Thanx for the quote, I hope it helps to bust the illusions of those on the left and in the working class that have illusions in what Chávez represents.


From

Venezuela: CIA Targets Chávez
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 787, 20 September 2002

"Over the past decade, the dominant model for imperialist exploitation in the Third World has been IMF-dictated “free market” neoliberalism and privatization of state industry. The IMF’s ability to dictate draconian economic austerity is in large part based on the absence of the Soviet Union as a counterweight to the imperialists. At the same time, the current economic crisis in Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico, is producing a broader shift in the political-ideological climate away from neoliberalism back toward the nationalist populism espoused by Chávez and identified most closely with Perón’s Argentina in the 1940s and ’50s, where wide sectors of industry were nationalized. While we defend nationalizations carried out against imperialism, these in no sense free those industries from capitalist domination..."

"...At bottom, populism and economic neoliberalism are simply alternative policies of capitalist rule, often pursued at different times by one and the same person. In Brazil, Luiz Inacio da Silva of the Workers Party (WP), the front-runner in the campaign for next month’s presidential elections, put aside his populist rhetoric this summer to embrace a $30 billion IMF bailout package, promising, if elected, to respect the austerity measures that were part of the deal."

see  http://www.icl-fi.org/ENGLISH/Ven787.htm for total artical

In the years 1960 - 1962, Fidel Castro also used to say that he was not a communist.
Chavez is quoted as saying that the Bolivarian Revolution is ''not communist but humanist''. I think the best way to define Venezuela now is as an oil rich global south protocapitalist state governed by a left nationalist pro cuba government under siege from a militant CIA funded neoliberal opposition.

What Chavez means is that he isn't a sectarian pinhead who believes in ideology for the sake of ideology. He lives and breathes the revolution, as opposed to fringe groups that rather dictate than lift a finger to defend those they ostensibly want to lead as the vanguard.

Luckily, the sectarians are being isolated every day due to their dystopian visions of "worker's paradise." People active in the Marxist left are waking up to the fact that hope has been reawakened, and that they have Chavez to thank.