Hugo Chavez

Gerardo Rojas discusses the July 28 presidential election, the current state of community organising in the country and why we might be witnessing the Maduro government’s final break with the Bolivarian process.

Reinaldo Iturriza looks at the competing — and inadequate — narratives surrounding Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election.

Antonio González Plessmann breaks down the country’s July 28 presidential election and its fallout from an anti-capitalist perspective.

June 1, 2022 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Monthly Review — It is a strange and interesting story how the longstanding and ultimately two-way relationship between revolutionary Venezuelan politician Hugo Chávez and Hungarian intellectual István Mészáros came to exist. It is a tale of elective affinities. On one side, we have a kid who grew up in the Venezuelan llanos in a household too poor to buy tableware. As a boy living with his grandmother, the young Hugo sold candy in the streets but wanted to play baseball, inspired by a namesake pitcher (el Látigo Chávez) on the team Magallanes. He entered the armed forces hoping to become a pelotero, but soon discovered that the army offered him a school for studying politics and history, along with a privileged vantage point from which to observe the injustices and contradictions of Venezuelan society. On the other side of the story, we have Mészáros, a full generation older than the former Venezuelan president. Mészáros grew up poor in Budapest, worked with Georg Lukács, emigrated to Italy following the 1956 uprising, then moved to England, where he spent most of the rest of his life.