I just stumbled on gif related and found out you guys made it

i just stumbled on gif related and found out you guys made it.

so what exactly is it that makes you guys say venezuela is not socialist? what is your (or if i'm mistaken, the) definition of "socialism", and how would "real"/"true"(?) socialism solve venezuela's economic perils? if capitalism is private ownership of production and manufacturing for market exchange, how does venezuela fit this criteria? venezuelan industry is, as far as i know, all nationalized. i'm not well acquainted enough in your theory and jargon, so some help understanding you would be appreciated.

purely on the topic of venezuela's current troubles, if you want my opinion and perspective, it would go as follows:

the main problem is price controls. if you are restricted to selling a loaf of bread for Bs. 10 and it costs Bs. 20 to make, you stop making bread, employee owned or not. when you remove the competent people that know how to grow food or drill and refine your oil (the evil capitalists, as you would say, the ones that in this process innovate and add to society because there is a profit motive to grease their pockets) and replace them will loyalists, and then redistribute all the profits to people that support you without any reinvestment into your infrastructure so you can stay in power, when the good times inevitably end, the current workers, whose only qualifications are loyalty or fear, don't know what they are doing and you suffer.

when because of price controls no one produces anymore, especially the farmers, and you have to import everything and you have no goods to trade, because again, you took the productive capacity of the nation to give to your friends and redistribute to the people, which is what venezuelan "socialism" (whether it is socialism or not) is, you must use real money to buy those imported goods, but now your currency's exchange rate is worth nothing and and you produce nothing so you cannot buy anything from abroad.

furthermore, giving away electricity and other goods to keep the poor happy, which results in not valuing the actual scarcity of electric power, which results in having no power left.

Other urls found in this thread:

wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Labor_as_a_Common_Pool_Resource
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_Federation_of_Chambers_of_Commerce
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonapartism
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

bump

Venezuala fucked up by having it's economy based on oil and got fucked by US for not being a good worker.

Is this why Maduro recently said he would give bunkrupt factories to the workers? "Fuck it, we do it"?

Can you please stop making "What about Venezuela" posts, Holla Forums?

Also, grats to the user that fixed the gif that pol was spamming for centuries of internet time.

Socialism is about a transfer in property, not control of prices.

Where did you "stumble upon" it?

80% of their workers are in the private sector. Same as U.S. Venezuela never transitioned to workers control or diversified their economy, now the crashing oil prices are fucking them over.

Worker control and ownership of the means of production. This didn't fail in Venezuela as much as it wasn't even attempted at any point in time, as if the concept didn't even exist, regardless of the word used to describe it.

The real issue with Venezuelan "socialism" isn't that it's not a true Scotsman, but that politicians like to call things "socialist" on a whim for public appeal. Lardass Chavez lacked any sort of economic policy and blindly meandered about with the previous status quo.

why did it do this? could it have done otherwise? can it still do otherwise and remain "socialist"?

what? does this mean nationalized enterprise cannot be socialist, or?

i'm not a Holla Forumsack. i sometimes browse it, but nothing else. i don't consider myself a fascist, Not Socialist, nazi, etc. either.


what does this mean? as i understand it, socialism is collective ownership and planned distribution of produced goods. this is different from capitalism, which is private ownership and market distribution of produced goods.


Holla Forums. they said you made it. but like i said, i just lurk there from time to time.

source?

what would transition to worker control entail? as far as i'm aware, this is already the case…

i'm trying to understand what this means, or at least to you. what does "worker control and ownership" look like. how do people get food, shelter, electricity and other stuff they need or even want beyond that.

so are you telling me that venezuela is socialist only in name and venezuelans are just chewing it up?

Those are two different things. You can have social ownership with market distribution or not. For example through the use of coops and socialized capital. Of course, you can reduce prices using subsidies, but subjecting firms to political oversight may also encourage them to lower prices

To begin with, all of Venezuelan industry isn't nationalised, by far.

But it's not what socialism is about anyway. As long as the production/distribution of goods and services is based on trade, it is still capitalism. Who (formally) "owns" the means of production doesn't matter. Which is why the USSR itself was capitalist, for exemple.

By the way, socialism would be a solution to Venezuela's problems for sure, but let's not forget that socialism must be global. So it's not an easy solution for tomorrow, it's a global revolution we are talking about here.

No, cause it was never "socialist". Reformism isn't socialism. SocDem isn't socialism. State Capitalism isn't socialism.

Now? Now I don't think it can do much, as the US wants Venezuela to go fullNeoliberalism and will strangle them to death in order to do so.

It means it's not nationalized.

Believing in Capitalism is enough. Also, you have a set Ideology that goes perfectly with pol's.

The wage-labour relationship is what characterizes capitalism. All property can be nationalized and this would just be monopoly capitalism with the state becoming the sole monopoly capitalist and employer.

Financial assets and other such abstractions are just high level abstractions masking the underlying wage-labour relationship which is the essence of capitalism.

Socialism would require in one sense or another overcoming wage-labour. There are many ways this could be done but I think the most realistic way of doing this today would be just to treat labour as a Common Pool Resource:
wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Labor_as_a_Common_Pool_Resource

In Marxist terms, "communism" is the eventual endpoint of humanity, i.e. a global, classless, moneyless, stateless society in which everyone contributes according to their ability, and is rewarded according to their need. "Socialism" is supposed to be the transitional system that gets us to communism, after the revolution overthrows capitalism. Theoretically, socialism means a classless, ideally democratic state run by the proletariat, who manage and distribute goods through their collective participation in government.

All of the 20th century "socialist" states have attempted to follow this model, but all have needed to compromise on Marx's theory to survive external and internal threats. This often meant lack of implementing true democracy, rule by elites and bureaucracy, repressive state security apparatus, etc. And so far, no "socialist" state has made significant progress towards Communism, though it is doubtful if one can without a truly global revolution.

Venezuela's price controls, allowance of private industry and reliance on nationalized oil exports were massive compromises on socialist theory, and have allowed massive corruption and bad economic decisions to fuck their shit up. So while some leftists cling to examples like Venezuela, Cuba, etc. because they're the best examples still in existence, many more dismiss them as shitty capitalist states with socialist window dressing on top.

No. Socialism is the first phase of communism.

Lenin, The State and Revolution
K. Marx, Critique of the Gotha programme

ftfy

so why does venezuela call itself socialist? more importantly, why is not socialist when it considers itself as such, or at least has socialists in power who vy to achieve socialism for so long already? i just don't get it.


a source, or some info would be appreciated.


i don't "believe" in anything (well, we all, consciously or not do so, but bear with me). i don't consider capitalism to be perfect, and see in it many flaws, especially from a ecological and sustainable point of view. however, i don't get what you guys think is the alternative or what your objective is, as i can't even figure out what "socialism" really is. to 99% of the world, it's either welfare state, or nationalization, or control on the market. only to you and far leftists it means "worker ownership", and even that i can't find a comphrensive definition, and then there are even far leftists who say venezuela is socialist.

i'm not racist, sexist, hating immigrants, etc. i don't see why you have to conclude this, or be so hostile…


thanks, that was an interesting post and i feel the first really informative one that clears things up…

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Socialism is workplace democracy where the workers own their own work place and does not get their surplus value extracted for a wage. It's pretty simple and if it doesn't fill this criteria it's not socialism.

I should be the one asking this. I've never read anywhere that all of Venezuelan industry was nationalised; where do you get that from? Holla Forums?

For exemple, would this exist if anything was nationalised?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_Federation_of_Chambers_of_Commerce

Want me to send you a link for the mango of Das Kapital?

tl;dr socialism is workers take the means of production and move to a classless society.

Ye, people are stupid. Tell me something I don't know.

Well, it's more socialistic than, say, the US, but it's not socialism.
Also, there are people on the far left that want us to go back to savagery.

Racism isn't what makes up the right wing.
Socioeconomics do.
Sorry for me being hostile.

Socialism is worker ownership and management of the means of production.

It isn't subsidies of any sort. It isn't state control of the means of production. It isn't price controls. It isn't manipulated currency.

Think of it this way:
In any given society, you're going to have three basic groups of people:

Productive Labor - The people who directly produce the goods and services society needs though their work, they must necessarily produce more than they themselves use, creating a surplus
Unproductive Labor - People who's work does not advance the productive process (eg - soldiers, lawyers, firemen, police, etc)
The Ruling Class - The people who receive the surplus created by productive labor and decide how it should be used and distributed.

Socialism is a relation of production where that third group has been abolished and its functions distributed to the former two groups, with special deference to productive labor. It isn't the state owning anything, if the relation of production hasn't changed. It isn't the ruling party calling themselves "socialist" if they haven't changed the basic relation of production. Only when that essential relation of production has been altered can a system legitimately call itself socialist.

why not keep the text yellow? Why did you have to make it red? If you kept it yellow people wouldnt notice the changes.

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To get votes.

Because this word has had a very specific meaning for a very long time now, and it's not up to Chavez to change it because it suits him. There's nothing we can do to about him calling himself a socialist though.

They don't try anything of the sort; they are just a bunch of reformists.

Direct democracy in the workplace. The employees of a company collectively own it and collaborate on decisions. This is compatible with markets, but they aren't necessary.

Pretty much. Any idea can be appropriated for public relations, even those that directly contradict the very act.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonapartism

workplace democracy in itself =/= socialism. It might be progressive but not socialist since wage-labour IS capital.

An economy dominated by worker owned firms would still be capitalist because the firms would still gain from lowering operating expenses by laying people off since labour is a cost of production, it might just be slightly more conservative about it.
Since unemployment would still be a profitable strategy the central dynamics of capitalism would still exist.

That's why I think it would first be necessary to socialize labour costs and make unemployment unprofitable before workplace democracy could really be successful.
PDF I linked goes into this much deeper

>The elected government defends the right to private property
nice meme

also
this shit loaded at less than 1/6 of the normal speed on my venezuelan internet, fuck you OP

Aren't you supposed to be dying from 7000000000% hyperinflation? Nice try NSA.

I just work and buy the food that I can find. I don't think that 200% inflation (last year) is really that noticeable.

False

A plant by Kimberly-Clark was jusy turned over to workers. ANY companies that abandon doing business get turned over to workers. Venezuela is also not dependent on just oil. It had banks like Citibank, Cola-cola, Kraft Heinz, clorox, lufthansa, aeromexico, and American Airlines for starters.

Your running on propaganda or misinformation user.

I didn't know that Clorox was a bank.