What makes Venezuela unique from a historical perspective?

[La Comédie Noire]

The thread title says it all, if you think Venezuela is going through a revolutionary situation why do you think that is? Those who entertain the Bonapartist angle are welcomed to comment too, but I'd rather hear from those who think Venezuela is the real deal.

Also, has this been anticipated in Marxist theory?

[Dimentio]

The thread title says it all, if you think Venezuela is going through a revolutionary situation why do you think that is? Those who entertain the Bonapartist angle are welcomed to comment too, but I'd rather hear from those who think Venezuela is the real deal.

Also, has this been anticipated in Marxist theory?

Venezuela is unique in that extent that it was the first state where a populist-socialist current managed to win power after the fall of the Soviet Union, beginning a trend in Latin America.

[Multatulit]

Venezuela is unique in that extent that it was the first state where a populist-socialist current managed to win power after the fall of the Soviet Union, beginning a trend in Latin America.
Basically this, but I'd add that the massive support from the favelas for Chavéz is significant, as he is, to my (limited) knowledge, one of the first South-American leaders to mobilize them. I think the favelas and slums of this world are probably the areas which will be most important to any radical left movement in the coming years.

[el_chavista]

I may add some odd facts:

1 In the 1970s, military man Chávez was also a member of the Central Committee of the Party of the Venezuelan Revolution (PRV), a faction from the Communist Party which wanted to do it different from the PCV's soviet Marxism: they elaborated a "Bolivarian Marxism-Leninism" and an economical line ("oil socialism").

2 His failed coup in 1992 turned to be a huge propaganda by the deeds, enough to letting him win the 1998 presidential election.

3 In 2005 Chávez called for the seizing of almost 2000 factories!!!
Sadly and shamefully enough, the Venezuelan left (Marxist or whatever) let this revolutionary situation pass away (low ideological level, tradeunionist opportunism, social-treason).

[Barry Lyndon]

The Bolivarian Revolution is of world-historical importance for a number of reasons:

1. It kick-started a swing to the Left in most of Latin America, after a period in the 1990's when the radical Left was in retreat nearly everywhere in the Western Hemisphere(or for that matter, the world), with the exception of Cuba and the part of Mexico liberated by the Zapatistas. Only about 10 years ago, nearly every nation south of the US border was under a right-wing government totally beholden to Washington and Wall Street. Now, nearly every nation in Latin America is under a Left government of either a radical(Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador) or reformist(Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil) persuasion. This is an enormous political sea-change.

2. As Hugo Chavez himself put it, the Bolivarian Revolution is one that is 'peaceful-but armed'. It is not an armed overthrow of the government per se like in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba or Nicaragua, but is rather a gradual erosion of the power of the capitalist class via elections and democratic reforms. It lacks the illusions of the experiment in Allende's Chile, however, in that the reforms are backed up by the guns of Chavezs's leftist soldiers and workers and peasants militias.

3. In essence, the capitalist state is being eaten away by the building up of alternative organs of workers power being built up alongside that of the capitalist state- community councils, workers controlled/workers managed factories, workers militias, publicly owned education and community health clinics in the barrios.

4. The experiment in Venezuela is both a rejection of social-democratic reformism(in that it involves the direct empowerment of the working class and their control over the means of production, and that its goal is socialism, not a reformed version of capitalism), and the mindless copying of the top-down bureacracy of Stalinism. In that sense, I see it as a genuine attempt to learn from the mistakes of the past while still refusing to give up on the goal of a post-capitalist future.

5. After the fall of the Soviet bloc, the Left, particularly in the Western world, seemed to ditch the whole idea of seizing control of the state at all, tarring the very notion with unreconstructed Stalinism- 'changing the world without taking power' being a popular slogan of the anarchist blac bloc in Seattle 1999 and elsewhere since. In Venezuela, the emergence of the first new explicitly anti-capitalist regime since the end of the Cold War has put the question of state power back on the agenda for leftists everywhere.

[bricolage]

5. After the fall of the Soviet bloc, the Left, particularly in the Western world, seemed to ditch the whole idea of seizing control of the state at all, tarring the very notion with unreconstructed Stalinism- 'changing the world without taking power' being a popular slogan of the anarchist blac bloc in Seattle 1999 and elsewhere since. In Venezuela, the emergence of the first new explicitly anti-capitalist regime since the end of the Cold War has put the question of state power back on the agenda for leftists everywhere.
As far as I know 'change the world without taking power' wasn't really a popular slogan until Holloways book which was published in 2002, three years after Chavez had ascended to the Presidency. I'd be interested into any evidence suggesting it was raised prior to that though, my guess would be it might have been but only in very isolated cases.