The Origin of Usurpation and Tyranny: Nonagentic Anti-Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century and the Legacy of Chavismo

As Venezuela’s Chavista regime presides over the country’s descent into Latin America’s worst refugee and humanitarian crisis in modern times, a mass exodus of nearly five million Venezuelans since 2015, the rhetoric of Western anti-imperialists and the regime itself has absolved it of any responsibility for the crisis and the increasing authoritarianism that led to it by abdicating the regime\u27s agency to act according to its own free will. This paper develops the discursive concept of nonagentic anti-imperialism, a rhetoric that effectively absolves self-declared anti-imperialist regimes, from Castro’s Cuba to Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka, of human rights abuses and democratic erosions by arguing that these leaders had no choice but to rule with an iron fist in the face of Western imperialism. Focusing on Chavismo, this paper analyzes the steps towards Venezuela’s democratic breakdown taken by both Hugo Chávez and Nicolas Maduro, the nonagentic anti-imperialist rhetoric that deflected the true intent behind these steps, and how those steps led the country to the manufactured disaster it finds itself in today. It concludes by positing that the legitimacy of supposedly anti-imperialist policies hinges not on the fierce rhetoric surrounding them but rather on the lived ends of the people affected by them

Spartan Daily, December 4, 1981

Volume 77, Issue 64https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6840/thumbnail.jp

Custom becomes crime, crime becomes custom

This thesis examines the changing relationship between customary activities of the poor and economic change. The social crime debate is used to illustrate the historical importance of informal economic activity, both as a survival strategy and as a means of protest. Key issues of the experience in Britain will be highlighted, and issues such as self-interest will be placed within community toleration. Ironically, social criminal activities are also in the wider interests of the class of people from which social criminals themselves originate. The change from Feudalism and the origin of capitalism (particularly industrial capitalism) created the working class. The peasantry were increasingly displaced from the land, and habits suitable for work paid in cash were inculcated and forced upon people. Customary agricultural practices were gradually whittled away, but the working class changed these into perquisites and new customary work-based appropriation. Protest became located within the official structures of the labour movement, and increasingly orientated around the wage form. The post World War II economic boom encouraged standardisation and stabilisation of products, and within society itself. The onset of economic crises, beginning in the late 1960s, had increasingly global effects, and involved new markets encouraged by European integration. This changed the nature of (un)employment relations, the composition of the working class, consumption demands and possibilities, as well as creating a large and growing informal economy. This new casual and opportunistic, official/unofficial labour market, has meant a resurgence of social crime as a normal feature of survival. Shoplifting, tobacco and alcohol smuggling will be theoretically and practically examined; social crime content assessed; and protest capacity explored. Informant narratives highlight these key features of our time. The thesis further argues that crime has returned as a central aspect of culture

Refashioning the enemy: popular beliefs and the rhetoric of De-Stalinisation, 1953-1964.

This dissertation explores the evolution of Soviet public culture during the decade of destalinisation that followed the great break of 1953. It was a period both of intense political change, as the party sought to create new kinds of legitimacy post-Stalin, and of major social upheaval as millions of prisoners returned from the Gulag to the Soviet mainland. Destalinisation is examined here as a dialogue between three actors: the state, the Soviet public, and the returning masses once regarded as society's outcasts. Recasting the notion of the 'enemy' was central to this re-conceptualisation of public culture. The enemy had long held a powerful place in the Soviet political imagination. In revolutionary cosmogony, the world was locked in a battle between socialism and capitalism in which good would finally triumph yielding a communist paradise on earth. Where loathing of the enemy had prevailed under Stalin, his successors sought to create a more moderate culture, claiming victory was near and the advent of communism imminent. After 1953, the vilification of political opponents waned, calls for vigilance lessened, and the rabid invective cultivated by the Stalinist press began to subside. The binary division of the Soviet realm into two 'zones' - one for Soviet citizens, a second for its demonic outcasts - was eroded. The thesis explores the complex nature of these changes. It examines the contribution of Gulag returnees who sought to recreate themselves as decent Soviet citizens, but who brought with them the culture of this segregated, other world. It also studies the reactions of a broader public, whose interpretation of both political and social change often reflected the ongoing sway of the Manichean beliefs cultivated by Stalinist culture