Socializing ownership in Venezuela

Some had asked when I would comment on Venezuela’s choice to nationalize telecommunications, energy, and oil. At the time I was and still am deeply involved with other issues and so was not a good time for me to think about how I wished to express myself on this issue. It is unfortunate, because I was one of the people who was aware this was going to happen through other indirect means, such as the new complex that was built by the energy, PDVSA, and Venezuelan telecommunication companies which was put together rather apparently for this purpose.

It is also known by some that I had met with their national communication agency, Conatel, back in 2005, and I had a lovely discussion while there on communication policy and VOIP at the time. My suggestion would have been to replace private and foreign ownership of telecommunications in Venezuela with local telecom worker and switching center coops. So I was actually somewhat disappointed that they choose to nationalize ownership under the state instead.

Far too often, socialist governments turn to nationalization to achieve public ownership over resources and industries that have suffered from the abuses of private ownership and capitalism. Very often, however, this path leads to failure. The idea of nationalization is simple enough. The government, as the presumed “representative” organ of an electoral democratic society, and hence is intended to act on behalf of the whole population. As such, ownership is then “shared” by the population as a whole through it’s government. If only it were that simple.

The main problem is that nationalization of an industry creates a complete and single monopoly. Even in heavily monopolized private hands, this level of monopoly ownership is almost never achieved, and certainly not across multiple and often separated industries. In doing this, and creating a single monopoly agent “owner”, that being the national government, every problem with monopolization is vastly amplified to it’s most extreme.

Some argue that there are “natural monopolies” in economics. I could not disagree more. There are cases where shared local commons are logical; for example municipal ownership of local roads, and wires. But aggregating such things and claiming something like “all telecommunications” is a “natural monopoly”, and accepting single ownership of such, whether by the state or private hands, should be resisted by ANY means necessary.

What is worse of all is what happens to national governments which own and operate monopolies. These are not really controlled by the “people” in electoral "democracies", but instead by newly empowered bureaucrats who then act as a political class. Great plutocratic power over national life and thru access and control over industry is rapidly acquired, and then far too often misused. The fastest way to turn communists into “commun-elites” is thru the state capitalism of nationalized ownership. The transformation of China from technical communism to a particularly fascist form of capitalism is a perfect example of this sad truth.

There are many valid and worthwhile reasons to take ownership away from the criminal capital class. There are cases for effective local ownership and control through municipalities. Using nationalization as a tool to rescue workers from the slavery of the capitalist and return ownership to them either directly as coops or to local worker councils and local governments operating under functional participatory democracy is perhaps even a good use of nationalization. Retaining national ownership is far to often the path to state capitalism, a crime for which those who do so should be hanged side by side with the private capitalists.