Well we’re kind of conflating capitalism with US military adventurism now. I’m not willing to concede that you can’t have a govt with highly regulated, strong social safety net capitalism, and still eschew military adventurism. I’ll also never be convinced that this [unclear but definitely not capitalism] brave new unknown world isn’t going to end up with much more military adventurism, if not outright war.
Do you think Bernie would say his ideal US is closer to a Scandinavian system, or closer to seizing the means, killing the landlords, and ending capitalism entirely?
I am writing about the scourge of colonialism, the USA’s evil foreign adventures, and the perils of globalization right now in my book. Believe me, I’m not ignoring anything. I knew the broad overlay, but reading the actual details has been incredibly eye-opening. But I’m also not convinced that the US turning into the Soviet Union is going to make things better for the rest of the world. Even a newer, better Soviet Union. Or any state-controlled system. Or anarchy on a scale of 350M people, which sounds like warlords and road warriors to me.
I’ve just read 6 books about the Nicaragua revolution - all of the authors were between neutral to very pro-Sandinista. There is no doubt that the US caused most of Nicaragua’s problems, and completely hamstrung the Sandinista’s to the point that we have no idea if they would have succeeded in what they were trying to do.
But it also seems some stuff like fixing prices and land reforms were extremely unpopular with the exact peasants they were supposed to help. And this was even before the Contras ratcheted up and made life hell. Even the most pro-Sandinista authors tend to argue that the Sandinistas were learning form their mistakes, and moving towards a more free market system in some areas where a state-controlled system didn’t seem to be working as planned. IE - huge black markets sprang up in the price-controlled items. Peasants refused to grow cotton, rice and wheat for the prices the govt was paying - resulting in all kinds of weird situations like young urban Sandinistas moving out to try to make a go of farming as a patriotic act.
The Sandinistas were actually pretty moderate by Marxist-adjacent revolutionary standards, and like most of those authors, I’d really like to have seen what would have happened without Reagan’s singular obsession with skull-fucking them at every turn. But even being moderate, a lot of their most Soviet Union style state policies seem to be have been very unpopular.
And of course - when the originally pure-hearted Sandinistas realized they were going to be out of power in the 90s, they stole everything they could get their hands on - privatizing all kinds of state-owned businesses. Something about a decade + in power and the scum rises to the top I guess. And now you basically have Ortega running a Putin-style sham democracy.
As fucked up of results as democracy can produce, if you can somehow preserve it, at least it seems to stave off dictatorships. In countries like Nicaragua or Russia without long histories of legitimate democracy, it seems a lot easier to corrupt into a sham democracy.
Before that I read a bunch of books about Honduras, the original Banana Republic and one of the countries getting most hosed right now by globalism. It’s completely fucked up that poor Hondurans are subject to the race to the bottom system where capital is free to chase profits around the globe, while the people who produce the goods and services are bound to the country they were born in.
But unlike what the US did with the Sandinistas - they give tons of aid to Honduras and have NGOs trying all kinds of things like setting campesinos up with coffee farms. But then coffee prices crash so they all try to sneak into the US for work.
My argument is for now just give migrants work visas like we do with Mexico. We give out 250k H2A and H2B unskilled labor visas to Mexico, and we give hardly any to Honduras. Just in the last few years they’ve allotted 10k work visas, but Hondurans don’t even know they’re available and the system is hard to navigate. So they still are paying coyotes $2-$5k and all that money goes to organized crime - instead of say a plane ticket to Houston and a lot more to get set up in the US.
Almost all of the men who leave from rural villages return to Honduras at some point, and most of the women. They don’t want to spend their lives in the US - they just want to save up enough to build a house and come back set up. Ideally things would get better in their own country so they wouldn’t need to migrate. But for now we should just let them in imo.
Obviously the people fleeing gang violence (which the US helped cause of course) are a different story. They deserve asylum.
So anyway I feel like this is something concrete we can advocate for. But if your only answer to every problem is always just “abolish capitalism”, that to me doesn’t seem that practical or useful. I don’t see how the US abolishing capitalism is going to help anyone in Honduras in the short term, and I’m not sure about long term.
I dunno, I guess I’m just the bourgeoisie and I’m old. If things get so bad that the youth in the US overturn the whole system, so be it. But I also think there’s a path that doesn’t have to end in bloody revolution, and doesn’t oppress the rest of the world.
