Constituent Power and Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution: A Reader-Authors Roundtable

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Venezuelan politics have been propelled since the early twentieth century by outbursts of popular discontent, organizing, and mobilization. These expressions of constituent power have toppled governments and reorganized social relations, as in the fall of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958 and the collapse of the ‘pacted’ Puntofijo democratic system in 1989-1992. Mass mobilizations, furthermore, redirected and radicalized the Chávez presidency in the early 2000s and, after the death of Hugo Chávez in 2013, have heightened tensions and sharpened the economic and political crises that continue into the present. These popular mobilizations have made history, but they continue to have difficulties in institutionalizing their gains, reconfiguring political subjectivity and identity, and correcting for the cyclical vulnerabilities of a petrostate like Venezuela. This roundtable is organized around three recent books on popular power in Venezuela and the lessons the Chávez era offers for future organizing and mobilization. Dario Azzelini’s Communes and Workers' Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below (Brill 2017 / Haymarket 2018); Donald Kingsbury’s Only the People can Save the People: Constituent Power, Revolution, and Counterrevolution in Venezuela (SUNY 2018) and Naomi Schiller’s Channeling the State: Community Power and Popular Politics in Venezuela (Duke 2018) bring unique disciplinary and methodological perspectives on the past, present, and future of mass mobilization in Venezuela, and the struggles of movements aligned with state institutions to advance meaningful change.

Sub Track

• Culture, Power, and Political Subjectivities

Session Organizer

• Donald V Kingsbury, University of Toronto

Chair

• Naomi A Schiller, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Presenters

• Dario Azzellini, Development Sociology, Cornell University

• Timothy M Gill, University of North Carolina at Wilmington

• Rebecca A Hanson, University of Florida

• Andreina I Torres Angarita, The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)