Slop.

TFW the Expanse book 1 Leviathan Wakes came out in 2011. In the Expanse series the big technological conceit is that we invented super efficient fusion powered space travel. It is referred to as the Epstein drive.

BUT IT WAS JUST FINANCIAL THINGS! - Zombie Noam

Explaining leftist discourse to a multimillionaire human trafficker who neither knows or gives a shit what the fuck ur talking about

Their relationship was much deeper than an email, this one’s just funny because of the argument

Nationalizing oil and distributing the funds to a variety of people-focused projects was the crown jewel, yes. Not just social welfare, it supported (supports, technically) the neighborhood/regional councils, the indigenous-focused anti-poveety projects, and, relevant here, economic diversification efforts, particularly food sovereignty projects. The latter was interfered with by sanctions, as substituting importa for an entire extraction economy in mere years is not possible.

Venezuela has substantial socialist formations including those who were in the orbit of Chavez. It also has and had plenty of opportunists, both in the "socialist in name only" sense and in the "I am literally a capitalist making deals at your expense" sense. As everywhere, the revolution leaves you with, more or less, the population you went into the revolution with, and Venezuela had a reformist "revolution" largely at the ballot box.

People here do not say that socialism is when there is some nationalization. But nationalization is a socialist policy, it is something you, a socialist, focus on using the state to do, as it expropriates the means of production and makes it something that can be leveraged by the political organs of the mass oppressed classes.

Yes, but perhaps more importantly is that the oil industry in Venezuela was nationalized decades before Chavez, let alone Maduro. This narrative that either of them nationalized the industry as a “power grab” is entirely ahistorical. The real change under Chavismo was that the largesse from the oil industry started getting directed towards the lower classes and away from the politically connected bourgeoisie.

Not necessarily the point you're at, question's already answered, and I say this /with you/ not /at you/ (I can come across as aggressive in a written format sometimes so I'm trying to tone indicate more):

Like idk though for my money I've stopped labeling whole countries as socialist or not socialist---- kindaaaa. Nationalizing an industry is a socialist policy if you think that government is adequately derrived from popular consent, sure. That's at least a form a democratic control of the means of production by one method in a certain way depending. It /does/ address that central contradiction of capitalism using a popularly controlled, democratic method. It /can/ be valid. (You see I'm careful wording this because I really don't know a lot about Norwegian politics and I couldn't say with any certainty how well it does that democratic/popular control part. Could be ass for all I know. The money from that oil could go to capitalists in the country or elsewhere and might not help those people. I can't say.)

I'm not an expert enough on Norway and VZ to go further then that but I don't think it's unreasonable to say the electorate in both countries share a pretty similar amount of power from what I understand.

Like China I'd say is overall ideologically communist and has a market-socialist economy with varying degrees of central-demand organization.

Norway I'd say is ideologically liberal-capitalist but they implement socialist policies in their economy using market-socialist methods. They also do a lot of global hegemon stuff for NATO/US (iirc) which I would personally consider antithetical to socialism. If you work to oppress other people's efforts to democratize their economies that, at best, makes you a hypocritic socialist (though you could argue they'd still be socialist none-the-less). It's an ideology, not something we call someone when we think they're the good guy (not saying you're doing that but I've seen some people treat it like that before).

VZ gets tricky huh? The revolutionary communist ideology of Latin America is kind of a branch in and of itself, and Chauvismo a branch within that branch. They take more of an economic approach more like A Norway but in some aspects like A China as far as I know.

I think it comes down to analyzing the mode/attitudes of governance as it interacts with the economy. VZ (as much as one could say the following about an entire "country" with how nebulous of a concept a country is) fundamentally, ideologically, sees the economy as an extension of politics and popular demand. It understands the influence of imperial extraction in Latin America as an extension of capitalism-based phenomena and is more then willing to treat the market like a tool and not like an enshrined human right that's as sacred as religion.

Norway does the market liberal thing and kind of treats the economy more like a Hellenic god or an invisible force. They have that western liberal reverence towards it even /with/ the policies they implement and they're still attached to the American-based economic umbilical that feeds Europe (petrol dollar especially a part of that too I think yeah?)

I think that's the closet thing to a label I'd personally put it at. You need the What, How and Why at a minimum imo. I think we put to much stress on labeling things broadly when they're as complicated as an economy that's woven into a global system 8.5 billion people large. Nationalizing oil is mostly a socialist thing to do. But the "country" or the government as a whole might be more attitudinally market-liberal or they might implement nationalization selectively and do different things with the money.

Personally though, gun to my head, I'd call VZ socialist and Norway Capitalist-with -heavy-use-of-socialist-policies mostly by factoring in the underlying ideological attitude and popular political currents. I don't think I'd argue too much with anyone if they disagreed so long as we both recognize that both countries do nationalization and social welfare but they do it for different reasons and use the fruits of that policy in different ways. Mechanism Understanding > Labels to me I guess.

The US is a capitalist hellhole though. We at least got that one figured out.