George Ciccariello-Maher on Venezuela
November 13th, 2009 § 2 Comments
I actually lived in Caracas for 3 months a couple years ago, and have on my screen in front of me (literally) a 25,000 word (coruscatingly intelligent) essay on rural mobilization in Bolivarian Venezuela. The video above is George Ciccariello-Maher, the English-language social historian of Bolivarian Venezuela. He’s no joke. If you have 19 minutes, watch it, and if you don’t have 19 minutes but have an inkling of an interest in the current goings-on in Venezuela, watch it anyway. The gist is that Chavez is not the messiah nor the Lenin-like lider maximo responsible for the Bolivarian Revolution. Instead, he is the output of a process of cultural radicalization, beginning in 1958, in fact earlier, stemming from the guerrilla struggle, which emerged out of the smashed hopes of the generation that installed nominal political democracy in 1958. Overly inspired by Regis Debray’s focismo, the guerrillas failed to make the links with peasant communities which would have enabled them, perhaps, to succeed in their struggle against the repressive state. By the time they realized their mistake, it was too late. The guerrilla struggle largely peaked by 1965, with maybe 1000-2000 guerrillas in the Venezuelan countryside. But it left an invaluable bequest, a legacy of resistance, that would later combine with Afro-Venezuelan and indigenous movements to begin the Bolivarian Revolutionary process. This radicalization really emerged during the caracazo, the “first shot across the bow of neo-liberalism,” before Seattle, before Chiapas.
The caracazo of course began in Caracas. Departing president Jaime Lusinchi passed the presidency to Carlos Andres Perez, who promptly put in place a structural adjustment package at IMF behest. The package contained the usual assortment of goodies: reductions in state employment, state-loans, subsidies, tariffs and price controls. One part of the package was the raising of fuel prices, theretofore extremely subsidized, to bring them closer to the world-market price. Such a measure was “rational” according to the precepts of the international financial institutions. In Venezuela, it was heresy—rending the “bond that united the body politic” as the owner of the “nation’s natural body,” in Fernando Coronil’s words, it broke faith with the “moral bond of protection between state and people.” Higher gas prices meant higher fares on the por puestos, the buses upon which caraquenos move about the city. And the city exploded. The fury soon spread to 19 urban centers—essentially every major city in Venezuela. The government called in the army to squelch the rebellion. It did so, gunning down hundreds, perhaps as many as 1,500, perhaps more, of the lower-class Venezuelans spilling into Caracas’s posh valleys from their peripheral shanties. Similar dynamics were afoot in other regions. Despite its potentially mis-leading name, the Caracazo was quite national in its scope, reflecting broad, class-based discontent with the eroding economic underpinnings of the Punto Fijo regime. There’s the tendency to think that Chavez is sui generis, that he is the forger of the Bolivarian Revolution. Ciccariello-Maher takes that claim head on and inverts it: the revolution forged him.
That kid is just dazzling.
Nineteen minutes extremely well-spent… in fact… I’m going to make it thirty-eight….
[...] http://pulsemedia.org/2009/11/13/george-ciccariello-maher-on-venezuela/ [...]