Hunter S Thompson once wrote of San Francisco in the 1960s, ‘with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.’ His sentiment of faded hope also captures the view of many of us who initially found reasons for optimism in the project of 21st century socialism that began to be constructed in Venezuela at the beginning of the millennium, initially under Hugo Chávez. It is this project, its promise, potential and at times its contradictions, that is the topic of Rowan Lubbock’s book, Cultivating Socialism: Venezuela, ALBA, and the Politics of Food Sovereignty with specific attention paid to the regional initiative Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de N
uestra América, or Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, ALBA.
Before I engage with some key themes of the book I think it is first vital to acknowledge the importance of the work Rowan has produced. In reading the book I found it elegant and engaging, complex yet still clear. Moreover, the analysis provided by the book is timely. I recall during my own academic journey, travelling to conferences of the largest academic societies for Latin American studies in the first decade or so of the Bolivarian regime when proceedings would be buzzing with commentary and hope for what Venezuela heralded for radical politics. This optimism has now largely receded – the wave has broken and rolled back – and with it the presentations and papers on Venezuela have quickly waned too. The reasons for the current malaise remain heavily debated (see here, and here for a counter position). However, it is nevertheless important both to see Venezuela back on the agenda, and to read a refreshing analysis that attempts to engage with both the potential that was offered, and to explain many of the failures of that political project. To that end, I found the book highly informative and my engagement with it here is intended not so much to challenge its central claims, but rather to have fruitful dialogue in trying to understand the current conjuncture.
The main issue I want to probe is the thorny problem of the state and radical transformation in the Latin American Pink Tide experience, and how we theorise and reflect on this. The book draws heavily on the state theory of Nicos Poulantzas, and his landmark text State, Power Socialism. Lest some think that the theorisation of the state is unimportant to practical matters of transformation, I would offer the case of Bolivia, where former vice president Álvaro García Linera invoked this text in perhaps his most important writing, Forma valor y forma comunidad. Poulantzas’s state theory provides several important postulates that comprise a crucial point of departure for evaluating the emancipatory potential of a radical state. He argues that 1) we must examine the ‘material substratum’ of the state to derive is character, 2) any state is always beset by class contradictions and is not a monolithic formation, 3) political struggles always take place within the state, 4) in thinking about issues of transformation, any transition to socialism should be a gradual rather than rapid process (which may involve the retention of capitalism for some time). Nevertheless, Poulantzas argues that 5) for a meaningful transition to occur, mass movements must remain in active support of this project and alternative grassroots forms of popular democracy must proliferate as a dual form of power of the left. The last point, so vital to the optimism at the beginning of the Pink Tide era, seems to me perhaps the most questionable, not just to Venezuela but to a number of states that formed the crucial axis of the Pink Tide (witness for example the recent fall from power of the MAS in Bolivia). My question would therefore be whether a) the state has failed to fully support alternative models of sovereignty and b) whether or not at times it has actively worked to undermine these alternative forms?
I pose these questions as, drawing from Philip McMichael, the issue of ‘multiple sovereignty’ emerged as a recurring leitmotif of the book. The multiplication of the spaces of sovereignty has also been a major feature of other professed post-neoliberal states. Bolivia for example, the case I have been most familiar with, declared itself as a plurinational state in 2009. This brought with it the promise to overcome the singular and homogenous form of sovereignty associated with the Westphalian state-system. However, as I have argued elsewhere, the extractive model of development pursued by most Pink Tide states has rendered this political project highly contradictory. When thinking about the issue of sovereignty I wondered whether the book could have found space to engage with contemporary Indigenous political theorists. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, for example, speaks not of ‘multiple sovereignty’ but rather ‘incommensurable sovereignties’ that I think is highly instructive. In a similar fashion, Audra Simpson notes the zero-sum game involved in claims of multiple sovereignty noting that, ‘In situations in which sovereignties are nested and embedded, one proliferates at the other’s expense.’ Drawing from these insights, does this not mean we have to reflect on the limits of neo-extractive development more broadly and how it actually renders alternative forms of sovereignty unlikely? I have argued that resource nationalism, of the sort practiced in Venezuela and elsewhere, ultimately leads to the reinscribing of a state-based colonial cartography that impedes alternative territorial claims and results in the state engaging in the very predatory forms of behaviour it initially sought to transcend.
On a related, but slightly different tack on state theory, one area of the book I would seek dialogue with is the relatively curt engagement with the Gramscian concept of passive revolution. Lubbock writes, ‘as insightful as this Gramscian framework may be, it tends to remain limited to the state/social movement relationship at the expense of a more class-relational reading of socioeconomic production.’ In my view, this was something of a missed opportunity to engage more with this as an idea, as to my mind passive revolution and its associated notion of transformism would seem to complement, rather than compete with the overall findings of the book. In putting forward the concept of passive revolution, Gramsci is essentially talking about the manner in which the state is able to absorb discontent and thus come to replace social movements as the major vector of social change, preventing more grassroots modes of transformation. Rather than providing a limited theoretical view (as charged), it struck me this concept would have enhanced the otherwise commendable analysis of authoritarian statism in Venezuela. If we take the two following lines from the book as major examples, I believe an engagement with passive revolution would have been apt:
With the statization of property rights, the division of manual/intellectual labor continues, and thus sovereign power is maintained under the “state capitalist.” (p. 157)
And yet, between social movements and the state, it was the latter that won out over the former (p. 115)
In his landmark book Envisaging Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright, spoke of three distinct strategies for revolutionary transformation. These were 1) ruptural, 2) intersticial and 3) symbiotic (using state power but also drawing in the support of elites and dominant classes). It was the latter strategy that Wright argued was the most viable. Indeed, this has been the favoured model of Latin American transformation with the move towards post-neoliberalism. However, the experience of the Pink Tide has also shown the limits of the state as an agent of emancipatory potential. The book does not directly address this at the theoretical level, but recent work has usefully drawn our attention to whether the state really can be an agent of decolonisation.
Let me finally turn to issues of the future. Lubbock is able to skilfully point to some of the contradictions and problems of the Bolivarian Revolution without dismissing the experience of it. Offering an overview of the Pink Tide he concludes that the ‘Latin American project of “socialism in the twenty-first century” was neither a complete success nor an utter failure but a concrete historical moment in which the cultivation of el pueblo (the people) moved through a dynamic synthesis of political forces.’ This however, raises a number of questions, which I realise are too large to expect an easy response to. What reasons are there for retaining optimism in the current conjuncture? Is it possible to challenge path dependencies, most notably of resource extraction? How can leftist movements in the region overcome the perennial problem of the personalism of leaders? Finally, what are the lessons to be learned for the left – both in and beyond Latin America – from the region’s last two decades of struggle?
The book perhaps does not, and cannot be expected to provide all the answers. What it does masterfully, however is to provoke the reader to ask the important questions.
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