What will happen if Hugo Chavez goes?

[naaman fletcher]

Most people who occupy key government roles do not enjoy the trust of the people. Corruption is rife in the Chavez government—and the workers and the poor of Venezuela know it.

...

In 2005 Chavez declared that the revolution would build “Socialism in the 21st century”.

These things haven’t happened.

Power has gradually moved back towards a state whose controlling class acts in many cases like its predecessors did.

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=25463

[joshcryer]

1. The left won't recognize the problems with Chavismo until many years down the road.

It's just like with Stalin, it took decades before the left finally said that it was failing and not in line with their "theory" (I won't go off on a tangent about how Trotskyism or any variant of statist socialism always results in a kind of Stalinism).

Interestingly Socialist Worker makes the same mistake here, even while being critical of the regime:

More importantly, the bourgeoisie has not been challenged. The Western press, which is consistently hostile to Chavez, complains about a lack of freedom of expression.

But I have never been anywhere where the opposition spoke more freely, or more viciously, about the regime.

The same bourgeoisie lives in luxury, despite some minor currency restrictions. It makes vast profits from constantly rising prices, currency and property speculation.

It's not that the bourgeoisie class has not been challenged, so much that the entire government apparatus in Venezuela embraces the bourgeoisie. Because Venezuela, like the United States, mandates a constitutional right to private property, the Venezuelan government must monetarily compensate the owners whenever they expropriate and nationalize something. Now if you nationalize something that the owner class holds, you can't just fire everyone that works for whatever you're nationalizing. And because capitalism is already corrupt by definition, the government, by virtue of compensated expropriation, is effectively bringing in the corrupted bourgeoisie into its own ranks.