November 18th 2008
Author:
Donald Kingsbury
There is an increasing though rather unfinished literature in social science and area studies circles on so called ‘post-liberal regimes.'[1] [1] Writing in this vein runs the gamut from the pejorative - as with Larry Diamond's (Diamond, 2002) notion of ‘pseudo-democratic,' ‘electoral authoritarian' or otherwise hybrid regimes that fail to live up to the criteria of good governance established in the United States and most of Europe - to the speculative and hopeful - as might describe the analytical position outlined by Benjamin Arditi (Arditi, 2003). Both perspectives note the ways in which the positions and institutions of modern liberalism - as a political praxis dominant in the west based at a minimum on a strong sense of individualism, formal-legal equality, limited government, free markets, and religious and ideological tolerance - are seemingly on the wane or losing their hegemonic position in the political imaginary.
These two opposed positions also characterize what is most consistent throughout the literature on post-liberalism, though from different political positions. That is to say, the era of the ideological emphasis of freedom first with unfettered transnational capital, and only then with western style abstract and formal political equalities (to say nothing of substantive, abilities-needs fairness or justice notions of equality) - has ended or is at the very least entering a major crisis. While this may or may not signal the end of ‘liberalism' as a legitimating discourse entwined with the modern state and capital, neoliberalism - which in political terms was effectively a counterattack on the part of the wealthy against the post-war Keynesian class compromise and in economic terms (especially in Latin America) called for the end of Import Substitution Industrialization and state-directed development policies (Harvey, 2007) - has certainly sustained a substantial blow to its short and medium term credibility.
In this ‘post neoliberal constellation' (a ‘constellation' in that there is by no means any sort of cross-case homogeneity - Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution is rather different than Putin's Russia or China's state capitalist development) it is rather important to keep in mind that despite left and right propaganda of the 1980s and 1990s that heralded the ‘whithering of the state' the state was alive and well throughout even the darkest of the neoliberal ‘lost decades.' That is to say, a strong state was necessary to facilitate the expropriation of labor and natural resources in Latin America - to privatize the social safety net and to keep the rabble in line. The ‘neoliberal state,' then is a form of government that facilitates this counterattack of the ruling classes, a more obviously and directly ‘instrumental' state than previous ones. Whereas the post-war state so famously described by Poulantzas as a "relatively autonomous" apparatus that could from time to time act against the immediate interests of the bourgeoisie in order to better serve the long term interests of capital (Poulantzas, 2000), the neoliberal state served as the structural means for the redistribution of wealth (not, importantly, its generation) from the commons to the few (Harvey & Lilley, 2006). In the course of this counter-attack that transformed the nature of state power from the 1970s to the 2000s, the immediate-term interests of the rich were pursued with an orgiastic fervor, and it is this fervor that is being tempered down to highly varying degrees in reaction to the contemporary crisis of global capital.
However, any triumphalism in the face of the contemporary crisis of global capitalism, its deployment of the modern state form and the obfuscatory discourses of liberalism would be well served to recall C.B. Macpherson's (Macpherson, 1965) observation that states were states before they were liberal, liberal before they were democratic, and finally that liberalism itself was liberal before it was democratic. We have seen crises before, and constantly been reminded that as a system, capital not only thrives on crises it produces and needs them. This historical persistence and adaptability can be seen perhaps in the first steps of ‘industrialized' nations of the north in the face of the crisis. Rather than calling the capitalist world system into question, the United States and several Eurozone economies have intensified the funneling of money to the rich (taxpayers ultimately being expected to carry the tab for bailing out firms ‘too big to be allowed to fail'), though these have been accompanied by a few timid calls for a green Keynesianism and increased government oversight of that ‘wild west' that is economic speculation. As such, it is not at all clear that ‘postliberalism' will be much better for the world's majority than was the past 30 years. What is clear however is that space has been opened, and it is in this space that experimentation with political and economic forms and the reinvigoration of class struggle can - and must - take place.
My wager in this paper is that the Bolivarian Revolution is in the process of building a new type of state power in Venezuela, one that represents one of the most progressive poles in the postliberal constellation. The at times inconsistent and at present precarious nature of this project is in part due to the state culture and the form of capitalism developed by the previous, Fourth, Republic (1831-1999). In large part, this history helps explain the centrality of the state in the pursuit of 21st century socialism. However, the extent to which this new role for the state is feasible is directly contingent upon the ability of the Bolivarians to resist the entropy and alienation of the modern state form. That is to say, the ability of the Bolivarian Revolution to create a new form of state power - one that emerges from the post-liberal moment de-linked from the requirements and domination of modern capitalism - is directly tied to its ability to move beyond the very notion of the state itself.
The revolutionary process in Venezuela has decidedly yet to take the form of a frontal assault on the most sacred institutions of liberal capitalism, but has rather of necessity been much more tentative and ad hoc than definitive; more additive than destructive. It is in this way still a democratic (increasing participation, injecting some needed justice into the pre-existing order) and not a social (that is, replacing the entire class order of society in its entirety) revolution. Far from exiling or attacking core liberal values like private property and individual liberty, the Venezuelan government has for at least the last 5 years attempted to augment such conventions. The chief means through which this has taken place has been massive increases in social spending - which democratizes consumption but, given the glut in oil profits that have accompanied Chávez's oil policy, has yet to be forced to make serious impacts on the fundamental class nature of Venezuelan society. While these measures are in no doubt long overdue and socially absolutely necessary, their revolutionary importance is decidedly lesser than that the creation of parallel institutions such as the consejos comunales (neighborhood based legislative, cultural and budgetary bodies), and the misiones sociales (an armada of educational, nutritional, health, collective-entrepreneurial and cultural projects).
The original aim of the misiones and the consejos was one of building direct democracy, decentralizing political power and the construction of a more fair economy. However, with the steady radicalization of the Chávez government - spurred on by what Gregory Wilpert describes as an opposition that was preemptively reactionary (Wilpert, 2007) - these parallel institutions were increasingly seen as capable of replacing the traditional and alienating bodies of liberal democracy. This radicalizing trend, and the potential for building a revolutionary counterpower within the revolution has been put into question in the aftermath of the failed Constitutional Reform of December 2007.
Within Chavista ranks an ‘endogenous right' made up of bureaucrats, careerists and largely middle-class supporters of the government has been able to expand its position, arguing for a slower, more defensive and conservative pace to the Revolution. This moment, or so their logic goes, is one in which the government needs to make friends amongst the upper and middle classes, to make gestures toward the ‘progressive' bourgeoisie, to forge public-private partnerships and work towards the integration of the opposition into the government - always with the aim of consolidating their own position relative to power. These conservative elements by and large see the consejos and the misiones as supplements to the pre-existing order - something akin to welfare programs designed to catch those who have ‘fallen through the cracks' of contemporary society (Ellner, 2008). In other words, their vision of socialism for the 21st century is rather closer to European social democracy than to communism of the Soviet or Cuban varieties.
At the same time, radical elements in the base have argued in essence that the best defense is a good offense. They rightly locate the failure of the 2007 reforma not in the opposition's ability to convert the government supporters but rather in the failure of the Chavistas to mobilize their own base. The opposition ‘No' campaign, mobilized the same numbers they have been able to historically, which allowed them to defeat the Chavista ‘Si' by a roughly 1% margin. More fundamentally, they point to a faltering in parallel institutions such as misión ribas and misión barrio adentro - and by extension, to the increasing influence of the endogenous right - as key reasons why Venezuelans did not turn out in the same numbers for the reforma as they did for the re-election of Chávez just one year earlier (where he won with 63% of the vote to opposition candidate Manuel Rosales' 37%).
Their strategic position is in essence rather similar to that of the Lenin of Dual Power (Ciccariello-Maher, 2007): that the state is necessary only insofar as it can be used to attack the enemies of the revolution but that it cannot and should not be mistaken for the substance and ultimate aim of the revolutionary process. Rather, once captured the modern state must only be seen as a temporary weapon in the fight against the ruling class. This weapon is to be used as the capacity, force, and organization of the revolutionary proletariat is in gestation, and will itself be overthrown when this ‘dual power' has reached the point in which it can replace these now outdated bourgeois institutions with its own. Even though both wings of the Bolivarian Revolution have been impeccably democratic - in Chávez's words, it is a "peaceful, but armed" revolution - this bloc is predictably much less accomodationist than the endogenous right, quicker to denounce fellow travelers for the corruption that remains endemic to Venezuelan politics, and much more skeptical of the existing state structure. As such, they envision the parallel institutions of the Bolivarian Revolution as tools to create political, social and economic powers capable of overcoming the inherently corrupt institutions of bourgeois liberal democracy rather than government charity (Ciccariello-Maher, 2007; Ellner, 2008).
This particular goal and strategy of the radicals is made all the more difficult given the nature of the Venezuelan state and its relation to the economic life of that nation. The extent of this difficulty defies a quick simplifying gloss. It entails a history spanning the long marches of Simón Bolívar's liberating armies in the early 19th century to the bloody Caracazo uprising against the neoliberal reforms of president Carlos Andrés Peréz and the collapse of the Venezuelan political establishment in and after 1989. I will do my best to highlight a few key moments in this history in the hopes of better contextualizing my concluding remarks on the transformation of the state in the Bolivarian Revolution.
The years following independence from Spain were rough for Venezuela. The wars had been particularly bitter there, and had a significantly negative impact on the country's working population, economy and infrastructure. Indeed, the centralization of military, economic and political power in the central Venezuelan state only truly came to its maturity during the Vicente Gómez years (1909-1935), a process which was greatly expedited with the discovery of (and state control of access to) oil starting in the first quarter of the 20th century. Having dispossessed the caudillos (local and largely agrarian strong men in control of their own private armies and of the territory they claimed as their own) both militarily and politically, Vicente Gómez exercised complete control over oil concessions, removing their potential economic power as well. It was also in this moment that the bases of power and the shape of Venezuelan society shifted from the countryside to the cities, and the beginning of a distinctly Venezuelan model of capitalism and the modern state form.
The modern sovereign state emerged at the same time as did Venezuela's capitalist economy - it was not a holdover from an absolutist ancien régime but rather in many ways its commencement. This economy, from the beginning, was based not on the capture of labor power, but rather on the capture of oil rents levied upon foreign petrol companies, a process which was monopolized by the state. It is thus rather difficult at this stage to locate sociologically something on the order of a distinct ‘ruling class' that could wield state power in any sort of ‘instrumental' fashion in that the state itself was the owner of the ‘means of production.'
Thus against traditional liberal and Marxist historiography of the modern state and capitalism which rely heavily on the emergence and consolidation of an indigenous bourgeoisie in the interstices of the absolutist state and the eventual emergence of a disciplined if oppressed working class (Koselleck, 1988; Marx, 1978), the primary indicator of social power in 20th century Venezuela was political rather than propertied in nature (Coronil, 1997; Hein, 1980). At precisely the moment in which a central state emerged which was strong enough to protect the country's fledgling industries, Venezuela threw itself headlong into oil production just in time for the Second World War. Subsequent intensification of the petrol industry further weakened what few autonomous social and economic forces remained, strengthening the power of the central state as it brokered the contracts of the foreign-dominated extraction process. Thus something of ‘the Dutch Disease' avant la lettre took hold in Venezuela for political as well as economic reasons. As a domestic strategy of control it endured the pacted transition to democracy in 1958, just as the consequences of uneven internal economic development persist for the population to this day.
This enduring trait of Venezuelan political economy is worth drawing out in more detail, as it is key to any attempt to think the state-form of the Bolivarian Revolution. While the transition to democracy energized and expanded its atrophied and exiled ‘civil society,' it did little to counter what Fernando Coronil (Coronil, 1997) has described as the ‘magical' or ‘shamanistic' nature of the Venezuelan state. In Coronil's estimation, this phenomenon, specific to the expanded opportunities afforded by oil wealth, was ‘magical' in that the state literally transformed ‘nature' (his word) into the physical and material traits of an imagined -and deeply desired - modernity. For example, the slogan "Sembrar el petroleo" ("sow the oil"), first coined by in 1936 by Arturo Úslar Pietri in the pages of Diario Ahora has been a constant theme of every subsequent Venezuelan government - including the present one. The notion of the oil economy is thus one that oil profits hold the key to Venezuelan development and modernization above and before all else, resulting in the perhaps paradoxical (given the meaning of the slogan) further deterioration of other economic sector. This persistent trait of Venezuelan political economy was intensified during the dictatorship years, as General Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1948/52-1958) adopted policies of intense infrastructure development - building highways, universities and housing on a scale never before seen in the country - and which arguably has lasted until the present government's attempts to build collective and communal forms of property and industry.
With democratization came a deepening of the Venezuelan form of the ‘Dutch disease,' as the parties which dominated the structurally exclusionary democratic system known as the ‘puntofijo pact' tightly controlled nearly all aspects of Venezuela's politics and economy (García-Guadilla, 2007) and the dominance of the oil sector led to consistent annual declines in domestic industrial and agricultural productivity (Karl, 1997). There was thus little space for autonomous power to be built against either the state or the ruling class by the bourgeoisie. Counter-systemic organizing was also rather unlikely from the organized working class, most prominent in the petrol industry, but also in aluminum and steel production, as they were tied rather tightly to the party machines of puntofijismo. What is more, the exploding informal sector (which picked up major pace in the 1970s, a trend that continues to the present (Orlando, 2001)) presented its own unique difficulties for any sort of traditional or Orthodox Marxist anti-state or anti-capitalist organization as informal sector workers are by definition a decentralized and precarious workforce more closely resembling the lumpenproletariat than the working class.[2] [2] The global boom in oil prices around that time contributed to a spike in urbanization without industrialization. Unable to compete with subsidized imports, Venezuelan farmers flocked to a few key cities in order to find employment in the interstices and service economies around the oil sector. By 1992 informality so dominated employment and housing in Caracas that, Aristóbolo Istúriz, then the recently elected mayor lamented that his administration had no clue how many people lived in the constantly growing city, let alone how to provide them with basic services (Harnecker, 2005).
The deepening of the social crises surrounding consecutive rounds of structural adjustments throughout the 1980s and 1990s did little to improve this situation, though they did hasten the collapse of the Fourth Republic. While the twentieth century political and economic history of the Venezuelan state defies easy classification as liberal, the years following the Caracazo or Sacudón - nationwide popular uprisings in response to president Carlos Andrés Peréz's bait-and-switch neoliberal reforms in which scores died in the state's response - clearly saw the development of a neoliberal state. The administrations of Peréz and then Caldera both oversaw the selling off of the state oil company, PDVSA (nationalized - by the same Peréz - in 1976), the telecommunications network and mining concerns - to name only a few prominent examples. Popular protest skyrocketed throughout the 1990s with little to no impact on substantive government economic policy (López Maya, 2005). As a result, by the time of the 1998 elections the political establishment had so discredited itself in the eyes of the population that Chávez's status as an outsider was perhaps the most important element of his resume.
However, it is important to note that Chávez was not immediately a revolutionary, to say nothing of him being a socialist. The process of radicalization only reached the point where Chávez announced the construction of ‘Socialism for the 21st century' in 2004, and it only arguably truly picked up pace between 2006 and 2007, first as Chávez faced an opposition candidate running on a populist platform, and second as the movement announced its roadmap (the so-called ‘5 motors') to a Bolivarian socialism. It has also been in this timeframe that the question of the state form in the Bolivarian Revolution has become increasingly prominent among radicals.
In 1871, writing on the Paris Commune, Marx warned that "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes" (pg. 629) a caution that has dominated subsequent Marxist thought on the role of the state in revolutionary transformation. It is precisely this warning which inspired the Leninist concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat' and of ‘dual power,' as well as the often (incorrectly) opposed Gramscian formulations of hegemony and War of Position. The state, they argued, was a powerful element of class warfare, either as the instrument of the ruling class (Lenin) or as a complex series of relationships capable of either crushing or neutralizing class struggle (Gramsci). In either case, the present liberal-bourgeois state would have to be done away with in the pursuit of socialism, and the party - in different ways - was precisely the body to take on this historical task.
This approach to the state and the party form was by and large eclipsed by the post-Soviet renaissance of ‘radical democracy,' a slogan that often took the place of Socialism, Marxism or communism in the imaginaries of university leftists and the so-called ‘anticapitalist globalization movements.' Perhaps not coincidentally, this discourse came to dominate progressive activism at the same time as the ‘Washington Consensus' - which put its own definition of democracy center stage - dominated political and economic policy throughout Latin America. Within these lines of thought, the state is often seen as a highly likely if not inevitable harbinger of Stalinist statism. The state is thus for this tendency uniquely a power-over, antithetical to the spirit of anticapitalism (or obversely, to the free market's singular capacity to realize human potential and freedom) (see, for the capitalist and anticapitalist views on this respectively, Friedman, 1982; Holloway, 2002). More troublingly, in the rejection of state power, the net result of the actions of these tendencies within progressivism often resulted in little more fundamentally than appeals for a kinder, gentler, perhaps more inclusive capitalism. The principle, then, of radical democracy when delinked from the pursuit of state power (pursuit as in the Leninist or Gramscian sense of ending liberal bourgeois governance and capitalist economics) comes down to little more than a democratization of consumption or the naïve faith that the principles of liberalism and the promise of the egalitarian, democratic state are sound if ill executed. If anything, current events have eroded this position's theoretical coherence, if not torn it completely asunder.
If the Bolivarian Revolution is to be successful as a social revolution, and not just a democratic one, it must capitalize on the uncertainty of this post (neo)liberal moment and end this substitution of radical democracy for the communist imperative that the liberal state is a lie, and must therefore go. This is, however, a rather difficult task in that the historical identification of the Venezuelan state with capital favors a political approach in the Poulantizian sense of the state as a field ‘traversed' by struggle (Poulantzas, 2008 pg. 367). The problem is deepened still more given the persevering political and economic consequences of the ‘Dutch Disease.' A historically weak working class, the absence of a significant peasantry and the ubiquity of the informal economy all make a rallying organizational praxis along the lines of ‘all power to the soviets' something of a ridiculous proposition. In its place - and this has been the strategy of the radical base of Chavismo against the endogenous right - the strategy must be ‘all power to the communal councils,' locating the terrain of the struggle against state domination and capitalist exploitation in the social.
There is, of course, something of a theoretical circle here. In order to avoid this problem - first that the focus on ‘civil society' in academic and activist circles throughout the past 20-30 years has dangerously tracked hegemonic tendencies in its rhetorical antithesis to state power; second that the particularity of Venezuelan capitalism and politics in the past and present requires a social as opposed to directly political or economistic organizing - a reconsideration of the state-form and indeed of ‘society' in non-bourgeois terms is in order. This reconsideration has been taking place in Venezuela at the radical base, as communities organize around social production, popular sovereignty (and defense), and continue the push for an economic system based on solidarity and a politics based attuned to the popular will. However, paraphrasing Lenin, this new order is perhaps not yet ready to be born from the corpse of the old. As such, there is little other choice than to rely on the current state to engender and protect the antagonistic force of the poor. And in this light, despite the present uncertainty and its rather uneven progress, Venezuela should be seen as building just such a state.
The project has, has, however, been able to do so for the past 5 years almost in spite of itself, given the tragicomic ineptitude of the opposition which all but gave Chavistas not only state power, but hegemony. The upcoming elections of 23 November put this luxury in question. While an opposition rout is highly unlikely, the reemergence of opposition lawmakers in key states would strengthen the hand of the endogenous right's calls for moderation and a slowing of the pace of the Bolivarian Revolution. In other words, the capacity of the hard line Chavista project of ending the substitution of radical democracy and the democratization of consumption for social revolution remains suspended in the balance. Such is the uncertainty of the post (neo)liberal constellation, and such is the situation we now face in Venezuela and throughout the world.
Arditi, B. (2003). The Becoming-Other of Politics: A Post-Liberal Archipelago. Contemporary Political Theory, 2, 307-325.
Ciccariello-Maher, G. (2007). Dual Power in the Venezuelan Revolution. Monthly Review, 59(4), 42-56.
Coronil, F. (1997). The magical state : nature, money, and modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Diamond, L. (2002). Thinking About Hybrid Regimes. Journal of Democracy, 13(2), 21-35.
Ellner, S. (2008). Rethinking Venezuelan politics : class, conflict, and the Chávez phenomenon. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner.
Friedman, M. (1982). Capitalism and freedom (R. D. Friedman, Trans. Vol. xi, 202 p. ;). Chicago :: University of Chicago Press.
García-Guadilla, M. P. (2007). Social Movements in a Polarized Setting: Myths of Venezuelan Civil Society. In S. Ellner & M. Tinker Salas (Eds.), Venezuela : Hugo Chávez and the decline of an "exceptional democracy" (pp. 140-154). Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Pub.
Harnecker, M. (2005). Haciendo Camino al Andar. Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamerican CA.
Harvey, D. (2007). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D., & Lilley, S. (2006). On Neoliberalism: An Interview with David Harvey [Electronic Version]. MRZine, 19 June, 2006. Retrieved 16 November 2006 from http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/lilley190606.html [3].
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Orlando, M. B. (2001). The Informal Sector in Venezuela: Catalyst or Hindrance for Poverty Reduction? Paper presented at the Asociación Civil para la Promoción de Esutios Sociales. Retrieved October 27, 2008.
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[1] [4] This is a slightly revised version of a paper delivered at the annual conference of the journal Historical Materialism convened in London 7-9 November, 2008. The comments that followed in the discussion period were both insightful and well appreciated. My special thanks to Jeffery Weber, Alberto Toscano and Nina Power.
[2] [4] This is of course not to suggest that the ‘lumpen' elements of a given economy cannot be organized. My personal political position argues that there is just as much if not more revolutionary potential in these elements than in the ‘organized and disciplined proletariat.' This is only to suggest that they present a unique set of conditions necessary to consider from the aspect of socialist strategy, and that traditional and orthodox Marxist approaches have by and large been rather skeptical.
The Bolivarian Project
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[3] http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/lilley190606.html
[4] http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/3960#_ftnref
