>>132629Venezuela is in a pool of contradictions right now. Nevertheless, things are starting to change for the better, economically speaking, that is, unless the U.S. invade us directly or indirectly through a third country, that would really fuck us up for good.
Regarding Covid19, we have the virus relatively under control, most of our medical staff attending Covid19 cases are vaccinated, be it by Sputnik V or the one from Sinopharm. Recently we have received the brazilian variant P.1 and P.2 and that has caused a second wave of cases during the last few weeks. We have reached more than 1000 cases these last few days going back to the numbers we had in september from last year. To address that the government has decreed two weeks full quarantine and lockdown to avoid the spreading, let's see how that works to flatten the curve again.
Right now I can only speak for myself, I'm an electrical engineer, I'm working in freelancer projects and at the same time I work in the ministry of industry, but I work from home for obvious reasons now. I design electrical systems at residential, commercial and industrial level. I have been involved in designing or supervising the electrical systems of several state owned factories that we created. For people here that talks very lightly about privatizations, well they are holding on to really weak arguments, they are the mirror of the people who said we expropriated and nationalized 99% of the economy. One word: WRONG.
Now the state can't do the dirty work, so the private sector has to do it. Before being blocked, the state provided everything and everybody was a parasite to it, everybody in a way worked for the state, the biggest contracts the private companies had was with the state as client, so in a way most infrastructure is thanks to the state, the private sector invested little and reaped the bigger profits, now they have to get their hands dirty too. The course we are taking is changing our shitty 100 year old single product rent capitalism for a more productive, efficient (in a capitalist framework) and diversified capitalism, at least in the medium to large industrial production processes, because we have the communal production processes and the communes developing at the side so we are walking forward but looking backwards at the same time hahaha.
Anyway, I still get paid from my government job and they sent me boxes and bags of food regularly, like fifteen days apart, because I live alone I have excess food sometimes, I can't eat too much pasta, so I give some to my neighbors so that it doesn't go to waste, the rest I try to provide to my mom and dad who live in another state, 5 hour drive. Also the "Fatherland System" or "Sistema Patria" never fails and sends people money like a UBI for everybody registered, that helps alleviate the hyperinflation.
Back to the socialism question, most people don't know what socialism is, however, they are coming to terms with the fact that our economical demise is linked completely to the blockade, sanctions, aggression from the U.S. and their lapdogs inside and outside our borders and also by the currency manipulation, and they know when you speak to people, that that is not caused by socialistic measures or by even government corruption or incompetence, at least at this outrageous level of collapse, and add to that the fact that people now objectively know that the opposition led by Guaidó during Trump's administration has robbed and has done more harm to the country and its treasury in these 2 to 3 years without even being in power, than the corruption of the supposed "chavistas" in all of the 20 years of revolution we have.
That is one side, the right here, has nothing, they are devoid of arguments, they are reduced to being explicit sycophants and gusanos, nothing more, driven by feelings and emotions, frustrations and anger, nothing to look for there.
The left, now that's is another story, we basically are at the point of "What to do?" "What to follow?" "Dogmatism Vs pragmatism" "Real politik"? "Should we become purists and succumb almost immediately?" "Invent or err"?. A good thing though, we have our National Assembly back so we are discussing, creating and modifying laws again. One thing that is being discussed in our National Assembly and works as a starting point for economic stabilization and recovery is a proposition to index the salaries and the state budget to the petro (But now for real hehe) in order to keep the purchasing power and maneuvering power of the state so that we neutralize the variations of the prices companies set and raise the salary automatically at the same ratio they increase the prices, without waiting for a decree or law raising salaries (we get paid every 15 days, we don't use the hour or year reference). That is good, and this is already being implemented locally to only oil sector workers to test how it goes empirically, last week that law project was presented, that proposition is from people who wants to deepen socialism but know the context and the steps needed to be taken at first, this guys are from the PSUV and are against a more liberal oriented faction of the PSUV. PCV doesn't understand this, they are a photograph of a party, I haven't heard from anybody there how to proceed under these current conditions or a proposal on how to implement communism or a planned economy option for the 21st century and how to politically make it feasible in this context, not as if we are Russia in the beginning of the 20th century.
Also considering something I stated before in some other posts in some other threads, due to unilateral coercive measures, in recent years Venezuela's income has been reduced to almost 1%. We have lost around 99% of what we received. Of the 56 billion dollars that we received monthly, we receive less than 740 million dollars a year. So in short term the state can't embark on full on nationalizations anyway, and also until the economy isn't stabilized the state's budget in bolivares gets eaten up by this induced hyperinflation so the state is focusing its efforts on the industries prioritized like obviously oil, gas, mining (Both traditional and crypto) and leaves the rest to the private sector and makes alliances with other companies without losing majority of shares of their own companies in order to increase production.
One other thing, our constitution from 1999 is still a bourgeois one, albeit a thousand times better than the ones beore, but it won't let us do "full communism""full socialism" like some of the kids here shout and criticize when talking about Venezuela, without even knowing recent history and our country's laws, not everything is that simple. In fact did anyone of you know that we had a referendum in 2007 to change our constitution to a heavily socialist oriented one and the PSUV lost? a very small margin, like 1% but a loss anyway so in our pacific path to socialism and adopting a more participatory democratic process we have to respect the results even when they are not favorable so that really makes this the slow and hard path.