We Created Chavez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution by George Ciccariello-Maher (review)

One wants to applaud this book for its stubborn refusal to put Hugo Chavez at the centre of the Bolivarian Revolution. Based on a large number of interviews, political scientist George Ciccariello-Maher is able to invoke the radical autonomy of many of the social movements which make up the popular revolution he describes, the contingency of their allegiance to Chavez, and the willingness of these movements to push beyond the limits that the Venezuelan state wants to impose on the revolution. His willingness to take informal workers seriously in particular is admirable; other scholars would do well to follow his lead. The author was wise to focus on the 1989 urban uprising known as the Caracazo, as well as on the role of popular forces in returning Chavez to power in 2002 (similar, in many ways, to 17 October 1945 in Argentina), and not on the failed coup of 1992 which first brought the paratrooper to national attention.

Much of the early chapters are less convincing as “popular history,” however. Ciccariello-Maher generally ignores popular actors and focuses instead on guerrillas. This is one of the book’s main analytical problems because although he criticizes vanguard theory at several points, he also makes clear that he believes that the guerrillas did represent the people, even if the people refused to accept that fact. (He regrets the failure of the communist party to seize power in 1960, although he does not consider what would have happened if it had done so.) His lengthy discussion of the ideological failures and deviations of various left-wing factions seems far removed from “the people.” And while he recognizes, for example, that ninety percent of the population went to the polls in 1963 when they presumably should have been supporting armed revolution, he does not know how to work that into his analysis. Certainly, this might suggest that formal democracy, whatever its limitations, had not run its course.

One wishes at times that this book was more grounded in historical context. It is unreasonable to expect the author to accept the scholarly consensus of a previous generation (Daniel Levine, for example) that Venezuelan in the 1960s and 1970s was a “model democracy.” But it would reassure this reader, at least, if he would recognize that a figure like Rómulo Betancourt himself was a product of historical experience, and that his determination not to move too fast in the late 1950s and early 1960s in terms of socioeconomic reform was based on his memories of a previous stint in power when his reforms were judged to have gone too far. This is not to justify the actions he took to consolidate his own power (if only, it might be noted, for the short term) and to create a political system that would last for decades without him.

Because Ciccariello-Maher is so insistent on shifting our attention to the popular movements, the act of the “creation” of Chavez itself remains unexamined and mysterious. He is somewhat convincing when he demonstrates how popular pressures forced Chavez to address society’s racism (although to a large extent this seems to have been because the opposition had felt free to express their prejudices when they thought that the leader had been removed in the coup). He supports the establishment of communal councils in the later Chavez years, which clearly were a response to popular pressure. When he finally gets around to the subject of urban informal workers, it seems that this is where his focus should have been all along.

The society Ciccariello-Maher describes probably will seem unusually dysfunctional to some readers and less an example of “dual power.” How many popular militias, ought a country have? Many of the “followers” the author interviews seem to have been totally disdainful of the leader. Others at least rejected seemingly all of his aides. How are these movements...