There is an on-going debate about Venezuela being a socialist country ever since Hugo Chavez made the oil companies state owned and operated. Granted, Chavez has said publicly that Venezuela is a socialist state, however he uses the term 21st Century Socialism. First of all, we should define socialism and capitalism. Capitalism according to Marx is, "The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value, and consequently to exploit labor power to the greatest possible extent." Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, ch. 12.
“Lenin's simple definition of socialism is set out in his The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It (September 1917): ‘Socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the whole people.’ Lenin knew that he was introducing a new definition of socialism here which was not to be found in Marx but claimed that there were two stages after capitalism: socialism (his new definition) and communism (what Marxists had always understood by socialism: a stateless, classless, moneyless, wageless society).” http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2001/no-1169-december-2001/marx-and-lenins-views-contrasted
Is it possible to have a country that is both?
If we look at Venezuela and the United States, we can clearly see both exist in some form. Capitalists want a free market, but if we did have a truly free market then the U.S. government wouldn’t have given the banks and car manufacturers government bail outs. They would have let the market play out the situation, let Smith’s free hand work out the bugs. Right? Well, believe it or not there are corporations in Venezuela. The most expensive McDonalds I have ever been to, is located in Altamira, Caracas. Here it is a popular hangout for rich folks since a meal costs 80 Bolivars or roughly $20 USD. There is also one or two state owned Banks to the many foreign owned private banks towering over the barrios in Caracas.
Why does everything have to be black or white? Right or left? Is it possible for people to see the grey shades of life and embrace them as if it were okay to have more than one ‘right’ answer to life’s tough questions? Or are we too narrow minded to see beyond what the philosophers of the 1800s were theorizing when it came to government regulation? Can we as an evolving human race re-think these theories and apply
them to our time the way we have evolved with technology?
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