Can someone explain me how the country with the biggest oil reserves in the world can be in economic problems, that lead to shortages? Even with an incompetent government this seems highly unlikely to happen to me.
There's also the government taking over private companies and running them poorly(surprise). Which leads to less investment and production which leads to less tax revenue, and the downward spiral keeps picking up speed.
Luckily there's a neoliberal right wing government ready to take over and run the country into the ground with a bunch of new dogmas, like Argentina went from Kirchner to Macri.
You can't just say their political system wasn't responsible for this, especially when it's how these types of governments always end up.
The two leading stances seem to be "it would have been totally fine except for enemy action" and "sure, chronic shortages are a predictable issue with not paying for things, but at least the starvation is distributed equally!"
No. In order for this to be a fallacy, it actually has to be fallacious. Many years I have been on Slashdot, Reddit and HN and seen this bandied about. I do not believe it is a fair assessment.
One of the core tenets of Socialism is collective worker control over social means of production and its democratic management. There have not even been plans in Venezuela to put this into place.
Another is the abolition of the functions of private (i.e bourgeois) property via seizure. This has not happened and many businesses employing wage labour continue unimpeded.
Another is the abolition of wage labour. This has not happened nor has there been any apparent effort put towards it.
Another is production for use (i.e maximising use-value) rather than for exchange, exchange containing within it the operation of the Law of Value. Almost all goods continue to be produced for the purpose of exchange value maximisation.
Another is the removal of money, as Engels said in Anti-Duhring, "Money is already contained in embryo in the concept of value; it is value, only in developed form." This has not happened nor has there been any effort toward it.
A possible replacement for money is the adoption of non-exchangable labour vouchers, a possible suggestion by Marx and Proudhon for "lower stage Communism". This has not happened nor has there been any effort toward it.
Venezuela exhibits all aspects of the capitalist mode of production. If you think that "Socialism" means "government doing stuff" or "government gives away money to people", you are either using a very strange and ahistorical definition of Socialism, or you are wrong. The actions of Venezuela more closely resemble a weak social democratic model.
So what exactly are you trying to say?
These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who's the banana republic now?
- Sanders (https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/close-the-...)
Instead they just deflect about oil prices. Are oil prices shooting protests and abolishing free speech? Is Dubai (with less money) able to stock tampons and basic medicine?
I can't really defend Sanders on that point, ultimately he and I have different goals, my goal is not to reduce income inequality, but rather to create the material conditions such that things like "income inequality" cannot manifest themselves.
Marxism is the bane of humanity--the ultimate promise of something for nothing which is the biggest lie ever told.
Socialism isn't about having other people work for you, it is about bringing about the necessary conditions such that the average amount of work per person required in society is reduced by eliminating what Marx terms 'contradictions' which are inherent in the capitalist mode of production. Nor do I believe it is about high taxes, or any taxes at all - in fact a key component of Socialism is the withering away of the state as the functions are either abandoned for not fitting material conditions or transferred to the proletariat.
>Marxism is the bane of humanity--the ultimate promise of something for nothing which is the biggest lie ever told.
I don't think that's true at all, and it's a gross misrepresentation that a Socialist society is a "promise of something for nothing". There are a great many people who would benefit by the kind of labour-saving optimisations that a Socialist mode of production introduces, especially those who put in something and get very close to nothing. As Russian anarcho-Communist Kropotkin said in The Conquest of Bread:
>In virtue of this monstrous system, the son of the worker, on entering life, finds no field which he may till, no machine which he may tend, no mine in which he may dig, without accepting to leave a great part of what he will produce to a master. He must sell his labour for a scant and uncertain wage. His father and his grandfather have toiled to drain this field, to build this mill, to perfect this machine. They gave to the work the full measure of their strength, and what more could they give? But their heir comes into the world poorer than the lowest savage. If he obtains leave to till the fields, it is on condition of surrendering a quarter of the produce to his master, and another quarter to the government and the middlemen. And this tax, levied upon him by the State, the capitalist, the lord of the manor, and the middleman, is always increasing; it rarely leaves him the power to improve his system of culture. If he turns to industry, he is allowed to work — though not always even that — only on condition that he yield a half or two-thirds of the product to him whom the land recognizes as the owner of the machine.
He didn't?
> I'm not against socialism but this particular form of it was basically handing out money for nothing.
Beyond that, Saudi Arabia has substantial infrastructure development to pull oil out of low-value land. Venezuela has ongoing fights over which reserves should be recovered (it's under valuable rainforest and watersheds) and excess spending has steadily undermined infrastructure - their break-even price is ~15% higher than Saudi Arabia's.
So: Venezuela sank their wealth into some mix of corruption and admirable initiatives that nevertheless haven't paid themselves back. Saudi Arabia saved the money and drove down production costs.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jan/01/saudi-arabia-r...
When resources are easy to extract, you don't need to attract foreign capital investments (for example, by protecting property rights) and you don't need a highly skilled, well educated population to work the oil fields and mines.
In other words, you can afford to turn into a dictatorship.