Created by history

Chris Dillow writes that individuals are Created by history.

The precise mechanisms in these stories differ. Sometimes, the transmission from past to present operates via institutions, sometimes via culture - though of course the two interact. You can read Greg Clark's work (pdf) showing that wealth persists through the generations as individual-level evidence for the latter.

All this suggests that, contrary to simple-minded neoclassical economics and Randian libertarianism, individuals are not and cannot be self-made men. We are instead creations of history. History is not simply a list of the misdeeds of irrelevant has-beens; it is a story of how we were made. Burke was right: society is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

One radical implication of all this is Herbert Simon's:

When we compare the poorest with the richest nations, it is hard to conclude that social capital can produce less than about 90 percent of income in wealthy societies like those of the United States or Northwestern Europe. On moral grounds, then, we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent to return that wealth to its real owners.

Emphasis Mine

This is why it is very important for revolutionaries to study the official and unofficial history of their own country. In order to understand how to get we want to go, we need to understand how we got here.

The Bolivarian Revolution is grounded in the history of Venezuela. There was no template for a successful revolution that can be transferred from one country to another. This was the fatal mistake that Ché Guevara made when he tried to export the Cuban Revolution to the Congo and to Boliveria.

This idea is best captured by Leon Trotsky's Law of Uneven and Combined Development:

Different countries, Trotsky observed, developed and advanced to a large extent independently from each other, in ways which were quantitatively unequal (e.g. the local rate and scope of economic growth and population growth) and qualitatively different (e.g. nationally specific cultures and geographical features). In other words, countries had their own specific national history with national peculiarities.

But at the same time, all the different countries did not exist in complete isolation from each other; they were also interdependent parts of a world society, a larger totality, in which they all co-existed together, in which they shared many characteristics, and in which they influenced each other through processes of cultural diffusion, trade, political relations and various “spill-over effects” from one country to another.

Revolutionaries have to understand and reflect on their own country's history and development as well as the interaction with the rest of the world. Parochialism is fatal to revolutions.