Leftypol, I've heard the assessment of Republicans, the mainstream and alternative media on the Venezuela crisis. I've head firsthand accounts from Venezuelans of the alleged horrors, the crime, the starvation, the riots, the lack of basic things like medicine and bandages in hospitals and toilet paper in stores.
I want to hear your opinion on the situation there from you, the self-identified politically left or Holla Forums. What, in your opinion caused and is driving the crisis and does this in any way change or challenge your views of socialism and/or communism? Is it all a CIA plot involving the leadership of every other South American nation as Maduro has claimed? Is it the work of a crypto-fascist cabal orchestrated by the grandchildren of the Nazis that fled to South America after WW2? Is it somehow a failure of socialism/communism as every remotely objective person thinks and does this failure challenge your views in any way?
Venezuela fixes the prices of certain goods, so businesses have stopped stocking stores since they can't make a profit. It's not socialism; it's anti-marketism.
Carter Baker
where does this "venezuala" misspelling come from?
Cameron Russell
manufacturers have stopped producing shit since they can't import what they need, they can't profit from anything with regulated prices unless the government gives them "regulated" dollars.
Joshua Cruz
...
Cameron Howard
keep in mind that the government is only now starting to let workers take over abandoned factories. Neither Chavez or Maduro ever established even market socialism
Blake Nguyen
Socialism just doesn't work. Only markets can meet the demands of the population.
Thomas Sanchez
Venezuela should serve as a warning for those naive enough to think they can seek refuge from the bourgeoisie within the bourgeois state itself. At this point I've come to look upon market regulation with all the same disgust weirdos like Hayek and Rothbard had.
Andrew Edwards
PSUV didn't even have any real economic policies, they just sold oil and bought people shit with the money.
Austin White
What went wrong is that the left bought the anti-imperialist rhetoric. Chavez was a strongman crank, and a tool, who tricked everyone with socialist rhetoric that he never fulfilled. The PSUV is corrupt, inefficient in running the oil sector and government, and even works with some business elites in violation of their supposed principles. They didn't keep their promises on participatory democracy, and actually instituted top down anti-democratic institutions to control civil society. Most importantly they were riding high on oil prices, the only important Venezuelan export is oil, and then those crashed and their economy went to shit. This is what happens when you try and build socialism in a state with one commodity, basically no industrial production sector, and with 70%+ of the population being uneducated, unskilled lumpenproles. You need a developed proletariat to have viable socialism. This was yet another nationalist banana republic regime built by a strong man, not socialist in any real sense.
Jace Torres
If the situation in Venezuela is a "failure of socialism" even though they're not even structurally socialist, is the economic basket case that North Dakota has become a failure of capitalism? Are the economic woes felt by Russia and Saudi Arabia failures of capitalism?
You know, it's almost like the crash in oil prices has hit every country that relied on oil exports hard and it has nothing to do with if the country is nominally "socialist" or not, and all this hullabaloo over Venezuela is just incredibly dishonest right-wing propaganda.
Robert Clark
the country is suffering the result of low oil prices and decades of economic warfare from the US.
Cameron Harris
in order to humiliate and discredit the government that they have been trying to overthrow and destabilize for years now as they stockpile but refuse to sell or distribute goods
Elijah Smith
Venezuela is not socialist, but it has a soc-dem ish government.
And it's not even that ideology's fault either. Just a retarded government.
Gabriel Green
How the hell do "countries" even work? How can food shortages even occur? Are the crops dying or something? Are producers just deciding to stop making food? Don't these people need to eat? All of this crap goes way over my head.
Correct me if I'm wrong comrades, but would not people in a socialist state just go to a farm and make themselves food, given they're collectivelly owned?
Who owns the farmlands in Venezuela? Porkies probably.
Daniel Watson
It's clearly the fact that Venezuela did not seize the means of production of toilet paper. You can't do shit like setting price controls if you don't have the means of production.
Parker Campbell
You can have market socialism.
Julian Walker
Socialism is a means of dealing with an industrial society, not a means to revert back to an agrarian society.
Easton Hernandez
What are they stockpiling, exactly? Polar couldn't import barley for beer, and the government does everything that they can to find any lie and shit on them 24/7
Coca-Cola ran out of sugar, they couldn't buy sugar locally and they couldn't import sweeteners, either. And Coca-Cola products don't even have regulated prices, but they need the government to let them exchange their bolivares to dollars too.
And PepsiCo doesn't show what they gain in Venezuela anymore because of the fucked up multiple exchange rate system giving inaccurate results.
Connor Turner
Venezuela's controls and exchange rate shit systems are confusing, yeah
Nicholas Cruz
Why-oh-why do they still try to peg their exchange rate instead of letting it float?
Look at the comment under that article, "Crackdown on Illegal Currency Market Continues in Venezuela": venezuelanalysis.com/news/5377
