The revolutionary baton passed back to Latin America quite unexpectedly right at the end of the twentieth century, posing difficult questions about populism and state power for all of us looking for alternatives now, and especially so in forms of ‘socialism’ that are in the gift of charismatic leaders who operate in such a way as to make their own version of their so-called socialism operate completely independently of the economy, which remains in the hands of the big capitalists.

The full chapter appears in Ian Parker’s Socialisms: Revolutions Betrayed, Mislaid and Unmade, published by Resistance Books and the IIRE (2020).

This was one of the Socialisms series of FIIMG articles