Speaker 2
And I do want to kind of talk about the fact that we see over and over again, and we've done so many of these episodes where we've covered revolutionary movements. And every time we see this pattern where the US will use before it engages in toppling regimes or funding and organizing coups, the first thing it always does is engage in economic warfare. And so, Alex just laid out a bunch of ways that the US did this. And then the economy starts to suffer. And then the first thing that reactionaries in the US and the US ruling class want to do is point and say, see socialism doesn't work. Look at it. The economy is a mess. Well, that's a direct result of the imperial sort of mingling inside the economy that the US did. And so I think we should, we always have to remember that it's kind of commonplace now, but it's like important to always just reemphasize that. Totally. I
Speaker 1
mean, this should immediately bring to mind one current case, right? Right. Yeah. Where's the same argument of, well, there's something innate to socialism that will always lead it to collapse on the basis of its own internal contradictions. Never like the broader context, never the type of economic warfare that's being waged. It's always something innate to this revolutionary socialist project. And we obviously, if you read any of the mainstream media pieces on Venezuela, it's like over and over and over. That's their thesis now. Yeah. Is that well, I mean, it's a mess because socialism is innately bound to fail. I mean, that's a completely anti-intellectual argument. And it's designed to further a certain political argument. And that's, you don't even have to, I mean, obviously the Venezuelan regime and even Chile under again, they committed a lot of mistakes on their own, right? But to just take that lazy argument, it's just, it's such an imperial argument at this point that we need to completely deconstruct it. I mean, there's one instance of Nixon. He was willing, he was, I don't think he did this. He didn't do this, but he was thinking of dumping the United States copper reserves onto the international markets in order to depress prices. Right. Right. Right. I mean, so he didn't have to because prices went down anyway during 1972. And nonetheless, the popularity of popular unity continued to increase. So yeah, there's a lot of this stuff that we don't see going on, right? But if you bring this up, whether it's, you know, people at the time are bringing this up and they're conspiracy theorists. Yeah, exactly. But then 30, 30, 40 years later, we get the documents and we're like, no, you know, we were actually right about this.