We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution

Abstract

Early works on the political rise of Hugo Chávez from military conspirator to charismatic leader on a continental scale focused on the collapse of Venezuela's representative democracy amid deteriorating social and economic conditions. After Chávez became president, researchers tended to stress the demographics of his social base and the class and ethnic connections between the charismatic leader and his followers. The underlying assumption seemed to be that Chávez had crystallized their insurgency against the Punto Fijo regime and their demand for social and economic inclusion.Lately, some leftist scholars have moved away from portraying the chavistas as a following and instead have begun to emphasize Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution as the product of the constituent power of Venezuela's people. Early in We Created Chávez, George Ciccariello-Maher asks us to avert “our eyes from the dazzling brilliance of the commanding heights of political power” (p. 7). Displacing “Chávez's centrality” leads, he says, to another question: “If Chávez does not drive the Revolution, if we deny him that coveted throne, then which historical subject assumes it?” (p. 7). Ciccariello-Maher's answer is the pueblo, conceived of as the poor, the commoners, the oppressed, much as Frantz Fanon conceives of the category. Social movements from the lower orders of Venezuelan society “created” Chávez.The bulk of the book, however, is not focused on studying the “people.” It is certainly not ethnography. The interpretation provided by Ciccariello-Maher is largely that of Left activists, most of whom are veterans of the insurgency that suffered military and political defeat at the hands of the elites who forged the liberal democratic Punto Fijo system after the fall of dictatorship in 1958. Ciccariello-Maher enters into dialogue with them, triangulating perspectives. This approach is not entirely convincing for the thesis that the pueblo created Chávez. It is more compelling in rescuing the Left from the historical judgment that the insurrection not only failed but also doomed any revolutionary resurgence. Ciccariello-Maher finds the bridges between the failed armed Left of the 1960s and the various tendencies within chavismo in the contemporary era.The survivors of the guerrilla movement sought to mobilize people through “vanguardist structures” that ultimately left them alienated from their popular base (p. 17). Ciccariello-Maher consciously resists the “tendency to fetishize antipower” (p. 16). Nevertheless, he argues that the guerrillas remained “the most revolutionary and intransigent representatives of the pueblo as a radical critique of oppression and inequality, and it is in this sense that the history of the guerrilla struggle remains, however imperfectly, a ‘people's history’” (pp. 17–18).Ciccariello-Maher does not claim that the guerrillas, most of whom joined a variety of unarmed movements and parties in the period between the 1970s and 1990s, speak and act on behalf of the people, only that they kept alive throughout the liberal democratic era (1958 to 1998) a culture of resistance deeply rooted in the gap between the wealthier, Western-oriented elites and middle class, on one side, and the base of the social pyramid on the other. In particular, he argues that the Left played a significant role in making the 1989 urban explosion, the Caracazo, which he characterizes as an insurrection, not merely a spontaneous and anarchic expression of anger. The Caracazo and the mass mobilization that rescued Chávez from the short-lived coup of April 2002 were both “‘constituent’ moments” (p. 20), more important for understanding chavismo than the failed coup of 1992, the election of 1998, or the writing of the new Bolivarian constitution of 1999. What appeared to be spontaneous, Ciccariello-Maher argues, was actually “practiced in the streets for several years before the revolt” and was fostered by “a deep and organic relationship between militants and barrio residents” (p. 95).In compiling his interviews, Ciccariello-Maher moved through Venezuelan society, meeting activists in a variety of class, political, and geographic contexts. This gives the book a rich texture, but in the end there seems to be a missing link: some kind of ethnology or sociological evidence that illustrates and validates the claim that this activism and experience contributed to the formation of constituent power. The author is more persuasive in arguing that the 1989 and 2002 popular mobilizations were constituent moments in the sense that they made the social forces behind Chávez not merely the base of his support but also active protagonists of the Bolivarian process he led.We Created Chávez is likely to be a point of reference for anyone seeking to assess chavismo as a seminal case of popular resistance to neoliberal globalization, as well as its relevance to twenty-first-century socialism. Not everyone will be convinced that the essence of Bolivarianism is the autonomous, constituent power of the Venezuela pueblo, but even doubters should concede that Ciccariello-Maher makes a major contribution to our understanding of leftist politics.