If there is one sweeping comment that can be made about the left in Latin America, it’s that it is struggling to imagine the accumulation of forces outside of electoral tactics.

Those with the historical perspective to emphasise this are still by and large isolated inside the larger left tendencies or organised in numerous competing small groups whose isolation from the mass and historical antecedents incline them to various ultra-left perspectives.

The Venezuelan revolution has had a contradictory impact in this respect. On one hand, it has inspired confidence and combativeness among significant battalions of the working classes across the continent.

On the other hand, the Venezuelan example has not really helped differentiate the left itself. It has not played the same sort of role that the Cuban Revolution did in helping to congeal a non-Stalinist revolutionary left with mass influence.

Instead, the Venezuelan example has tended to reinforce the electoralist left. This in large part reflects an objective reality of the political conjuncture and possibilities. The crisis of neoliberalism in Latin America – including the delegitimation of the political model and crisis of traditional bourgeois political forces and institutions – created possibilities for working class resurgence. But the subjective conditions for revolutionary upheavals did not exist in most cases.

Venezuela’s exceptionalism in this regard was based on a unique and “non-exportable” set of circumstances: the development of a revolutionary leadership of sorts, linked to an anti-capitalist movement among junior officers and soldiers.

When Evo Morales’s Movement for Socialism triumphed electorally in Bolivia, it did so after a decade of intense mass struggle and at the height of the Venezuelan revolution’s resonance. Since then, the Workers Party administrations in Brazil and the Broad Front in Uruguay have helped shift the discourse of the broad left to the right. The experience of “centre right” and “centre left” governments in Argentina and Chile also contributed to this.

In the context of the ideological, and we could say structural, crisis of the left since the late 1980s, this was all somewhat to be expected.

Here in Chile, the continuing significance of non-Communist/Socialist Party currents in the working class and student movements has created possibilities for building a new revolutionary political instrument or party. While this depends on many factors, and while the challenges of orienting tactically to parliamentary politics remain, the next few years could prove very interesting.