What Hugo Chávez failed to understand about Karl Marx

It’s 25 years this week since Hugo Chávez – an inspiration for leftwingers like Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn – was elected president of Venezuela. Chávez may not be the person primarily responsible for his country’s descent into dictatorship, anarchy and humanitarian disaster (that would be his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro) but the foundation was laid by his unrestrained populism. 

That populism had two pillars: socialism and nationalism. Chávez claimed inspiration from Karl Marx and, particularly, from the Venezuelan independence hero Simón Bolívar. During his 14 years in power, Chávez tried to combine these two influences to create a socially equal and sovereign Venezuela. He called his project ‘Bolivarian Socialism’. The problem? Marx absolutely hated Bolívar.

Marx wrote one essay about Bolívar, published in 1858 in the third volume of the New American Cyclopaedia. In it, Marx presents the Liberator not as a proto-socialist but as a mediocre general, a despot, and a racist.