Your readers may be interested in a blog by one of Chirinos’ comrades, Miguel Angel Hernandez:

http://www.miguelaha.blogspot.com/

I would also argue that the World Socialist Web Site is a lot more wrong and more guilty of the kind of ridiculous Chavez-phobia that you are talking about than Chris Harman. But I appreciate your thoughtful post even though I disagree with some of the conclusions.

You might be interested in this piece I wrote for the Guardian (UK) back in February.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/calvin_tucker/2007/01/post_984.html

Calvin
Co-editor, http://www.21stcenturysocialism.com

And how do you propose any faction in Venezuela breaks with capitalism - “as such?” Do you think there is some kind of 10-step program, perhaps akin to a weight-loss diet, at the end of which a regime liberates itself and says, “finally, we have done away with capitalism - as such!”

Socialism in isolation is a guaranteed path to disaster. For all your invocation of Lenin - or rather this must be a symptom of said invocations - you fail to grasp that main lesson of Lenin’s project. An exhausted and isolated country stripped of bourgeois expertise and assets overnight is doomed.

Chavez’s regime is trying to orient the country and the continent toward a model that is (a) less dependent on America, (b) more dependent on the continent’s own production and resources, and (c) more savvy and responsive to the contradictions of world capitalism. These are buffer measures designed to give the movement’s goals some breathing space to demonstrate its achievements.

Achievements, as in tangible improvement in people’s lives, such as have occurred over the past four years. That is worth more than a thousand slogans about overthrowing the “bonapartist bourgeois regime,” as if Chavez and Hillary Clinton are fundamentally the same thing.

What would happen if, instead of current steps, all assets were nationalized tomorrow morning, all foreign companies thrown out? Then, indeed, a few “internet Marxists” who love to bandy about the Marxist version of taster’s choice terminology (”seize the commanding heights!”, “grab the means of production!”, “expropriate the expropriators!” would be thrilled. Meanwhile, the country would be fucked.

Lenin’s leading role was only possible given that the Bolshevik program was the result of decades of revolutionary experience. Lenin on the State takes note of Marx on the Paris Commune and imperialism. The class character of the state is not limited to evidence of bureaucracy and corruption. These are symptoms of a particular class rule.

Similarly the Bolshevik assessment of the revolutionary situation in Russia which led to the adoption of Lenin’s April Theses is a ‘qualitative’ leap that cannot be ignored in Venezuela. So which part of the revolutionary program can be left to the current ‘class struggle’(as if it began yesterday) exactly?

And which class forces in what sort of organisation will be responsible for implementing that program within the working class? If you think that the qualitative leap is to get rid of the bureaucracy and corruption then all that is needed is a left wing of the Bolivarian movement to keep the revolution ‘honest’. Perhaps this could be done by bloggers from outside Venezuela without the active role of organised workers.

This would be to sow illusions in a populist regime that has held back the independent organisation of workers. So long as even ’self-proclaimed Trotskyist’ groups hold the Chavez’ regime to be progressive, then they act as a leftwing of a bonapartist bourgeois regime that is actually capable of no more than a break with neo-liberalism and not capitalism as such.

This is not to say that revolutionaries reject Chavez reforms any more than the Bolshevik program rejected the February revolution. But history does have vital lessons for us, and among them, are the overthrow of the bourgeois state, and permanent revolution. Fortunately, the revolution in Venezuela, will be determined by the leading role of the working class and not internet self-proclaimed ‘marxists’.