Mick Hartley

A powerful piece from Philip Collins in the Times (£) – Venezuela shows Corbyn’s socialism in action. 

‘Chávez . . . showed us that there is a different, and a better way of doing things. It’s called socialism.” That’s what the man who is now leader of the Labour Party told a rally in London. “I think the importance of Venezuela,” said Diane Abbott in 2012, “is that it shows another way is possible.” It would be nice, now that the Venezuelan way has turned out to be a via dolorosa, if Mr Corbyn and Ms Abbott and all the other Labour cheerleaders for the Chávez and Maduro regimes — John McDonnell and Seumas Milne among the top brass and some of the foot-solders too — were to let it be known that they had been taught a valuable lesson.

As thousands of protesters take to the streets to demand the end of Nicolás Maduro’s presidency, let’s spell that lesson out, because the British left has a tin ear for egregious regimes on its own side. When the grand and noble idea of social democracy is pushed harder towards truer socialism, this is how it ends. This is how it always ends.

The decline of Venezuela is not a contingent accident, to be explained by malign imperial forces or the infirmities of the men in charge. It is intrinsic to the creed. It is the fatal, defining trait of authoritarian politics of a left-wing kind. If the band who aspire to govern Britain regarded this nation as an exemplar, it matters. Labour MPs once looked to Sweden for inspiration. Ed Miliband wanted a Neue Labour cover version of Germany. The embodiment of the Corbyn world view has been, instead, Venezuela and its descent into chaos therefore demands their response. The justification of the use of state power and the transfer of resources from private to public, central precepts for the Corbynite left, are thrown into question by its demise.

The scale of the collapse really cannot be ignored by anyone who has ever been its cheerleader. In the nation with the world’s largest oil reserves, production has almost halved since 2013. The government has presided over a contraction in GDP that, in the four years from 2013, was more severe than that suffered by the United States during the Great Depression. Inflation is running at 1.7 million per cent. By the end of last year prices were doubling every three weeks. It is a negative achievement of historic standing.

The human costs of this economic collapse are heart-breaking, Infant mortality rose 30 per cent in 2016 and malaria, which, in 1961, Venezuela had been the first country to eradicate is back. So is diphtheria. HIV and cancer patients are going without treatment or clean water and parents are surrendering their hungry children to orphanages. […]

It was never meant to be like this and the denizens of the British left naively never expected disaster. They thought it would be different this time. Oil revenues might be fairly distributed, to pay for social programmes and to the lasting benefit of the poor. The early gains in literacy and health care appeared to show, as they had in Cuba, that left-wing populism could redeem both of the competing promises of equality and liberty. Those on the British left kidded themselves that Venezuela was an embodied critique of neoliberalism (their term). They thought it was the discovery, after a few false trails, of a different path.

The important point here is not, as the witless Tory attack has it, that the British left is staffed by dreadful people who are all motivated by envy of the elite. The truth is much deeper, more sophisticated and insidious than that. It certainly is a road to hell that the left is travelling but it is paved with good intentions. It requires an act of imagination, and a reassessment of your political principles, to understand that, as Karl Popper was the first to point out, utopian fantasy always ends in violence. Much easier to pretend to yourself that repression serves the greater good or that the capitalist hegemon America is at fault.

This is how, when a favoured nation is on the brink of collapse and some bedrock principles about democracy and freedom are at stake, the British left, which is normally so voluble, can be reduced to guilty silence.

The horrendous collapse of Venezuelan society isn't a strange perversion of the usual happy progress towards socialism. It's what always happens. It's not a bug: it's a feature.