Let's respond to what people actually say, please? No fabrications or inventions of other positions.
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