It's a familiar story.
Leftwing party pledged to bring in pro-worker reforms gets elected
enthusiastically. Puts into practice some of the promised reforms which do
actually benefit some workers. Begins to
ignore that under capitalism profits and profit-making have to have priority as
that's what drives capitalism. So, economic problems (shortages, inflation,
unemployment) develop, causing popular discontent. A majority of voters turn
against the leftwing government and boot it out, electing to power an openly
pro-capitalist party pledged to putting profits before people.
It's true that, in the case of Venezuela, the leftwing
government survived for a record 16 years but that was because it was able to
finance the pro-worker reforms out of oil rents but, when the price of oil (and
so the rent income) fell they were sunk.
Lesson: you can't
make capitalism work in the interest of the workers, even though you can bring
in some temporary pro-worker reforms. In the end the economic laws of
capitalism assert themselves as people don't see any alternative.
The problem is that the leftwing never learn from the
history lesson. They always repeat
the same mistakes over and over again, and workers spend their whole life
oscillating like a pendulum from left-to-right and right-to-left.
ALB
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