Introduction
These past few months I have been encountering all sorts of opinions regarding the current situation in Venezuela, and the different causes for all of its problems. I have seen people that for some reason support socialism, start denying the fact that Venezuela is a socialist country, and others that recognize the country as a socialist one, but instead of accepting its failure they start to blame other countries such as The United States for Venezuela’s problems.
For me, this topic seems like a hot potato, with a lot of socialist people trying as hard as they can to distance themselves from the disaster that is now the country, up to the point of deliberately spreading lies and trying to fake reality. As a funny anecdote, I have even seen people calling Venezuela a state capitalist country, which is something that doesn’t make any sense because capitalism by definition requires private property, not government property.
I decided it was a good idea to write a post sharing my opinion about Venezuela, and explaining some important aspects about the economic model that was unfortunately implanted in this country.
Understanding socialism
For some reason, there are a lot of people that believe socialism is simply having the government charging a lot of taxes and offering basic services back to the people. While it is clear that higher taxes and expending are the type of things that the left support, believing socialism is equal to public services is a dangerous misunderstanding.
Socialism has always been about control over the means of production such as companies and factories, not about public services paid with taxes that are levied in a capitalist economy. I am going to share a definition of socialism from the Cambridge dictionary below, but anyone that decides to look for the real meaning of this term will realize it is about controlling the means of production and some “mystical” equality, not about public services paid with taxes.
any economic or political system based on government ownership and control of important businesses and methods of production. Source
The truth is, there are not many truly socialists countries in the world, after the Berlin Wall fall in November of 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in December of the same year, socialism became pretty much a dead ideology, with only some rogue nations such as Cuba or North Korea representing it. This ideology sadly started to resurrect with the chavistas in Venezuela.
However, there are some people that think Europe is full of socialist nations, even believing Finland is socialist when they actually went to war against the socialist Soviets to defend themselves against this dangerous nation. I would bet that any Finnish with some family members that participated in that war would be very alarmed hearing people from other countries calling them socialists.
As mentioned before, this confusion is mainly caused by a lack of knowledge regarding the meaning of the used words, to describe today’s European countries the best terms could be something like, social democracy or simply a welfare state. Both have different meanings than socialism and both terms are compatible with a capitalist economy, which is something that requires the existence of private property protected by law, free market and commerce, and the existence of private investments, dividends, capital, etc.
Since the Nordic countries are the ones that are most confused with socialism, there have been several knowledgeable people from that part of the world, explaining that their countries aren’t socialist. Such is the case of Denmark’s Prime Minister...
… and the economist Otto Brøns-Petersen.
I have also noticed that famous socialists such as Bernie Sanders defended the Venezuelan model before it collapsed, and suddenly started to proclaim the virtues of the “Scandinavian socialism”. In his official website as a US senator we can find the following quote that hasn’t aged well at all:
These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now? Source
That quote is from 2011, we should notice there were no words about the Nordic model. It was only after Venezuela collapsed that socialist from all over the world started to distance themselves from Chavez’s revolution and start confusing some European countries with some kind of socialism.
What about Venezuela?
Apart from the definition I just shared some paragraphs above, I decided it was a good idea to explore some of the measures written by Karl Marx that have been the backbone of every socialist nation in history, and see if they were applied in Venezuela. We will also notice that some of these measures exist in “normal” countries such as the United States or any other similar nation, but the more extreme measures are always present in socialist countries and are the ones that always cause disasters.
These measures can be found in the Communist Manifesto, page 11 or page 13 if you start to count from the actual beginning of the book. In this article, we are only going to discuss the first of these measures and will continue in the following article.
The first measure says “Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.”: this clearly violates the existence of private property protected by law, which is why measures like this one aren’t adopted by prosperous countries but by rogue nations or banana republics that always end up in absolute economic misery.
In Venezuela, Chavez expropriated countless companies, factories, farms, lands and the majority of them were never paid for, which has caused a lot of legal disputes in other countries, mostly in The United States.
This was a strategy very similar to the one applied by Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution some decades ago. It is meant to destroy private companies and increase the control of the mafia state over the economy, what is even more shocking is that there were a lot of people supporting this type of actions, and today, a lot of socialist from all over the world still support the violent take over of totalitarian governments over private property.
In Venezuela, the people that supported these actions are mostly very regretful and in some cases very ashamed of themselves for realizing their political idols fooled them and used them to loot the country and enrich the government elite with stolen money.
Conclusion
In the next article, we are going to continue exploring more measures from the Communist Manifesto and see if they were applied in Venezuela.
Authored by @dedicatedguy
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Let us remember that socialism is a socio-political and economic doctrine based on the ownership and collective management of the means of production in order to achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth. The eagerness of the government to control and possess all forms of production is proper to socialism, in addition to seeking to expropriate all private property, puts them closer to a socialist government. Surely many will say that a socialist government would guarantee equity in wealth, equality of classes and goods. Well, the Venezuelan Chavista government has tried to equalize all its inhabitants, but from below. Every day we are all poorer, we all eat very badly, we all use very bad products, we all charge the same thing, professional or not, we all suffer the disease in hospitals, not in clinics. The socialism of the 21st century is hunger, it is misery and this is known by the government, which uses this hunger to control, subdue and humiliate the people. It's good to read you here again, @dedicadoguy
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It's not a socialist country. This failed ideology has been used by criminals to suck the nation. We just need to look where their families live now. They are spread in the world, living in USA and Spain, Germany and other capitalist countries.
This is just a gang, composing a drug traffic mafia, and doing others criminal activities. People need to be educated that these people don't belong to any ideology in particular. Their only conviction they have embraced is to steal, murder, and destroy anything that is apt to prosper while they enrich themselves.
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People can be socialists and criminals at the same time, in fact, most of the time both things (being a politician that supports socialism and a criminal) go hand in hand.
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Totally right, we've never know any socialist that has been honest so far. That's why I said it's proven ideology. In case of Venezuela, they went to establish a world record.
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Hi. Thank you for touching such an important topic for my country. I have always thought that Venezuela is not a socialist country, at all. It is assumed that the socialist countries develop policies in favor of improving the quality of life of their citizens, and that has not happened in Venezuela. Nor are their rulers supposed to be enriched by the public era, which has happened in Venezuela. What we have today in the country, is a band of criminals who took advantage of a supposedly socialist and egalitarian political offer, but what they really did was to take advantage of power to enrich themselves and impoverish the citizen. All unprecedented horror. It is difficult to make a political analysis based on the form of governing of these delinquents. Greetings.
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No, the result of policies cannot determine the nature of said policies because otherwise, people could say "it is socialism but only if it is successful" which would be very absurd right?.
In fact, it is the policies regarding economic freedom that allow prosperity to thrive throughout the world, this is why every prosperous country has economic freedom (capitalism).
These misconceptions about socialism wouldn't exist if people took the time to research the meaning of that word/ideology.
Venezuela is full of socialist policies that caused the economic collapse, besides, the government's corruption is enabled thanks to the control they have over the economy, a control that wouldn't be possible without socialists policies regarding the central planning of the economy.
Yes, this always happens when socialism takes control.
Unprecedented only in Venezuela, there have been other socialists disasters throughout history, like for example the USSR, East Germany, Cuba, North Korea, among many others. The video in @d4rkflow's comment talks a little bit about previous socialists failures.
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Scandinavian or scandivanian? 😂
By the way just few thought about the topic.
First and for all i am not a supporter of socialism.
By when i was talking with a old peope in my area many of them told that they liked it. According to them there was no crime and everyone had a work.
Mainly the problem with the socialism was just the politicans. So if they are not corrupt than no problem.
But we can see corrupt people and criminals even in a western countries so doesnt mater.
Maybe one day if the govs. will be on blockchain😁 there will be a change😉
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You are right, there is a small typo ^^.
These are things that only people that have never lived under socialism can say. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Socialism's problems are not only the inevitable corruption caused by having too much power in the hands of just a few power-hungry politicians. It is also an immoral ideology that isn't compatible with freedom and can only be implemented / maintained through the use of force. It is not a coincidence that socialists governments always end up being totalitarian murderers.
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"These are things that only people that have never lived under socialism can say"
Dont joke with me😂 i born and grow up in eastern europe mate. And here the old people like my grandparents or neightbours they survived much more than we. Even from the word wars many of them they have different memories what we learned from the books.
I believe them to be honest. People in USA or western eaurope they dont have even a clue what was here. They have they version and they think they are right.
By the way thats whay i dont use to post about politics😂
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There could have been a time when people had something resembling a good life, the same happened in Venezuela, but it collapsed for a reason, and I doubt people's lives were good when the socialist model collapsed.
There have also been people from several countries risking their lives to escape socialism (East Germany, Cuba and now Venezuela).
By the way, since you are from Eastern Europe, it could be interesting or fun to show your old family members the videos from this ex soviet citizen (Vladimir Jaffe)https://www.youtube.com/user/pp000610 he always looks for leftist people in America and try to debate them in the street and some videos are even funny.
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Yes many people left. I dont say that socialism was super good. Just example for sure there was less crime and everyone had a job. The price was also cheap of the food. These are the facts they shared to me.
I think we cant compare eastern europe and cuba. The attitude of the people are very different.
Even i have many russian friends and example they never complain about they gov.
But there are also people who wanna leave. I think it depend on the person.
But i really disagree with the propaganda which is comming from USA or UK.
My personal opinion anyway that even nowdays we just have a illusion that we live in a democracy. But we are even not close to it😉
This is a long and difficult topic by the way. For sure there is some truth in both sides.
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Magic Dice has rewarded your post with a 13% upvote. Thanks for playing Magic Dice.
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Excellent your post and the series that you have proposed, @dedicatedguy. It is very clear and very revealing of deceptions. As a Venezuelan, I thank you.
When I was reading your post, I thought there were some things that should be added. But then, when I read your comments to those who wrote, it seemed to me that there was no need (plus the posts that will continue this series are missing).
I would simply like to add that you fall into a deception when you say, for example: "In Venezuela there is no true socialism. The only true socialism is the one that really exists (or existed), and its reality is a set of human defects such as authoritarian and totalitarian power, poverty, lack of freedom, false egalitarianism (priced by poverty and the penury of all), etc. So it was in the USSR, in communist China (today it is a mixture of savage capitalism with communist party ideology), the countries of Eastern Europe, North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, etc. There is no different reference and there will be no different reference to a supposed libertarian and prosperous socialism. Greetings.
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The lack of knowledge is dangerous. Even more when people repeat what they hear in spite of not truly understanding it. Socialism failed in the past over and over again, so why should we try to use it as it was a good thing? People who defend Venezuela's "socialism" are simply ignorant. First because this is mora a communism and second because there ain't nothing good about being a socialist country. I'm gonna read the second part of this great article now. Thanks for sharing.
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Thanks for your support and for your good comment!
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Yes it is socialism
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Yep, of course it is.
The thing is every time socialism fails and causes disasters some socialists suddenly start saying it isn't socialism, even if they defended the same movement in previous years. Not to long ago socialists from all over the world were speaking wonders about Venezuela, and now it is either silence or denial (dishonesty) saying it is not socialism.
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