I wrote a little obituary of Hugo Chávez for VICE. I love writing for the venue, but it’s obviously geared for a mass audience. My more considered thoughts on the new wave of Latin American populism have been published in New Politics, In These Times, and elsewhere. In those essays I try to assign a useful, non-pejorative, descriptive meaning to word “populist” — putting Chávez in that tradition, but also explaining why the Bolivarian Revolution is more interesting and promising than old-school Peronism.

But I also think it’s important for the Left to differentiate, at a normative level, between the goals and composition of populist movements and those traditionally associated with the socialist left. That may seem like sectarian nitpicking, but if we aspire to something more radical than what the likes of Chávez can offer, keeping an alternative vision alive is important.

There was something more than state paternalism, or what old lefties would call “Bonapartism,” going on in Venezuela. From above, Chávez sparked class struggle from below. But where can Chavismo go from here?