Socialism works on the short term every place it it is attempted, for one reason and one reason only _ the government gets to keep all the guns, and those who resist are eventually executed, in ever-increasing numbers.
Eventually, the population gets tired of the one-sided deal they have been given, and armed with weapons other than guns, they seize control of the government again, hanging the former despots from nearby lampposts.
Witness Italian despot Mussolini or Romanian despot Ceausescu.
And recall all of the other peaceful revolutions in eastern Europe in 1989, where communist regimes fell one by one like dominoes.
The Soviet Union dissolved.
Who knows what would have happened in China, if not for the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
And the Tiananmen Square massacre showed us all, that these communist/socialist regimes stay in power by force. If the true will of the people is allowed to be expressed, they would be overthrown.
The main reason it works in the short term is there is still wealth left over from the prior rulers; in the case of Venezuela, they originally had a lot of money from oil sales that is now gone.
Usually it lasts a bit longer in places where the lower class really has a miserable existence; for them even what we view as spectacular failures is an improvement over the prior arrangement. Red China and Cuba probably fit this mold; Chiang’s army supposedly didn’t even have a medical corps (if you were wounded, tough sh!t). The problem in Venezuela is that too many people remember much better times; these aren’t Incas from the Andes but often educated modern people.
Once the upper and middle classes flee (which happened in Cuba, and to some extent, Venezuela) the communists could probably win valid elections until people are literally starving. Places like Newark NJ or the NYC district won by that barmaid are cases like this; the Dem primary is the real election, as so few “normal” even live and vote in those places. They last in the US because much of the safety net (free sh!t) is federalized, so productive states subsidize these economic dead zones.