From Populism To Protagonism (and Back?) in Bolivarian Venezuela: Rethinking Ernesto Laclau’s on Populist Reason

Abstract

Ernesto Laclau’s On Populist Reason, now over a decade old, is one of our generation’s most nuanced contributions to debates on political community and social change in the era of mass democracy. Against critiques of populism as illiberal demagoguery, Laclau’s conceptualization emphasizes the discursive nature of power and politics and considers populist sequences as radical democratic openings in an era of consolidated global neoliberal capitalism. This article considers the shifting terrain of democracy – from liberal, to populist, and finally to protagonistic forms – in the context of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. I argue that despite Laclau’s important contributions, the formulations of power that underlie his populist reason are symptomatic rather than critical of contemporary liberal politics. The article offers an analysis of Bolivarian Venezuela that emphasizes popular experimentation with protagonism as an expression of democracy based in grassroots collective autonomy and direct democracy over the representation and managed development of the modern state.

Keywords:

• populism
• protagonism
• Ernesto Laclau
• Bolivarian Revolution
• Hugo Chávez
• constituent power
• democracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Many thanks are due to Megan Thomas, Juan Poblete, Michael Urban, Theresa Enright, and Alexander Hirsch for their helpful comments on previous drafts of this article I am also indebted for the encouraging and challenging comments of two anonymous reviewers, and to the editors of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Any errors or oversights are solely the fault of the author

2. Silva 2013.

3. Laclau 2005, 225.

4. Laclau 2005, ix.

5. Mainwaring 2012.

6. Castañeda (2006).

7. Conniff (1999).

8. Weyland 2013.

9. Laclau 2005, 19.

10. Indeed, Laclau only ever raises the spectre of the economy in order to dismiss it, and then only rarely at that.

11. Laclau 2005, 93.

12. Laclau 2005, 71.

13. Laclau 2005, 225.

14. Laclau 2005, 13.

15. Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 176.

16. Laclau 2005, 95.

17. Arditi 2003, 30.

18. Beasley Murray 2010b, 47.

19. Laclau 2005, 250.

20. Laclau 2005, 163.

21. Laclau 2005, 200.

22. Indeed, in a response to Slavoj Žižek’s critiques of On Populist Reason, Laclau (2014) is at pains to insist that his book outlines a general theory of politics, one centered on the symbolic construction of shared identities through mutual identification but, and primarily, through the symbolic representation of an antagonistic frontier. Here, Laclau accedes that this is precisely the modus operandi of Nazi and Fascist propagandists and ideologues. However, ‘there is nothing specifically Fascist in doing so, for there is no political discourse that does not construct its own symbols in that way. I would even say that this construction is the very definition of what politics is about … what else but a symbolic embodiment is involved in a political discourse that presents Wall Street as the source of all economic evils?’ (147).

23. Interestingly, in On Populist Reason, Laclau only considers Perón’s ‘second coming’ in 1973.

24. Romero 2002, 96.

25. Romero 2002, 132.

26. Once Perón was exiled, Peronista organizations – youth groups, unions, aid societies – were disbanded. Images of the leader, or of Evita, were banned and made punishable by imprisonment. Most importantly, Perón – now the absent father – was only able to talk to his followers under clandestine conditions: notes and recordings had to be smuggled into the country and delivered in person. In many cases, proxies passed instructions via word of mouth. There was, according to Laclau (2005), ‘a permanent chasm between Perón’s acts of enunciation (which were invisible) and the contents of those enunciations. As a result of this chasm, those contents – in the absence of any authorized interpreter – was endowed with a multiplicity of meanings a multiplicity of meanings’ (216).

27. Romero 2002, 197.

28. Laclau 2014, 19.

29. James 1988, 242–5.

30. Laclau 2006, 220.

31. Laclau 2005, 221. Indeed, by Daniel James’s (1988) account, competing elements of Peronismo during the years of exile usually identified one another as an existential and political threat – the Montoneros, for example, were just as if not more eager to execute collaborationist union chiefs as conservative politicos or members of the military (240).

32. Laclau 2005, 214.

33. Laclau 2005, 217.

34. Beasley Murray 2010b, 52.

35. Beasley Murray 2010b, 49.

36. Auyero 2001, 190; James 1988, 263–4.

37. Beasley Murray 2010b, 59.

38. For more on constituent power in Bolivarian Venezuela, see Azzellini 2013; Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, 2013b; Kingsbury 2013.

39. Auyero 2001, 196.

40. Beasley Murray 2010b, 30.

41. In his The Gramscian Moment Peter Thomas (2009) warns against appropriations of Antonio Gramsci’s theorization of hegemony such as that of Laclau. For Gramsci, Thomas illustrates, hegemony is always determined by a particular class struggle. In the original formulation, hegemony operates as a means to naturalize and reproduce bourgeois orders. For Thomas, Laclau’s approach dehistoricizes hegemony’s function in favour of an abstract logic of ‘the political.’ As a result, hegemony becomes ‘merely another variation within the problematic of (a particular concept of) sovereignty that dominated bourgeois political theory in the twentieth century. Ultimately, it issues in a political theory of ‘governance’ as a ‘technical,’ i.e., non-political, concern’ (221). Hegemony, like all politics, must be understood in terms of the class project in which it is situated as a tool lest it recreate and naturalize the self-serving notion that there is no alternative to liberal and bourgeois variants of democracy.

42. Weyland 2013, 22. Indeed, many critics at home and abroad of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, insist on pointing out that the current president ‘is no Chávez’ – and that he lacks his predecessor’s bombastic personality and connection with ‘the people.’ While such characterizations are obvious to the point of a banality, they also reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the Bolivarian project as being reducible to a single leader. While Chávez was without question an important figure in the Revolution, the project’s substance is constitutive, not representative.

43. Corrales and Penfold 2011, 138.

44. Raby 2006, 188.

45. Martínez, Fox, and Farrell 2010; Raby 2006.

46. Coronil and Skurski 1999.

47. The exact number of dead and disappeared in the caracazo continues to be disputed. Officially, the death toll was quickly established by the government at 276. However, record-keeping in the city's morgues was notoriously inexact or tampered with, and mass graves continued to be discovered well into the 1990s. Independent researchers and testimonies gathered by victims’ organizations put the number of fatalities during the events between 2,000 and 3,000 souls. On the caracazo as foundation for the Bolivarian Revolution, see Beasley-Murray 2010a; Ciccariello-Maher 2013a; Kingsbury 2013.

48. Ellner and Tinker Salas 2007, 5.

49. López Maya 2005.

50. A similar rationale can be seen in Chavismo’s embrace and deployment of the figure of Simón Bolívar. The nineteenth-century ‘father’ of the country and the promise of something ‘new’ allowed for potentially competing desires for equality, social order, heroic action, and national sovereignty to be pulled into a tight orbit around Chávez’s Fifth Republic Movement (MVR, for its initials in Spanish).

51. Wilpert 2007, 19. It should also be noted, however, that these early elections saw the lowest turnout in an election in which the presidency was at stake.

52. Ciccariello-Maher 2013a, 237.

53. Laclau 2006, 57.

54. Negri 1992, 11.

55. Negri 1992, 313.

56. Kingsbury 2013.

57. Motta 2013, 38. See also the contributions to Spronk and Webber 2011.

58. This is not to suggest that in the aftermath of the 2003 lockout the constituent core of Chavismo became somehow homogeneous, or that the shift to a new and more egalitarian moment of protagonistic democracy was irreversible or complete. Far from it. Internal debates continued and positions proliferated around the internal democracy of the movement – especially since the formation of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV, for its initials in Spanish) and the recentralization of power around the executive branch was even acknowledged by Chávez shortly before his death. In the Chavista camp, debates continue despite the steady closure of space for internal dissent under Maduro on questions of centralization and autogestión, sexual diversity, on indigenous sovereignty and land reform, on how to deal with the opposition, ecology and conservation, and how to pursue economic development – to cite only a few significant issues of contention within the Bolivarian camp.

59. Colectivo Situaciones 2011, 7.

60. Denis 2001, 11.

61. See comments on the formation of the PSUV by the contributors to Spronk and Webber (2011).

62. Colectivo Situaciones 2011, 28.

63. Azzellini 2013.

64. See, for a theorization and roadmap of the consejo’s increased role in governance and politics in Venezuela, the Ministerio del Poder Popular para las Comunas y Movimientos Sociales (Popular Power Ministry for Communes and Social Movements) 2013–2016 Strategic Development Plan Comuna o Nada (Commune or Nothing) available at http://www.mpcomunas.gob.ve/plan-politico-estrategico-comuna-o-nada.

65. Lander 2008, 157.

66. Cannon 2014; Gil Yepes 2011.

67. See for example Alejandro Velasco’s (2011) account of the revolutionary roots of collectives in the Caracas perish 23 de enero and Sujatha Fernandes’s work on urban social movements (2010). For a more critical approach, see López Maya and Lander (2011).

68. Denis (2013).

69. Ciccariello-Maher 2014; Lovato 2015; Kingsbury 2014; Tinker Salas 2014

70. Denis 2012

71. Colón Ríos 2012, 17–18.

72. Ciccariello-Maher 2014.

73. Ciccariello-Maher 2014, 801–2.

74. Chávez 2012, 20.

75. Chávez 2012, 37.

76. Chávez 2012, 22–3.

77. Chávez 2012, 27.

78. Laclau 2005, 231.