The Experiment Once Cheered and Now Passed Over in Silence – Socialism of the 21st Century

I. The Cheering

On 30 January 2005, at the close of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Hugo Chávez told tens of thousands that he had not the slightest doubt that the way forward was socialism. In the following years he gave this way a name: socialism of the 21st century. For many on the European left this was a deliverance. After the end of the Soviet Union there was once again a country one could point to, with a charismatic president, with oil, and with elections he won.

The cheering was loud. Sahra Wagenknecht, then in the PDS, called Venezuela as early as 2004 the first country since the end of the Cold War to have broken out of the logic of neoliberal capitalism. When Chávez died in March 2013, the chairs of Die Linke, Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger, together with Gregor Gysi, honoured him as an undaunted defender of a new, just world and as an example for the integration of Latin America.

Today hardly anyone speaks of it. This text asks who devised the experiment, what of it was actually built, who paid the bill, and why those who once cheered are silent today.

II. Two Men from Around Bremen

The term comes from a German. Heinz Dieterich was born in 1943 in Rotenburg an der Wümme, studied in Frankfurt and Bremen and has taught sociology since 1977 at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. He spoke of “socialism of the 21st century” from the mid-1990s; his book on it appeared in Spanish in 2002 and in German in 2006. In December 1999, when Chávez had just become president, the two met. Long conversations followed, and Dieterich was soon regarded as an adviser; some called him the president’s ideologue.

The economic core of his teaching comes from a second German: Arno Peters, born in Berlin in 1916, died in Bremen in 2002. Peters became world-famous for his world map of 1973. It shows countries at their true size and distorts their shapes to do so. Africa is as large on it as it really is, and looks stretched.

Less well known is Peters’s second idea, which he set out in 2000 in conversations with the computer pioneer Konrad Zuse: a “computer socialism”. The value of every good is to be calculated by the working time contained in it, and everyone is to receive the undiminished yield of his labour. Planning instead of market, calculation instead of profit and interest. Dieterich adopted this equivalence economy as the heart of his socialism of the 21st century.

One can argue about this idea, and there are serious economists who consider it computable. But it was an idea with a rule of calculation. It could have been tested.

III. The Other Whisperer

Dieterich was not the first to advise Chávez. Before him came Norberto Ceresole, an Argentine sociologist born in 1943, who found his way to Chávez through the right-wing nationalist military circles of the Argentine “Carapintadas”. In 1994 and 1995 he advised the former coup leader; in June 1995 he was arrested and expelled under President Caldera.

He described his model in 1999 in a book entitled “Caudillo, Ejército, Pueblo” – leader, army, people. Nothing was to stand in between: no parties, no independent institutions. The leader speaks directly to the people, and the army is his arm. Ceresole was accused of neo-fascism, antisemitism and Holocaust denial. At the end of 1999 he had to leave Venezuela again, at the urging of Chávez’s circle. He died in Buenos Aires in 2003.

As with Putin and Ivan Ilyin, whom we described in “The Bones from Zollikon”, the whisperer’s influence continued after he was gone. Every Sunday Chávez spoke for hours on television directly to his people, and officers took over ministries, governorships and the management of state companies. Dieterich supplied the name. Ceresole supplied the form.

IV. What Was Actually Built

What was built was not Peters’s calculation but an oil rent with a caudillo. Working time as the measure of prices was never introduced in Venezuela. The “Law on Fair Prices” of 2014 capped profit margins at thirty per cent. That is a price control of the kind war economies have had everywhere, not an equivalence economy. Dieterich himself wrote as early as 2008 that the government had not created a single institution qualitatively different from market economies.

In fairness, one must say what succeeded in the good years. According to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, the share of the poor fell from 49 per cent in 1999 to 28 per cent in 2010. The “Misiones” brought doctors into the slums and reading courses into villages that had never had them. That was real, and many Venezuelans remember it.

But it was paid for with oil, not with a new economic model. Almost all export revenue came from oil. When the price was high, there was enough for everything. A household living on a single lottery win can be generous until the money runs out. Then it becomes clear whether it has built anything. Venezuela had built nothing that could stand without oil, and had not even maintained oil production itself.

V. The Break

Dieterich noticed this early. After the lost referendum on Chávez’s constitutional reform in December 2007 he wrote that the revolution was “on the way to suicide”. In 2009 he criticised the excessive concentration of the whole system on the president. In August 2011 he made the break public.

Read unsparingly, Dieterich was also wrong. In October 2013 he predicted that Maduro would not last beyond March or April 2014. Maduro lasted twelve more years. And in 2019 Dieterich claimed that “his” model had worked until 2010, carried by an oil price of 120 dollars. In doing so he unintentionally says the same as we do: what worked was the oil.

Dieterich is thus a kind of thinker this series has not yet had. He gave a president the word, watched the president use the word and build something else, and broke with him. That does him more credit than most thinkers in this series. But the word was out in the world, and it no longer belonged to him.

VI. The Bill

After Chávez’s death in 2013 and the fall of the oil price in 2014 the country collapsed. By common estimates economic output shrank by three quarters by 2020. According to the country’s own central bank, inflation reached 130,000 per cent in 2018. At such rates money loses its value faster than it can be spent. Whoever received his wages at the end of the month ran to the shop before the prices caught up with him. Oil production, on which everything rested, fell in 2020 to about 570,000 barrels a day, the lowest level since the 1940s.

Some seven to eight million people left the country; 6.9 million of them live today in other countries of Latin America. That is about one Venezuelan in four. Whoever left often started at the very bottom, diploma or not. Whoever stayed experienced empty shelves, power cuts and a government that had protests crushed. The International Criminal Court has been investigating crimes against humanity since 2021. At the end of September 2026 the human rights organisation Foro Penal still counted 324 political prisoners.

VII. The End Without Farewell

In the night before 3 January 2026, American special forces took Nicolás Maduro and his wife out of Caracas and flew them to New York. There they are in pre-trial detention; the trial for narco-terrorism is due to begin in June 2027. His deputy Delcy Rodríguez has governed since, recognised by Washington as head of state.

On 29 January Venezuela passed a law giving private companies control over the production and sale of oil. On 23 September Rodríguez promised elections at the United Nations, without a date, and thanked Donald Trump. Socialism of the 21st century thus ends with privatised oil under American supervision and an heir of the system who thanks the American president. No farewell was celebrated. There was none.

VIII. The Silence

And the German left? On the day of the American operation its chairman Jan van Aken spoke of “brutal state terrorism”, the parliamentary group leader Sören Pellmann of a clear breach of international law and of imperial power politics. Sahra Wagenknecht, now in the BSW, called it a flagrant breach of all the rules of international law.

This criticism is justified. A state that has the president of another state abducted breaks international law, and one must be allowed to say so, whatever one thinks of the abducted man. But something is missing from the statements. Not a word about what Maduro made of the country. Not a word about the eight million who left. Not a word about the fact that the experiment had once been celebrated as a breakout from capitalism.

This is the pattern we described in “Why I Did Not Become a Leftist”. A doctrine that does not examine its failure but keeps silent about it cannot learn. In science a failed experiment is a result that is published so that others do not repeat it. In politics it is struck from memory, and the next one begins with the same cheering.

IX. Who Pays the Bill

Venezuela is the fourth laboratory after the Church, East Germany and the Watchtower, and it follows a rule older than any of these doctrines. For thousands of years ordinary working people have paid all the bills, often enough with their lives. The theorists almost never pay.

The few exceptions confirm the rule in a bitter way. Leon Trotsky was killed with an ice axe in Mexico in 1940 on Stalin’s orders. Nikolai Bukharin, whom Lenin called the favourite of the party, was shot in 1938 after a show trial. When theorists pay, it is mostly to their own revolution, which devours its children. Rosa Luxemburg, murdered by Freikorps soldiers in 1919, is the rare exception killed by the other side.

In Venezuela the rule holds without exception. Ceresole died in Buenos Aires in 2003, Peters in Bremen in 2002. Dieterich teaches and writes. Chávez died in office in 2013, celebrated. Maduro sits in New York, with lawyers and a trial date. Those who paid were the nurse who today cleans in a foreign country, the engineer selling on the street, and the old who stayed because they could no longer leave.

X. How This Text Could Be Refuted

The strongest objection comes from Dieterich himself: his model was never tried. He is right. Venezuela does not refute the idea of an economy that calculates by working time, because that idea was never built there. Whoever turns Venezuela’s failure against Peters and Dieterich makes the same mistake as those who once took the oil for socialism.

Our thesis is a different one: that the experiment was cheered without being tested and is passed over in silence without being evaluated. It would be refuted if the parties and foundations that cheered at the time now presented an honest balance: what succeeded, what failed, what they themselves misjudged. There were isolated critical voices, for instance a 2010 seminar of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation announcing a “critical assessment”. A balance of the cheering after the collapse we do not know of. If there is one, we will gladly name it.

XI. An Experiment Nobody Talks About

An experiment whose result is kept quiet is not finished. It will be repeated, in another place, under another name, and with other people who pay the bill.

Socialism of the 21st century did not fail because of its enemies but because of reality. It is its friends who keep silent about it.