Dual Powers, Class Compositions, and the Venezuelan People
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George Ciccariello-Maher’s We Created Chávez is the most important book available in English proposing an anti-capitalist framework for understanding the Bolivarian process in contemporary Venezuela, as well as its historical backdrop dating back to 1958. The book contains within it a laudable critique of Eurocentrism and a masterful combination of oral history, ethnography, and theoretical sophistication. It reveals with unusual clarity and insight the multiplicity of popular movements that allowed for Hugo Chávez’s eventual ascension to presidential office in the late 1990s. We Created Chávez has set a new scholarly bar for social histories of the Bolivarian process and demands serious engagement by Marxists. As a first attempt at such engagement, this paper reveals some critical theoretical and sociological flaws in the text and other areas of analytical imprecision. Divided into theoretical and historical parts, it unpacks some of the strengths and weaknesses by moving from the abstract to the concrete. The intervention begins with concepts – the mutually determining dialectic between Chávez and social movements; ‘the people’; and ‘dual power’. From here, it grounds these concepts, and Ciccariello-Maher’s use of them, in various themes and movements across specific historical periods of Venezuelan political development – the rural guerrillas of the 1960s, the urban guerrillas of the 1970s, the new urban socio-political formations of the 1980s, Afro-Indigenous struggles in the Bolivarian process, and formal and informal working-class transformations since the onset of neoliberalism and its present contestation in the Venezuelan context.
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Breman Jan At Work in the Informal Economy of India: A Perspective from the Bottom Up 2013b New Delhi Oxford University Press
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Ciccariello-Maher George ‘To Lose Oneself in the Absolute: Revolutionary Subjectivity in Sorel and Fanon’ Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 2007 5 3 101 111
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Ciccariello-Maher George ‘Dussel’s 20 Theses and Anti-Hegemonic Praxis’ Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture 2008 43 1 3 49
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Ciccariello-Maher George We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution 2013a Durham, NC Duke University Press
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Ciccariello-Maher George ‘Constituent Moments, Constitutional Processes: Social Movements and the New Latin American Left’ Latin American Perspectives 2013b 40 3 126 145
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Ciccariello-Maher George ‘Decolonial Realism: Ethics, Politics and Dialectics in Fanon and Dussel’ Contemporary Political Theory 2014a 13 1 2 22
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Ciccariello-Maher George ‘Venezuelan Jacobins’ Jacobin 2014c March 13 on-line available at: <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/03/venezuelan-jacobins/>.
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Dussel Enrique Ciccariello-Maher George Twenty Theses on Politics 2008 Durham, NC Duke University Press
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Fernandes Sujatha Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela 2010 Durham, NC Duke University Press
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Spronk Susan J., Webber Jeffery R., Ciccariello-Maher George, Denis Roland, Ellner Steve, Fernandes Sujatha, Lebowitz Michael A., Motta Sara & Purcell Thomas ‘The Bolivarian Process in Venezuela: A Left Forum’ Historical Materialism 2011 19 1 233 270
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1
See Ciccariello-Maher 2010. In a series of articles, he has developed the theoretical concerns that are finally taken up in his dissertation. See, for example, Ciccariello-Maher 2007; Ciccariello-Maher 2008; Ciccariello-Maher 2014a.
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5
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 6.
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6
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 5.
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7
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, pp. 5–6.
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8
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 6.
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10
Raby 2006, pp. 165–6.
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12
Azzellini 2010, p. 9.
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13
Fernandes 2010, p. 5.
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15
James 1989.
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16
Gott 2005.
-
17
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 7.
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18
Thompson 1966.
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19
Wolf 1999.
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20
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 7.
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21
See Dussel 2008, of which Ciccariello-Maher is the translator. To a lesser but nonetheless important extent, ‘the people’ here corresponds with its usage in the work Ernesto Laclau. See particularly Laclau 2007. For a favourable reference by Ciccariello-Maher to this component in Laclau’s theory of populism, see Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 236.
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22
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 8.
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25
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 16.
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28
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 18.
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29
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, pp. 239–40.
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30
Trotsky 2005, p. 225; emphasis added.
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31
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 19.
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32
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 16.
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33
Skocpol 1979, p. 4.
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34
Davidson 2012, pp. 494–5.
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35
Webber 2011b, p. 46.
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36
Bensaïd 2002.
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39
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 25.
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41
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 29.
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42
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 36.
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43
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 28.
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44
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 25.
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47
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, pp. 28–9.
-
48
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 43.
-
49
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 33.
-
50
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 42.
-
51
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 35.
-
52
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 44.
-
53
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 76.
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56
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 32.
-
57
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, pp. 38–40.
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58
Debray 2000. For an earlier set of critiques that has largely fallen out of scholarly consciousness, see Huberman and Sweezy (eds.) 1981. Ciccariello-Maher elaborates and extends the critique of Debray later in the text in the context of a discussion of new urban social movements which emerge in the 1980s (Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 82).
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59
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 40.
-
60
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 41.
-
61
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 46.
-
62
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 47.
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63
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 51.
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64
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 53.
-
65
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 54.
-
66
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 55.
-
68
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 56.
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69
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 58.
-
70
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 61.
-
71
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 64.
-
72
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 63.
-
73
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 70.
-
75
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 90.
-
76
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 89.
-
77
Webber 2012, pp. 185–6.
-
78
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 93.
-
79
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 95.
-
80
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 74.
-
81
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 80.
-
82
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 78.
-
83
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 150.
-
84
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, pp. 160, 162.
-
85
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 163.
-
86
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 164.
-
88
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 185.
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91
De Ste. Croix 1989.
-
92
Bergquist 1986, p. 1.
-
93
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, pp. 292–3, n. 54.
-
94
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 233.
-
95
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 221.
-
99
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 222.
-
101
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 220.
-
102
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 223.
-
103
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 224.
-
104
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 219.
-
105
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 224. The sources for these contentious figures are less than ideal. The first is an article by Marta Harnecker from 2004, which offers no source from which she derived her figures on informal and formal employment (Harnecker 2004). The second is a conjunctural news story from Venezuela Analysis in 2007 (Venezuela Analysis 2007).
-
106
See Breman 1996; Breman 2013a; Breman 2013b.
-
107
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, pp. 226, 227. Elsewhere, I have written about the concepts of lo vecinal, vecino, and oppositional consciousness of race and class in the Bolivian context in complementary ways. Webber 2012, pp. 263–8.
-
108
Camfield 2004.
-
109
Camfield 2004, p. 421.
-
110
Camfield 2004, p. 424.
-
114
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 234.
-
115
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 235.
-
116
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 242.
-
117
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 244.
-
118
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 250.
-
120
Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, p. 235.
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Dual Powers, Class Compositions, and the Venezuelan People
In: Historical MaterialismSearch for other papers by Jeffery R. Webber in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
George Ciccariello-Maher’s We Created Chávez is the most important book available in English proposing an anti-capitalist framework for understanding the Bolivarian process in contemporary Venezuela, as well as its historical backdrop dating back to 1958. The book contains within it a laudable critique of Eurocentrism and a masterful combination of oral history, ethnography, and theoretical sophistication. It reveals with unusual clarity and insight the multiplicity of popular movements that allowed for Hugo Chávez’s eventual ascension to presidential office in the late 1990s. We Created Chávez has set a new scholarly bar for social histories of the Bolivarian process and demands serious engagement by Marxists. As a first attempt at such engagement, this paper reveals some critical theoretical and sociological flaws in the text and other areas of analytical imprecision. Divided into theoretical and historical parts, it unpacks some of the strengths and weaknesses by moving from the abstract to the concrete. The intervention begins with concepts – the mutually determining dialectic between Chávez and social movements; ‘the people’; and ‘dual power’. From here, it grounds these concepts, and Ciccariello-Maher’s use of them, in various themes and movements across specific historical periods of Venezuelan political development – the rural guerrillas of the 1960s, the urban guerrillas of the 1970s, the new urban socio-political formations of the 1980s, Afro-Indigenous struggles in the Bolivarian process, and formal and informal working-class transformations since the onset of neoliberalism and its present contestation in the Venezuelan context.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 2652 | 81 | 11 |
| Full Text Views | 240 | 11 | 2 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 78 | 14 | 0 |