Thanks for the insight into local voting there. It's amazing that so many equate Venezuela with communism. There is no relation between the two.

What I don't understand is why people on the left are unable to convince people that all the various right-wing dictatorships are examples of capitalism.

There are dozens of those, and one Venezuela. Venezuela is run by someone who is incompetent and desperate to cling to power. He is more like Trump than he is a communist (Venezuela is not at all a communist country).

The other issue is that there has never been a formal communist government in the world. Nobody knows if one would work if it was tried.

Nobody knows what, for example, the United States might look like if workers truly owned the means to production and then competed on the world stage.

We are seeing partial hints of what that may look like in the entertainment and sports industries, but since those are still dominated by extreme, late stage capitalist entities, it isn't indicative of what a more complete experiment would look like.

Most Americans confuse state control of industry (which is no better than capitalism) with communism.