1. Methodology¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter opens by situating humanity at a crossroads in the early twenty-first century: scientific and industrial progress promises prosperity, yet profit-driven ecological destruction, mass poverty, and rising barbarism threaten the planet’s future. The fall of the Soviet Union triggered an ideological offensive against socialism, with capitalists proclaiming the end of history and the impossibility of crisis. These illusions were quickly shattered; a new period of mass awakening and questioning of capitalism is underway, exemplified by the Venezuelan Revolution and Hugo Chávez’s turn toward socialism. This has sparked serious debate among the masses, not merely within academic circles.
The author then launches a sustained polemic against Heinz Dieterich, a German professor who claims to have invented “Socialism of the 21st Century” and to speak for Chávez. Dieterich is presented as a lineal descendant of Eugen Dühring and the Katheder Sozialisten — petty-bourgeois academics who sought to water down revolutionary Marxism. His ideas are dismissed as a rehash of utopian reformism, stripped of class struggle and the revolutionary role of the working class. Dieterich’s method is criticised as rationalist, obscurantist, and full of platitudes; his objective of “peaceful social coexistence” is no different from bourgeois philanthropy. The chapter argues that such revisionism, waged under a false left banner, is more dangerous than open bourgeois attacks because it confuses the youth and blocks access to Marxism.
The critique deepens by contrasting the clarity of Marx and Engels, who wrote for workers in simple language, with Dieterich’s obscurity, which conceals an absence of real content. Dieterich arbitrarily reduces human evolution to “three complex strategic dimensions” and obsessively uses initials (NHP, CDS, HCDS) to give unintelligible ideas a false appearance of scientific rigour. He positions himself as the official interpreter of Chávez’s thoughts, but his ambiguous phrases, like “antisystemic and anticapitalist alternative,” are meaningless: one system can only replace another. His real argument is that socialist revolution is impossible in the twenty-first century, so capitalism must be accepted. Dieterich replaces proletarian class struggle with existentialist anxiety and the Hegelian “alienated Subject,” avoiding any revolutionary class content. He refers to “the majorities” without definition, defying logic. His analogy of capitalism and socialism as caterpillar and butterfly is misleading eclecticism, mixing Marx, Keynes, and postmodernism. Crucially, his model does not propose breaking the power of capitalists: it explicitly rejects generalised nationalisation of private property, reducing socialism to a problem of “informatic complexity.”
Dieterich proposes establishing socialist accounting (value) alongside capitalist accounting (price) to create a parallel economic circuit that would gradually displace the capitalist market. The text attacks this as reformist gradualism, arguing it avoids the central problem of state power. It points out that Chávez himself has identified a counter-revolutionary bureaucracy within the state, which Dieterich ignores. The author insists that a decisive break with capitalism — expropriation of landlords, bankers, and capitalists — is necessary before any step towards socialism can be taken, whereas Dieterich opposes nationalisation and favours a mixed economy. This is dismissed as warmed-up reformism, not Marxism. The text traces Dieterich’s ideas to the Porto Alegre World Social Forum, which it characterises as a blind alley that posed no challenge to capitalism, and to obscure “schools” around figures like Arno Peters. It concludes that Dieterich is dragging the Bolivarian Revolution away from socialist revolution towards bourgeois reformist politics.
The chapter then turns to the Peters World Map, presented as the culmination of Arno Peters’ work, supposedly establishing the principle of Cartographical Equality by granting all landmasses equal space on the printed page. However, Peters’ cartographic achievements have been exaggerated. He claimed to have discovered something new but did not; he claimed the projection did not distort area, but it does. Since Ptolemy, mapmakers have known no perfect flat projection exists: accurate shapes require distorted sizes, and vice versa. Only a globe shows accurate geographical relationships. The Peters map merely presents distortions different from those to which viewers are accustomed. Since its publication in 1974, few atlases have adopted his model. Meanwhile, real inequality between