Government taking your produce is LITERALLY COMMUNISM

Venezuela was lauded as a positive example of socialism until about 2012, because it even seemed to exit the 2008 recession unscathed.

Saying its not socialism is not a good argument since they can just point to socialists praising it a few years ago as an example of hypocrisy.

Venezuela WAS socialist.

However the system Chavez built collapsed on his exit, because it was too tightly bound to his cult of personality.

^ thats the fucking argument you should use.

Joke's on you, I always dismissed it for being shitty socdems. Not my fault /r/fullcommunism-tier retards dickride anybody who uses left-populist rhetoric and hands out gibmedats to the population
I would ask you what is socialism but I'm not in the mood to shit on people who don't read.

How much do they pay you?

Chávez' "socialism" was a social democracy with a different name. The people who do that are mostly illiterate, vague leftists. Socialism is a set of specific things, not everything the government does.

Not really related, but you could sense Chavéz lack of any real ideological sense in his vacillations on what his ideology was. Sometimes he called himself a Marxist, then the next time would drop the label and call himself a Bolivarian socialist. All the teachings of important socialists abandoned.

Not to mention that socialism can not be instituted through reforms.

Any intermediate state between capitalism and communism, progressing towards the latter.

Social democracy is part of socialism.

Complete idiocy. An economy based on wage labour is capitalism and just because some retard in charge says "fug gabidalism :–DDD" while still retaining said mode of production doesn't mean you suddenly have some "intermediate stage". Read a book.

You forgot your flag… Or did you?

An economy cannot be both things at the same time. You would do well to define what communism is as well, because I'm pretty sure you are using definitions that have little to do with the leading theorists in the field.

read a book

read the book to start with

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_mode_of_production

What book?

thise

By whom? Go to libcom.org and have fun searching for anybody referring to it as a positive example of socialism. Even those who were much more positive about Venezuela, like Chomsky or some guys on Revleft back then, did not refer to it as a socialist economy, since for the most part the means of production were privately owned.

Again, most jobs are in the private sector, and there hasn't been a point under Chávez in contradiction with that. There hasn't been any sort of equivalent to Gosplan at any point.

Here is a statement: Bill Clinton had a cult of personality around him. Can you disprove that? You can't, because the term is too vague. This accusation doesn't amount to anything. Here, read the followng comment under the article from 2010, that actually addresses a particular economic policy:
venezuelanalysis.com/news/5377

Why does leftypol refuse to face the fact that the socialist policies implemented by Chavez drove his poor and corrupt country further into the gutter?

Socialism only "works" in one-percenter white havens like Sweden and Denmark, for a limited time.

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The definition of socialist isnt "most jobs in public sector".

When a particular category definition is a list of features and a person makes a point that some situation doesn't fit that definition, it is sufficient to name one such feature.
Example:
A: Carl could play in our band. He's a guitar wizard, his fingers move at incredible speed.
B: Err, didn't you hear, he recently lost his fingers.
A: What?
B: He lost both arms in a traffic accident two weeks ago.
A: Carl WILL play guitar. Not having arms is not the same as not having fingers, that's a fallacy!

You argue like person A.