Vargas Llosa Touts For Gangsters and Facists

Property is individual and private or it is not property, said the author Mario Vargas Llosa addressing a far-right conference entitled "International Conference for Freedom (sic) and Democracy (sic) held in Caracas. Er, I thought Venezuela was supposed to be a virtual dictatorship, and here they are allowing the enemy to hold a conference. For the record, I wouldn't. I would send these criminals packing, toute de suite. (For those who object to my statement, Venezuela is undergoing a revolutionary process, and you don't allow counter-revolutionaries a chance to regroup. (1) It is a matter of life or death, should reaction succeed in Venezuela, the outcome will be a bloodbath, that will make Pinochet look like Gandhi.)

Now Vargas Llosa is a fine novelist – I have read most of his books and enjoyed them – but he is a shitty politician and an even shittier anthropologist. Property is individual and private or it is not property, simply does not stand up to anthropological inquiry. Communal property is very common, almost universal among hunters and gatherers, early agriculturalists and the peasants of Russia until the end of the 19th Century. This line, was in fact, the very one the European invader used to steal First Nation's land. Since their communal property was not a legitimate form of property in the eyes of these land thieves, it was not owned and therefore open to appropriation. I wonder what the First Nations People think of Llosa's comment? I also wonder how the one billion members of cooperatives world-wide feel being told that their coops should not be recognized as property? Could it be the criminals for whom Llosa is the intellectual facade, are preparing for another robbery, seeking to pillage the social economy?

For someone who supports corporate capitalism, touting individual or private property, is laughable hypocrisy. Corporations are forms of collective capitalism. Apply Llosa's concept honestly and corporations are not legitimate property.

See http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/4488

1. Make the lands and machinery of production for common use... And those who... oppose this work of supreme social justice, kill them! Ricardo Flores Magon in the 1910 Mexican Revolution.