Venezuela seizes General Motor plant

Just curious, would you or anyone else here in this thread be willing to address what that reddit post says?

It is copy and paste propaganda. Reddit is the most heavily censored and shilled site on the entire internet.

This guy is saying that Scandanavian countries aren't socialism because the MoP are privately owned but then the rest of his post is blaming all of Venezuela's problems on socialism even though the MoP is also privately owned there.

I'd like to add that Venezuela also never added any significant element of planning or self management to the nationalized firms. They remained private, only just with the owners as the government. The concept of nationalization has been around since before socialism was even thought of, and the misconception that "nationalization = socialism" comes from the fact that many socialists of the past believed that nationalization was a means of taking industry from private hands and thus being able to eventually give it to the workers.

He's saying that they own the means of production even though they literally only seized GM today

There are a few, I'm not expert but this one is obvious:

If the goverment owns the "means of productions" (a term he seems to be unfamiliar with), then the workers don't control them. Socialism isn't the goverment owning things, even though he believes that either private businesses or the goverment are the only two options for "controlling" the MoP.

Other than that he believes reddits fetish for social democracy is socialism, and he's probably also falling for the planned-market dichotomy.

I just don't get this level of political retardation, fam. He doesn't even have the "WELL IT HAS PLANNING" excuse that people pull with the ex-Ba'athist states and NK. According to this man, Charles de Gaulle, despite being a right wing conservative who took significant effort to remove socialism from politics, was a democratic socialist.

Nationalised production doesn't require profit, money wages, or market competition
I'd consider nationalization to qualify as Socialism. More than market coops

Nationalisation *could* be socialistic, but Venezuela's nationalisation still was profit driven, still utilized wage labor, and was still hierarchical, private ownership. I'd personally say even a co-op is preferable to that.

Allende 2.0

Nice talking points. Everyone focuses on corporate shills all over Reddit and CTR back during the election, but you see shit like this and you just know this is an astroturf paid comment.

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Using your own words, explain how it is.

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As a Nordick this is a bit annoying to me.

Guy says Scandis are not democratic socialism, Venezuela is democratic socialism. Later the guy slips and calls Venezuela a social democracy, which it of course is, much like the Scandinavian nations.

They cite the Swedish free schools as a good thing, even though the Swedish school system is in absolute shambles.

Then they say something about how Scandis only can do this thanks "resources,´and tiny homogenous populations". Norway is the only resource heavy place, tiny-ness doesn't matter and neither does "homogenity" AKA whiteness.

Then basically a load of obfuscation and bullshit that tries to obfuscate the reality that the successful "nordic model" would have anything to do with social democracy. They mention Italy and Greece, Spain as welfare states in big countries, but don't mention Germany.

I'm nordic so I don't know too much about Venezuela so I cant comment on that, but the part mentioning the Nordic countries is a big pile of lies. The commentator creates a false difference between the economic systems in Venezuela and the Nordic countries by minimizing the social democratic accomplishments of the Nordics.

If anyone wants to I can detail it.

Basically just lies, lies and damned lies. Those dumb fucking redditors will be eating that shit up. I have been seeing this Venezuela stuff so intensively on reddit that I highly suspect its being financed by CIA people or something.

I'd say 5 years in teh gulag for the commentator for him to learn what social democracy is all about

A lot of Chile's mines are government controlled, no one is calling them socialist as they are doing well atm

sure, I'd be interested in reading it if you have time

The govt. of Venezuela no longer represents the people of the country. Maduro aims to expel all companies from the country so he could create a monopoly which will bring profit ONLY to him and his clique of corrupt officials.

I may be an anti-warmongering and pro-isolationism, but Trump should really step in.

anything specific? I didn't expect anyone to actually take up the offer

the tl;dr is basically that social democracy and labour/capital compromise created stable societies without having to be that rich

later on with globalization the power has shifted towards capital which has weakened the social democracy which leads to austerity et. al

just go kill a hobo or something before you do anything actually damaging to humanity

Sorry, Im not antifa.

Kek

Antifa hasn't killed anyone who didn't deserve it

Attempts for murder, assaults and violence are crimes tho.
Just to remind you.

Oh wow so you're on ISIS's side? Why do you like terrorism?

Kek, please.

And no, I'm for Assad. It's very interesting that both the far-left and the far-right supports him tho.

No one on the far left actually supports him

reddit/twatter tankies do

Has modern Antifa even ever killed anyone?

Why "support" (a meaningless word unless you're actually aiding him) him, if there is Rojava/SDF?

Additionally there is the belief that capitalisms is markets (and "the more free the markets are, the more free the people are") and communism is planning (ie. by the 🍀🍀🍀government🍀🍀🍀 which is evil). From this they develop the theory that these two things, can be mixed, and it makes sense (but the problem is in the definitions, eg. capitalism isn't trade, it's wage-labour and production for exchange), and they call this socialism.

Now one might say "what do I care about these semantic discussions, they're irrelevant". The problem is that by defining the space like this, they are terminologically undermining far-left theory, and annihilate the concept of "communism" the way we think of it and use it in our texts. Interestingly enough it opens up a extra definition for them, ie. "capitalism" in relation to "corporatism".

The result is the following: what we call "Capitalism", the call either "corporatism" or "capitalism" depending on the scenario. What we call "Social Democracy", they call "socialism" - add cold war propaganda to this and "Social Democracy" becomes a taboo, Unions are evil, "collectivism" is created as a political category. Now we reach what we either call "Socialism" or "State Capitalism", depending on ones Position, and they call of of this "communism", leaving no space for our last stage, "Communism", ie. a society freed of the law of value and with for-use production, etc. - It is therefore important to question their premises and coordinates of the dominant, liberal Ideology and not accept them the way many "leftists" do, calling for a "mix of capitalism (ie. markets) and socialism (ie. government does stuff)".

Basic reading helps: libcom.org/library/capitalism-communism-gilles-dauve

Depends on if you consider the kurdish forces flying the flag in the pic I posted to be properly "mordern antifa"

That's what said though…

Without him, a power vacuum will emerge and islamists/jihadis will take power.
Christians/alawites/druze will be terrorized en masse.

With you up until the last sentence. If you want that you're an idiot.

that's the smart thing to do you retard

The issue with Reddit is if you commented at this point your comment would just get buried. Nobody would see it besides the original commenter (who is probably a paid shill anyways). This is what makes reddit such an ideal place for astroturfing the person who made the OP and this commenter were probably coordinating.

If you comment on a reddit post early you will almost always get upvoted to the top. Basically shills probably made the comment and OP at the same time gave them both a couple hundred upvotes and voila anti-communist propaganda that will be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people that appears organic.

Also that comment is very clearly propaganda. The fact that it very specifically addresses american Millennials, Sanders, and Democratic Socialism at a time when the DSA is taking off is too perfect. It has govt. psyop written all over it.

Venezuela is a populist shithole, they don't give a fuck about unionizing anything so it's probably just to get back at American companies.

Car companies can't make shit in Venezuela due to lack of materials.

finance.yahoo.com/news/toyota-tm-restarts-production-venezuela-120712089.html

And that was a year ago.

GM will just go from not making anything under a private company with some chance of being able to produce things somewhere in the future to not making anything under the government and a high chance of being abandoned before 2019.

You should read the news more often, Venezuela has been both of those for more than a decade.

But obviously both are a bit exaggerated, the second one is Chávez or Maduro just waking up one day and saying "hey man let's expropriate this company and see how its international branch reacts".

Was it loaded with cars and materials despite the company saying they had none? That's happened a few times there.

It is finally communism Y/N

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