Venezuela: Maduro Orders Shuttered Factories Seized and Given to Workers
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Sunday told a crowd of supporters that in order to increase productivity and help alleviate basic products scarcity, all businesses and factories closed down by their owners would be given to the workers so production could be restarted.
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socialism doesn't work
trying to blend capitalism and communism is like trying to blend water and oil
Communism is based on the collectively owned and managed socialist mode of production, newfag,
yeah and trying to merge it with capitalism doesn't work
either everything belongs to the state, or nothing does
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Communism and socialism aren't defined by state ownership.
Maduro is giving ownership of the means of production to workers. It is literally socialism (unlike basically anything Chavez did). It may be with brute force, but that is not related in principle.
HAPPENING
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Back to facebook
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BASED MADURO
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Perfect, the Americans will be too distracted to sabotage the plan
Will Maduro try and fight the sabotage with decentralizing the economy?
based
Well, depending on whether or not the workers will actually own and control the factories, this is one of the first times I have actually seen ML statism to anything at all to actually transition into socialism.
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Apparently this is what Maduro said:
TOP KEK
LET'S GO BOYZ
He actually did it
The absolute madman
Holy mother of god! Is this it? Is this the beginning of a qualitative change in the mode of production? Are we finally going to get socialism and not just some doomed transitional period like state capitalism or SocDem liberalism?
lol no
Nicolas Maduro has a death wish. TOP KEK.
And it's not like Maduro can give government bonds to the bourgeoisie to pacify them for seizing their factories. Because the Bolivar (national currency) is inflated to worthless anyway. It's only a matter of time before CIA-bankrolled right-wing death squads take him out.
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RIP Maduro
Its enough to make you sick.
CLAP means that people that live in urbanizations instead of barrios will get fucked in the ass.
People have taken over abandoned factories before, afaik
Someone showed me this post: caracaschronicles.com
It was a joke
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I never thought he would be the one to do it.
Is it too little too late though?
I mean, it seems like they are on the verge of a coup.
He sounded worried after what happened in Brazil.
Only criminals and people in the millitary have guns. Normal civilians get fucked.
I take it that Zero Hedge is an Autistian Economics Libertartardian channel?
Seeing how the legal ways to throw Maduro out are being blocked… maybe there could be a coup.
np.reddit.com
where are these people getting their news from? holy shit, where do those misconceptions come from?
Memes
The DNA of the soul
Yes please avoid it.
So the elites of Valenzuela going to go full communism stalin mode to keep power?
Cant wait for the cia coup that installs a fascist dictator
t.pol
Thanks for your retarded opinion lad
The comrade was making a joke, comrade
you're welcome
Ignore this retard, if you can't read any text and still be a communist at the end of it your theory is weak and you deserve to be purged
No thanks
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FUCK IT
WE'LL DO IT LIVE
FUCK YES, ITS HAPPENING
The Zero Edge commentators are complete retards. Someone there actually said that Norway will become like Venezuela in 10 years because they are being negatively impacted by the low international oil price (and refugees).
Considering that
1) Capitalists are too short-sighted to care for the long-term benefits of investing in renewable energy
2) Fossil fuels are a finite resource
3) The First World consumes a shitload of energy
We can conclude that the international oil price is going to rebound in a couple or few years anyway.
Fucking Libertarian retards.
What is she coughing up there? It looks like a semen-like substance.
The Zero Hedge cult does swallow a lot of Porky semen indeed.
>We are going to do it, fuck it!"
THE ABSOLUTE MADMAN, HE ACTUALLY SAID THIS
BASED
What's going on? Did the factory owners go on a strike like in that Ayn Rand book?
I think he may basically see the writing on the wall, and is willing to be killed to keep the flames of revolution alive.
The whole Nodric SocDem model, will colapse, but purely because Capitalism.
It will then create the strongest fascism in years, from people afraid of losing their security.
"carajo" isn't that strong
chávez actually named a phone "vergatario"
and who would forget "váyanse al carajo, yanquis de mierda"
They need one of us in the wreckage, brother
I've been reading that there have been shortages of all sorts of things because factory owners and other bourgeoisie have been either halting production or imports in order to wreck the economy and destabilize the Maduro government.
But I'm not an expect and have no way of weeding out the disinformation.
polar didn't get dollars assigned by the government to import barley, so it stopped producing beer.
I imagine this is going to all end badly, coups, right wing death squads, dictatorships, civil war, actual war.
Spin the wheel of fuck!
It feels bad to know that every time a spark of hope appears it'll be crushed in one way or another. How long is he gonna be around after this? A month?
laverdad.com
tl;dr: Mother burned her kids' hands with a hot metal spoon for wasting 2kg of flour, she spent 10 hours in a line to buy it
what the fuck
lel
No matter how much rain the gods bring uppon us, the sacred fire will live on.
Yeah! That's why all the fire departments and water utilities are private!
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They have elections for a representative democracy, a judiciary system based on private property, and a military and police sector to uphold it. How is it anything but bourgeois? What remains to be seen is whether Maduro really will get the factories into worker hands to shift it to a socialist society.
I am feeling really good about this development for one reason: it follows the precepts of historical materialism. Venezuela is fully capitalist and suffering due to the contradictions built into it. It is industrialized and not a partially feudal backwater like every other society that has had a revolution has been. Also, unlike so many other so-called socialist revolutions, this move has the effect of actually taking private property from capitalists and putting it into the hands of the working class, which is what socialism is actually about.
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good point.
youtube.com
HE SAID FUCK IT
GLORY TO NICOLAS MADURO, SAVIOR OF THE PROLETARIAN RACE
May total total victory be with him. May the parasites who undermine his efforts get crushed under heel.
This is the biggest "FUCK YOU" to porky since the 1960's.
fug iddd :DDDD dime for gommunism
t. maduro
Is this the greatest quote in socialist history? It's at least top 10 right?
and then the state takes back control of the factories once again reducing their efficiency and effectively stripping the power of the workers again, or the workers will fight to keep their control over the factories and the government wont like it ad will kill them or at least try. that ll happen between 1 week and 3 months, i guarantee it.
Is Maduro litteraly Stalin?
I think not.
I don't think they can afford it, at least.
I think they'll play it like tito did aka authoritarian market socialism
Maduro is a bus driver, not some megalomaniac.
He's awkardly doing the best he can in a bad situation. I wish I could share a beer with him tbh.
No, and he doesn't need to be, once the workers have actually made the factories more effective, and once the gain the capacity to run them themselves, they will soon find they can run other things themselves, inevitably some will want to do this and take actions towards this which will lead to a reaction from the Venezuelan government in order to regain control.
And Stalin was a bank robber
I might be wrong, and i hope i am, but if history is anything to go by i suggest we remain skeptical of the outcome of this or at least the intentions of the Venezuelan government in doing this.
He even looks like spurdomeme
You sound like a Republican back in the 2000's who's main qualification for determining a president is whether or not they think they could have a drink with them.
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oh god that picture
You know what this made me realize?
Now more than ever we need someone like Bernie in office.
We can't have someone like hillary or donald sending the CIA in to fuck things up.
youtu.be
Jason "State Ownership is better than Coops" Unhrue
"vayanse al carajo, yanquis de mierda" is up there
His beard is getting pretty impressive 2bh
HERE WE GO BOYSS
The delicate part is, Venezuela's oil (as most of SA's oil, in Brazil we have the same problem) is a much heavier oil than that of the middle east and other places so it takes some pretty advanced tech (my geography teacher says only the US have it) to process.
Long story short Venezuela has to sell the oil to the US for processing in order to buy it back for domestic use.
gulag all of them
It is not so much that the technology to extract oil from tar sands is advanced as it is prohibitively expensive. The American and Canadian tar sands are being drained for hardly any direct profit at all. They are just drilling it to flood the market in order to destabilize countries with nationalized production. In Venezuela's case it worked like a charm. …maybe too well.
He's actually right
NOW IS THE TIME
STRIKE WHILE THE IRON IS HOT BUCKOS
Do NOT let His sacrifice be in vain
This.
The problem is that the co-ops will still play in the market, i don't know how this will work out.
Canada has been hit hard by the oil price crash as well though. Canada's economy is far more dependent on oil exports than the United States. The Canadian dollar has tanked. The Canadian job market has went to shit. Especially in Alberta.
I don't mean to sound like a dick but why be an ancom if you see the pitfalls of market socialism. Like I realize some ancom theory is anti-market but how do you realistically work that without a state to help coordinate planning between various communes at the national level?
Bruh, communism is stateless. Marxists and Anarchists want more or less the same thing. You don't need a state for communes to coordinate production.
Yes the worker cooperatives will still charge what the market will bear for their prices. But with democratic management of the workplace, the workers will finally get their fair share of what they produce. Increased wages for workers will stimulate the economy. And the more production we have by turning over these idle factories to the working-class, the more that the prices will come down for goods. Making them more accessible to the poor.
hmmm i dunno fam…it would seem like we need a state to coordinate things while classes still exist.
I can see humanity reaching a state where the law of value doesn't operate: 1. either from complete automation or 2. from the size and productivity of labor being expanded to the point that as long as everyone more or less contributes some labor to the social productive process, then no one is going to really give a shit about money or prices. That could be done without a state, as long as there is a communal emphasis on reprocity like in native american tribes.
Theoretically, we probably could create a planned economy through discussion of needs over the internet, rather than through the pricing of a market. But then the problem arises if nations that still have classes threaten our country or if some people stuck in the mentalities of the old society want to return to a market-based system under the mask of the communes.
How would we do things if commune A decides to go full porky and commune C doesn't like that but none of the other communes wish to intervene? Hell, sometimes it could be as simple as a commune not wishing to diminish what Lenin called "bourgeois right" when the time where it was justified was long passed.
I have confidence that this is not an impossible task for the masses to learn given a long period of trial and error. But I somehow doubt we will be allowed to "just try it out" till we get it right on planet porky.
I CANT WAKE UP
SAVE ME
have these classcucks ever thought that maybe there might be a class basis behind the big ebul gubermint that they don't trust?
So has the economy of the United States. You are not under the impression that capitalists give a tinker's damn about the host countries they inhabit, are you? This oil crisis will only last long enough to debilitate OPEC forever. Afterwards, the private companies will dominate oil production globally again like they did during the era of the Seven Sisters.
That is true, but it is the goal of every communist to eliminate class divisions so that anarchy can be achieved.
Jesus Christ, what cuck.
True dat m8
I don't know if the problem lies with the United States and Canada though. On RT they explained that the oil production boom came mainly from the Middle-East. And that it's high grade oil. Meanwhile the US and Canada have shitty grade oil. Canada's tar sand oil was going for as little as $7-8/barrel. Meanwhile the stuff in the Middle-East was fetching the top price.
RT is Russian propaganda though. So I don't know how legit that is.
Haliburton drilling the shit out of Iraq did a lot of that, as did the Saudis throwing open the floodgates to their enormous deposits to mitigate the effect that the plummeting price of oil (due to the United States becomming a net exporter again) would have otherwise had on their economy. They are bleeding themselves dry to prevent their feudal mode of production from collapsing.
The differences in grades can be cracked away, albeit at great cost, in the huge refineries in the United States. The expenses involved in that process are why nobody had bothered to drill the tar sands before. It is not profitable to do so, at least not directly.
Socialism and communism have nothing to do with state ownership.
Then you don't know the definition of socialism. Socialism, according to both Marx and Lenin, is the full control of the economy under the proletarian state (dictatorship of the proletariat). Communism is when that state ceases to exist.
Socialism is a relation of production in which those who produce goods and services (workers) are also those who manage the process of production and keep and distribute the product.
A state owning the means of production can be socialism, but only if it is a legitimate workers' state and retains this basic relation.
just add lecithin
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Trotsky?
no, because they aspire to to that classhood
No, Maduro-san, son of Stalin returned to Earth to bring happiness and proletarian revolution to all Mankind. He came to wash away the sins of revisionism from all Mankind and to return the means of production to the meek and wretched of the Earth who have been deprived for so long. He was washed in the waters of the river Drin by Hoxha the Baptist who taught him to unconditional faith in the science of Marxism-Leninism.
As on Earth as it is in Heaven, in Stalin's name we pray, amen.
That book was shitty and long.
I actually did enjoy the fountainhead, but atlas shrugged was way too long
It didn't work out last time. No reason to think it will work out now.
The fountain head feels fucking retarded
The main character is a serial criminal yet he doesn't face any consequences ever
SELF INTEREST ISN'T CRIMINAL YOU FUCKING ALTRUIST
So whenever someone say Canada will be like Venezuala, just tell them it's because of oil fuckery. That's what I would do.
And then they'll just counter with something even more uninformed and retarded.
Who the hell really believes Canada might end up like Venezuela?
Fucking commies.
The West should send in the tanks and crush this pathetic little country.
Liberate South America from the communist scourge once and for all.
fountainhead wasn't bad.
Atlas shrugged made me want to gauge my eyes out.
Stay mad,
class cuck.
Just fucking LOL @ conservatives saying Canada will be like Venezuela. Oil represented like one-third the value of Canada's exports (which is still much too high. We need to diversify our exports more). Oil represents like 90% of the value of Venezuela's exports. Something crazy like that.
Also Venezuela has price controls. Canada doesn't for the most part. Price controls cause unexpected negative consequences in the economy. Like black market sale of price controlled goods.
And the Venezuelan bourgeoisie have engaged in deliberate economic warfare against the Maduro government by halting production and imports. The Canadian government serves the interests of the Canadian bourgeoisie so why would the Canadian bourgeoisie ever do this? Justin Trudeau may not be as good of an ally to the bourgeoisie as Stephen Harper or Rona Ambrose. But Justin Trudeau is still playing ball.
If I was Comrade Prime Minister of Canada, the first thing I would do is institute a Universal Basic Income of $20kCAD/year to every adult, $8kCAD/year to every dependent minor. Which would devalue the income and wealth of the bourgeoisie and increase the purchasing power of the vast majority of the working-class. I would expect economic warfare coming from the bourgeoisie in that situation. I'd probably have to send the Canadian military to seize control of factories, construction sites, tar sands, mills, farms, offices, etc. and hand ownership over to the workers. And then I'd be assassinated by right-wing death squads funded by the CIA.
Could it be any more pure ideology,though?
Your communist empires died years ago.
Now you're left with a handful of outposts scattered around the globe.
Your ideology is dead and scuttling away to the darkest most depraved corners of the world to escape total annihilator.
When Western backed troops liberate Venezuela, images of the horrors of communism will be broadcast for all the world to see how rotten and base that ideology is.
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3/10
probably not.
The end message, if I remember right, was something about the collective vs the individual.
Never mind the fact a collective could be in an individual's self-interest. Essentially, it promotes a false dichotomy.
Heard of a little country called China?
That was a commnist empire.
What's more, at its doorstep, lay the Republic of China: a right wing nationalist republic, plus Hong Kong (the British pearl of the Orient. Capitalist success story that now yearns to return to the days when she still linked arms with the UK) and Macau, gambling capital of the world.
Our of four of these Chinese countries which do you think is the worse off?
Communist China of course.
Despite being the biggest of all three, by any measure it's actually one of the most economically depraved.
Gee I wonder why.
Might it have something to do with that communism it's suffered for decades?
stirner confirmed for gay
Oh no, not the total annihilator…
I like that you basically admit you're cool with propaganda.
Nah, I'm not watching that imperialist bigot.
2/10
made me reply
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Think of the 100 million my sasenach!
If he was,
he hid it well from his two wives.
China is corporatist, not communist. China has a system of state-sanctioned/state-monitored private ownership.
Employing workers in sweat shops at paltry wages, shitty work conditions, long hours, etc. is not communist.
Just like Jesus.
They keep trying to do that and failing horribly at it.
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As much as I am pro co-ops, Argentina pulled the same move but it didn't proof as being superior. They still suffer under the competition inherent to capitalism/free markets (I am Mutualism-leaning but sometimes dubious about the benefits of free markets).
Didn't China have co-ops for a while too?
It seems like capitalist businesses always have the edge because they have an easier time exploiting workers.
No matter how much you deny it, and say "free markets can work" "capitalism can be fixed, we just need to call it "not-capitalism", the rules of "Whoever exploits the most, wins" will always be there.
You can't have real communism and still have a state
The worker coops will have to charge what the market will bear for their products. So they have to compete with the capitalist businesses on price. But at least the workers would have democratic control in their workplace and the revenues would be shared more equitably.
coops can be successful under the right conditions
we'll see
Could they pull of something like Mondragon did?
Is that even possible in venezuela?
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maximum fedora
Considering that Venezuela is fairly industrialized, I would say that they have a fighting chance.
The retard blows up affordable housing just because it wasn't built to his autistic specifications. Lol
how do we fight the porky propaganda?
Start a media company
at the same time? sauce?
Learn what exploitation means, dipshit.
I know its not going to convince normies who tend to think that the only reliable sources of news are the Big Black Cock and the Clinton News Network but Telesur English is actually pretty damn good leftist media pham.
most fucking shameless yellow journalism i've seen in a century
about worker co-operatives?
uk.coop
*clapping intensifies*
He cant be serious. Not even the most radical communists dared to do this.
And what would be this board's reaction when the worker controlled factories turn out to be shittier than bourgeois-owned ones?
Blame the workers?
Gosh, I dunno, I guess we'll have to examine the material circumstances under which they existed and operated and then draw our conclusions.
Yeah, it's time to blame the CIA again.
wew.
Yeah, it's never the fault of the populace.
I wonder who could be behind these posts
Bane?
uk.coop
uk.coop
It's odd how so many people are ignorant of the existence of cooperatives.
What part of "no medicine" isn't true? My grandmother had a shitload of problems getting medicines for chemotherapy (forgot what they were called) a year ago, and I really doubt that it has gotten better since then.
Patria querida!
Yea I'm sick of people being in denial that there are really serious problems in Venezuela right now.
The bourgeoisie may be engaging in economic warfare against the Maduro government. But the Chavistas have made A LOT of mis-steps.
- They failed to diversify the Venezuelan economy. Oil represented 95% of the country's exports and 50% of the country's GDP. When the international price of oil crashed, this severely depleted Venezuela's hard currency reserves. Which limits Venezuela's ability to purchase imports.
- The Venezuelan government subsidized imports through their CADIVI program. So instead of charging market rate for US Dollars (ie. $1USD = 416.62 BsF) they sell US Dollars to Venezuelans at a massive subsidy ($1 USD = 10 BsF). Which depletes Venezuela's hard currency reserves even further by the way. Chavez first implemented this program back in 2003 in order to control for inflation. It's common for national governments to use foreign currency reserves to buy back their own national currency in order to control inflation.
- Artificially pricing imports cheaply discourages domestic food production and kills domestic food production jobs. Which further depletes the nation's hard currency reserves and leads to higher unemployment
-Also: People would buy US Dollars on the cheap from CADIVI and then re-sell these US Dollars on the black market for market price. Making a huge profit margin. If you were to buy US dollars for 10 BsF each now and re-sell the US dollars for 416.62 BsF on the black market, that's 41.662x profit.
- The price controls of the Maduro government encouraged merchants and food producers to sell imported and domestically produced food to smugglers. Who then smuggle food into neighboring Colombia to sell for market rates (which are significantly higher than the price controlled rates in Venezuela) at US Dollars. And then these smugglers return to Venezuela and sell these US Dollars on the black market for major bank.
So before the bourgeoisie has to even lift a finger, the Chavistas screwed themselves over by putting all their eggs in one basket (oil), killing domestic production and in turn employment (subsidized imports) and creating perverse incentives for corruption (subsidized imports, price controls).
Nicolas Maduro's team is incompetent. They need more economically savvy people handling their finances.
My solution to Venezuela
- End fixed currency exchange/subsidized imports
- End price controls, give cash transfers to the poor or implement a basic income system. Start with a meager sum per month. And increase that amount as the country's hard currency reserves recover.
- Focus on export-led production first, domestic production second. What good is domestic production if you don't have the hard currency reserves to import medicine or medical equipment?
It's going to take a long time for Venezuela to diversify their economy. People who think that voting in the right-wing reactos in power is going to change things overnight are deluded. But if Maduro won't surround himself with smarter people, Maduro does need to go. The neo-liberals at least have enough sense to know that the country needs to increase exports, stop subsidizing imports and end price controls. The caveat though is that income inequality would skyrocket under a neo-liberal regime.
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In America there is enough medicine and people are forced to die for not having enough money anyway. Capitalism works!
Is this really their fault? I think they could have solved this problem if they had immediately moved to central planning.
The tankies on leftypol's IRC are the scum of the left. They literally don't give a fuck at all that workers have finally seized the means of production. "Who cares about worker's seizing the means of production lmao" -actual quote.
I fucking hate you people. How can you not realize this is the most important thing that has happened for the left in decades?
that the bourgeois are giving shuttered factories to the workers instead of the workers seizing them is saying enough about this pseudo-socialism.
Poor central planning is actually what fucked Venezuela. When the Venezuelan government subsidizes imports with oil money, what incentive do you have to not only domestically produce goods but to produce exports too?
If the Venezuelan government didn't offer cheap subsidized imports, Venezuelan bourgeois would have been forced to build up their export industries and domestic production.
But you see this is not a politically popular move. For the government to sit on a mountain of foreign currency reserves and say that we need to save for a rainy day in the event that the Gringos in Washington would boost oil production and crash international oil prices.
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LOL. Target abandoned the Canadian market because they weren't pleased with the profits they were making here. So there was a huge liquidation sale.
that's not central planning, user. that's "central planning" mixed with a market economy. of course that will lead to disaster.
Well fuck me sideways….
Whatever you want to call it, the Chavistas lacked foresight. They didn't foresee all of the problems that their fixed currency exchange/subsidized imports and price controls would create. And the state didn't make any effort to diversify exports. And the private sector had every incentive to import and no incentive to export or produce domestically due to the fixed currency exchange/subsidized imports.
What Venezuela did is akin to some retard from 2013 saying "I'm going to invest my life savings in Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin is the future." Or some retard in 2008-2009 investing in Gold. And then seeing the value of their life savings collapse practically overnight when the Bitcoin and Gold bubbles burst.
Even Peter Schiff, the Autist School of Economics libertard nutjob who hawks Gold, will tell you to diversify your portfolio and put only like 10-15% in Gold.
VENEZUELA PUT 95% OF THEIR EXPORTS IN OIL!!!!
IDIOTS!!!
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It's the cancer of literally every imageboard that ever existed.
Do you have a single fact to back that up
sup prickly cactus
the fact that the government of Venezuela is bourgeois? The fact that the Venezuelan state is the ideal capitalist of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie?
No, usually what leftcoms have to say is utterly retarded, they will simultaneously defend the bolsheviks and Lenin while at the same time complain about how the destroyed the revolution, how workers co-ops are bourgeois and the refuges should stay in war torn hell holes and die there instead of going someplace less shit.
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Yeah, he is right. But the hope anons have that this can move in a more coherent and radical direction isn't completely misplaced. I don't think their gonna tap a hat with a magic and get some sort of Soviet planned economy or leftcom utopia. They have resisted that critique from their Left from people like the communist party of Venezuela
for a while.
The national liberation angle could be worthwhile by itself. And if it inspires or polarizes the rest of Latin America thats good. The bourgeoisie know that partial nationalization isn't lethal but they know once those floodgates are off its hard to look back.
Focusing on the fact that Maduro represents a bourgeois party and government blithely steps over the fact that its probably the workers themselves pushing for this. Working class struggle finds expression even under bourgeois politics.
Have to agree with this user sounds like socdem gibs me dat. It can work if the conditions are right but the contradictions of capital are a difficult beast to tame and ride.
So what are the chances of them actually diversifying their economy?
Who is actually in charge of setting their economic agenda?
I hope if there are other Marxist economist out there, they have tried to reach out.
not all leftcoms are pro-bolshevik, I am though. this isn't "retarded" at all. As with many things in history there's no black and white to the bolsheviks, especially when we talk about different periods in history. The october revolution was a genuine proletarian revolution, led by the bolshevik vanguard. And after this rather short revolutionary period the revolution failed and the the bolsheviks where the Dr. Frankenstein of this frankensteinian pseudo-socialist soviet union.
they are essentially reaffirming capitalism and merely a different form of capital-management. The laborers are still exploited by the individual capital they're subjected to.
Huh? I've never heard a leftcom say something like this. A defining feature of left-communism is the strong emphasis on proletarian internationalism. And solidarity with all workers worldwide means also solidarity with all refugees worldwide.
leftcom.org
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Wew. The whole "state-capitalism-is-the-ideal-form-of-capitalism-for-porky" maymay needs to die. Almost 40 years of neoliberal privatizations and market liberalization and you'd think you'd have learned something by now.
Even Zizek's meme about dictatorial state-capitalism being superior to bourgeois "private" (if you can call massive multinationals that) democratic Western capitalism has major flaws.
The fact he's mainly right about is that it needs a large repressive apparatus. The two state-capitalist "challengers" to the West, Russia and China are in serious crisis and are responding to it by idiotically privatizing more state-assets.
in response to wrong post
oh god yes!!
FULL COMMUNISM NOW!!!!
REEEEEEEE
Just change State with Corparation, and State-Capitalism works JUST FINE!
CYBERPUNK IS NAO!
youtube.com
opposition protesters in caracas beating up police
this has nothing to do with the assertion that Venezuela is state capitalist or not. Every state is the ideal capitalist to its own bourgeoisie.This means that the state represents / tries to represent the totality of all capitalists' interests.
In Venezuela the constellation of class struggle led the state to take this specific form to appease the working class and give the bourgeoisie a certain degree of social peace so they'd be able to continue the valorization process. Such a constellation is fairly common on the periphery of imperialist blocks because the proletarians in these places tend to be prone to a higher degree of exploitation, making them unsatisfied and rebellious.
So if Maduro talks about protecting the workers and giving them factories then he doesn't do this because he's got a soft spot for the poor workers but because he NEEDS to protect social peace and thus the capitalist order.
And frankly, I don't care what Zizek memes about as long as there's no sound reason to think he's memeing reasonably.
cont.
and he isn't even giving them to the workers as you're led to believe. I'll just repost this post from reddit:
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Trying to control prices has never worked and it never will. But sure just dismiss me as a socdem gibs me dat if you want. I'll argue with the facts, you argue with your ad hominem attacks. Price controls create perverse black market incentives.
Why the hell would you sell an item for the state regulated price of 3 BsF when you can smuggle it over to Colombia and sell it for market rate at 10 BsF?
What incentive do you have to produce domestic goods and exports when you can buy heavily subsidized imports?
Price controls have failed in every single state that it has been tried.
Reddit please
International travel/trade was far more cumbersome in the 13th-18th century than it is now. Policing the bakeries regularly to make sure that they are selling an acceptable quantity of bread for a penny sounds pretty expensive. It would make more sense to just give the poor cash transfers to buy the bread.
Right but certain factions of the bourgeoisie might be associated with a more progressive outlook and revolutionary impulse (at least when it comes to fighting rentier interests) than others. Certain segments are going to be better at expanding the economy and the capital-worker contradiction then others.
I mean to just say that the state represents the totality of capitalist interests leaves aside other important factors in class struggle. For instance in many European countries a non-capitalist aristocracy held de jure or de facto state-power at earlier stages of development; they often continued to be a drain on the economy, and implanted spooky reactionary ideologies in peoples minds.
Now leaving aside the whole development question, which isn't terribly relevant to most of us in the West, there are factions of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie more interested in class conflict then social peace or this wouldn't be happening.
Even if the working class has to push against the very furthest edge of the left-wing of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie it is not a terrible move. Better to go along with what may now seem like a bourgeois nationalization and revolutionary terror effort then surrender the position of strength the working class has achieved to a fascist dictatorship.
Wouldn't it seem that once you've eliminated the extreme-right and liberal center factions of the bourgeoisie that it will be much easier to challenge the hegemony of the left-wing nationalist bourgeoisie from the ground up and from the Left?I don't ascribe to the theory that the proletariat takes power all at once it has to win some major battles in the social war, perhaps maybe even have to experience a real counter-revolutionary war and triumph over it.
As long as capitalism exists then no commune or council is going to be as socialist as we would probably like it to be. In this case the councils are institutionalized and that makes them harder for the Right to attack without crashing the government with no survivors.
This at least recognizes that bourgeois and capitalistic elements exist within communes but only acknowledges it for the reason that its state-mediated not because there are contradictions among the people or the commodity production process itself this does not only encompass capitalism, but a real Marxist movement must eventually supersede it
I think struggling here is good as once they get more factories out of the private domain, they can focus on using its semi-public nature to challenge bourgeois hegemony and work towards smashing the bourgeois state and gaining the rest of the means of production with it.
kek
Plus doing it despooks people about the holy nature of private property as far as possible under a bourgeois democratic regime.
No there wasn't, Target had terrible logistics problems and couldn't keep their shelves stocked.
You see any liquidation signage in that Target?
That's probably why those idiots at Target lost money in Canada and had to leave. Lol. No one ever said that incompetent management is non-existent in capitalism. You just won't last very long (unless you get a government bailout of course).
You're missing the point.
Or maybe you're intentionally avoiding the point.
The Byzantine empire also had stringent price and market controls and their economy was entirely reliant on international travel and trade, with the strength of their economy strongly correlating to the strength of those controls which worked more-or-less effectively from the 4th century to the 15th.
it sounds like unfounded conjecture, faggot
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Please explain, in your own words, how Venezuela is socialist.
Make sure to define "socialism" while you do it.
The Byzantine empire. Fucking LOL. Bringing up old-ass examples.
Every time price controls have been tried in the 20th and 21st century, they have failed.
If I am a food distributor and I exchange my bolivars for US dollars at a very favorable exchange rate (subsidized imports) so that I can purchase imports abroad, do you think that I'm going to be an honest businessman and spend all those US dollars on importing food to sell? Or do you think I'm going to take those US dollars to the black market to sell for a shitload of bolivars at massive profit?
If I'm a merchant and a smuggler offers to pay me double the state-controlled price under the table for my goods, do I refuse or do I take the money?
Soviet Union/Cuba/Sandinista/Chavista/etc. apologists are living in a fantasy world in their mind.
Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro are dumb ass spics who don't know shit about macro-economics. The concept of equilibrium price and supply/demand is the first class of Economics 101 and they don't even understand that. Setting the price below the equilibrium price will always lead to a shortage. Because the producers would be unable to meet the demand in that situation.
So where would Holla Forums rather stay?
poal.me
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Yes, those disgusting capitaist american pigs sure have it much worse than the superior SOCIALIST Venezuelan proletariat when it comes to healthcare!
So it's a white people thing.
The fact of the matter is that 0% of the Venezuelan population will ever get to stay at a hospital that nice.
No hagás de cuenta que así no es la norma en la region. Al menos en venezuela tienen camillas, en colombia atenden a la gente en el piso pero yo sé que ud. no tiene problema con eso.
Spooked out by bourgeois probably autistrian economics and shitty b8 posting.
How do you explain the fact that Cuba has a world-renowned medical system despite being the subject of a vicious economic blockage?
Its about time for Holla Forumstards and other reactionary trolls to quit pretending like like they actually care about things that happen in the third world. You probably did not give a shit about poverty in Venezuela or elsewhere until the gov started calling itself socialist.
Kill yourself
There are girls in capitalist Bangladesh who are forced to suck dick just to survive. I don't see any right-wingers crying for them. Right-wingers only seem to become bleeding hearts when it's a country led by a government that calls itself socialist.
Single-payer health care is more common than not in the developed countries. That's not the problem here. The problem is that due to the production and import shortages, Venezuelan hospitals don't have the resources they need. Norway has "socialized medicine too". But they don't have price controls like Venezuela. They have capitalism with a welfare state.
I don't see any left wingers crying for them either, apart from that post I guess.
Just to clarify.
Do the Obamacare expansion states cover medical stays like that now though?
And yet working-class white Republicans have the audacity to say that Obamacare is evil. Affordable public health insurance for low and middle-income Americans is evil!
what the fuck
Bretty Good bait 4/10
If there isn't money, the factories can't pay wages, taxes, etc. so they can't operate. It's not sabotage, it's simple market dynamics. It was expected when you're ruled by a bus driver.
If you had money, would you invest it in the country that offered you 0% chance of profit, or 50% chance of profit?
You can't be this thick on purpose, come on.
Now would be a good point to raise the idea of labor vouchers
fucking lefties
KEK
There's a greater level of state involvement in the healthcare industry, but its still all private.
And it's not so much the Republican "base" that's against it so much as the medical insurance companies that are against it, because a lot of the ways that they screwed people were banned by the law. The Republican "base" serves as little more than the reactionary horde used for mass support of largely minority corporate interests.
Jesus wants you to get fucked by insurance companies or something. It doesn't really make sense, and reason is beyond the point. Most of the American religious right are all but outright cultists.
lol lefties constantly bring up how bad the third world is exploited you even have people who focus almost solely on it like Jason unruhue
Isn't that the basis of your whole ideology, leftcom?
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TOP KEK. It's hilarious seeing Ancaps like Stefan Molyneux or those WeAreCharge guys on YouTube talk about how socialism ruined Venezuela. But then when you point out the problems with American capitalism, they will be quick to point out to you that America isn't real capitalism.
*WeAreChange
this is a good post, thank you. i've been looking for something that explained the problem without it being BWAHHH SOCIALISM DOESN'T WORK on one side or BOURGEOIS SABOTAGE on the other
Here are some things that retards say:
One that most people probably won't care about:
Also, people say that TeleSUR and Russia Today are in venezuelan digital TV now. I wonder if they have to show the national anthem (at 12pm and 12am) and the forced government broadcasts like the other channels.
it's a failure, as every socialist state ever.
a failure, as evident by 100% proven result of every socialist state failed.
So, in your mind, not only are all socialist states failures (they're not)… all failed states are automatically socialist.
Venezuela had basically no economic policy at all, capitalist or socialist. Liberals are butthurt, but the left knew better.
even basic knowledge of him would throw that out the window
You understand COMINTERN doesn't exist anymore, right?
That's not "yellow journalism" you fucking red bastard, there's actual people dying in Venezuela because of the shortage of medicines and the poor state of hospitals, several attemps to send medicines to Venezuela had been denied by Maduro.
What's the argument here? Nationalization and price controls aren't inherently socialist and the government calling them it doesn't make it so.
Worker control over the means of production on the other hand is a socialist policy.
Whether the economy is good or not has nothing to do with it. What remains to be seen is whether Maduro will do what he claims or simply keep misusing leftist concepts as demagoguery.
You know what the worst part is? He can't even do a proper purge on the corrupt bureaucracy or he'll be called totalitarian. I hate the 21st century.
Did those offers of foreign aid come with strings attached?
Pretty much every IMF bailout package ends up in disaster for the countries that implement them.
Heheheh what do you mean worker? The IMF has improved every country it has intervened in ever.
Pretending to care about people dying from poverty and lack of medicine in Third World countries or really even anywhere again.
I'm sure your quite the activist trying to get medicines denied by sanctions to the DPRK and Iran. I'm sure you weep every day for the one million children killed by Western sanctions on medicine in Iraq which was justified as "worth it" by Albright.
I love how all these right-wingers make jokes about muh six million and helicopter rights and then become beautiful souls whenever it comes to a nation that is socialist, calls itself socialist or simply struggling against imperialism.
*helicopter rides
I like how Holla Forums is eternally ass damaged over a couple of liberal protesters from a random video.
what makes you think that he's not venezuelan?
Who's the guy on the t-shirt on the left?
What makes you think he is? And even if he is how do you know he's telling the truth? And even if he is, class struggle isn't a dinner party; there are such things as enemies.
Some RAF (the commies, not the pilots) guy Holla Forums is obsessed with because he apparently called for a "Long March through the Institutions" which is allegedly irrefutable evidence of the SJW-Jew-Negro Academic coalition to deny them a wheat-loving aryan gf.
there's something called "news" man, you should try reading them.
making paramilitaries made up of armed citizens to defend the country better are only okay when we do it!
t. Burgers
the only people that can defend themselves with guns are criminals and criminals with a license (cops, military)
Does this make Venezeula officially socialist? Or is there other steps that it needs to take?
Sorry I'm new to this
putting factories in which the workers labor into the control of those workers is a socialist policy, yes
but it isn't the sole condition of the transition from capitalism into socialism
so theoretically it's a step in the right direction but it depends on how such a transition is implemented and the form this "workers' control" takes, which ideally would be determined by the workers themselves
Thanks
What are the other requirements to be considered a Socialist society?
Classless, moneyless, stateless.
Thats Communism not Socialism
Socialism = another name for lower-stage communism
Yes in other words, Socialism is a transitional stage from Capitalism to Communism
In other words they aren't the same thing
Fuck off, socialism is worker ownership. It can coincide with both money and states.
No. Socialism is the first stage OF COMMUNISM. In other words, it IS already communism (classless, moneyless, stateless).
"Worker ownership" is just too vague, it can mean anything.
SOCIALism is (classless) SOCIETY ownership. It cannot coincide with money (which isd a mean for exchanges; who would the entire society exchange its products with?), and once it's achieved, the state withers away.
K. Marx, talking about socialism (= lower-stage communism) in the Critique of the Gotha programme.
my gott have you read any theory or just the wikipedia page
for the last time, Socialism is NOT classless, moneyless or stateless
Socialism is actually classless.
Socialism and communism are alike in that both are systems of production for use based on public ownership of the means of production and centralized planning. Socialism grows directly out of capitalism; it is the first form of the new society. Communism is a further development or "higher stage" of socialism.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his deeds (socialism). From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs (communism).
tl;dr socialism is transitory, not classless
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Holy kek.
Communism includes two distinct stages. Socialism is one of them. What's so complicated in that?
By the way, the "transitional stage" has a name too: revolution.
if they're distinct they're not the same you idiot
Well, communism doesn't include these stages so much as it is a result of them (dialectical materialism).
Anons are just trying to point out this pattern of fallacy for you:
Viva.
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What the fuck?
"Tree" is the set of "lower tree" and "upper tree". "Trunk" is just another name for "lower tree"
"Communism" is the set of "lower-stage communism" and "upper-stage communism". "Socialism" is just another name for "lower-stage communism".
Again, is that really so hard to understand?
Of course they're not the same: socialism and upper-stage communsim do differ. But they're also both stages of communism. So they differ, but not on the distinctive features of a communist society (which they both are): being classless, moneyless and stateless.
You keep framing this idea around abused terminology. Do you also think that because communism emerges from capitalism that there will also be class-hierarchy and bourgeoisie? Hopefully not.
Obviously not:
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lol
haha
