ADSactly World - Venezuela and its socialist measures

Introduction

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Some time ago I decided to start a new series of articles about the Venezuelan situation, with the goal of providing some coverage to the type of measures that resulted in the economic collapse of the country, as well as encouraging others to research and discuss this topic.

As the majority of the readers would probably know, Venezuela is a country that is currently experiencing the worst economic and political collapse of its entire history. The level of corruption and looting coming from government officials is absolutely unprecedented, even to the point of having links with drug cartels and Islamic terrorists.

This disaster started when the Venezuelan voters decided it was a good idea to support a socialist revolution following Cuba steps under the leadership of a radical military person such as Hugo Chavez.

For some time, people from all over the world that support this ideology were amazed at the “beautiful” revolution that was taken place in Venezuela. I indicated a specific example of this in the first article where I shared a quote from the website of the well known American socialist Bernie Sanders:

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? Source

^{Source: AP}

One of the reasons I decided to write these articles was because since the Venezuelan collapse a few years ago, there is a narrative trying to portray this country as something different than socialism, when it is actually a perfect example of what happens when socialism is implemented. Before the collapse it was celebrated as a great socialist victory, after the collapse, it suddenly stopped being an example of socialism...

So far, I have covered the first 4 measures taken from Karl Marx’s book. The first one was discussed in the first article and the next 3 measures were discussed in the second article.

Today, I am going to continue with some of the remaining measures. I also recommend anyone to first check out the previous 2 articles mentioned before, in order to avoid repeating arguments, ideas, etc.

Karl Marx Measures

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• Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. ^Source: this measure was half applied. In Venezuelan the banking industry is mixed, there are private banks and public ones. There are also banks that were taken over by the government like the Bank of Venezuela, expropriated by Chavez in 2009.

In those years there were also rumors that some government’s cronies were investing heavily in other banks such as Banesco to gain administrative control over them. Besides, there is also an organism called SUDEBAN which means “Superintendence of the Institutions of the Banking Sector of Venezuela”. This organism belongs to the Ministry of Popular Power for Economy, Finance and Public Banking, and its functions are to oversee and regulate pretty much any activity that happens on the banks.

To give you a quick example of how disastrous are these distortions caused by the government’s intervention, currently the majority of the credit cards have a limit of around 1-3 dollars in local money. There are some banks that can offer bigger limits, but the majority are unable to offer bigger credits because of the lack of sufficient cash flows to handle this type of operations.

To put this into perspective, the basic food basket in Venezuela is around 300 USD, it depends on how many people live in a single house, but the number should be very close to 300 American dollars and the minimum wage is currently around 13 dollars on a monthly basis. I don’t use the local money (Bolivares) to measure prices because as some you might know, the hyperinflation makes it pointless to use Bolivares because prices would change every day. This is why a growing number of people are starting to simply use USD.

The following picture is from a well known report from American journalists where they compared how many Venezuelan bills it took to purchase just 1 chicken. This photo is from last year so today the price of the chicken in local money is much higher:

^{Source: Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters}

The great disparity in minimum and average salaries with food prices is the reason why a lot of people in Venezuela have been losing weight for years. This worrisome circumstance is described as “Maduro’s diet”, in my case, I prefer to call it the socialist diet.

• Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State ^Source: such as with the previous point, the transport industry is mixed. We can find both private companies or individuals offering this service and public ones doing the same. However, there is a strict centralization regarding the prices because these are determined by the government, and as expected, when a government enforces a price over some product or service, everything starts to fail.

In Venezuela there has been a severe crisis in the transportation sector for years, sometimes there are problems with finding replacement tires, other times there are problems finding other replacement parts, and these are issues that affect the whole industry. This results in a reduction of the available units offering transportation services. Last year it was reported that around 90% of the transportation industry was inactive. I couldn’t find more recent statistics but the situation hasn’t improved so far.

This problem causes very difficult moments for the people that need public transportation to go to their jobs, and there have been some instances where desperate people take the drastic measure of using trucks that are designed to transport animals, not humans. Sadly, pictures like the one below are becoming more and more common as people use any type of vehicle to transport themselves, regardless if the vehicle has seats or not.

^Source

Conclusion

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In this article, I continued with the exploration of Karl Marx’s measures and shared my own views about whether these measures were applied in Venezuela or not. If you notice the last measure it says “means of communication” and I didn’t mention anything about them. The fact is that there are so many things to say about the way the means of communication were treated by this government that I will leave that part for the next article.

As always, I invite every Steemian to share their views and opinions about the difficult Venezuela’s situation, especially fellow Venezuelan Steemians that are experiencing the collapse of this socialist model.

Authored by @dedicatedguy