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Sure. Socialism is generally recognized as 'remotely close' to communist, and the Venezuelan government under the PSUV was for about a decade across the 2000s was widely praised as socialist success by other self-identified socialist and communist individuals, parties, and in some cases governments around the world, even as Venezuela's own leaders proudly claimed their own socialist credentials, albeit through the Chavismo mixture of socialism.
Now, the classic motte and bailey is that true communism has never been tried and all the self-identified communists who were recognized as communists at the time really just tried to implement variations of socialism. Or the no true communist fallacy that, in hindsight, they were just right-wing autocrats who betrayed true communist/socialist principles.
Most communist and ideologically socialist states look like autocratic states because they are. Their specific funding source may differ- Venezuela's was and still is oil- but the devolution into criminal states because corruption becomes a requirement to handle the economic disfunction is pretty par for course.
I will happily admit I know very little of Venezuela. Everything I've read about it's governance in this thread sounds more like "dictatorship loots country for its seed corn, country spirals into poverty" moreso than "they legitimately tried to ensure the workers owned the means of production/captured more of the surplus of their labour and then it fells apart for X reason"
I also imagine I probably have a somewhat simplified model of communism in my head, I don't have a deep dialectic understanding of Marx et al, that's for sure.
This rings pretty true to me? Most communist nations may have called themselves communist, but again kind of just did the whole "dictatorship loots country for its seed corn" thing.
I'm not entirely sure how that's a fallacy. I think I'd pre-emptively reconcile it by saying I'm pretty confident communism is an optimistic idea that simply doesn't work when paired with human nature, as we keep seeing when communist countries end up being autocratic shitholes where the workers are just as fucked as they were previously.
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