 Now, the book is entitled Permanent Revolution in Latin America, but then it has a subtitle which says Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. When John originally proposed this book, this book was to cover much wider scope and we had an idea of having chapters or dealing with Permanent Revolution in other countries where it is important and they have an important history of revolutionary struggle in which the theory of Permanent Revolution played an important role, for instance Bolivia and others. But in the end, as the different chapters were growing in size and number of pages, we had to limit ourselves to these three countries which I think are relevant for the continent as a whole. And they also provide very good examples and indications of a positive confirmation of the Permanent Revolution and a negative confirmation of the Permanent Revolution. Now, first question we need to answer, we need to ask ourselves is what is the theory of Permanent Revolution? The theory of Permanent Revolution was first explained by Trotsky in his conclusions from the 1905 revolution in Russia and then it was systematized or crystallized in the form of a proper theory in the early 1920s in debates in the Soviet Union between Trotsky and the Stalinists who were inventing an attack against Trotsky on this question of the Permanent Revolution. And that's when Trotsky wrote the book Permanent Revolution, which we advise everyone to read. But if you want to know the center or the real meaning of Permanent Revolution, this can be explained in this quote from Trotsky where he says in his thesis on Permanent Revolution at the end of the book he says, with regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the Permanent Revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation above all of its peasant masses. So basically saying that in countries which arrived late to the capitalist development that capitalism was developed when imperialism was already dominating the world, even though in some of these countries national and democratic tasks, i.e. the tasks of the bourgeois revolution are still pending in one degree or another, this cannot be carried out by the national bourgeois. The national bourgeois by virtue of having arrived late at the scene of history is now linked and tied by a thousand threats to imperialism, to the land owners and therefore no genuine progress on the national and democratic revolution can take place, neither on the question of agrarian reform or genuine national independence, genuine struggle against imperialism, if these revolutions are led by the bourgeois class in these countries. Not only this, it also says that therefore this task now falls onto the shoulders of the working class, however small in numbers it might be in these countries, but remember that in Russia in 1917 the working class was also very small in numbers. It is the working class, the only class in this type of countries that can carry out these tasks by taking power in its own hands. Not only this, but once having taken power this class will not stop purely at the national democratic demands, but it will start to infringe onto bourgeois property rights, it will start to move in the direction against capitalism and the theory of permanent revolution also says that these tasks cannot be fully completed on the national arena but have to be linked with the international revolution. This is a very summarized explanation of what the theory of permanent revolution means. Now in the book we argue that this applies to Latin America completely, not only today still applies today, but it applies in Latin America for the last 100 or 200 years since these countries won independence. That is that the national bourgeois was too backward, too linked with imperialism, too linked with the landowners to carry out any genuine progressive role or to carry out any genuine national liberation and democratic struggle. Now as we know, as I said just a minute ago, this theory was then contested by the Stalinists who in reality recovered the Menshevik theory of two stages and made it their theory and they implemented it throughout the communist international in the mid to the late 1920s. And this had an impact also in Latin America. The two-stage theory of revolution in backward countries means that because the main tasks in these countries are national democratic or bourgeois tasks, therefore the leadership of the revolution should fall on the shoulders of the bourgeois or the progressive sections of the bourgeois liberals in these countries and the working class should play an auxiliary role. And only later, after a period of capitalist, genuine capitalist development, will the tasks of the socialist revolution be opposed. This is not just a theory which had been disproven by the experience of 1917 in Russia, but it is also a theory that led to major disasters for the working class revolutionary movement in the cities of countries, chiefly in China in the 1920s. So Latin America has been always a big debate about the character of the socio-economic formation of Latin America under the Spanish colonization and later after independence in the 19th century. There are some particularly Stalinist authors who argue that Latin America was feudal in its socio-economic formation. Not only it was feudal under the Spanish colony, but it was feudal all the way up to whatever the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s, or that there was still a semi-feudal regime in many of these countries. And from this they drew the conclusion that therefore the revolution had to be an anti-feudal or anti-oligarchic revolution as separate from a socialist revolution in a completely different stage. Now this is not the case. If you actually look, even under the Spanish colony, the situation in Latin America was very particular because it is true that in 1500s Spain was a feudal country, a feudal country in which the feudal institutions were already very weakened, but and obviously this country is a country that colonized Latin America. The socio-economic formation in Latin America was never really feudal in the strict sense of the word because this was large plantations, large states, mines, and so on, which were not producing for their own limits. They were producing for the world market, which started to arise at that time, and in fact they were not even, they were integrated in a world system which was starting to set the basis for the primitive accumulation of capital, and as Marx explained, the expoliation of Latin America played an important role in the primitive accumulation of capital. So even at that time Latin America was not really feudal as such, feudal economy is basically a closed economy within the constraints of the domains of a feudal lord. And that was not the case in Latin America, but clearly after 1810, 1820s when the main countries in Latin America achieved independence, the new socio-economic formations were extremely dependent on imperialism, extremely dependent on imperialism first of British and to a certain degree American-U.S. imperialism, but then mainly dependent on U.S. imperialism. But you couldn't say that the socio-economic formation was feudal at all. You had at the top of these societies a very reactionary block of different classes that united the industrialists, which did exist in a nation form at that time, the land owners, which were mainly producing for a capitalist market, and the bankers so that the land owners had the money deposited in the banks, the banks had investment in the land, the industrialists had the investments in the land as well. So it was what we sometimes call an oligarchy, a block of different classes, and this block was completely linked and dependent on imperialism through many different ways, but mainly through the domination of the world market and the inability of creating a national economy, national internal market. And what best describes this socio-economic formation is not feudalism or semi-feedalism, but capitalism in conditions of combined and uneven development, which is what Trotsky described the Russia before the revolution as being. And this is the best way to understand Latin America from a Marxist point of view. Yes, there were remains of previous social formations. In some cases, the Spanish colony was grafted on top of the Asiatic mode of production of the Inca Empire and so on, but nevertheless the dominant feature was one of the dependency on imperialism, and imperialism is clearly a feature of advanced capitalism, not a feature of feudalism. So that is what in our opinion makes it the theory of permanent revolution is completely applicable to Latin America. In fact, the first Latin American Marxists in the 1920s, even though they were not aware of Trotsky's permanent revolution, they adopted the same strategy or one that was very, very close. For instance, Mariathegi, who was the founder of the Peruvian Socialist Party, which was in effect the Communist Party, also the founder of the Peruvian Trade Union, Confederation, an amazing figure in Latin American Marxism. He had some shortcomings. He didn't really understand some of the international debates that were going on in the communist movement at that time. But in relation to Peru, he had a very sharp understanding, which was exactly the same as Trotsky's permanent revolution. He said, for instance, in his famous seven essays on Peru, on the economic formation of Peru, he said, in Peru, there is not and there has never been a progressive bourgeois. Only the action of the proletariat can stimulate first and realize later the tasks of the democratic bourgeois revolution, which the bourgeois regime is incompetent to develop or fulfill. And once fulfilled these democratic bourgeois tasks, the revolution becomes, in its aims and in its doctrine, a proletarian revolution. The revolution in Latin America will be nothing more and nothing less than one stage, one phase in the world revolution. It will be simply and purely a socialist revolution. I think it's quite clear. And I'm stressing this point because Mariettegi has been completely distorted by everyone, by reformists, by Stalinists and so on. And they have tried to present Mariettegi as someone who somehow invented a new type of Latin American Marxism. And this is not correct. He was just applying Marxist theory to the concrete conditions of Peru. Julio Antonio Mella, the founder of the Cuban Communist Party and a very important figure in the revolutionary movement in Cuba, who was also the founder of the Students' Federation in Cuba, he also had the same approach. And he said, in its struggle against imperialism, the foreign thief, the bourgeois, the local thieves, unite to the proletariat to use it as canon fodder. But in the end they understand that it is better to ally themselves with imperialism, which at the end of the day pursue a similar interest, and from progressive they become reactionary. The concessions which they used to make to proletariat in order to have it to its side, arbitrate once this, in its advance, becomes a danger both for the foreign thief as well as for the national thief. And here they start to shout and scream against communism. To speak concretely, the full national liberation can only be obtained by the proletariat and it will achieve through workers' revolution. So he was also very clear in his position, and I'm stressing this because then when the communist international degenerated in a Stalinist way, and the two-stage theory was promoted and adopted, imposed really throughout the communist parties, including in Latin America, to the opposition of many of these people. For instance, Mariette was supposed to go to the 1929 conference of communist parties in Argentina, and he was written a thesis which was against the two-stage theory. He was unable to attend in the end, and the leader of the Latin American Stalinist, Vittorio Codovilla, basically destroyed that thesis and he was voted down and the two-stage theory was imposed. Two disastrous effects. We had later on, particularly also in the 1930s, but particularly in the 1940s in the context of the Second World War, which according to Stalinism was a war between democracy and fascism. We had the communist parties in Latin America supporting democracy in the form of the right-wing reactionary dictatorships in those countries, which just happened to be on the side of the United States during the Second World War. So in effect, these communist parties ended up supporting U.S. imperialist interests in their own countries. For instance, in Nicaragua, where the communist party supported Somoza in 1944. In Cuba, where the communist party joined the Batista government in 1942 with two ministers. In Argentina, where in 1946 the communist party supported the candidate proposed, the bourgeois candidate proposed by the U.S. embassy against Perón in the 1946 election, just to give some examples. This was a complete disaster. In general, now as I said, the book deals mainly with three revolutions, the Cuban revolution, the Nicaraguan revolution and the Venezuelan revolution. The Cuban revolution is a very good example of a permanent revolution. Cuba was the last country in the Spanish America to achieve its independence and because of this reason, when it achieved independence at the end in 1898, it already had a developed working class and this made the Cuban bourgeoisie more reactionary even than others in the continent, only as a matter of degree. Because they were very afraid of the revolutionary potential of this working class, if they were to mobilize the masses in any serious way against imperialism, they would be mobilizing the working class, which was a threat to their own interests. And so from the very beginning of the national liberation struggle in Cuba, the national question and the social question became very, very closely linked. You can see that even in 1868, when the beginning of the war for independence, when Manuel the Céspedes issued his first call for a revolutionary war, he was a landowner, a slave owner. And the first thing he did was he liberated his own slaves and he therefore linked clearly the cause of the struggle against the slavery with the cause of the struggle against national slavery. Then later on, for instance, Martí at the end of the 19th century, Jose Martí, one of the main leaders of the struggle for independence, when he set up his revolutionary Cuban party, his main base of support was amongst the cigar workers, both in Cuba and also in Florida, where there was a large colony of Cuban workers. So you can see that the two things became very closely linked. That can also be seen, for instance, in the 1933 revolution, which also showed the treacherous role of the Communist Party, which first advocated an alliance with Burjua and then shifted towards an ultra-left position of creating Soviets everywhere where conditions were not present. So you see that at every single stage of development of the Cuban revolution, as a matter of fact, the Stalinists were in the wrong side of the argument and in the wrong side of the battle. As I said, in 1942, they joined the Batista government and they had two ministers, Juan Marinello and Carlos Fernández, and this meant that for many of the revolutionary Cuban youth who wanted to fight against the Batista regime and against imperialism, the two things were very closely linked, the Communist Party was not an attractive proposition. So you had the rise of the movement around Fidel Castro and his companions, who in 1953 launched the assault on the Moncada barracks in an attempt to act as a spark for a revolutionary uprising that will bring down the dictatorship. Now, these people, what program did they have? What was the aim of their struggle? The program that they had was the classic program of the National Democratic Revolution. You can read it, it's in a text called History Will Absolve Me, which is Fidel Castro's speech on the dock, and you can see that he says, when we speak of the people in relation to the revolutionary struggle, we speak of the workers, the peasants, the poor, but he also mentions the small businessmen, the petty bourgeois, the medium-sized entrepreneurs, industrialists and so on. And when he mentions the aims of their struggle, the main focus of the struggle was the restoration of the 1940 constitution, democratic rights for everyone, and it had some degree of agrarian reform, the national independence, and some measures to improve the lot of the workers, but within the limits of the capitalist system, for instance, the workers should share in the profits of the companies they work for and things like this, things like this, which are now coming back onto the agenda, even in this country, but that's a different matter. So it was clearly a national and national democratic program within the limits of capitalism. So the important question is that on the basis of this program, and the program wasn't so much the most important thing, the question was that they launched a revolutionary struggle in their case through means of an expedition to disembark in Cuba and again provoke a revolutionary spark and a massive insurrection. That didn't go according to plan, but in a very short space of time, between December 1956 and January 59, of which 60 years are coming up this January, they had overthrown the Batista dictatorship. And this you cannot just explain on the basis of the guerrilla war, you have to explain on the basis of the rottenness of the regime they were fighting against and the mass support, the death struggle and sympathy the death struggle created, not only in the countryside, which was the main base of the guerrilla struggle where they basically distributed land to the peasants and so on, but also in the cities where they had large underground networks of support and it is not generally known or highlighted the fact that in the end when Batista fled the country on the eve of January 1st, 1959, the guerrillas were still miles away from the capital and the only way that they managed to actually win the revolution and take over the country was through a revolutionary general strike that they declared, particularly in Havana, which lasted for a week before any guerrilla troops were able to enter. So the working class did play a key role, but not an independent role. It only came as at the end of the revolution and it was not part of the main strategy of the revolutionary movement. But the most interesting thing is what happened between 1959 and 1962. Here's a movement which you can describe as a national democratic movement led by Petit Bourgeois revolutionary youth, which did not have a socialist program, but nevertheless in the space of three years they abolished capitalism in Cuba. This is quite clearly, in our opinion, a demonstration of the validity of permanent revolution. If they wanted to carry out a genuine agrarian reform, genuine national independence, they had no other alternative than to expropriate capitalism and on the basis of the expropriation of capitalism is that all the conquests of the Cuban revolution rest. And now, there is a debate in Cuba today about opening up to the market, basically a section of the leadership in Cuba, a dominant section of the leadership of the revolution in Cuba is thinking along the lines of implementing the Chinese model, let's put it that way, i.e. the slow and gradual restoration of capitalism under the leadership of the same people who are currently at the top of the Communist Party. This is very dangerous, very dangerous for the conquests of the Cuban revolution because the minute capitalist productive relations are dominant in Cuba, all the conquests of the revolution will go with it. Free housing for all, free education for all, free health care for all and all the living conditions and living standards that have been won as a result of the Cuban revolution will be destroyed if capitalism is restored and that's the way the revolution is going now. But the most important thing is to understand that even though the Cuban revolutionality leadership did not have a program of abolishing capitalism, they were pushed into that by the objective conditions because they were consequent and consistent in applying their own program which was a national democratic program. And this puts Cuba in contrast with the two other revolutions that we are discussing in the book with Nicaraguan and the Venezuelan revolution. In Nicaragua, I won't have time to go into any detail, but Nicaragua as you know is in Central America. Central America is one of the areas in Latin America that had the most crushing domination of U.S. imperialism and this started back in the 1820s with the destruction of the attempt to set up a united bourgeois republic throughout Central America. Central America was split up into many different non-viable so-called independent countries that were completely under the boot under the domination of U.S. imperialism which constant military interventions, military presence for years on end and brutal dictatorships. This is the history of Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, all the countries in the region suffered from that. And there have been El Salvador and there have been a number of revolutionary uprisings in all these countries, the struggle of César Augusto Sandino in the 1920s and 1930s in Nicaragua, the uprising of Farabundo Martí, who was a communist in 1932 in El Salvador, who was drowned in blood, 10,000 people were massacred and so on. Nicaragua lived for many decades from 1937 up until 1979 and brutal dictatorship of the Somoza family. Somoza family were not only a bourgeois capitalist family with close links with imperialism, but they basically dominated a large part of the country's economy, maybe 40% of the economy was in their hands, the land, the industries and so on. And because of the treacherous role played by the Communist Party, which in Nicaragua was going under the name of the socialist party of Nicaragua, again we see a situation where revolutionary youth who want to struggle against this dictatorship repel, in fact many of them came out of the socialist party, the Stalinist party, partly as a result of the influence of the Cuban revolution and they set up a new organization named the Sandinista Front of National Liberation, which was set up in the 1960s by Carlos Fonseca, Tomás Borje and other leaders. This organization carried out again a guerrilla struggle, which was mostly ineffectual for many years. It was smashed almost any time they reared their head and attempted a new campaign. And progressively the Sandinista Front was split into three different factions and one of the debates was precisely around this question, or the main debate I would say was around this question of the role of the bourgeois in the anti-Somos struggle and the attitude that the revolutionaries had to have towards that. Even though there were some people at the beginning who were against that and Carlos Fonseca himself had a more critical attitude, but in the end by 1978-79 when the Sandinista Front reunited in one single organization, the stages' tendency had won the debate and everyone was defending the idea that they had to make an alliance with the progressive bourgeois and there were some bourgeois who were against the Somoza at that time, only they didn't want his revolutionary overthrow, but they had differences with him. And that the revolution in power should limit itself to national democratic tasks, the socialism was not on the agenda. The Sandinista Revolution takes the name from the Sandinista Front, but as a matter of fact most of the uprising took place outside of the FSLN formal structures. People in cities like Leon, in neighborhoods like Monimbo and other places, they just rose up in an espontaneous uprising led by very young people, most of them secondary school students, and they took the name of the only organization that seemed to be consequent in fighting the dictatorship, but in most cases the guerrillas arrived only when the uprising had already taken place. On the 19th of July, 1979 the dictatorship fell and the Sandinistas came to power, but from the very beginning the leadership of the Sandinista Front carried out a policy which was to stop any attempt at the revolution going beyond the formal limits of the bourgeois democratic revolution. They had first a coalition government which collapsed because the bourgeois withdrew from it, similar to what had happened in Cuba, but instead of taking advantage of this to move forward and expropriate capitalism, the leaders, particularly Daniela Numberto Ortega, who were the leaders of the right wing of the Sandinista Front, insisted that no property should be touched and carried out, the most conservative possible policy in relation to the question of the economy. By 1981, as we know, Reagan was elected president in the United States and immediately launched a campaign against the Sandinista Revolution with the full support of the bourgeois in Nicaragua, and they launched the Contra War, a campaign of insurgency, a really reactionary gang of cutthroats and the worst elements in society were recruited into this Contra army, were armed and financed by the CIA, and they were neighboring countries, were used as bases for attacking the Nicaraguan Revolution. That is not a surprise. There's a revolution, counter-revolution, organizes itself with the support of imperialism, what was really scandalous in Nicaragua was the fact that while the bourgeois was all on the side of count-open-counter-revolution, they were still allowed to operate legally in the country. The properties were untouched, and so they could use the mass media, the influence through the Catholic Church, the political parties, and above all, the economic power that they still had to sabotage the actions of the Sandinista government. So the Sandinistas were fighting against counter-revolution with not one, but two arms tied to the back by this theory of respecting bourgeois private property, and all the time the whole policy was to please Scandinavian social democracy, Spanish socialist party, try to prove to them that they were not communists, that they were not socialists, that they were committed to what they call a mixed economy, i.e. an economy that's dominated by the capitalist sector. And this led eventually to the defeat of the Nicaraguan revolution, the attempt to make a revolution half-way, and progressively, even some of the conquests of the revolution were being rolled back by 1990, there was an election which the Sandinistas lost. At that time the economy was in complete collapse, there was hyperinflation, and it was a complete disaster, and many people thought, well, if we get rid of the Sandinistas, at least we'll have an economic stability, we'll put an end to this never-ending war, and so on. I want to mention that both the Cubans, the Cuban leadership and the Russians, the Soviet leadership, advised the Nicaraguan leadership not to follow the same path as the Cuban revolution. i.e. the Cuban leadership had come to power on the basis of a national democratic program and then had abolished capitalism, but they insisted that this is not what should happen in Nicaragua, and they obviously had a lot of political authority. Yes, Humberto and Daniel Ortega were already committed to such a policy, but the advice that they were getting from the Cubans was, do not do like we've done, and it was a completely disastrous advice which played a disastrous role in the defeat of the revolution. And the consequences of that we see today in Nicaragua, we have a Sandinista government which has nothing to do with the conquests of the gains of the revolution which were genuine gains in terms of agrarian reform, although limited, education, health care and so on. This is a Sandinista government that has ruled the country for two mandates in agreement with Cosep, the capitalist confederation, in agreement with the owners of the industries in the Maquiladora sector, with agreement with the hierarchy of the Catholic church, which came to power on the basis of voting to criminalize abortion. We were discussing abortion rights in the previous session, and through the book we explained how abortion rights and women's rights in general are one aspect that allows us to see how progressive or in which direction a particular regime is going. And in the case of Nicaragua, abortion, to a certain extent, was already legal from the 19th century, but then was criminalized, was illegalized by the votes of the Sandinista party just before they came to power this last time. They came to power on the basis of an agreement with the liberal party, the party of the Contra. It's the party that had been carrying out the counter-revolutionary war against the Nicaraguan revolution. And now finally we come to the situation in Venezuela, because the situation in Venezuela has many parallels with the situation in Nicaragua. There are also obviously differences. The Venezuelan revolution came to power through an election 20 years ago, on the 6th of December 1998, it's now nearly 20 years, Chávez was elected for the first time, and his election represented entry of the masses onto the scene of politics after a whole series of events that had happened before and the complete discreting of the previous regime. At the beginning, Chávez also had a program. He even said his program was the third way. During his election campaign in 1998 he came to Britain, he went to Oxford, gave a speech, met with Tony Blair, and he said, I like his idea of a third way, something that is not capitalism and not socialism. And basically his idea was to democratize the political process in Venezuela and to a certain extent use the oil wealth for the benefit of the majority of the population. That's a very limited program, but the program, which in the conditions of Venezuela, the ruling class will not accept that it will be carried out fully. And so in 2002 we saw how the ruling class organized a military uprising, a coup against this government. A government that was not communist, was not socialist by any stretch of imagination, was just proposing some minor progressive reforms that we fully support. But that just demonstrates the reactionary character of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie in these countries, the whole of the bourgeoisie carried out this coup against Chávez. In fact, they were so full of themselves, so confident that when they appointed the new president after the coup in April 2002, they had a meeting in a room, a bit bigger than this, with 400 people, and they signed an attendance sheet. And in this attendance list you can see the who's who of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie. If Chávez had expropriated the properties of the people in that room, and he had ample reason for doing that, capitalism would have been abolished in Venezuela overnight. But he did not do that, and at every single juncture he attempted to again compromise with the bourgeoisie, appeal to the bourgeoisie to invest and so on. By 2005, and this is also an interesting point, Chávez changed his line. He said, while he had previously talked about the third way, he now said, the only way to achieve the aims of the Bolivarian Revolution is by abolishing capitalism, and overcoming capitalism can only be done through socialism. Now we fully agree with that, and that is again a demonstration of the permanent revolution. The problem is that these words were never fully taken into practice, and Venezuela, all the way up to 2013 when Chávez died, continued to be a capitalist country. We have to say that this confusion existed within the whole Bolivarian movement, but also within Chávez himself. One day he will be talking about socialism, he will be supporting workers taking over factories, he will be talking about workers control and encouraging workers to take over the factories, which they did. The next day he will be appealing to the bourgeoisie to be productive and invest and so on. So there was a lot of confusion in his own political thinking, but I think it's still very significant that he moved from a position of saying, no, we're not socialists, we want a third way or whatever, to a position where he said, the leader of a revolutionary movement involving millions of people, he said the only way forward is socialism. And that really opened the debate in Venezuela and beyond about that question. By the time Chávez died in 2013, in his last election, he made a speech called Turn the Rada, Golpe de Timón, and in this speech he basically expressed his frustration at the lack of progress of the revolution and he said there's two things that will not be solved. One, the economy is still a capitalist economy and the state is still a bourgeois state. The economy must become a socialist economy and the bourgeois state must be pulverized, we must create a worker state based on the communes which at that time were starting to be created. But nothing of that was then carried out into practice and Maduro, if anything, when he was elected in 2013, turned further to the right, further towards compromise with a capitalist and the capitalists were in no mood to compromise, they were sabotaging the economy but above all the attempt to combine elements of state control and regulation of the economy without creating a nationalized and planned economy completely disrupted the Venezuelan economy and that is the reason for the current economic crisis. Now the bourgeois are all shouting, oh the situation in Venezuela is terrible, yes the situation in Venezuela is terrible, this is one of the worst economic crisis in recent history, 40% of GDP has been knocked out, there is hyperinflation, I don't know the IMF says the inflation will reach 1 million percent this year, I think that's probably in the judge's generation but it's not far from the truth and the living conditions of the masses are collapsed but that's not the result of socialism because there's no socialism in Venezuela, that's precisely the result of the failure to nationalize the economy and plan the economy under a democratic plan of the economy with the participation of the workers. Obviously I don't have the time to go into detail into each one of these countries but you can see that the common, there are maybe one or two common threats in these three revolutions that we want to bring out in this book because this book is not just about history, it's about revolutionary strategy for Latin America today and these main threats are one, there can be no genuine advance even on national democratic anti-imperialist demands of agrarian reform which still has to be carried in many countries of genuine liberation from imperialism and so on without the abolition of capitalism and without the workers really taking power and number two, this requires a revolutionary leadership equipped with a Marxist program, this cannot be improvised and in all of these three cases including in the case of Cuba where the revolution then acquired a number of bureaucratic features came under the influence of the Soviet Union and there was never a genuine regime of workers democracy, a revolutionary leadership equipped with a clear Marxist program is required for the revolution to be successful and to follow the correct path and without that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, we're not here judging whether Chávez was honest in his speeches the problem is that his shortcomings in carrying out even what he was talking about has led to the disaster now and this is a lesson for all of these revolutions, the case of Nicaragua is particularly is particularly striking situation where you have now an extremely repressive regime, 200 or more people have been killed in protests since April in alliance with the bourgeois and the most reactionary elements of the Catholic Church and so on and these regimes still calls itself Sandinista, he claims the legacy of the Sandinista revolution which has nothing to do with this and in Venezuela we're moving very very rapidly to a situation like that where there's a regime that calls itself Bolivarian that has nothing to do with the revolutionary traditions as smashed workers control, is compromising with bourgeois, is opening up the country for foreign multinational investment only this time not from the US but from China, Russia and other countries Iran, Turkey and it's a complete disaster so therefore studying theory and studying the experience of previous revolutions is absolutely required, is an absolute requirement for preparing the forces for the new revolutionary events that are going to take place end up in a victory for our class in one country or another which will then open the floodgates throughout Latin America will have an impact beyond the continent.