Reconciling the State and Diffused Autonomy? Political Brokers in Venezuelan Poder popular

• Date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20924366
• Author: Stefano Boni
• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20924366

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 233, Vol. 47 No. 4, July 2020, 170–189

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20924366

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

170

Reconciling the State and Diffused Autonomy?

Political Brokers in Venezuelan Poder popular

by

Stefano Boni

The most widespread implementation of the autonomous sovereignty of the popular

sectors in the socialist policies of Chávez’s Venezuela, known as poder popular (popular

power), is the consejo comunal (communal council), a neighborhood assembly that has

received sizable state funding to implement self-managed projects ranging from house

renovation to local public works and from social events to small-scale productive activities.

Examination of the establishment and operation of these councils in Cumaná (Estado

Sucre)—their successes and failures, popular involvement and personal corruption—

reveals the ambiguous role within them of political brokers employed by local administra-

tions and heading the party’s smallest organizational units and shows how incorporation

of forms of direct democracy into larger institutions (the government and the party) hin-

ders the exercise of autonomy.

La implementación más extensa de la soberanía autónoma de los sectores populares en

las políticas socialistas de la Venezuela de Chávez, mejor conocida como poder popular,

yace en el consejo comunal, un tipo de asamblea vecinal que ha recibido considerables

fondos estatales para implementar proyectos autogestionados: desde la renovación de casas

hasta obras públicas locales, desde eventos sociales hasta actividades productivas a pequeña

escala. Un análisis en torno al establecimiento y funcionamiento de estos consejos

en Cumaná, Estado Sucre (sus éxitos y fracasos, participación popular y problemas de

corrupción personal) revela el ambiguo rol que dentro de ellos jugaban los agentes políticos

empleados por las administraciones locales para encabezar las unidades organizativas más

pequeñas del partido. También muestra cómo la incorporación de formas de democracia

directa a instituciones más grandes (el gobierno y el partido) obstaculizan el ejercicio de

la autonomía.

Keywords: Poder popular, Consejos comunales, Autonomy, Political brokers,

Ethnography

For the past two decades, Venezuela has been an excellent vantage point for

evaluating the feasibility of coexistence of the state and grassroots political

organizations.1 The popular hopes sparked by Chávez’s rise to power required

that his administration be marked by a decisive break from previous govern-

ments—a revolutionary discontinuity in the direction of participatory and

autonomous political practices aspired to by poor and middle-class barrios.

Stefano Boni teaches cultural and political anthropology at the University of Modena and Reggio

Emilia and has carried out research in Venezuela since 2007. Among his publications is Il poder

popular nel venezuela socialista del XXI secolo (2017).

924366LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20924366Latin American PerspectivesBoni / Political Brokers in Venezuelan Poder Popular

research-article2020

Boni / POLITICAL BROKERS IN VENEZUELAN PODER POPULAR 171

Feeding on the strong tradition of local autonomy in the region, these wide-

spread radical groups were hopeful, in the first period of the Chávez era, that

a revolution was about to materialize.

Upon taking power in 1998, Chávez announced revolutionary innovations

and promised to alter the very foundations of the relationship between central-

ized institutions and citizens. The government revised the constitution to

encourage, legalize, and strengthen the formation of autonomous political bod-

ies: parallel structures of governance based on people’s assemblies, known as

poder popular (popular power), were established to draw power away from the

central government. These “constituent” reforms are seen, by those sympa-

thetic with the Chavista project, as a historic innovation in the role of the state:

“What comes ‘from below’ is fortified through the state’s decentralized and

self-managed decision-making structures, becoming an active agent in the con-

struction of a new state and a new society in which the aim is to reduce, and to

try to eliminate, the division between political society and civil society”

(Azzellini, 2012: 25–26; see also Ellner, 2017).

Azzellini (2012) and Ciccariello-Maher (2013: 228) hold that Chavista popu-

lar power is the outcome of the historical struggle of the marginal sectors of

Venezuelan society for political agency. The power of “those below” is cele-

brated as a force that contrasts with the institutional hierarchy on equal terms;

consequently, Ciccariello-Maher (2013: 19) applies the Leninist notion of “dual

power”:

I will speak neither of power from above nor entirely from below, but instead

of a ‘‘dual power’’ that exists in ongoing, tense, and antagonistic opposition to

the state, straining insistently upward from the bases to generate a dialectical

motion allowing the revolutionary transformation of the state and its institu-

tions, with the ultimate goal of deconstructing, decentralizing, and rendering

it a nonstate.

Popular power policies can be interpreted as a significant enhancement of

the trend toward institutionalized participatory democracy in Latin America.

The Venezuelan experiment has attracted international attention, and there is

now an extensive literature evaluating the promised construction of the “com-

munal state” (Wilde, 2017a) and its most relevant implementation, the consejos

comunales (communal councils).

In what follows I focus on issues that approaches celebrating popular power

tend to neglect—the dependence of grassroots politics on institutions, the suc-

cess of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of

Venezuela—PSUV) in containing conflict and promoting the subordination of

popular sectors to institutional demands, and the clientelistic relations associ-

ated with the disbursement of state services and benefits in exchange for elec-

toral support. The role of political brokers operating in poor Venezuelan

neighborhoods is crucial to an understanding of the limits of grassroots agency

in the implementation of popular power. Barrio brokers mediate between

diverse interests: on the one hand, they serve the consolidation and continuity

of prevailing institutional power structures, and, on the other, they intercept

state resources and allot them to communities. Their success lies in the capacity

to satisfy both sides. Institutions and communities relate, to a great extent,