No, it isn't, but there ought to be truth in advertising, and Marxists such as Frantz Fanon emphasized that truth.
To make a country richer in absolute terms, the country has to raise its productivity (unless the country has a lock on some very profitable international market niche like oil), but capitalism tends to be better at raising productivity than socialism. After all, typical capitalist means of raising productivity -- except education -- tend to go against the socialist ideals of egalitarian social relations and all-around human development, and when socialist leaders try them, workers under socialism tend to resist.
To decrease international inequality, making poorer countries richer in relative terms, there has to be transfer of wealth from the global north to the global south, the opposite of what normally happens under global capitalism. For such a transfer to take place, developed areas such as the EU, Japan, and the USA must go socialist first of all.
> Capitalist
> South Korea and Taiwan were able to make themselves richer. If you're
> saying that socialism can't, then why be a socialist in the Third World?
It depends on what level of capitalist development a "third-world" country stands at. What state socialism of the sort that we've known historically can do is to push a country out of feudalism through land reform, industrialization, and education. That is a worthwhile goal, if you are stuck in areas such as Afghanistan, Nepal, the countryside of India, and so forth, especially considering that areas like them won't get to the position of South Korea or Taiwan through capitalist means.
Socialists in areas such as Latin America can aim for a regional block of countries whose economies are integrated on a basis other than neoliberal capitalism's (if not on a fully socialist basis yet), which I take the Bolivarian process has been all about. That's an uphill struggle, given economic and political disparities within the region, but it may be possible to make some progress on that path.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>