IN WHAT sense political developments in Venezuela since 1998 can properly be designated ‘Bolivarian’, I remain unsure even after completing the book we are about to discuss. But it is even harder to see how they can be described as a ‘revolution’, as enthusiasts for that country’s president insist that they must.

Don’t get me wrong here; in a continent that has served as a laboratory for a particularly savage brand of neoliberalism for three decades now, Hugo Chavez’s brand of petrodollar-funded top down social democracy is an important break with the Washington consensus, and rightly enjoys the sympathy of much of the international left.

Subsidised food and free healthcare for the 80% of the population that lives in poverty – in what is after all the Saudi Arabia of the western hemisphere – are quite literally matters of life and death. Improvements in the status of indigenous peoples, mestizos and blacks are important advances.

But strip away the radical rhetoric in which the reforms are dressed up, and it is clear that their has been no change in the class nature of the Venezuelan state. The capitalist class remains the ruling class, even as the government implements policies that are against their immediate interests. Chavez no more merits the demonisation of his opponents than he does the adulation of his cheerleaders. Our sympathy, then, should not be unquestioning.

Author Richard Gott is a British journalist who has specialised in coverage of Latin America since the 1960s, and who by his own admission ‘lunched with the Russians during the cold war’. He resigned from the Guardian in 1994, after it was established that took three freebies on the KGB, although he strongly rejects any suggestion that this somehow made him ‘an agent of influence’.

As befits books written by hacks rather than academics, ‘Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution’ is actually readable. Gott’s narrative clearly benefits from his access to all key players in the story he wishes to tell.

Moreover, his comprehensive grasp of the history of the region is displayed to full advantage. Those who start with little or no prior knowledge of the process by which Spain’s former colonies became independent, or of the left-nationalist tradition in the armed forces of some South American countries, will find the background context amply supplied.

Yet the assessments on offer are uniformly positive. As Gott himself notes of a visit to the Comandante in the wake of the April 2002 coup: ‘I am a privileged visitor: we have met several times, and he greets me as an old acquaintance, with a friendly hug.’ Critical distance from the subject is clearly not among the many admirable aspects of this work.

Even given the author’s determination not to bury Chavez but to praise him, it would have been advisable to spend more time rebutting the accusations frequently leveled against his hero by the right. On my own reading of the situation, the measures taken by the Venezuelan government against hostile broadcasting outlets and yellow trade unions that lined up with reactionary forces in 2002 were if anything mild, especially compared to the treatment that such misdemeanors would have attracted elsewhere in the world.

But precisely because these matters – along with Chavez’s aborted coup attempt in 1992 – are so often adduced as evidence of nascent authoritarianism, Gott should have addressed them more fully than perhaps he has done.

In sum, Venezuela has lived in a condition of class polarisation ever since the Caracazo uprising of the inhabitants of the shanty towns of Caracas in 1989, and the tension could yet be resolved either way. Gott’s book offers a briefing on a situation on which all leftists will want to keep tabs. By all means read it, but do so in full awareness of its limitations.