Bolivarian Democracy from Five Perspectives

• Author: Daniel Hellinger
• Date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19859600
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X19859600

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 233, Vol. 47 No. 4, July 2020, 238–249

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19859600

© 2019 Latin American Perspectives

238

Book Review

Bolivarian Democracy from Five Perspectives

by

Daniel Hellinger

Luis Fernando Angosto-Ferrández Venezuela Reframed: Indigenous Peoples and Socialisms

of the Twenty-first Century. London: Zed Books, 2015.

Dario Azzellini Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela: Building 21st-Century

Socialism from Below. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

Raúl Gallegos Crude Nation: How Oil Riches Ruined Venezuela. Lincoln, NB: Potomac

Books, 2016.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt How Democracies Die. New York: Crown Publishing,

2018.

Ana L. Mallen and María Pilar García-Guadilla Venezuela’s Polarized Politics: The

Paradox of Direct Democracy under Chávez. Boulder: First Forum Press, 2017.

The books considered here provide a range of perspectives on Venezuela’s experi-

ments with participatory democracy, socialist “horizontal” relations of production, and

investment in social programs. The most optimistic of these works, Azzellini’s Communes

and Workers’ Control in Venezuela, despite his frequent acknowledgment of challenges

and shortcomings, seems almost utopian in its description and analysis of Bolivarian

experiments in twenty-first-century socialism. At the other extreme, Gallegos’s Crude

Nation is almost dystopian in its close-up view of everyday life in Venezuela, provoking

despair that the country can ever dig itself out of its current crisis without surrendering

to a neoliberal logic. The volumes by Mallen and García-Guadilla and by Angosto-

Ferrández stand somewhere between these poles. In contrast to these four books, How

Democracies Die, by Levitsky and Ziblatt, is focused not on Venezuela but on the dan-

gers to democracy posed by the ascendancy of Donald Trump. However, it draws heav-

ily on Venezuela and the legacy of Hugo Chávez to make its case, providing a quite

common and much too casual portrait of the Bolivarian crisis.

POLARIZATION AND DIRECT DEMOCRACY

For Mallen and García-Guadilla’s Venezuela’s Polarized Politics the “paradox of direct

democracy under Chávez” is that the exaltation of popular sovereignty over recogni-

tion of plural interests, movements, and organizational life “transformed Venezuelans

into polarized subjects.” While Chávez is accorded a significant quota of responsibility

for this development, the authors’ analytical lens is focused well beyond the question

Daniel Hellinger is a professor emeritus of international relations at Webster University and the

author of Comparative Politics of Latin America: Democracy at Last? (2011).

859600LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X19859600LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESHellinger / BOOK REVIEW

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