"...When the situation in Venezuela got even worse, the Western Left fell silent on Venezuela. It is as if the country had just dropped off the map. It is clear what the next step will be: we will soon hear post-hoc rationalisations explaining why Venezuela was never “really” socialist, and why it is a silly straw man to hold the failure of that experiment against the socialist Left. This process has already begun.

Noam Chomsky now says he never described “Chavez’s state capitalist government as ‘socialist’ … It was quite remote from socialism. Private capitalism remained … Capitalists were free to undermine the economy in all sorts of ways, like massive export of capital.”

This has happened many times before. In the 1930s, hundreds of Western intellectuals flocked to Stalin’s Soviet Union, and came back praising it to the skies. A few years later, they decided that Soviet socialism was not “real” socialism, and crucially, that it had never been socialist in the first place. Then the same thing happened all over again in Cuba, in Mao’s China, in Enver Hoxha’s Albania, and many other places...