It’s 25 years this week since Hugo Chávez – an inspiration for leftwingers like Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn – was elected president of Venezuela. Chávez may not be the person primarily responsible for his country’s descent into dictatorship, anarchy and humanitarian disaster (that would be his hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro) but the foundation was laid by his unrestrained populism.

That populism had two pillars: socialism and nationalism. Chávez claimed inspiration from Karl Marx and, particularly, from the Venezuelan independence hero Simón Bolívar. During his 14 years in power, Chávez tried to combine these two influences to create a socially equal and sovereign Venezuela. He called his project ‘Bolivarian Socialism’. The problem? Marx absolutely hated Bolívar.

Marx may not have been entirely fair, but his view of Bolívar was unequivocal

Marx wrote one essay about Bolívar, published in 1858 in the third volume of the New American Cyclopaedia. In it, Marx presents the Liberator not as a proto-socialist but as a mediocre general, a despot, and a racist.

Bolívar’s military prowess was central to his importance to Chávez – a former army officer who constantly tried to present himself as Bolívar reincarnate. As president, Chávez gave his international allies replicas of Bolívar’s sword. After his failed coup in 1992, he announced: ‘The authentic leader of this rebellion is General Simon Bolívar.’

Marx, however, disdained Bolívar’s generalship. He argued that if Bolívar had moved decisively in Venezuela in late 1819 ‘the Spaniards would have been crushed…but he preferred protracting the war for five years longer’. Of his campaign in 1820, Marx wrote that ‘notwithstanding his vastly superior forces, Bolívar contrived to accomplish nothing’. Of the liberation of modern-day Ecuador and southwest Colombia, he stated: ‘This campaign was nominally led by Bolívar and General Sucre, but the few successes of the corps were entirely owed to British officers such as Colonel Sands.’

Marx then harangued Bolívar for his dictatorial proclivities. Describing the post-independence period, Marx wrote: ‘Bolívar gave full scope to his propensities for arbitrary power…Bolívar wanted a pretext for overthrowing the constitution and reassuming the dictatorship…What he really aimed at was the erection of the whole of South America into one federative republic, with himself as its dictator.’ In Bolivarian Socialism, this is heresy.

Marx also attacked Bolívar’s moral courage, and accuses him of racism. Despite sparing seditious white officers, he wrote that Bolívar ‘put to death General Padilla, whose guilt was not proved at all, but who, as a man of colour, was not able to resist’.

Friedrich Engels, Marx’s longtime collaborator, wondered whether his friend had gone too far. Marx defended himself in a letter in which he described Bolívar as ‘the dastardly, most miserable and meanest of blackguards’.

It is extraordinary that Chávez’s devotees in the international left (many of whom must have read Marx) have overlooked the Father of Communism’s view of Bolívar. Marx may not have been entirely fair, but his view was unequivocal. He had utter ad hominem disdain for the man Chávez lionised.

Chávez’s adulation of Bolívar was excessive. He renamed his country the ‘Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela’. He built a £90 million mausoleum to hold Bolívar’s remains. He even left a chair empty at cabinet meetings so that Bolívar’s spirit could guide the socialist revolution.

A more articulate, less populist leftism would promote scepticism of ‘great men’. It is a conservative view, after all, that individuals make history. For Marx, social forces – not individuals like Bolívar – create change.

But Chávez had little interest in what Marx thought of Bolívar or what Bolívar would have thought of Marx. The Liberator’s politics could hardly be called socialist. In Colombia – Bolívar’s base in the years after independence – his followers founded the Conservative party.

Chávez’s ‘Bolivarian Socialism’ was a muddling attempt at a synthesis. Above all, Bolívar and socialism were totems to promote his populist agenda.