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Venezuela is a basket case thanks to its incompetent socialist dictatorship – that is the overwhelming explanation given for the country’s travails across our mainstream media. Scores of outlets have recently essentially published the very same story. Bloomberg ran an article entitled “Venezuela isn’t just a failed state. It’s a failure of the left.” Not to be outdone, USA Today published a piece from a writer warning that “Venezuela was my home, and socialism has destroyed it”. The Spectator placed the blame for Venezuela’s crisis squarely at the feet of socialism, claiming the “socialist experiment” had brought a once-great country “to its knees”. The New York Times claimed Venezuela was now a “socialist catastrophe” – strikingly similar to Fox News’ description of the country as a “socialist wasteland”. All these articles blamed the inherent failures of socialism for Venezuela’s problems and used it as a stick to beat progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jeremy Corbyn.

But is it true? Anything stated so confidently across the entire spectrum of mainstream media should always give cause for concern. The first problem with the critique is that it rests upon the idea that the Venezuelan economy is indeed “socialist.” In reality, the majority of the economy is still in the hands of massive, monopolistic private businesses that dominate the country’s food and goods supply, in the classic “banana republic” style. Empresas Polar, the largest private company in Venezuela, essentially controls the country’s food supply and distribution. Its president is Lorenzo Mendoza, a major opposition leader who decided to run for president against Maduro in 2018, before untimately deciding to boycott the elections. He uses its power to contract the supply of key goods; hence the much-publicized bread shortages. The inconvenient fact that the local opposition controls the production and distribution of the very goods in shortest supply in Venezuela is never remarked upon.

In terms of government spending as a percentage of GDP – a common definition of socialism – Venezuela is far below Cuba, virtually every major European country, and even behind the United States and Canada. So by that measure, the US is more socialist than Venezuela. Someone tell the media!

In terms of moving towards an actual socialist economy, where the means of production is owned and democratically run by the people, there have been a few tentative steps in that direction. By the end of his life, President Hugo Chavez had become convinced the way forward was communes and a communal state. However, these steps have not gone far and often face the strongest resistance from the government itself!

Venezuela today is apparently, case study number one in why socialism cannot work. Yet when the Venezuelan economy was booming under Chavez, when poverty was halved, according even to the CIA, when illiteracy and malnourishment had been declared eradicated by the UN, this was not proof that socialism does work. In fact, in response to the Venezuelan economic boom, Fox News explicitly informed its readers that it was still a capitalist country. Meanwhile, the media is suspiciously quiet when it comes to many other self-identified socialist governments in the region, for example Bolivia, where the economy boomed, poverty and inequality dropped precipitously and a whole range of social programs were implemented to improve the lives of their citizens. This unhelpful socialist counter-example was simply ignored, ensuring that, in the media at least, countries are socialist when they fail and capitalist when they succeed.

In their eagerness to blame the crisis in Venezuela on socialism, the media has largely downplayed or ignored the US role in causing the crisis. The US sanctions have wrought tremendous harm to the country. Not only has the US frozen assets belonging to Venezuela, effectively shutting off their vital oil revenue and cutting them off from global capital markets, Trump has also threatened banks and lenders with 30 years in prison if they deal with Caracas, intimidating much of the world into complying with the sanctions.



The United Nations formally condemned the US, urged all member states to break the sanctions they described as targeted to harm “the poor and most vulnerable” and started discussing reparations the US should pay to Venezuela. One UN rapporteur described the sanctions as akin to a medieval siege and declared Trump guilty of possible “crimes against humanity”. None of this has been reported by the New York Times, CNN, CNBC or any other national US news outlet. The sanctions have cost Venezuela dozens of billions of dollars in income and caused terrible shortages that even the leading economist for the pro-US opposition coalition described as being a driver for starvation.

For all the talk of “socialism”, Venezuela’s economy has changed very little in half a century. The country is still over-dependent on a single primary resource (oil) and the government has failed to adequately invest in infrastructure or to deal with widespread currency manipulation, speculation and hoarding. Yet its current crisis is also, in no small part, manufactured in Washington DC as part of a strategy to “make the economy scream” to justify US “humanitarian” intervention. How many times does the US military have to intervene before the world learns that socialism doesn’t work?