Abstract
Thomas Ponniah and Jonathan Eastwood have produced an engaging and profoundly thought-provoking collection of essays on Venezuela’s process of political and social change under the late President Hugo Chávez. The volume rises above the simplistic, and often sterile, debates over democracy versus authoritarianism, and capitalism versus socialism that Venezuela’s polarized politics all too frequently elicit. Instead, its high quality analytic and theoretically-driven essays explore the consequences of Venezuela’s political experiment for institutions and individuals in all of their complex, multidimensional, and contradictory nature. In carefully selecting essays that reflect the gamut of political positions, the editors invite us to confront our preconceptions, move past them, and draw our own conclusions about the impact, meaning, and legacy of Venezuela’s “revolution.” Blissfully, our minds are given free range to roam until the concluding chapter where the editors offer their own interpretation.
The book’s organization deftly guides us through the exploration. The introductory chapter by co-editor Jonathan Eastwood clearly lays out the subject, scope, and purpose of the volume, which are framed in terms of the problem of evaluating the revolutionary character of Bolivarian Venezuela. To address this puzzle, the book is divided into two parts whose chapters systematically explore the nature, extent, and limitations of key transformations in class, status, and power from multiple points of view.
Part I analyzes major political developments in the context of shifting state-society relations, political polarization, and radicalization of the “revolution.” From a cultural politics framework, Fernando Coronil tells the story of the opposition’s shift to an insurrectionary stance from 2001 to 2003 in reaction to real and perceived power grabs by Chávez and radical redistributive policies, such as land reform. The opposition’s utter defeat after a failed coup d’état and an unsuccessful national petro-strike to destabilize the economy opened opportunities for further radicalization of Chavismo. At a deeper level, however, he argues that the fundamental nature of the Bolivarian state and its relationship to society remain unchanged. It still obeys the logic of the petro-state, meaning politics is about controlling the state and the distribution of its oil rents. Javier Corrales follows up with a provocative rational choice analysis of the electoral logic behind a pervasive, corrosive feature of Venezuelan politics: an acute polarization that fans the fires of divisive conflict. Gregory Wilpert shifts the focus from the government-opposition dynamic to the relationship of the popular sectors to the state with a lucid analysis of one of the defining characteristics of the process of change: its experiments in participatory democracy. He describes various programs to implement radical democracy, mainly at the local level, which are responses to the citizenry’s deep desire for participation beyond elections. By 2010, community councils had become their main organizational form. Wilpert acknowledges that their direct relationship to the state in terms of support and funding carries with it the danger that they may succumb to clientelism and become politicized by the Chavista government. Margarita López-Maya and Luis Lander close Part I with an account of the significance of the 2006 presidential election. Although the opposition shifted from an insurrectional to an electoral strategy, poor decision-making and weak electoral showing opened opportunities for the further radicalization of Chavismo, now with the explicit goal of implementing the socialist transformation of Venezuela.
Part II switches the focus to key social, economic, and foreign policy issues. In a brilliant policy process analysis Cathy Rakowsky and Gioconda Espina assess the advances and shortcomings of a feminist social agenda in the Bolivarian project. They conclude that institutional and legal changes potentially open opportunities for improvements. However, shortcomings in implementation and partisan politicization make it difficult to capitalize on them. Keeping the focus on emblematic social programs, Carles Muntaner, Haejoo Chung, Qamar Mahmood, and Francisco Armada analyze the Ch vez administration’s flagship popular sector healthcare program Barrio Adentro. They show how radically this model departs from the neoliberal paradigm and how, contrary to common wisdom, it developed as a bottom-up initiative that the government later expanded. They argue that Barrio Adentro is a truly transformative development. Changing tack, Mark Weisbrot takes a controversial stance on the country’s macroeconomic and social policy performance. Arguing against a relentless drumbeat of opinion that Chávez’s regime recklessly mismanaged the economy in pursuit of political goals, he shows that Venezuela efficiently used its oil revenue to promote a genuinely new development path. The closing chapter by Mark Williams is an illuminating, refreshingly theoretically-based analysis of Venezuela’s foreign policy.
Co-editor Thomas Ponniah wraps the volume up with an assessment of Venezuela’s process of change based on three fundamental tensions that Eastwood outlined in the introduction. First, there is the tension between promises of social equity and a new development model on the one hand, and the oil-based economy on the other. Can Venezuela overcome the “resource curse” and the political dynamics of the petro-state? Second, can the tension between promoting participation and the temptation of clientelist control be resolved? Third, can socialism of the twenty-first century transcend the tension between participatory democracy and a tendency toward authoritarian centralism? Ponniah concludes that the evidence is mixed, at best. Real world Venezuela is still dependent on oil revenue. Without denying the regime’s innovations in participatory or radical democracy, clientelism and authoritarian centralism are, unfortunately, significant developments.
Given this mixed result, and with no guarantee for regime consolidation, what lasting positive legacy can Venezuela’s process of change offer those in search of democratic alternatives to liberal democratic capitalist development? Ponniah turns to Hegel and Gramsci for inspiration. Another world will not be possible without compelling, clear, well-thought-out ideas. Venezuela, with its mostly peaceful, radical reformist path to socialism within a democratic regime, with all its faults, provides a laboratory from which to distill and refine such ideas. Ponniah suggests it is up to us to seize the opportunity Venezuela offers in the quest to develop ideas for a counter hegemonic democratic project based on reality, not ideology. This book, anchored in solid scholarship, moves us in the right direction by, if nothing else, asking the right questions and taking an empirical approach.