Which isn't really supporting the argument. He praised Venezuela for relatively low inequality in the very last line, but that's not the thrust of the argument.
Where I come from, socialists tend to be seen as boring maintenance workers of the welfare status quo apparatus, more worried about incremental improvements to paternity leave benefits than enacting any sort of revolution... I guess they could use a Bolivarian spice-up.
In all seriousness, the only left-wing politician I can recall singing the praises of Chavez was Fidel Castro, and he was a hard-boiled authoritarian himself, as well as completely out of sync with the mainstream of European-style socialist parties.
I think it's pretty fair to say that almost all of the left sang the praises of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution for over a decade. The more leftist, the more praise.
You know, you'll grow up, and at some point you're going to realize that the left in fact sang the praises for a long time of many people that are now considered evil incarnate. Mao, Stalin are just some examples, and probably not even the worst.
Random links indeed. Did you even read them? The tone is largely neutral to critical.
"Today, Chavez’s desultory government spending and overall economic approach resembles the populism of the Argentine Juan Perón far more than any authentic socialist model. It is an incoherent mess, dependent on constant infusions of oil money, and is highly unlikely to lead to sustainable development for Venezuela. It is governed primarily by an age-old autocratic goal: the maintenance of personal power."
That's from the Atlantic article. Not exactly singing praises.
I'm not disputing that there must have been Western leftists enthusiastic about Chavez back around the turn of the millennium. I just couldn't think of anyone. Chomsky seems like a solid example though.
Amusingly, Donald Trump is currently the closest equivalent to Hugo Chavez in his rhetoric and political style. The populist strongman is a category of his own, not owned by the left nor the right.
I mean, I get it. Leftists are famous for making this point. Famous leftists of the past that turned out to be monsters responsible for millions of deaths ... deny that they were leftists. Stalin ? Not a leftist. Lenin ? Not a leftist ! Mao ? Not a leftist. Pol Pot ? Not a leftist !! Soviets ? Never any real socialist policies !
Now you are trying to make the point that Hugo Chavez ... wasn't left or right. Seriously. Does that justify a response any more than the "theory" that the Soviets weren't socialist ?
I can certainly understand why western leftists wouldn't want to be associated with Hugo Chavez these days. Amazingly, they don't seem to feel the same about Che "kill all doctors when we arrive, so the population depends on us for survival" Guevara.
Leftists have a long and sordid history of supporting monsters, even back when left actually meant left (ie. the time of the French revolution), and then abandoning them and claiming they're not really leftist when the result of -always the same now declared "not actually socialist"- policies becomes clear. I mean you wouldn't recognize the names these days, but the leftists of the French revolution ... I may recognize (some of) their accomplishments ... BUT they were loathsome monstrous mass-murderers who massacred their way through Paris, killing in estimation >20% of the whole population.
But the fact that they're unwilling to distance themselves TODAY from someone like Che Guevara, just because he's popular in a certain crowd, really tells you enough about leftists, doesn't it ?
It did bring poverty down enormously. Even the current crisis hasn't put it back up to the levels it used to be at.
Moreover, the current crisis is simply a repeat of what happened in the 80s when Venezuelan "capitalists" were in charge - also caused by a plunge in oil prices.
Time after time socialism has brought nothing but catastrophe, genocide and hunger. Venezuela is just the latest example in a very long line of examples.
I live in Miami and have so many Venezuelan neighbors escaping that country because of socialism.
>My food situation... well, i used to eat 3 times a day, pizza, nutella Grilled meat idk anything that i wanted to eat, now sometimes i eat twice or once a day, and sometimes i have the bad luck of having nothing to eat for the whole day ;( it gives headache...
>i used to work in a office editing videos in sony vegas, making around 2-4 videos per day.
>Everytime i steps the streets, i see starving people with not too bad clothes, makes me think about how people that used to be like me is now looking for food at gargabe... sometimes i am afraid of end up there too....
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I can imagine myself in his shoes so easily! I used to live in Bolivia and lived the same way he used to live. Churrasco, pizza, shopping whenever - now Venezuela is in a really bad place.
You can't really compare Venezuela socialism and Northern European socialism. The only thing they have in common is the word socialism. IMHO it is totally useless as it is used to describe things that are completely different.
and yet they so often end up there. I think its desperation, trying to convince a whole population to do things differently all at once which never goes well. They end up trying to make change by fiat, instead of working with what they have. So authoritarianism.
Venezuela was democracy. Indeed, Chavez was elected democratically. It eroded. The institutions were weakened. It is now an authoritarian regime, willing to stay in power no matter the costs.
Bad government in practice. There's nothing in socialism that says a government has to build an economy with zero fail-safes. Venezuela is in this spot because their government was lazy and opted to import almost everything using oil money. Had they built any semblance of a self-sustaining national economy they wouldn't be in this spot. Sure they might've had to cut some social programs as the price of oil tanked but it wouldn't be the complete collapse we see now.
Although many regimen in South America labeled themselves as Socialists in the last decade, they were more Populist soft-dictatorships.
They worked by swelling up the state with a massive patronage system and punishing any opposition (like not renewing public concessions of Radio/TV networks that criticize the government or imprisoning dissidents under pretext). All of this was made with special care to give everything the illusion of legality while raising corruption to unprecedented levels even for the region.
Chavez in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil, Morales in Bolivia - they made a lot of damage in the continent.
European socialism works. Bolivarian socialism totally does not.
I think the critical difference is that Bolivarian socialism believes something that European socialism does not. It's something like "all profitable companies are stealing from their workers" or "companies don't deserve profits" or something in that neighborhood. Therefore Bolivarian socialism regarded it as justice to expropriate profitable companies, so that the profits would go to the people via social programs. But they didn't know how to run those companies that they took over. And even for the companies that they didn't take over, the expropriations that they did destroyed incentive to invest any further in Venezuela. The net result was that there wasn't enough money coming in to fund the social programs.
European socialism, in contrast, merely taxed profitable companies, and only taxed a fraction of their profits - something around a third is typical, I think. This left employment, profits, and tax income operating normally.
The lesson seems to be that if you go into socialism with too much of a victim mentality, placing too much of the blame on "them", then you take so much that you destroy the economy.
Its a common misconception. Europe does Social Democracy but most governments do not exercise the sort of direct control you see in purely Socialist governments.
The state run oil company makes up about half of their GDP, which is why the economy collapsed when oil prices fell.
People are pointing to socialism and saying that it caused this hardship, but the same would have happened under a privately run oil company as well. It's the danger any economy heavily dependent on a single commodity faces.
Venezuela is a larger example of what happens to a company town when the company shuts down or moves the factory somewhere else.
I disagree. The economy would've been fine, just as it was before the prices boomed in the 00's.
The problem is entirely caused by government policy. Arbitrary and CONSTANT expropiations accross all industries and subsequent bankrupcy of the expropiated companies caused the decline. People wanted to get their money out so the government banned forex. Then prices soared because importing was now hard as hell, so they controlled prices and everyone has been going bankrupt in a domino effect since.
I live here and I don't give a fuck about socialism/capitalism debates. This country was destroyed by a socialist government. That is all there is to say.
The oil industry is the majority chunk of our economy. In other industries, the government has expropiated most of the main players (and subsequently driven them to bankrupcy). Forex is banned and most goods are price controlled, from vegetables to healthcare. These controls do not reflect reality.
just what happens when the one percent; read the political class; is given enough power to strip the rights of the people layer by layer until no one can object.
In Democratic countries there is a chance to vote them out. In socialist countries the laws get changed sufficiently to keep the political leaders separate from the body of representatives the people can actually elect. the courts are controlled by the political leadership, not the elected body.
when push comes to shove new laws are pushed out to "protect the people" with suitable bad groups identified. these only serve to strip resources (read money/property) from those with the means to oppose.
socialism and even communism which have never been tried 100% fail for the same reasons all governments get into trouble, the political class sees themselves as the only group with enough intelligence to guide their nation and discredit anyone who says otherwise as ignorant or dangerous
Well, Venezuela came to socialism by democratic means. The socialists were kept in power (the first few times) by legitimate democratic means. And while they were in power, they were doing just what you said - stripping the rights of the people layer by layer, to the point where real democratic opposition was no longer possible.
It still baffles me why groups of people can't see this coming for them, time after time. (I have even seen it even be apparent in very small groups of 6 people where people in the minority actively voted against their own best interests only to be saved by a benevolent dictator.)
