Hugo Chavez was a hero to many on the left. Where are they now Venezuela is collapsing?

There was no single moment when things went horribly wrong in Venezuela. The sitting President Nicolás Maduro is the legitimate progeny of the late Hugo Chavez, just as Stalin was the legitimate heir of Lenin.Whereas the Russian state founded by Lenin contained "the germ of all Stalinism...at its beginning", as Victor Serge put it, so Hugo Chavez's Bolivarian Revolution contained the genesis of today's collapse into economic catastrophe and dictatorship from the start. This is not a revolution betrayed. It was obvious a decade ago that the 'Bolivarian Revolution' was rotten, and this was no less true because governments in the United States behaved appallingly towards Venezuela.More…