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.
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