I've been hearing a lot about Venezuela in the news lately. And it seems there is a big debate over whether it was socialism or not, or whether it was implemented properly.

Is it safe to assume that it was indeed a socialist experiment?

What would make it not socialist?

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    Regarding the "implemented properly" debate, I would recommend referencing "No True Scottsman" fallacy description in a list of logical fallacies. People making that argument are mostly arguing using that fallacy. Socialism isn't a cookie recipe, where you can conclusively prove it was or wasn't followed "properly" - it is a broad and varied umbrella set of ideologies. – user4012 Sep 14 '18 at 20:19
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    There is no definite description for a socialist system but the main feature of Socialism tends to be the social ownership and self-management of the means of production. Some people interpret that (or just find it convenient) an authoritarian centralized state is a similar notion. There are indeed plenty of socialized sectors in Venezuela, but calling that government socialist is a stab in the hearth for people from Proudhon to Rosa Luxemburg. Strictly speaking Venezuela is an authoritarian centralized economy (called Chavismo but similar to others such as Leninism, or Maoism). – armatita Sep 24 '18 at 12:47
  • @armatita The premise of this question is flawed. There is no debate about whether socialism was implemented. PSUV is the political party of Chavez and Maduro. The S means Socialist. What has been implemented also looks consistent with socialist goals. – H2ONaCl Sep 25 '18 at 20:21
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    @H2ONaCl I disagree. The OP clearly asks "Is Venezuela an example of socialism?". Either you just say yes and ignore several perfectly functional democratic countries around the world; or you say no and need to explain why. The fact remains that just saying yes is the same as equating the word to authoritarianism. At the very least a bunch of EU countries and political parties (incl. ones were Socialist and Social-Democracy is the name of the party) would vehemently disagree. And they would be right to do so. Also names are often propaganda. DPRK for example... – armatita Oct 2 '18 at 8:06
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    @H2ONaCl There are plenty of socialized sectors sectors in Venezuela. For the same reason names in parties or countries cannot be considered a dictionary definition for a specific ideology, the same is certainly true for individuals. As for saying yes or no to the question just check the very first sentence of the most voted answer: "Venezuela is a communist planned economy with an authoritarian government." Communism is by definition stateless and money-less. Definitions are important. Altering them, even if by unintentional association, leads to erasing philosophy or destroying knowledge. – armatita Oct 4 '18 at 7:53

Venezuela's economy
Venezuela is a communist planned economy with an authoritarian government. It is, therefore, an example of Socialism. Under Chavez and Maduro, Venezuela's economy became a planned economy based on oil production, with few other industries, its oil industry has been nationalized since 1973, and there were significant petrol subsidies for its citizens.

Under the tenures of Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro, many businesses abandoned Venezuela. In 1999, there were 13,000 companies in the country. By 2016, less than a third of companies remained in Venezuela, with only 4,000 companies operating in the nation.
Venezuela has large energy subsidies. In 2015, the cost of petrol was just US$0.06 per gallon, costing 23% of government revenues.

Although Venezuela's economy was planned around a single industry, they are beginning to diversify.

A range of other natural resources, including iron ore, coal, bauxite, gold, nickel and diamonds, are in various stages of development and production. In April 2000, Venezuela's president decreed a new mining law and regulations were adopted to encourage greater private sector participation in mineral extraction.

Some reasons for the failure of Venezuela's economy:

The 1999 Vargas tragedy was a disaster that struck the Vargas State of Venezuela on 15 December 1999, when the torrential rains and the flash floods and debris flows that followed on December 14–16 that killed tens of thousands of people, destroyed thousands of homes, and led to the complete collapse of the state's infrastructure.

Venezuela as an example of failed Socialism in debate
A lot of internet conversations use Venezuela as an example of Socialism failing, and they often do it in response to discussions of Democratic Socialists in America, and the viability of Democratic Socialism at large. Undoubtedly, this argument is the main driver for the existence of this stackexchange question and quite a lot of other stackexchange questions about Venezuela. This attempt to associate Democratic Socialism with Authoritarian Socialism is a mistake for multiple reasons:

  • Although many political candidates in the United States are now self-identifying as "Democratic Socialist," they tend to model their principals after Nordic Model Social Democracy. Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism are somewhat close in many ways, but Social Democracy is a bit more like a well-taxed Capitalist economy with social benefits; whereas Democratic Socialism has more government control over the economy, property and institutions are more public than private, and there are more elements of a decentralized planned economy.
  • Democratic Socialism and Authoritarian Socialism are not the same thing and do not have equal track records.
    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism
Democratic socialists oppose the Soviet economic model, rejecting the authoritarian form of governance and highly centralized command economy that took form in the Soviet Union in the early 20th century.

Authoritarian Socialism, as well as any Authoritarian government combined with any economic system, has a consistent track record of poor quality of life, weak civil rights, poor democracy, and sometimes a poor economy. Democratic Socialism (and other kinds of Social Democracies, democratic Mixed economies, and democratic Social Capitalism) offers many success stories of countries with good economies, strong democracy, strong quality of life, strong social progress, and good economic freedom (seriously, open up some of these rankings and go looking for Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Australia, Germany, and Canada). If a politician says that they want to model the economy after Denmark, it is simply dishonest to say that the economy will instead turn out to be like Venezuela.

Here is a list of examples of Authoritarian countries, Socialist and otherwise.

  • Socialism itself has many economic flavors, creating a broad opening for weakly informed people to equate countries with very dissimilar economies.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

  • Some people don't understand, or act like they don't understand, that national economies exist along a continuum. Economic systems are not binary. They are almost never entirely capitalist, and rarely entirely socialist. Most countries fall in the middle, and simple variances in tax rates, social benefits, or business regulations can subtly move a country along the continuum; not into an entirely different, discrete box. America's form of Welfare Capitalism and the Nordic Model's form of Social Democracy only vary mildly in terms of government regulation, tax rates, social programs, etc. This article even lists the United States alongside the Nordic countries as examples of welfare states. However, it seems that the small differences in tax rates and social programs between the United States and the Nordic countries were enough to create a large difference in their income inequalities.
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    Hmmm... Oil prices smacked Venezuela? macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart In 1973, oil was about $24/bbl. Briefly in 1998 is was below that. Most of the time since 1973 has been significantly above that. Today it is around $70/bbl. It seems odd that they could not cope. – user21424 Sep 14 '18 at 20:19
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    @puppetsock adjusting for inflation $24 in 1970 converted to 2018 dollars is $136.30. Source – lazarusL Sep 14 '18 at 20:33
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    You say authoritarian government like that's a part of socialism. You also don't go into the nuances of what is and isn't a communist economy, which is where the debate actually lays. – tox123 Sep 15 '18 at 3:28
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    +1 just for the last bullet. There are economic theories and there are real world practices. It is wildly simplistic to claim that one country subscribes to some economic theory and blame all the countries' economic troubles on the theory. I would claim no country has implemented an economic theory cleanly. One needs to do careful analysis to see how the claimed theory has influenced results, not just say the USA is capitalist, Venezuela is socialist, and the old USSR is communist. – Ross Millikan Sep 15 '18 at 3:32
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    @tox123 Are you sure? I don't think he said authoritarianism is part of socialism, I think he said Venezuela is a country that is an example of socialism and it happens to be authoritarian. – H2ONaCl Sep 20 '18 at 20:08

It does somewhat depend how you define Socialism, but it most definitely falls within the broader definition. This can be seen in various policy positions the people currently running the country take, especially economically. The thing that would not make it socialist is corruption and the near dictatorship, but these are general things that occur in various political systems, and seem especially present in more "pure" socialist systems (as opposed to what is increasingly referred to as democratic Socialism)

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There has been a lot of straw manning here. You can find many other people straw manning what socialism is elsewhere too, and when someone corrects them, they say they are committing the no Scotsman fallacy - so be careful. Here are some corrections:

"Venezuela is a communist planned economy with an authoritarian government. It is, therefore, an example of Socialism." If Venezuela was communist, it would follow that it is socialist, but it isn't. Communism is socialism without a state, class, or money. The confusion is understandable because Communist parties have called themselves such because communism is their end goal.

Furthermore, it being authoritarian doesn't have anything to do with socialism - some anti-authoritarians are socialist because of socialism being against a form of authoritarianism (which I will explain later). It being a planned economy doesn't make it closer to socialist either - there are many socialists who are market socialists.

This raises the question of what socialism is. It is usually defined as one of these four:

Worker ownership of the means of production

Social ownership of the means of production

Democratic ownership of the means of production

Collective ownership of the means of production

Or a mix of them. All of them revolve around at least the workers owning the means of production. "Ownership" is sometimes replaced with "control", as ownership is about who has control over an object. What is important is that socialists argue for socialism by critiquing capitalists mode of production, where "private individuals to own the means of production, with the goal of extracting a profit from the sale of commodities produced by wage workers" as BSA puts it. One such critique is that the private owner/s can be authoritarian.

Some socialists argue that public ownership of the means of production fit into these definitions because the people (including workers) control the state, and the state controls the means of production. This never means that socialism is exclusively where the means of production are publicly owned.

Venezuela is currently trying to become socialist in the Bolivarian Revolution. It is far from it, as the private sector dominates:

In another part of his speech, Víctor Álvarez affirmed that the economy has become more capitalist because the contribution of the private sector to GDP increased from 65% in 1999 to 71% today, while the State's contribution fell from 35% to 29%. Álvarez does not take into account that the State captures part of the private GDP through the tax on surplus value (mass of profit) and thus obtains as much income as the private sector. Government revenues have multiplied by 25 since 1999. The fact that the State loses relative weight in total production with respect to the private sector does not mean that it loses weight in the collection of monetary income. The truth is that the Venezuelan State has not lost ground in the face of capitalist property.

  • translated from here

Edit: That statistic is very old. Venezuela may actually be more socialist now, so if anyone has more recent statistics please send them to me. I haven't found any.

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    Very good answer, nice to see appropriate understanding of terms involved. – user2501323 Jan 24 '19 at 7:12
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    "Furthermore, it being authoritarian doesn't have anything to do with socialism" Nothing to do with the theory of socialism, but highly correlated with actual real-word socialist parties. – user19831 Jan 24 '19 at 12:57
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    @Orangesandlemons Unfortunately you are right. What they seem to try to do is try to impose socialism on people, rather than than help the masses understand what their place is in society to get them to change the system. Along with the other problems that authoritarianism causes, the people probably aren't going to concede to the new way of doing things unless they bring it about themselves, from real understanding of the problems with capitalism. From what I've read and heard, less authoritarian socialist societies have been more successful. – Jake D'Cruz Jan 24 '19 at 15:33

As you can imagine, politics is often complicated by a very partisan and politically/historically illiterate approach to definitions.

Socialism, like other political terms, is a broad classification which allows for a considerable degree of variation in practice. What makes a socialist society "socialist" is "public ownership" of the "means of production". Socialist politics attempts to create an egalitarian society by "sharing" ownership of industries which typically are owned almost exclusively by an aristocratic elite. Socialism is a political response to inequality.

It's worth noting that Communism is a variety of socialism where society is governed by a one-party state, whose purpose is to lead the people towards greater equality. Considering that Lenin said: "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country" ... it's fair to say the exact definition can vary considerably.

There are many different examples which are relevant to contextualise the point. The Soviet Union is the most famous, but even within Soviet history there were arguments about how society should be organised. The USSR switched between leaders who, generally speaking, prioritised the survival of the state (Stalin, Brezhnev) and those who prioritised the empowerment of the individual (Khrushchev, Gorbachev). Lenin even proposed the "New Economic Plan", which advocated the Communist state's industry should become for-profit. Stalin disagreed.

Lenin believed, without global revolution, the Communist state had to be pragmatic and manage capitalism over the long term to survive. Stalin believed that, without global revolution, the Communist state needed to rapidly industrialise to provide the military-industrial capacity to protect its short term survival.

What's interesting here is that Mao's policies were essentially Stalinism for peasants, but after his death China's Communist party adopted the NEP under Deng Xiaoping's leadership. All of this is socialism, because the means of production is owned and run by the state, (in principle) for the benefit of the people.

Communism is a top-down system, where the leadership make decisions which must be obeyed by the people. The two main alternatives, Democratic Socialism, and Anarcho-Syndicalism, represent other ways of distributing power.

The simplest way of describing the difference is to say that in Communism power is given to the Party, in Democratic Socialism power is given to the voters, and in Anarchism power is given to the workers. Again, these are all legitimately socialist systems, just governed by different philosophies.

After the Second World War the United Kingdom voted for the socialist Labour Party. Their policies were to nationalise many industries (coal, steel, transport, healthcare, defence, etc) and create public housing after clearing the slums. This was the socialism which George Orwell wrote 1984 and Animal Farm in defence of, in opposition to Stalinism. British socialism came to an end with Margret Thatcher's election victory in 1979.

The Labour Party became "New Labour" with the abandonment of Clause IV in 1995. This clause in the party's constitution made the party socialist, by requiring the public ownership of the means of production, and without it Labour transitioned into a Social Democratic party.

Venezuela's economy consists of a large public sector of nationalised industries, in an attempt to create an egalitarian society. That's quintessentially socialist. However, Venezuelan Socialism appears to be transitioning from a Democratic Socialism which emphasised the empowerment of the individual, into something more Stalinist, which emphasises national survival. It's all socialist, but whether it is any good is another question.

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  • Communism is more broad than "socialism with a one party state", and generally includes a stateless society, where there is no government, or where all government decisions are collective. – David Rice Sep 24 '18 at 14:18
  • @DavidRice There's always going to be debate, though isn't that more of a theoretical definition than one going by the realities of what Communist states have looked like? – inappropriateCode Sep 24 '18 at 14:23
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    @DavidRice I'm not interested in how you or I define it, but by adhering to a demonstrably general classification. I think Communism doesn't work when we talk about leaderless collectives owing to the split in the first international between Marx and Bakunin, the latter becoming Anarchists, the former Communists. Otherwise it seems like Anarchists are Communists, and what does that make Communists? – inappropriateCode Sep 24 '18 at 14:39
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    Some anarchists are communists. Some anarchists are not communists. Otherwise, Anarcho-communism couldn't be a thing. Communism is a system where the means of production are commonly owned, it doesn't require a State to exist any more than Capitalism requires a State to exist. – David Rice Sep 24 '18 at 14:55
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    @DavidRice No, I'm saying there seems to be little real distinction between anarchism, anarcho-communism, anhrcho-syndicalism. They function is very similar ways, generally speaking. Ukraine's Black Army were anarchists, for example. And "anarchist" in the context of socialist politics basically means horizontal collective leadership. That's the way it has been since the First International split back in 1872. What I'm saying is that it doesn't make much sense as they seem very similar, generally speaking. – inappropriateCode Sep 24 '18 at 15:35

Was socialism "implemented properly" in Venezuela? That tends to beg the question. There's always been widespread disagreement about what's proper in economics, and what's not. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that the science of Economics is now perfected, and proper methods of implementing any given economic system are known and obvious to the whole world, and never controversial. Even if that were really so, a nation's mere aggregate failure or success is insufficient evidence, since...

  1. A nation could implement an economic system improperly and yet be quite successful due to various other factors; say a meteor of gold falls from the sky and saves an incompetent government from ruin. Or an incompetent government is supported by a powerful ally, who rescues them just to spite a rival. Etc.
  2. A nation could implement an economic system properly and yet fail, due to various other factors; say an immense meteor of lead falls on the capital, effectively assassinating the entirety of a competent government. Or the small nation could be opposed by a larger adversarial nation that sets out to ruin the small nation by various underhanded but well-funded means, and then install its own eager to please puppet government. Thereafter the larger nation denies, distracts, and justifies the results of its efforts, and forever blames the victim.

In this instance Venezuela is opposed by a larger adversarial nation, (with a mostly unapologetic history of "destabilizing", covert and otherwise), that wants its own favorite economic system implemented in Venezuela. In which case, the larger nation might have already deployed its usual methods of destabilizing to "make an example" of Venezuela.

So the answer is: It's hard to tell whether Venezuela is a failed example of socialism. A building is shaking! It looks ready to collapse! It might be bad design. Or shoddy contracting. Or it might be that guy with the ski-mask and the blowtorch melting a few I-beams in the basement.

(Note: of course being ruined by a larger nation is no proof of competence. The point is such action changes the experimental design.)

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    @H2ONaCl, Re: "...seem to believe is unjust?": a misreading. This answer doesn't contain the word "justice"; rather it addresses sufficient and satisfactory evidence, and therefore accuracy. The effects of adversarial actions, (see URLs in answer), should not be inaccurately confounded with more relevant data when evaluating a nation's implementation of an economic system, as distinct from its military system. – agc Sep 23 '18 at 9:46
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    I don't know about the history of destabilizing but on the surface it appears socialism is a choice that can be implemented even in the context of the U.S. having contrary preferences. Chavez and Maduro had/have real power within the borders. What is the mechanism by which sanctions resulted in the economic recession? It would seem socialism is easier to trace to a recession. It would seem lower a oil price is easier to trace to a recession. – H2ONaCl Sep 24 '18 at 17:19
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    @H2ONaCl, It's possible, (probable even...), that it wasn't just sanctions. That is, the adversarial nation uses a three-pronged strategy, a maybe *legal*(-ish) suit and tie one of sanctions like embargos and whatnot; a second full-on cold-war strategy of spies, subversion, bribes, gun-running, and kindred methods; and a third media strategy where they absolutely ignore strategy #2, softpedal strategy #1, and blame everything bad that happens on the destabilizee. More on economic sanctions later... – agc Sep 24 '18 at 17:36
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    How's it going with those sanctions? – H2ONaCl Sep 25 '18 at 20:08
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    My understanding is the Obama sanctions did not target the economy. The recession started before the Trump sanctions. Look at the drop in oil prices in 2014. Look at the history of inflation. A default is a victory: you pay back less than you borrowed. The leadership changes and the reputation is (partially) repaired overnight if you pick the kind of leader that is conducive to that. – H2ONaCl Sep 26 '18 at 23:39

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