Capitalism, culture, and contextFirst, it is important to realise that Chavez chose to call his transformative project "21st-century socialism", but
Venezuela's economy remained market-based and private-sector dominated throughout his time in office.
Though the social economy and the public sector were heavily promoted - including through nationalisation - the private sector was expected to remain dominant, and it did.
A centrally planned socialist economy like Cuba's was neither the aim nor the reality.
Second, part of the problem was always that
oil-rich, hyper-consumerist Venezuela was the last place you would expect socialism to blossom - and these characteristics caused grave problems for the government.
The crucial role of oil in the international capitalist system makes oil-price volatility a central player in Venezuelan development, as Maduro has discovered to his cost.
But more importantly, the sheer value of oil provokes the "resource curse" in undiversified economies like Venezuela's. With boom-time windfalls favouring exchange-rate shifts that make other exports uncompetitive, "petromania" leads to lavish public spending, while distorted incentives undermine ethics, entrepreneurship, and efficiency throughout the state and wider society.
As Al Jazeera's insightful documentary The Battle for Venezuela explains, this is nothing new. On the contrary, Venezuela's formation as a state and as a society was intimately linked to the oil industry, and this is reflected in its politics.
Oil, opposition, and obstacles to development
Long before Chavez took office in 1999, there were two Venezuelas: "the Venezuela that benefits from oil, and the Venezuela that remains in the shadow of the oil industry" as veteran Venezuela analyst Miguel Tinker Salas puts it.
The benefiting elite, from which the core of Venezuela's opposition emerged, rightly recognised that Chavez's promise to redistribute the oil wealth to the marginalised majority was sincere. But they also instinctively understood that Chavez wanted to rewrite the national narrative without the rich, white, educated, Western-facing elite as its heroes, thereby also robbing them of the social status that reproduced and ring-fenced their material wealth.
It is this cultural threat that explains the ferocity and durability of elite rage and obstructionism: staging the 2002 coup even though Chavez's democratic legitimacy was undoubted and then organising a devastating, management-led oil strike at a time when his economic policy remained more reformist than radical.
By his own account, it was the implacability and intransigence of this elite, bequeathed to him by Venezuela's capitalist history, that drove Chavez towards the idea of a more radical 21st-century socialism in 2005.
Like the bolivar, the claim of an "economic war" is a ludicrously devalued currency under Maduro. However, nothing suggests that provoking political problems through hoarding, cutting production, or manipulating the black-market exchange rate was ever beyond the pale for private actors with the power to do it.
Companies and wealthy individuals have also always had the clearest means and the most capital to invest in the large-scale currency arbitrage that has been bleeding Venezuela dry for over a decade.
But the effects of oil dependency extend far beyond a particular group or class. As one of the architects of Venezuela's social-economy drive puts it, the pervasive culture has always favoured "living off government transfers of [oil] rents instead of deservedly enjoying the fruits of productive work."
In Venezuela, social divisions are so deep and societal trust is so weak that the idea of a social contract, a national pulling-together, or even a basic acceptance of the rules of the game is a distant dream. As the local saying goes, "for my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law".
Politics must play out against a cultural backdrop that implicitly understands that you should use any means necessary to siphon off as much oil wealth as possible for you and yours....
... Chavez's response to implacable opposition and widespread corruption was to turn to those he trusted in the military and to the promise of social transformation through socialisation of the economy. But his faith in neither was repaid.
But
just as capitalism itself was not to blame for the pacted corruption and murderous repression of prior governments that created the popular discontent and personal drive which brought Chavez to power, socialism itself is not to blame for the creeping authoritarianism of a Maduro regime that is now preventing replacement of a failing government and model.
In many ways, the blame game is a red herring, an exercise in cherry-picking to promote greater state intervention or the "free" market rather than any identifiable model. The statist might cite happy Norway before the Gulag, whereas the free-marketeer will surely prefer New Zealand's peaceful neoliberalisation during the 1980s to the murder and torture of Chile's under Pinochet.
The lesson is perhaps that there are no clean, textbook models. The real issue is whether a given political economy is producing desirable results for its citizens. Where once that was the case in Venezuela, clearly it is no longer so.