Kristian Niemietz explains why “Venezuela” isn’t a sensible or satisfactory answer to claims in favour of socialism:
Shaded relief map of Venezuela, 1993 (via Wikimedia)
The main point to note is that Venezuela is an actual country, not a shorthand for “everything I don’t like about the Left”. It is a country that is in trouble for specific, identifiable reasons, not for being, somehow, generically, “too left-wing”. This sounds obvious when you put it like that, but deviations from this point are the main cause of V-word inflation.
So when somebody on the Left proposes to, for example, raise income tax, wealth taxes, or corporation tax, people on the pro-market side should not respond by shouting “Venezuela!”. Because that’s not what happened in Venezuela. Venezuela is not a high-tax economy, or at least, their tax burden is not what ruined them.
In the same way, if somebody on the Left proposes to hike the minimum wage, to abolish university tuition fees, or to ban zero-hour contracts, shouting “Venezuela!” is not the answer either. Those are bad ideas, sure. But those are not the ideas that destroyed Venezuela.
In short, we shouldn’t bring up Venezuela in a discussion of run-of-the-mill left-wing policies, which bear little relationship to anything that Chávez and/or Maduro did.
Furthermore, when somebody points out a genuine social problem in Britain, “Yeah but Venezuela!” is not much of a reply. Socialists are sometimes good at identifying problems, even if they are terrible at developing solutions. It is true that we have some of the highest housing costs in the world. It is true that our productivity performance, and as a result, wage growth, are poor, and have been poor for far too long. It is true that our welfare system is riddled with flaws, and often fails to support people who have fallen on hard times.
“It’s much worse in Venezuela, which is the system you lot want!” is not good enough. “It’s much better in capitalist countries X and Y – which is the system we should learn from” is more like it. So in such cases, it’s best to leave Venezuela out of it. Let “Venezuela” be a country, not a rhetorical all-purpose put-down.
That said – don’t declare that moratorium just yet. When prominent British socialists call for mass nationalisations, when they call for price controls and capital controls, when they deride the rule of law as a mere “bourgeois” construct that only serves “the elites” – then yes, it is absolutely fair to point out that this is exactly what happened in Venezuela. Here, we’re not talking about some allegorical “Venezuela”, but about the actual country, and about specific things that happened there. These are the very policies, and this is the very mindset, which turned what was once South America’s richest country into a basket case. This argument may not “resonate with people” – but it’s true.
Further to that: when socialists claim that “their” version of socialism will be completely different from any of its previous incarnations, that it will be genuinely democratic, empowering, grassroots-based and non-hierarchical – then it is fair to point that this is exactly what the Chavistas also used to say.
Some Western socialists are currently trying to convince themselves that Chávez and Maduro just never really aspired to a different kind of socialism, that authoritarian populism is all they ever wanted. This is fundamentally untrue, and Western socialists used to know this very well. The project of Venezuelan socialism started with the aspiration that this time would be different, that this time, “socialism” would not mean an all-powerful state controlling everything. It started with the aspiration that there could be completely different forms of collective ownership, which had nothing to do with the top-down nationalised industries of the past.
The appeal of Millennial Socialism rests on the delusion that the democratic, bottom-up socialism Millennial Socialists aspire to is a fundamentally novel aspiration, and that nobody in history has ever tried to build anything like this before.
But it is not a new aspiration. This was precisely what Chávez’s and Maduro’s “21st Century Socialism” was also about, which is why it used to be so popular in the West. A moratorium on the V-word would just play into the hands of those who now want to pretend that none of this ever happened, and that “Millennial Socialism” is novel, untried and untested.
