THE president of Venezuela, Hugo Rafael Chavez, passed away on Tuesday after a protracted battle with cancer. Chavez had only recently returned to what he liked to call the ‘great fatherland’ after a fourth operation in Cuba as part of his battle against the disease.

His death is likely to be greeted with jubilation in many Western capitals, alongside the propertied elite of his own country, who have been trying for more than a decade to throttle the “Bolivarian Revolution” which Chavez initiated when he first won the presidency in 1998.

Chavez followed in the footsteps of many left-wing popular leaders of non-Western countries that have bedevilled the Empire since the end of the Second World War. But Chavez also deserves recognition in his own right, because the political movement that he led — the ultimate fate of which will be determined by posterity — reignited global interest in the socialist project following the spectacular collapse of the Soviet bloc.

This was no small matter. The world in 2013 does not by any means feature a significant radical left bloc, but there are nevertheless a handful of anti-capitalist bastions spread out across the globe. This was not the case 20 years ago following the end of the Cold War. At that juncture the “end of history” thesis made famous by Francis Fukuyama was all the vogue, liberal democracy and capitalism widely considered inevitable culminations of the Enlightenment narrative.

Chavez took power only seven years after the demise of the USSR and the socialist states of Eastern Europe. Within a year of his accession to the presidency, the so-called anti-globalisation movement came of age during the World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle. Over the next few years, this movement ebbed and flowed, peaking when millions took to the streets against the imminent invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

There may not be a lot to cheer about a decade on from those heady scenes, but there is little question that the neo-liberal bubble has definitively burst as the US and now Europe struggle to emerge from the wreckage of the global financial crisis.

To assert that Chavez was the moving force behind the substantive shifts in global public opinion vis-à-vis the neo-liberal growth model and imperialist wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries would surely be overstating the case.

Yet it would also be unfair to not accord him his due role in reminding us all that there is life yet in the socialist project, and that capitalism is not the pinnacle of humanity’s struggle for collective betterment.

If nothing else, Chavez was a breath of fresh air in an era that has been defined by the refrain “there is no alternative”. Mainstream commentators referred to it as a rant at the time, but Chavez’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2006 against the cowboy imperialism of George W. Bush was truly a memorable one.

Ever one for political theatre, Chavez brazenly labelled Bush “the devil” and voiced the sentiments of millions of anti-imperialists otherwise rendered non-existent by the corporate media.

Beyond sloganeering, Chavez was truly reviled by Western governments because he practised what he preached.

As leader of the world’s fourth-largest oil-exporting country, Chavez spearheaded an epic battle against the Venezuelan oligarchy to redirect oil revenues so as to provide free education, healthcare, housing, drinking water and arable land to the country’s poor, and build a regional bloc with other left-of-centre governments in Latin America following decades of subjugation to Washington.

Notwithstanding the predictable rhetoric of the corporate media, Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution was first and foremost about organising Venezuela’s working people so that they themselves took on the country’s dominant forces, including the state bureaucracy.

Chavez’s avowed mentor Fidel Castro has long been accused of being a ruthless dictator, but both in Cuba and now Venezuela, there is more democracy than in the so-called “free world” where a narrow clique of media moguls, financial barons and war-making industries rules the roost.

Indeed, it was the people of Venezuela who thwarted a coup attempt against Chavez in April 2002, believed by the Venezuelan government to have been backed by the CIA. In a quite remarkable show of popular power, ordinary Venezuelans converged in the millions on the capital Caracas the day after Chavez was whisked away by army men, forcing the coup-makers to back down and return Chavez to the presidency.

It can be argued that the dramatic turn of events that day are at least partly explained by Chavez’s own military background. Indeed, he first attempted to come to power in an abortive coup in 1992 led by mid-ranking officers. He retained a close following within military circles even after his winning the presidency as a civilian.

Given that the Venezuelan military has a history of pandering to Uncle Sam — much like our holy guardians — it will now become fully clear whether or not Chavez was able to oversee a change in the institution’s posture, or if instead counter-revolutionary forces are again able to rely on military backing to retake power.

Yet ultimately Venezuela’s future will be decided by its people, by the millions of “Chavistas” — defenders of the revolution — who are naturally devastated by the loss of their leader but who will not keel over and allow the gains of the past 14 years to be reversed.

It is impossible of course to predict exactly what will happen in Venezuela following Chavez’s death, especially given the likelihood of intensified attempts by Washington to usher in a “friendly” government.

It is nevertheless true that the experiment with “21st-century socialism” in Venezuela will not prove as brittle as its detractors have insisted.

Amongst the bigger question marks that hang over the socialist projects of the 20th century is the fact that working people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe appeared to willingly abandon the revolutionary project. The commitment to the cause was eventually found wanting, which suggests that the cause itself was beset by contradictions.

The Venezuela that Hugo Chavez has attempted to build over the past 14 years is far from a utopia. But socialism has never been about a utopia; it is about uncovering the best that humanity has to offer. Chavez gave us hope that there is indeed hope for humanity yet. That achievement in itself will ensure that his legacy lives on.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.