Jim, don't tell me that you didn't know that Evo ain't anti-capitalist till _now_. Neither is Chavez, for that matter, when it comes to investment. That's why I bundled both of them with Putin and Ahmadinejad and called them "resource populists," because that's what their economic policy makes them.
And the strategy of populist reform that they are all pursuing -- increasing transparency, fighting corruption, increasing government oversight, renegotiating with foreign companies to acquire more rents, favoring domestic production only where it makes sense to do so -- is neither an anti-capitalist strategy nor a classic form of populism that depends on the cultivation of clients but a strategy that employs one part of neoliberal policy package against another part of neoliberal policy package but still overall inside neoliberal capitalism as a stage of the capitalist mode of production.
I'd venture to say that is the correct economic strategy for them _at this point in history_ -- it will have to change when circumstances change, e.g., the end of the current oil boom, the end of cheap credit, etc.
What makes Chavez a socialist is not his economic policy but his commitment to participant democracy, in which everyone is a protagonist. That's not the reality in Venezuela yet, but that's the vision that guides his government. That's what the other resource populists ought to emulate, too. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>