> "In Venezuela, a petit-bourgeois populist leader has political
> supremacy..."
to a friend who's a professor of Latin American history and knows Venezuela quite well. His comment:
> Well, aside from being an accusation rather than an analysis, I'd
> say it was completely wrong and does nothing to explain the
> dynamics of Chavismo nor recent Venezuelan history, not to mention
> that it would hard pressed to find much of a petit-bourgeoisie in
> Venezuela. Chavez's provincial, relatively poor family, not
> petit-bourgeois in any meaningful sense of the term. If the point
> is that he politically represents the petit-bourgeoisie, that is
> even more ridiculous. A case could certainly be made that he
> represents the financial sector of the economy, but even that would
> miss what he is doing. The charge can't explain why Chavez, in the
> face of one assault after another, would become progressively more
> radical, even if only in terms of rhetoric. And of course to call
> him that is to completely ignore his relationship with his primary
> social base: the urban poor who have filled the ranks of the
> informal economy as the old two-party patronage system broke
> down. If the point is to say that he uses this relationship with
> the poor to achieve political consolidation while actually ruling
> on behalf of the "petit-bourgeois," that likewise would
> misrepresented the nature of his policies. As to "political
> supremacy," I would argue the opposite, that what distinguishes
> Chavismo is its fragility. That while he may have electoral and
> rhetorical hegemony, he doesn't have institutional hegemony yet.
> Part of this is that he represents a revolution, a political one at
> least, that came to power through the ballot box, and not a
> protracted insurgency that would have produced an ideologically
> coherent cadre that could replace the old order. As a result,
> Chavismo has had to make considerable compromises with power blocs
> in the military, police, state b'cracy, unwilling to give up its
> privileges and to in fact use the openness of the moment to extend
> them. In other words, the corruption that still plagues VE society
> is a result of Chavismo's weakness, not its omnipotence.