Among unreconstructed leftists who believe “the USSR was not real socialism”, Hugo Chávez has long held a certain appeal as a different kind of socialist: one who will place the welfare of the people above the security of his own regime. This appeal continues despite despite numerous warning signals that Chávez intends to practice “actually existing socialism” rather than some Marxist fantasy. The latest warning sign? The development of Mugabe-style militias and paramilitary groups that operate outside the law and can be freely used to terrorise Chávez’s political opponents:

The collective, led mainly by university students in their 20s, leapt into the Venezuelan consciousness in recent weeks after its members were videotaped defacing the headquarters of Globovisión, the country’s only remaining opposition television network, amid an intensifying debate here over freedom of expression. “We’re Marxist-Leninists,” Robert Longa, 30, the group’s chief spokesman, said nonchalantly in a recent interview, as if the Berlin Wall had never come down. “The counterrevolutionaries at Globovisión sprayed their own graffiti on the consciousness of the Venezuelan people. We felt we had to react to them.”

This is Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela: a land of freedom and expression for all, unless you’re a “counterrevolutionary” (ie. someone who disagrees with Hugo Chávez), but then you’re wicked and clearly deserve to have your rights taken away.

None of this should be surprising: Chávez’s authoritarianism is necessitated by the political ideology he wishes to implement. Simply put, the sheer extent of change demanded by revolutionary socialism can only be met by the hegemonic power of an autocratic state. Marx himself understood that, which was why he argued that socialism had to be implemented by a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. But he also believed that the state, despite having amassed so much power, would simply “wither away” once the socialist revolution was completed instead of becoming steadily more oppressive. Chávez merely provides one more illustration of the naivety of this belief.