this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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But that's not what global south socialism is. If there is a global project to establish the sovereignty of exploited and impoverished nations, first with a combined effort of the national bourgeoisie with the workers and the peasantry, socialists across the world should support it. That's what's already happened and you can clearly see that the power the national bourgeoisies gained in the global south after throwing off the yoke of colonialism was either itself significantly weakened through socialist revolution, or it grew to the point of facilitating continued extraction as neocolonies. In the case of the nations that had socialist leadership curb the power of the new bourgeoisie (Cuba, Nicaragua, Burkina Faso, Vietnam, Tanzania, etc) none of them were able to simply do away with capitalist exploitation entirely. Demanding that they do such a thing is ahistorical, and it misses the point of their revolutions as being, principally, about taking political power into the hands of the people and away from colonizers. Should all of those projects be condemned because they didn't have a time machine to jump 800 years in the future to the point where they could avoid all those problems entirely?
It's completely non-actionable and facile to apply criticism of every socialist nation on the basis that some form or another of exploitation still exists inside of them. If there was a way to have the productive forces to get everyone fed, housed, and healed overnight then sure, you're totally right! It's abhorrent that some workers in Cuba work in private businesses that make profit off their surplus value! They should simply abolish the value-commodity form!
I am not condemning them. I am merely saying that they're not socialist. Struggle to throw off the yoke of colonialism is commendable, whatever form it takes, whether liberal capitalist, or nationalist or state capitalist. It's still capitalism though and no matter how much benefit it brings initially due to the liberalism and industrialization, it will inevitably degenerate to the detriments of those under it's yoke. I just have my eyes open and suggest those people agitate towards socialism. I don't tell them to just "trust the plan" just because their exploiters are flying a red flag.
But their exploiters don't fly a red flag. The state which flies a red flag, the democratically elected governments with extremely high approval ratings, are obviously not the exploiters.
If you go to Cuba and ask around, the problems people might have with the government are probably gonna be related to censorship, not exploitation. The blame for people's economic woes will, unless you talk with a very confused person, be placed on the US blockade. It might be true that for the Cubans who work in a private business, they're being exploited by their bosses, but that's really not a primary concern because the conflict between countries is a much larger issue for everyone in the island. That's true in most of the global south, really, the exploitation done by the owners of little enterprises is very small compared the the larger problem of a nation's resources and sovereignty being trespassed. Those are conditions that make the abolition of capitalist exploitation impossible.
I think that it makes sense for the people in the global south socialist countries to keep their trust in their democratic governments. They're individually incapable of launching some kind of assault on US empire to bring it down, so this is just necessarily a slow process where more places in the world will slowly break away from the US, and the empire will collapse in time. Until then, would it really make sense for anyone to light molotov cocktails in Beijing, Havana, or Caracas? You realize that's exactly what the CIA wants?
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