Venezuela officially enters the not-REAL-socialism stage

Writing at the IEA blog Kristian Niemietz says,

Now we’ve finally learned what went wrong in Venezuela: it wasn’t real socialism. At the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell explained:

“It’s not that the issue is socialism vs capitalism. […]

All the objectives of Chavez […] would have been successful if they had mobilised the oil resources to actually invest in the long term […]

I think in Venezuela they took a wrong turn, a not particularly effective path, not a socialist path.”

McDonnell is in good company. Quite a few prominent figures on the left, such as Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek, are now explicitly disputing Venezuela’s socialist credentials.

So Venezuela joins the very long list of countries that at some point are held up as role models of "socialism" by Western intellectuals but which, once they start failing, became an embarrassment to the socialist cause. When the problems become so obvious and undeniable socialism in these countries ceases to be ‘real’ socialism, which of course why it fails. Or so we are told. But every socialist country seems to suffer the same fate. Why is this I wonder.