In Venezuela, the ruling Chavistas are starting to implode as an organization.

The reason for this is Chavez has gotten rid of all institutions of government and left only the political-party and campaign apparatus as its substitute. Imagine Karl Rove running the Supreme Court, the Congress, the White House, the election apparatuses, the district attorneys, all by his lonesome. You can’t run a government like that. That’s contributed to an idea that’s been around for about two years, somethng called ‘Chavismo without Chavez,’ a face-saving way to say one doesn’t support dictatorship, but loves all the byproducts of dictatorship, like worker collectives. It tries to make the claim that such worker collectives could exist without a dictator to coerce them, as if anyone out there would willingly be a slave.

Chavismo is not about ideas but about Chavez’s personal consolidation of power. In Chavismo, all power flows from the individual people toward the center. That disempowers the people. If you are poor, you depend on Chavez for your welfare goodies, that tends to inform whether you dare challenge him. Chavez knows this. Everything is about disempowerment. The poor are forced into worker collectives and land-confiscating collectives whether they like it or not. The block committees in the shantytowns keep absolute order about what you do and don’t do. Chavez’s economic warfare also is disempowering – the middle class moves into the ranks of the lower middle class, the lower middle class moves downward into the welfare class. Third, Chavista bureaucrats, who used to be unafraid to speak for the government, are all deathly afraid of talking to independent journalists. They used to come to the phone all the time; now they don’t dare, for fear of offending the Ultimate Power, Hugo Chavez by what they try to say.

All of this creates an amazing maelstrom of disorder. And for the those who supported Chavez, there is the sudden deja vu realization that one has once again bet on the wrong horse. For the left, it happened with Stalin (Stalinism without Stalin was an idea that was once in vogue, too, so even this Chavismo without Chavez is not original), it happened with Mao, it happened with Ho Chi Minh, it happened with Fidel Castro, it happened with Daniel Ortega. In each case, the broad left realizes it has made a mistake and is dealing with a full blown dictatorship.

What is Chavismo without Chavez? It’s the left’s effort to extricate themselves from backing yet another dictator, while not having to get rid of the root cause of the dictatorship, which is the cherished notion that somehow, somewhere, some way, Marxism will eventually work on this earth. But Chavismo is about power, not Marxism. Marx is only a vehicle to justify consolidation of power. All power abhors a vacuum. There would be no Chavismo without Chavez.

Daniel has some thoughts about this here.

Alek has translated an articulate essay here.