Neo Balka wrote:Triblios wrote:Nice, in trying to be sarcastic you actually described the status pretty accurately.
Keep railing about how Socialism is a failure when your examples don't even hit the first point of Socialism:
democratic control of the company by the workers.
So the definition of Socialism changes whenever something goes wrong?
Amaze.
No. Venezuela simply does not fit any definition of "socialism", except perhaps "socialism is any country whose leaders claim to be socialists".
And I do mean
any definition. Not just my preferred definition or Triblios's definition. I honestly do not know of
any definition of socialism, as advocated by some group of socialists, that would actually fit Venezuela.
Some definitions of socialism are based on workers' control over the means of production, expressed through a democratic state. Venezuela doesn't have that.
Other definitions are based on state ownership over the means of production (not necessarily democratic) and a planned economy - as in the Soviet system. Venezuela doesn't have that either.
Then there is the social democratic definition, in which socialism is considered to be something like the societies currently existing in Scandinavia. I don't consider this socialism, but for the sake of the argument I'm including it here. Venezuela does not have this either.
Then you've got the anarchist definitions, which claim that socialism is incompatible with the existence of a state. I think they are ridiculous, but again I'm including them for the sake of the argument, and again Venezuela does not fit.
By any of the known definitions of socialism - whether utopian, or Marxist-Leninist, or social democratic, or anarchist - Venezuela does not have socialism.