A level Economics: The 1973 coup against democratic socialism in Chile still matters

It happened 50 years ago, changed the course of world history – and revealed just how authoritarian conservatives are. Andy Beckett in The Guardian


Fifty years on, the 1973 coup in Chile still haunts politics there and far beyond. As we approach its anniversary, on 11 September, the violent overthrow of the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and its replacement by the brutal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet are already being marked in Britain, through a period of remembrance scheduled to include dozens of separate exhibitions and events. Among these will be a march in Sheffield, archival displays in Edinburgh, a concert in Swansea, and a conference and picket of the Chilean embassy in London.

Few past events in faraway countries receive this level of attention. Military takeovers were not unusual in South America during the cold war. And Chile has been a relatively stable democracy since the Pinochet dictatorship ended, 33 years ago. So why does the 1973 coup still resonate?

In the UK, one answer is that roughly 2,500 Chilean refugees fled here after the coup, despite an unwelcoming Conservative government. “It is intended to keep the number of refugees to a very small number and, if our criteria are not fully met, we may accept none of them,” said a Foreign Office memo not released until three decades afterwards.

The Chileans came regardless, partly because leftwing activists, trade unionists and politicians including Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn created a solidarity movement – of a scale and duration harder to imagine in our more politically impatient times – which helped the refugees build new lives, and campaigned with them for years against the Pinochet regime. Some of these exiles settled in Britain permanently; veterans of the solidarity movement are involved in this year’s remembrance events, as they have been in earlier anniversaries. The left’s reverence for old struggles can sometimes distract it or weigh it down, but it is also a source of emotional and cultural strength, and an acknowledgment that the past and present are often more linked than we realise.

Two weeks ago, it was revealed that an old army helicopter that stands in a wood in Sussex as part of a paintball course had previously been used by the Pinochet government, to transport dissidents and then throw them into the sea. The dictatorship was a pioneer of this and other methods of “disappearing” its enemies and perceived enemies, believing that lethal abductions would frighten the population into obedience more effectively than conventional state murders.

Not unconnectedly, the regime also pioneered the harsh free-market policies which transformed much of the world – and which are still supported by most Tories, many rightwing politicians in other countries, and many business interests. In Chile, the idea that a deregulated economy required a highly disciplined citizenry, to avoid the economic semi-anarchy spilling over into society, was exhaustively tested and refined, to the great interest of foreign politicians such as Margaret Thatcher.

Augusto Pinochet, left, and President Salvador Allende attend a ceremony naming Pinochet as commander in chief of the army, 23 August, 1973. Photograph: Enrique Aracena/AP

Another reason that the 1973 coup remains a powerful event is that it left unfinished business at the other end of the political spectrum. The Allende government was an argumentative and ambitious coalition which, almost uniquely, attempted to create a socialist country with plentiful consumer pleasures and modern technology, including a kind of early internet called Project Cybersyn, without Soviet-style repression. For a while, even the Daily Mail was impressed: “An astonishing experiment is taking place,” it reported on the first anniversary of his election. “If it survives, the implications will be immense for other countries.”

The coup happened partly because the government’s popularity, though never overwhelming, rose while it was in office. This rise convinced conservative interests that it would be reelected, and would then take the patchy reforms of its first term much further. For the same reasons, the Allende presidency remains tantalising for some on the left. An updated version of his combination of social liberalism, egalitarianism and mass political participation may still have the potential to transform the left’s prospects, as Corbyn’s successful campaigns in 2015, 2016 and 2017 suggested.


Files reveal Nixon role in plot to block Allende from Chilean presidency


There is one more, bleaker reason to reflect on the coup: for what it revealed about conservatism. When I wrote a book on Chile two decades ago, it was unsettling to learn about how the US Republicans undermined Allende, by covert CIA funding of his enemies, for instance, and how the Conservatives helped Pinochet, through arms sales and diplomatic support. But these moves seemed to be explained largely by cold-war strategies and free-market zealotry, which was fading in the early 21st century.

Yet from today’s perspective, with another Trump presidency threatening, far-right parties in power across Europe, and a Tory government with few, if any, inhibitions about criminalising dissent, the Chile coup looks prophetic. Nowadays the line between conservatism and authoritarianism is not so much blurred occasionally, in national emergencies, as nonexistent in many countries.

Some critics of conservatism would say that it’s naive to think such a line ever existed. In 1930s Europe, for instance, supposedly moderate and pro-democratic rightwing parties often facilitated the rise of fascism. Yet the postwar world, after fascism had been militarily defeated, was meant to be one where such toxic alliances against the left never happened again.

The 1973 coup ended that comfortable assumption. “It is not for us to pass judgment on Chile’s internal affairs,” said the Tory Foreign Office minister Julian Amery in the Commons, two months later, despite the coup having initiated killings and torture on a mass scale. When the coup is remembered, its victims should come first. But the response of conservatives around the world to the crushing of Chile’s democracy and civil liberties should never be forgotten.

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Imran Khan on Himself

From The Friday Times

Friends, fundos and youthias, I want you to know that I took the Hypocritic oath ages ago while schmoozing my way across London with one eye on my political career back home, and the other on the chicks of Chelsea. I knew that once I’d taken the Hypocritic oath, I’d be free to do Hypocritical things. Like pretending to be a democrat while trying to oust elected governments via conspiracies. Like pretending to be a principled leader while treating my party like a principality. Like defending the disadvantaged while taking advantage of defenseless women. Like funding madrassahs in Pakistan whilst sending my owns sons to England’s best madrassah, at £ 22,000 a year.

The problem is not with me but with this formerly glorious land that was once full of stupas, but is now full of stupids.

Why is my marriage to my spiritual advisor a scandal? Because it shows my utter lack of judgment? Or because it reveals my callousness? Or both?

Well, I don’t care and I’m going to carry on doing whatever or whoever I like. I really thought I had it all under wraps and was enjoying the winter sun with my spiritual advisor out on the lawns of my Bunny Gala estate. Then, suddenly a drone flew past with GEO NEWS written on it. I waved and waved but it didn’t stop for me. It was not until my spiritual advisor gave me a violent nudge in the ribs that I stopped waving. My spiritual advisor dived under the table to hide herself but by then the drone had let down a streamer which said, “touch luck, dumb f—-k”. I was spelling it out to my spiritual advisor when I came to the end and realized that the middle three letters of the last word were missing.

The fact that GEO NEWS’ drones can’t spell so alarmed me that whilst still writing this diary, I began suffering from writer’s block. I turned to my spiritual advisor and said, “please give me a profound thought on which to conclude my diary”. She said what about “the end”?

Im the Dim 

How Steve Bannon captured America's spirit of revolt

Thomas Frank in The Guardian

 

Illustration by Matt Kenyon



So our billionaire president hangs a portrait of Andrew Jackson on his wall, spits on his hands, and takes a sledgehammer to the Dodd–Frank Act. The portrait is of the banks’ all-time arch-enemy; the reality is that the banks are going to be deregulated yet again. And in that insane juxtaposition we can grasp rightwing populism almost in its entirety: fiery verbal hostility to elites, combined with generous government favours for those same elites.

Donald Trump’s adviser Stephen Bannon presents an even more striking combination. A former executive at Goldman Sachs, Bannon is also the product of what the Hollywood Reporter calls a “blue-collar, union and Democratic family” who feels “an unreconstructed sense of class awareness, or bitterness – or betrayal”. Bannon is a founding member of the objectionable far-right website Breitbart and an architect of Trump’s unlikely victory, the man at the right hand of power. And yet almost no one in Washington seems to understand how he pulled this off.

Let me propose a partial explanation: that one of the reasons Bannon succeeded is because he has been able to unite the two unconnected halves of American populist outrage – the cultural and the economic.

Start with the latter. In a 2014 interview on the recent financial crisis, Bannon proclaimed: “The way that the people who ran the banks and ran the hedge funds have never really been held accountable for what they did has fuelled much of the anger in the Tea Party movement in the United States.”

Fair enough. I myself am outraged that financiers were not held responsible for the many obvious mistakes and even acts of fraud they appeared to commit.

But when we turn to the specifics of Bannon’s indictment, accountability gets a little blurry. In 2010 Bannon wrote, directed and produced a documentary film about the 2008 financial crisis called Generation Zero – a documentary that explicitly tries to get laissez-faire capitalism off the hook for this colossal capitalist disaster. Remember the roll-back of banking rules under Bill Clinton and George W Bush, or the hapless regulatory agencies filled with former bank officers and lobbyists? Evidently none of that really mattered. As one of the movie’s many experts intones, “Deregulation is not the problem.” The first sentence in the promotional copy on the back of the DVD case is just as blunt: “The current economic crisis is not a failure of capitalism, but a failure of culture.” 

What culture do you think Bannon means? The buccaneering culture of the Wall Street traders? The corrupt culture of the real estate appraisers or the bond rating agencies? The get-rich-quick culture of the mortgage originators?

No, no and no. He means … the counterculture of the 1960s. Bell bottoms. Drum solos. Dope. That’s the thing to blame for the financial crisis and the bailouts. Not the deregulation of derivatives in 2000. It was those kids having fun at Woodstock in 1969.

I am not joking. This really is Bannon’s argument, illustrated again and again in Generation Zero with 40-year-old footage of hippies dancing and fooling around, which is thrown together with stock footage of dollar bills being counted, or funny old cartoons, or vacant houses, or really mean-looking sharks, and then back to those happy hippies again.

One way of assessing this is that Generation Zero is the transition from the culture wars to Trumpism. What Bannon is doing is bringing the strands of outrage together. He’s saying that the culture wars and the financial crisis both share the same villain: the bad values that supposedly infected our society in the 1960s. The same forces that made the movies and pop music so vulgar also crashed the economy and ruined your livelihood. Here is how Roger Kimball of the New Criterion makes the case in Generation Zero:

“A lot of what we have just seen is a kind of a real-world dramatisation of those ideas that became popular in the 60s and 70s, and that had a dry run then. And that, I think, has been a prescription for disaster in some very concrete ways. Take, for example, the financial crisis. What we have just seen in the irresponsible lending by banks and the irresponsible leveraging by many hedge funds is an abdication of responsibility.”

That gives you a taste of how Bannon’s logic unfolds. The decade of the 60s supposedly introduced Americans to the idea of irresponsibility and self-indulgence, and now that we are suffering from an epidemic of irresponsibility and self-indulgence a mere 50 years later, it’s obviously the fault of people from that decade long ago. Blame is thus offloaded from, say, the captured regulators of the Bush administration to the pot-smoking college students of the Vietnam era. Unfortunately, just because something makes moral sense doesn’t mean it’s true. Take the phenomenon of “stated income” or liar’s loans, the fraud that came to symbolise so much of what went wrong in the last decade. One of the movie’s experts, Peter Schweizer (later the author of Clinton Cash), seems to blame this dirty business on … Saul Alinsky, an author and community organiser who died in 1972. Alinsky, he maintains, “applauded activists who used lying effectively. You end up where applicants lie on their applications, mortgage lenders lie when they pass that to the underwriters, and then these mortgages are sold as mortgage-backed securities on Wall Street ... It’s a chain of lie after lie after lie, which eventually undermines even the most effective system.”

Schweizer is right that loans based on lies undermined the system. By 2005 they had become an enormous part of the mortgage market, and the story of how that happened is a really fascinating one. Many books have been written on the subject. But filmmaker Bannon shows no interest in any of that. He makes little effort to find out who was issuing such loans, what kind of houses they were used to purchase (McMansions?), who packaged them up into securities, or why regulators didn’t do anything to stop it. Instead, the movie just implies that the diabolical Alinsky had some vague something to do with it and then walks away. This is not history, it’s naked blame-shifting.

In fairness, Bannon’s movie also makes plenty of valid points and has some fine moments. The director obviously cares about the working-class people who were ruined by the recession. He correctly portrays the Democratic party’s love affair with Wall Street in the 90s (although he downplays the amorous deeds of Republicans). He understands the cronyism between government and high finance, and one of his sources aptly describes the bailed-out system as “socialism for the wealthy but capitalism for everybody else”. Which kind of sounds like something that old 60s radical Bernie Sanders might say.

The putative moral of Generation Zero is that we all need to grow up and take responsibility for our actions; and yet as I watched it I was bowled over by how profoundly irresponsible this documentary is. Other than a single quote from Time magazine circa 1969 and the old TV footage of hippies doing their dance, Bannon doesn’t really try to nail down what “the 60s” stood for or meant. None of the leading participants in that decade’s bacchanals are interviewed. Skipping ahead to the financial crisis, we never learn whether it’s the dishonest home-buyers who were hippies, or the fly-by-night mortgage lenders or the Wall Street traders who were hippies. Which set of hippies are we supposed to crack down on? We never find out.

All we know, really, is that there was once a dreadful thing called the 60s, and then there was a terrible financial crisis four decades later, and because the one came before the other, it somehow caused it. The effort to bridge that evidence gap is almost nonexistent. In a typical moment, Bannon shows us Republican treasury secretary Hank Paulson desperately trying to stop the money haemorrhage in September 2008, and then cuts immediately to footage of the Black Panthers, holding a rally many decades ago. Why? What is the connection? Does Paulson, the devout Christian Scientist, the teetotalling college football star, have some secret affiliation with 60s radicalism?

Worst of all is the former presidential adviser Dick Morris (Bill Clinton’s Steve Bannon, come to think of it), who appears throughout Generation Zero blowing hard about this outrage and that. Here is what Morris tells the camera about the threat of hyperinflation, which loomed so large in the rightwing mind back in 2010: “The real catastrophe is going to come in about a year, a year and a half, or two years, when all of this money that the Fed has been printing comes out of hiding all at once and causes explosive inflation.”

The movie’s most far-fetched proposition is also its most revealing. Generation Zero asserts that history unfolds in a cyclical pattern, endlessly repeating itself. Historical crises (such as the Depression and second world war) are said to give rise to triumphant and ambitious generations (think Levittown circa 1952), who make the mistake of spoiling their children, who then tear society apart through their decadence and narcissism, triggering the cycle over again. Or as the movie’s trailer puts it: “In history, there are four turnings. The crisis. The high. The awakening. The unravelling. History repeats itself. The untold story about the financial meltdown.”

In a word, the theory is ridiculous. It is so vague and squishy and easily contradicted that the viewer wonders why Bannon included it at all.

And then it hits you. He included it because this rainy-day Marxism is pretty much the only way you can do what Bannon set out to do in this movie: get deregulated capitalism out of the shadow for the financial crisis and blame instead the same forces that the family-values crowd has been complaining about for years. Blame the hippies for what arch-deregulator Phil Gramm did 40 years later and call it a high-flown theory of history: the “fourth turning”, or some such nonsense. Of course Bannon’s fans believe it. It makes perfect sense to them.

A funny thing about Bannon’s stinky pudding of exaggerations and hallucinations: in the broadest terms, it’s also true. The counterculture really did have something to do with both our accelerated modern capitalism and the Democratic party’s shift to the right – it’s a subject I have written about from The Conquest of Cool to Listen, Liberal.

The Clinton administration really did strike up an alliance with Wall Street, and this really did represent a new and catastrophic direction for the Democratic party. Trade deals really did help to deindustrialise the US, and that deindustrialisation really was a terrible thing. The bankers really did get bailed out by their friends the politicians in 2008 and 2009, and it really was the greatest outrage of our stupid century. And there really is a lot of narcissism mixed up in modern capitalism. Just look at the man for whom Bannon presently works.

Generation Zero acknowledges these visible facts but connects the dots by means of a vast looping diagram of confusion and blame evasion. It is a fantasy of accountability that actually serves to get the guilty off the hook.

Then again, another way to judge this alternative theory, with its alternative facts, is to set it off against what the Democratic establishment was saying at the time. Which was pretty much nothing.

Centrist Democrats simply don’t talk about their alliance with Wall Street – it’s like the party’s guilty secret, never to be discussed in a straightforward way. Try asking former President Obama or former treasury secretary Geithner or former attorney general Holder why they were so generous with the bankers and why they never held them responsible, and see what kind of answer you get.

And that, in short, is the story of how the right captured the spirit of revolt in this most flagrantly populist period in modern times. Want to take it away from them, liberal? Start by understanding your history.

Julian Assange - The Democrats scapegoat?

G Sampath in The Hindu

To blame Donald Trump’s victory on Julian Assange or, for that matter, on Russia, not only amounts to a refusal by the Democrats to take responsibility for Hillary’s defeat but is also an insult to the U.S. electorate.

One of the most banal tropes of Hollywood blockbuster trailers is about one man pitted against an all-powerful enemy, and ultimately prevailing. The figure of the lone ranger battling on with his back to the wall is a popular figure of American pop culture. How ironic, then, that this very figure seems to have become the bane of the country’s righteous political establishment.

So one man, holed up in the embassy of a tiny Latin American nation, a man who hasn’t seen much sunlight in four years, who is under round-the-clock surveillance, and is subject to arbitrary denial of Internet access, has managed to swing the presidential election of the most powerful country in the world in a direction it ought not to have gone. Or so we are told by influential sections of the Western press.


From revolutionary to villain
The past week or so has seen a spate of articles on the so-called unravelling of Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. They suggest that Hillary Clinton lost the U.S. presidential election because of him. Backing this logic is the allegation that WikiLeaks served as a conduit for disseminating documents obtained by hackers working for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The leaked emails and documents of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) published by WikiLeaks were damaging enough to spark the resignation of top Democratic Party officials, including the DNC chair and the communications director. These leaks, the argument goes, ruined Ms. Clinton’s electoral prospects, thereby paving the way for Donald Trump’s triumph.

The Democrats have been saying since July 2016 that their servers were attacked by Russian hackers. Last week, the U.S. intelligence community (USIC) officially confirmed the allegation. Kremlin has dismissed the USIC’s charges as “unfounded”. While President-elect Donald Trump seemed to acknowledge that Russia may have been involved in the cyber-attacks, he has maintained that it had no impact on the elections. Mr. Assange has denied that he got the leaks from Russia, and claims that his source was not a state party. In such a scenario, what one believes boils down to who one believes, which, in turn, depends on one’s political or ideological allegiances — the quintessential “post-truth” situation.

However, the extraordinary spectacle of erstwhile liberal hero Assange and current liberal nightmare Trump on the same side of the American political divide, with each appearing to endorse the other’s claim that Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks, had one immediate outcome: it prompted the American liberal elite to question Mr. Assange’s motives, and cast him as the villain who collaborated with Mr. Putin to interfere in the U.S. elections and ensure a Trump victory. For them, the USIC’s official statements are proof of Mr. Assange’s culpability, attesting to his metamorphosis from idealistic cyber-revolutionary to opportunistic charlatan.

It must, no doubt, be tempting, and rather convenient, for Democrat supporters to pin the responsibility for Ms. Clinton’s defeat on anyone but the Democrats themselves. But there are several problems with this narrative.

Flaws in the ‘trial’

For starters, both the declassified report of the USIC and the “Russian dossier” leaked allegedly by a private firm make claims of Mr. Putin’s involvement in the DNC hacks without presenting supporting evidence. The excerpts from the latter, published by some media outlets, were unverified quotes by anonymous spies. None of the claims has been independently authenticated by a media outlet. And no reason has been given why reports of Western intelligence agencies should carry more credibility than the denials of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Second, are Mr. Assange’s motives or credibility the issue here? If we assume that they are, then we cannot avoid subjecting his accusers — the American press and intelligence agencies — to the same test.

In the 10 years of its existence, WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million classified documents. Till date, there is not a single instance where its material has been found to be false or inauthentic. On the other hand, sitting in judgment on Mr. Assange today are the same media outlets and the same intelligence community that sold to the public what is arguably the most egregious lie in the history of journalism — about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — which helped justify a needless, destructive war that consumed tens of thousands of civilian lives, dismembered a country, and hatched several terrorist organisations.

Perhaps it is because the authenticity of the DNC leaks is beyond question, and their content raises difficult questions about the Democratic Party establishment — questions easier avoided -- that the response has turned ad hominem, focussing on Mr. Assange instead.

It may or may not be true that Mr. Assange worked with Russia to publish the DNC leaks with the aim of ensuring a Clinton defeat. Let us assume that he did. Does it then constitute an act of villainy or moral trespass?

One could respond, as Mr. Assange has, with two arguments. First, that American interference in the democratic processes of other countries is well documented. Therefore, it is not tenable to hold that other nations do not have the right to pay back in kind.

Second, Mr. Assange believes that it is his moral responsibility to do whatever he can to prevent a Clinton victory. He has said many times that Ms. Clinton is a warmonger, that her victory would lead to greater American military involvement outside its borders, and thereby impose greater misery on the people of the world.
Liberal commentators have dismissed his statements as his “Clinton obsession” and the delusional ranting of a paranoid eccentric. And yet, a recent report in The Guardian cites U.S. Defence Department data to the effect that in 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped 26,171 bombs, or three bombs an hour. In this context, it is hardly immoral for anyone to want to deploy his resources to steer America’s presidential choice toward a candidate who he thinks might be less of a military interventionist. From this viewpoint, which Mr. Assange appears to hold, undermining the Clinton campaign by sharing secret information that is of public interest constitutes a perfectly legitimate enterprise. Interestingly, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times has acknowledged that the internal DNC emails published by WikiLeaks were newsworthy, and it is quite likely that mainstream publications would have published them had they got hold of them first.


It was about new information

What Mr. Assange did — the act for which he is undergoing trial-by-media — was to supply relevant but new information about an electoral candidate so that the American voter could make an informed choice. One could argue that he did what the mainstream media was supposed to do but wasn’t doing enough of.

In the event, it was the American voter who made the final choice, a choice that may or may not have been influenced by the material published by Mr. Assange. At any rate, thanks to the leaks, it was a choice made with more information than less. No one who believes in the accountability of political parties should have a problem with that. Therefore, to blame Mr. Trump’s victory on Mr. Assange or, for that matter, on Russia, not only amounts to a refusal on the part of the Democrats to take responsibility for the defeat, it is also an insult to the American public that has delivered a mandate from the limited choices it was given.

If Mr. Assange must be criticised, it must be for not giving enough bang for the buck, as it were, for his whistle-blowers. He ought to be doing more to ensure that his data troves are systematically analysed and organised in a user-friendly format, with the significant bits sifted out from the routine ones. But the bulk of the data on WikiLeaks’ servers continues to be inaccessible to the public even as they remain in the public domain. Second, he is yet to match the scale of his U.S.-centric leaks with similar disclosures on its geopolitical rivals such as Russia or China.
However, to blame him for Ms. Clinton’s defeat, or to brand him a Trump supporter, is to wilfully disregard his track record. Mr. Assange’s politics has been clear from the day he founded WikiLeaks, and it hasn’t changed since. He believes that the biggest threats to democracy and freedom are the twin phenomena of mass surveillance for the powerless and secrecy for the powerful. He has made a career out of reversing this paradigm: transparency for the powerful and anonymity for the dissenting citizen. His personal motive for publishing the DNC leaks, whatever it may be, is evidently not one that is inconsistent with his stated mission of making secrecy a losing proposition for governing elites.

Why Corbyn could come up Trumps

Mary Dejevsky in The Independent

The season of looking back with big ideas has come early this year, thanks to Brexit, Donald Trump and now the referendum rout in Italy. And two of these big ideas tend to converge. The first is that populism is on the march, thanks to those “left behind” by free-market orthodoxies. The second is a despairing cry of: “Where, oh where, is the political left when we need it?”

In the UK, those “left behind” are now in the sights of all political persuasions, but most conspicuously from the right and from those experts so derided by the Brexiteers. Theresa May has made social justice a theme of her early months as Prime Minister, while the minuses of globalisation have featured even in a speech by the head of the Bank of England, along with arguments that something – though it is unclear precisely what – should be done.

The difficulty is that the mooted solutions are unpalatable, especially to those who have thrived amid free movement and the free market. More redistributive taxes in the Scandinavian mode; swingeing tariffs on imports of cheap foreign goods; walls, literal and metaphorical, to keep cheaper labour out; incentives for employers to keep jobs at home; subsidies for workers who would otherwise be priced out of their jobs by foreign competition – none of these are seen as desirable or realistic. They fly so much in the face of all the prevailing assumptions of a generation.

If the ideas about populism in the UK and its causes differ little from those swirling around elsewhere, we have our own local personification of the political left’s failure in the figure of the Labour leader. Jeremy Corbyn is seen as inept and divisive; a man who became party leader by a fluke and has no prospect whatsoever of becoming prime minister.

Why not? To his detractors, the reasons are so obvious that they hardly need to be stated. He is in every way a throwback to an age that is long gone. He may have taken the advice about suit-wearing offered vicariously by David Cameron’s mother, he may have learned from Michael Foot about how not to turn up on Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph. But he lauded Fidel Castro after his death, and he still harps on about exploitative employers and profiteering bankers.

He has absorbed nothing from the victories of Tony Blair and what makes a modern Labour party electable; nothing about aspiration from erstwhile Mondeo Man, and nothing about remaining “intensely relaxed” with people getting “filthy rich”. No wonder, Corbyn’s opponents would say Blair is contemplating a comeback.

The fact that Labour’s poll ratings are disastrous, that a party candidate lost their deposit at the last (Richmond Park) by-election, and that one-time safe northern constituencies are haemorrhaging votes via Brexit to Ukip are all reasons why Labour under Corbyn is supposed to be a lost cause. And, of course, to return to appearances, Comrade Jeremy just does not look or sound prime-ministerial, and everyone knows he is a hopeless administrator: not leadership material at all.

This is not, however, anything like the whole truth. Labour’s poll ratings are dismal at least in part because it is presenting itself as a divided party. And whose fault is that? There is an ideological rift between the mainly Blairite MPs and the grassroots who – post-Ed Miliband – were given a vote for leader. Under that system, Jeremy Corbyn has won the leadership convincingly, not once, but twice. So who is perpetuating the division – the majority or the minority? In other contexts, those who don’t accept the rules of the democratic game have been called variously “sore losers”, “Remoaners”. Who, I repeat, are the non-democrats here?

Under Corbyn, Labour’s record in by-elections has been creditable – it has not lost a single seat it previously held – despite the fervent hopes of some that a loss would offer a pretext to oust him. And after the Brexit vote, has Labour’s record been any worse than that of the divided Conservatives? On the contrary, in the former Attorney General, Keir Starmer, the non-managerial Corbyn has somehow found a persuasive spokesman. Emily Thornberry is making a decent job of shadow Foreign Secretary. Labour has been scoring points on benefits and the NHS.

If it were united, it could do much, much better. But it would have to be united on Corbynite, old-Labour terms – the very terms, in fact, which explain Labour’s appeal to a whole new constituency: all those young people allegedly turned off by politics, who thronged the rallies of a bearded 67-year-old. At a time when the great and the good lament the political disengagement of the young, Corbyn has struck a chord with a programme of back-to-basics leftism from which he has barely deviated over decades.

After Iraq, the financial crisis, the spinning away of the super-rich, and the legions “left behind” by late 20th-century capitalism, those basics have a new resonance. This is why one of the big questions of the year has been: where is the left when we need it? But it is also why those who embraced Blairite centrism don’t want to know. It is their model of ideological flexibility and economic compromise that has aged badly, not Corbyn’s attachment to the old verities. It is the old left – of workers’ rights, the social-safety net, redistribution, and equality, of opportunity if not outcome – that has to be the source of Labour’s revival.

These are not my politics, and – according to some – Labour is already up to its old “splittist” tricks, with Trotskyite entryism again a threat. But there is a place for an old British left perspective on the world and its coherent critique of capitalism could yet enjoy electoral appeal. Corbyn is building a passable team; he has scored points at Prime Minister’s Questions, and in tapping into the youth vote, he has done what no other party leader has managed to do.

He may not look, sound or behave as a prime minister-in-waiting and the polls have him doomed – but these are not necessarily counter-indicators in this perverse age.

Chavez a true Democrat - termed Dictator by the American Right

If you want to learn about human rights in Venezuela before Hugo Chavez, type “Caracazo” into Google, and do so with a strong stomach. Back in 1989, then-President Carlos Andrés Pérez won an election on a fiery platform of resisting free-market dogma: the IMF was “a neutron bomb that killed people, but left buildings standing,” he proclaimed. But after safely making it to the presidential palace, he dramatically u-turned, unleashing a programme of privatisation and neo-liberal shock therapy. With gas subsidies removed, petrol prices soared, and impoverished Venezuelans took to the streets. Soldiers mowed protesters down with gunfire. Up to 3,000 perished, a horrifying death toll up there with the Tienanmen Square Massacre – in a country with a population 43 times smaller.

It was his abortive coup attempt against Pérez's murderous, rampantly corrupt government in 1992 that launched Chavez to prominence. Though locked away, Chavez became an icon for Venezuela's long-suffering poor. By the time he won a landslide victory in 1998 on a promise to use the country's vast oil wealth to help the poor, Venezuela was a mess. Per capita income had collapsed to where it had been in the early 1960s. One in three Venezuelans lived on less than $2 a day. Oil revenues were squandered.

Over the coming days, you will be repeatedly told that Hugo Chavez was a dictator. A funny sort of dictator: there have been 17 elections and referenda since 1998. Perhaps you think they were rigged. When he won by a huge margin in 2006, former US President Jimmy Carter was among those declaring he had won “fairly and squarely”. At the last election in October 2012, Carter declared that, “of the 92 elections that we've monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” I was there: perhaps you think I was like those hopelessly naïve Western leftists who visited Potemkin villages in Stalinist Russia. I was with a genuinely independent election commission, staffed with both pro-Chavez and anti-Chavez sympathisers, who had previously been invited by the opposition to run their own internal elections. We met with senior opposition figures who railed against Chavez, but acknowledged that they lived in a democracy. When they lost the election, they accepted it.

Social justice

Indeed, Chavez himself has had to accept defeat before: back in 2007, he lost a referendum campaign, and did not quibble with the results. Until he came to power, millions of poor Venezuelans were not even registered to vote: but dramatic registration drives have nearly doubled the electorate. There are 6,000 more polling stations than there were in the pre-Chavez era.

On the other hand, the democratic credentials of many of his opponents can certainly be questioned. In 2002, a Pinochet-style coup was launched against Chavez, and was only reversed by a popular uprising. Much of the privately owned media openly incited and supported the coup: imagine Cameron was kicked out of No 10 by British generals, with the support and incitement of rolling 24-hour news stations. But Venezuela's media is dominated by private broadcasters, some of whom make Fox News look like cuddly lefties. State television could rightly be accused of bias towards the government, which is perhaps why it has a measly 5.4 per cent audience share. Of seven major national newspapers, five support the opposition, and only one is sympathetic to the government.

The truth is that Chavez won democratic election after democratic election, despite the often vicious hostility of the media, because his policies transformed the lives of millions of previously ignored Venezuelans. Poverty has fallen from nearly half to 27.8 per cent, while absolute poverty has been more than halved. Six million children receive free meals a day; near-universal free health care has been established; and education spending has doubled as a proportion of GDP. A housing programme launched in 2011 built over 350,000 homes, bringing hundreds of thousands of families out of sub-standard housing in thebarrios. Some of his smug foreign critics suggest Chavez effectively bought the votes of the poor – as though winning elections by delivering social justice is somehow bribery.

Alliances

That does not mean Chavez is beyond criticism. Venezuela was already a country with rampant crime when he came to power, but the situation has deteriorated since. Around 20,000 Venezuelans died at the hands of violent crime in 2011: an unacceptable death toll. As well as drugs, near-universal gun ownership and the destabilising impact of neighbouring Colombia, a weak (and often corrupt) police force is to blame. Although the government is beginning to roll out a national police force, endemic crime is a genuine crisis. When I spoke to Venezuelans in Caracas, the sometimes frightening lack of law-and-order was brought up by pro-Chavistas and opponents alike.

And then there is the matter of some of Chavez's unpleasant foreign associations. Although his closest allies were his fellow democratically elected left-of-centre governments in Latin America – nearly all of whom passionately defended Chavez from foreign criticism – he also supported brutal dictators in Iran, Libya and Syria. It has certainly sullied his reputation. Of course, we in the West can hardly single out Chavez for unsavoury alliances. We support and arm dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia; Britain's former Prime Minister Tony Blair is paid $13 million a year to work for Kazakhstan's dictatorship. But our own hypocrisy does not absolve Chavez of criticism.

The so-called Bolivarian Revolution was overly dependent on Chavez's own reputation, and inevitably his death raises questions about its future direction. But have no doubt: Chavez was a democratically elected champion of the poor. His policies lifted millions out of abject poverty and misery. He represented a break from years of corrupt regimes with often dire human rights records. His achievements were won in the face of an attempted military coup, an aggressively hostile media, and bitter foreign critics. He demonstrated that it is possible to resist the neo-liberal dogma that holds sway over much of humanity. He will be mourned by millions of Venezuelans – and understandably so.