Hugo Chavez: A Revolutionary Life
Weekend Edition April 4-6, 2014
The New Socialism
Hugo Chavez: A Revolutionary Life
by RON JACOBS
Hugo Chavez was one of the most important public figures of the last twenty years. From the moment of the failed 1992 coup he helped foment until his death from cancer in 2013, his presence was felt around the world. Politicians, media outlets and capitalist power mongers despised his popularity and what they feared it meant for their future. Many of those around the world who are not among the powerful or working for their public relations machinery saw him as a hero and leader in the struggle against those very powers that repress the common people’s desire for a decent life and a more just world.
Chavez grew to understand this role and seemed to relish it the bigger he became. People cheered when he equated George W. Bush with the Devil at the United Nations and North Americans noted when he offered gasoline to the citizens of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the Bush administration’s intentional neglect of those victims. His popularity in his home land of Venezuela exists still and is a good part of the reason his successor Nicolás Maduro has been able to hold on to his office despite severe and violent pressures from the wealthy right wingers of Venezuela and their foreign allies. That part of Venezuela’s history continues to be written as I write.
For the past few years Pluto Press has been publishing a series of biographies of selected revolutionaries. The series is called “Revolutionary Lives” and has included the life histories of French Jacobin Jean Paul Marat, Chilean socialist Salvador Allende, and socialist suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, to name three. The books are short, usually less than two hundred pages, and provide a leftist introduction to the subject and their place in history. One of the most recent biographies in the series is that of Hugo Chavez. Titled Hugo Chavez: Socialist for the Twenty-first Century, and written by Mike Gonzalez of the University of Glasgow, this brief work does a very competent job of presenting Chavez’s political biography.
Gonzalez describes Chavez’s growing political awareness during his early years in the Venezuelan military while simultaneously giving the reader a general description of the historical class and ethnic divisions found in Venezuela. Although Chavez studied Marx and other leftist writers, he kept the writings of Latin America’s liberator Simon Bolivar closest to his heart. In due time, it would be Bolivar’s name that would become the descriptor of the government Chavez would lead—the Bolivarian Republic.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/04/hugo-chavez-a-revolutionary-life/