Germany’s socialist left is currently embroiled in a row over the correct stance on Venezuela. The conflict came to the fore at the February conference of Die Linke, the country’s main socialist party, when a group of Nicolás Maduro fans stormed the stage, chanting slogans and waving banners with pro-Venezuela messages.

Nicolás Maduro is the successor to Hugo Chávez, and has served as Venezuelan President since 2013. The legitimacy of his presidency has been in free fall in recent years, and many now call him a dictator. As Maduro’s popularity has waned, his tactics have become increasingly brutal. In 2018, a panel of legal experts convened by the Organization of American States recommended that the regime be referred to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Many members of the Die Linke party establishment, however, still side with Maduro, whom they see as a comrade under siege. Others, especially in the party’s youth organisation, take the opposite view—which is why the February conference was contentious. One young member describes the party’s in-house Chavistas as “die-hard reactionaries, who have an antiquated understanding of socialism.”

This has been widely portrayed in the German media as a struggle between reformists and fundamentalists, with the battle lines running loosely along generational lines. In this version of events, the older crop of socialists tend to have a more rigid, dogmatic understanding of socialism, while the newer generation is more open-minded in its approach.

This coincides with the portrayal, and the self-perception, of “millennial socialist” movements across the Western world. A lot has been written recently about the resurgence of socialism among young voters. Socialist candidates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the United States, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France have seen huge surges in popularity. And while the candidates themselves span the age spectrum, they all find their most enthusiastic support among young people.

This socialist revival is, of course, neither a homogenous movement, nor a fully worked-out policy program. But if there is a common thread, it is the belief that emerging forms of socialism could be completely different from anything that has flown under that ideological banner in the past. For these new socialists, socialism doesn’t necessarily mean a society run by large, hierarchical government bureaucracies. Nor does it mean a command-and-control economy, directed by a distant, technocratic elite. It means experimenting with new forms of social ownership and democratic decision-making, devolving power to the grassroots, and empowering ordinary working people.

Since earlier socialist projects didn’t develop in this way, modern socialists tend not to identify with them; and sometimes even reject the idea that these precursors were even “socialist” at all. If one had to summarise the public-facing posture of modern socialism in one sentence, it would be: “This time will be different.”

The problem is that it won’t be. Notwithstanding the often sympathetic media portrayal lavished on modern socialists, there’s little reason to believe that the governments they produce, if elected, will differ in basic structure from those of their ideological forebears.

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Even in the above-cited example of Die Linke member attitudes toward Venezuela, I see little evidence that young socialists are taking any sort of radically new approach. They are simply too young to have any kind of strong, active memory of a time when Venezuela represented the great white hope of socialism. Chavez died in 2013, before many of today’s 20-somethings became politically active. They have not made the same emotional investments in personalities, parties, movements and whole nations as their older fellow travellers. As a witty headline writer put it in 2012, “To college freshmen, Kurt Cobain has always been dead.” Similarly, to today’s college freshmen, Venezuela has always been in crisis.

As it happens, I remember the beginnings of Venezuela-mania in the mid-2000s quite well. I was not a socialist, but I spent a lot of time arguing with socialists—because, well, I was a student in Berlin, and there was no one else to argue with. There was just the left, the far left, and the very far left.

On the one hand, there were (typically older) socialists who still felt varying degrees of attachment to the former German Democratic Republic (the GDR, i.e., East Germany) and its “big brother,” the Soviet Union. They did not want to reanimate the GDR, and they condemned the Stasi and the Berlin Wall. But they could not completely let the dream go.

On the other hand, there were (typically younger) socialists, who felt no such attachment. They saw themselves as the vanguard of a different kind of socialism—less rigid, less dogmatic, less ideological. They saw GDR nostalgists as die-hard reactionaries. And when they looked around the world for a place where socialism was evolving in a way that was new, exciting, flexible and democratic, that place turned out to be Venezuela.

This was not entirely an act of political self-delusion. When Chávez outlined his vision for a “Socialism of the 21^st Century” at the 2005 World Social Forum, he defined it explicitly in opposition the socialism of the USSR. Soviet socialism, in Chávez’s words, was a “perversion.” This time would be different.

And notwithstanding the chaos and cruelty that has unfolded in Venezuela, Chávez and Maduro really did try to build something new. There were genuine attempts to create alternative models of collective ownership and democratic participation in economic life. In particular, the government heavily promoted the formation of worker co-operatives and various forms of social enterprises. We now know that nothing much would come out of those efforts, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

In the mid-2000s, things were looking up. Oil prices had more than quadrupled in real terms since Chavez first came to power in 1998. And as a result, the Venezuelan economy was booming, flooding the government with petrodollars. Chávez could afford to spend lavishly on social programs and public-sector projects. Western socialists finally had their proof-of-concept. Here was a country whose success seemed to prove that socialism could be economically viable, democratic and (for a time) respectful of human rights. And so it’s not surprising that many on the left built up a strong emotional attachment to Venezuela. There was even a fad for a political ideology known as Chavismo—a mash-up of socialism, populism, Latin American internationalism and recycled Bolivarianism.

Back then, it was the Chavistas who would look down on nostalgic comrades who still retained an attachment to earlier, discredited socialist projects. Now, suddenly, they find themselves in that same unfashionable role.