Tom Becker hosts this Old Mole and we hear about Hugo Chavez and Venuzuela, the new drug-war action film Snitch, wage-slavery and republican visions of liberty, and space warfare.

Bill Resnick talks with Michael Fox, a freelance journalist and documentary film-maker, about the death of Hugo Chavez and the future of popular movements and socialism in Venezuela. They consider the charges of authoritarianism, on the one hand, and the vibrancy of Venezuelan democratic culture and controls, on the other.

Today words like "republican" or "independence" or "liberty" are likely to conjure ideas about the freedom of business, right to work laws, and the aggrandizement of owner-entrepreneurs. Joe Clement interviews Alex Gourevitch's about his recent article for Jacobin Magazine on "Wave Slavery and Republican Liberty", which argues against this grain.