Whoâs Afraid of Hugo ChĂĄvez? Race, Empire, and Chavismoâs Revolutionary Subjectivity

Orinoco Tribune – News and opinion pieces about Venezuela and beyond
From Venezuela and made by Venezuelan Chavistas
By Lucas M. Koerner – Mar 17, 2021
What is it about ChĂĄvez and the national-popular movement bearing his name that is so threatening to the US Empire to this day?
âEmbodying at once the âredâ and âblackâ scares, Venezuela is cast as a global socialist narco-terrorist âsuperpredatorâ capable of stealing the 2020 election as well as âflooding the US with cocaineâ and simultaneously as a kleptocratic âbasket case.ââ
For years, a specter has haunted the West, the specter of populism. Spawned originally by the leftist âPink Tideâ sweeping Latin America in the 2000s, the populist menace has morphed into a generalized moral panic following the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The far-right real estate mogul has come to personify the proverbial barbarian at the gates of liberal democracy, in the eyes of the US ruling class, alongside an unlikely doppelganger: Venezuelaâs socialist Afro-indigenous president, Hugo ChĂĄvez FrĂas, who according to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani recently returned from the grave to rig the 2020 US election. How are we to understand US elitesâ obsession with ChĂĄvez and what can that tell us about the racial ideology underpinning US imperialism? What is it about ChĂĄvez and the national-popular movement bearing his name that is so threatening to the US Empire to this day? In what follows, I will make a case for reading the reactionary fixation with ChĂĄvez as an index of Chavismoâs enduring world-historical significance. I argue that ChĂĄvez must be taken seriously as a Marxist thinker whose praxis of âmutual interpellationâ with the popular masses â perhaps unique in the post-Cold War world â has crucial implications for revolutionary theory and practice across the globe.
Race and ideological representation
In the aftermath of Trumpâs defeat, Rudy Giuliani accused  Venezuela of meddling in the 2020 US election together with billionaire financier George Soros and the Peopleâs Republic of China. Meanwhile from the other side of the political spectrum, the New York Times broke with its time-honored practice of promoting  baseless fraud claims  targeting official US enemies, warning  that in refusing to recognize the election result, Trump took up the âtime-honored tools of dictators⌠commonly employed by leaders like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, NicolĂĄs Maduro of Venezuela and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia.â The apparent political conflict occults the fundamental ideological consensus: both the Trumpian âfringeâ and the (neo)liberal-neoconservative âextreme centerâ construe Chavismo as a threat to democracy that must be violently contained through murderous economic sanctions  and/or âhumanitarian intervention.â
How are we to understand this convergence? In Abolition Democracy, Angela Davis writes: â[T]he terrain for the production of the terrorist as a figure in the American imaginary reflects vestiges of previous moral panics as well, including those instigated by the mass fear of the criminal and the communist.â[1] Charisse Burden-Stelly elaborates on this insight, observing that âthe Communist was n*****ized insofar as the n***** is the most âinferior, stained, and impureâ non-white. The Communist/Black became entangled as not-white/not-American since whiteness meant citizenship, nationalism, patriotism, and belonging.â[2] Anti-communism and anti-blackness are thus interwoven into the discursive fabric of the US imperial ideology of American exceptionalism, which presents the United States as a uniquely endowed âland of opportunityâ where hard work is the only barrier to social mobility. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor observes, cultural racism is indispensable in cohering this foundational meritocratic fantasy by disavowing its underside of disproportionately black poverty systemically (re)produced by capitalism.[3] In other words, by blaming black as well as poor white people for their poverty while cultivating a black bourgeois elite, the US imperial stateâs ideological apparatuses aim to inoculate the body politic against the virus of communism and anti-capitalist radicalism more broadly.
âAnti-communism and anti-blackness are interwoven into the discursive fabric of the US imperial ideology of American exceptionalism.â
Following Stuart Hall,[4] Chavismo and its metonym âVenezuelaâ function within this discourse as a floating signifier that oscillates between the ân*****izedâ particularity of tropical populist âauthoritarianismâ on the one hand and the universality of âcommunism,â âsocialism,â and Muslim-aligned ânarco-terrorismâ through its (real or imagined) association with Cuba, China, Russia, Iran, Hizbollah, Soros, and the FARC on the other. Embodying at once the âredâ and âblackâ scares, Venezuela is cast as a global socialist narco-terrorist  âsuperpredatorâ capable of stealing the 2020 election as well as âflood[ing] the US with cocaine â and simultaneously as a kleptocratic âbasket caseâ parasitically rich in oil wealth but starving its own people. And precisely because Chavismo is an empty signifier, it can acquire different valences according to its position in the signifying chain. As we have seen above, Venezuela is undoubtedly the fantasmatic Other of a US and Ibero-Latin American far-right, for whom it fulfills extraordinary functions from masterminding mass protests in Chile , Ecuador , and the United States  itself to controlling political parties and politicians, whether Spainâs Podemos , the US Democrats, or Colombiaâs Gustavo Petro . Meanwhile, for the âextreme center,â Chavismo occupies a subsidiary position in relation to the master-signifier of âRussiaâ which is believed to have engineered the rise of Trump and right-wing populism across the global North, notably with âChavista characteristics.â As Hall emphasizes, the racialized floating signifier slides seamlessly between biology and culture such that Chavismo has âcontagion effects beyond Venezuela â and Russians are âalmost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor .â We must ask then, what is it about Chavismo that allows it to play this critical role in sustaining the ideological fantasies of both the Trumpian ultra-right and the establishment âextreme centerâ in the context of arguably the deepest institutional crisis since the US Civil War?
ChĂĄvezâs Bolivarian Marxism
As Reinaldo Iturriza, Ociel LĂłpez, George Ciccariello-Maher, and others have documented,[5] Chavismo was not a top-down creation of ChĂĄvez but a bottom-up movement â organized by the black and indigenous semi-proletariat of the peripheral shantytowns alongside former communist guerillas â of which the future president was himself a product. It was precisely this class fraction, constituted by small producers displaced from the countryside without being fully integrated into the industrial or service sectors,[6] which similarly played a decisive role in the Algerian Revolution and Black Freedom Struggle in the US.[7] And like both revolutionary sequences, the Bolivarian Process was, from the outset, a movement of world-historical significance. Just months before the Berlin Wall fell and Western imperialism proclaimed the end of history, the Venezuelan masses came down from the hills in the first ever rebellion against IMF-imposed neoliberal structural adjustment, known as the Caracazo. A decade later, as the Bush administration geared up to destroy âseven countries in five years,â ChĂĄvez was once again raising the banners of Third World nationalism and eventually twenty-first-century socialism, initiating a wave of left-wing advances across the hemisphere.  From the Bolivarian Alliance of Peoples of Our America  (ALBA) and PetroCaribe  to the Union of South American Nations  (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States  (CELAC), Venezuela and Cuba spearheaded a counter-hegemonic project of worldmaking, which sought not just ânondominationâ[8] vis-Ă -vis US imperialism but, at least in the case of the ALBA, socialist delinking from the capitalist world-system.
âVenezuela and Cuba spearheaded a counter-hegemonic project of worldmaking.â
It is not entirely surprising that, despite being battered by US economic carpet bombing  and non-stop coup efforts that have strengthened  the hand  of rightist  reformist forces within the state, Chavismo continues to be the boogeyman of Euro-American ruling classes across the hemisphere just like revolutionary Haiti was in the nineteenth-century.[9] Indeed, the histories of both Caribbean nations have long been intertwined: Haiti played a pivotal role in Venezuelan independence and arguably anticipated  the âPink Tideâ with the 1984-86 revolt that toppled Jean-Claude Duvalier and paved the way for the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the regionâs first elected leftist since Salvador Allende. The present Haitian rebellion against the Biden-backed MoĂŻse dictatorship continues in this tradition, possibly prefiguring a new leftist cycle in the region.
Perhaps we should read the reactionary obsession with Chavismo as a symptom of its world-historical importance, which has been ignored by a Western left busy proclaiming  the end  of the Pink Tide that it did little to defend  from unceasing imperialist aggression in the first place. Indeed Chavismo has been largely pigeonholed within the paradoxically narrow yet overly broad frame of âpopulism,â[10]impeding consideration of its transversal theoretical implications. ChĂĄvez, in particular, has not only been utterly discounted as a serious revolutionary thinker, but his theoretical-political innovations have been distorted[11] by the corporate media and even the Western social democratic left, who portray the Venezuelan leader as at best a tropical social democrat or at worst an authoritarian populist strongman.[12] Apropos Cedric Robinson, it might thus be productive to reflect on ChĂĄvezâs relationship with Marxism and other revolutionary traditions. As Iturriza observes, ChĂĄvez understood that to construct a new popular majority with the âdark [semi-]proletariatâ[13] at its core, it was necessary to go âbeyond the left,â as former communist guerrilla leader Alfredo Maneiro and others argued, breaking with the traditional organizing praxes of parliamentarianism and trade unionism that failed to garner more than five percent of the electorate for decades:
âIt might be productive to reflect on ChĂĄvezâs relationship with Marxism and other revolutionary traditions.â
His [ChĂĄvezâs] âdiscoveryâ of the key idea of participatory and protagonistic democracy was decisive. It implied radically, mercilessly questioning of the traditional political culture of the left. For starters, the political leadership would have to abandon any pretension of being an âenlightened vanguardâ and would have to learn to move through the popular catacombs… like fish in the water. They could take the word to the people, yes, but above all come to and understand the suffering of the masses and accompany their struggles. It seems to me that ChĂĄvez, who has been accused of being a messianic, vertical, authoritarian leader, understood that the common citizen had to be treated as an equal: with respect and dignity. I am not at all sure that weâve assimilated his profound impact in the sphere of political culture![14]
ChĂĄvez thus embraced a dialectic of âmutual interpellationâ vis-Ă -vis the pueblo[15] â arguably unique in the post-Cold War world[16] â, which was simultaneously thrust upon him from below. Driven forward by the âwhipâ  of US-led counter-revolution, the Venezuelan leader came to adopt the âstrategic hypothesisâ of the commune, a form of bottom-up territorial organization combining participatory democracy exercised by communal councils with socialized control of the means of production, which he conceived as the foundation for a popular-democratic hegemony capable of confronting the metabolic logic of capital embedded in the petro-state.[17] In this sense, the comandante articulated a vision of âtwenty-first-century socialismâ that sought to transcend the failures and defeats of the USSR and of an orthodox Venezuelan left nursed on Soviet manuals, proposing to radically transform bourgeois representative democracy paradoxically through popular participation at and beyond the ballot box. Immanent in Chavismo is a critique of Western Marxism not altogether different from that advanced by Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism. However, ChĂĄvez (and the Chavista movement) never saw any fundamental contradiction between the Marxist and Bolivarian traditions, as evidenced in the late presidentâs weekly AlĂł Presidente television broadcasts where he seamlessly referenced Marx, Bolivar, Lenin, Zamora, Mao, MartĂ, Luxumburg, Trotsky, Christ, Che, Gramsci, Kropotkin, MariĂĄtegui, MĂŠszĂĄros, among numerous other revolutionary thinkers. Indeed for ChĂĄvez, Marxism was not a mere âapprenticeshipâ or âstaging area for⌠[his] immersionâ[18] into an autochthonous radicalism but a tradition he fully embraced in the final years of his life as
undoubtedly the most advanced theory firstly in the scientific interpretation of history, of peoplesâ concrete reality, and also⌠the most advanced proposal towards [creating] the world that Christ came to herald over 2,000 years ago, the kingdom of God here on Earth, the kingdom of equality [âŚ].[19]
âThe comandante articulated a vision of âtwenty-first-century socialismâ that sought to transcend the failures and defeats of the USSR and of an orthodox Venezuelan left.â
But like countless fellow revolutionaries across the global South and within the imperial core, ChĂĄvez and other Venezuelan militants[20]âstretchedâ[21] Marxism to account for Venezuelan reality â the predominance of an urban black and indigenous semi-proletariat in a peripheral rentier capitalist social formation â, and in demonstrating its incompleteness, reconstituted the originally Euro-centered theory as a concrete universality embodying that excluded particularity.[22] ChĂĄvezâs was thus a distinctly Bolivarian Marxism initially elaborated by the former communist guerrillas of the Party of the Venezuelan Revolution (PRV) that drew as much from âliberation theology, [the Afro-Venezuelan cult of] MarĂa Lionza, MariĂĄtegui, and the history of slave rebellions in Venezuela and elsewhereâ[23] as it did from Marx, Lenin, or Gramsci. It was precisely this theoretical reflection forged in the heat of revolutionary practice that led ChĂĄvez to place the protagonism of Venezuelaâs âdark [semi-]proletariatâ[24] at the center of his strategic political project of communal socialism and anti-imperialist internationalism.
The Struggle Against Empire
The fantasmatic fixation with Chavismo on the part of US ruling class fractions tells us a lot about the racial ideology of American exceptionalism undergirding US imperialism. This paranoia might best be interpreted as an index of Chavismoâs enduring liberatory potential whose universal implications I have taken a very tentative first step in partially sketching out. Most of my discussion has centered on ChĂĄvez as theorist-cum-strategist, which is a line of inquiry largely neglected by Northern scholars and leftist intellectuals, who have yet to take seriously the late presidentâs revolutionary thought. However, the Bolivarian movement crucially âprecededâ and âexceededâ[25] its dialectical relationship with ChĂĄvez, and as such we must continue to excavate its past and living present through bottom-up social history. But this can be no idle intellectual pursuit: theoretically reckoning with Chavismo must be organically embedded in an anti-imperialist praxis aimed at urgently halting the murderous US onslaught against not only Venezuela and countless other global South nations from Yemen and Syria to Cuba and Iran, but also black, red, and other communities of color within the empire.
Notes
[1]  Angela Y Davis, Abolition Democracy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010).
[2]  Charisse Burden-Stelly, âCold War Culturalism and African Diaspora Theory: Some Theoretical Sketches,â Souls 19, no. 2 (February 13, 2017): 216, https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2016.1239169.
[3]  Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2016).
[4]  Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
[5]  Reinaldo Iturriza López, El Chavismo Salvaje (Caracas: Editorial Trinchera, 2016). George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chåvez (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). Ociel Alà López, ¥Dale Mås Gasolina! Chavismo, Sifrinismo, y Burocracia(Caracas: Casa Nacional de las Letras AndrÊs Bello). Also see Alejandro Velasco, Barrio rising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
[6]  âThis expelled population has a fundamental function in the world economy, not merely as a labour reserve which drives down wages all around (Foster et al. 2011b), but as a reserve which also âsubsidizesâ the reproduction of capital by its own unremunerated labour. The self-exploitation of the semi-proletariat is a key dimension of super-exploitation, and is itself an extra-economic contribution to capital, in the sense of not being accounted for by the market.â Sam Moyo, Paris Yeros, and Praveen Jha, âImperialism and Primitive Accumulation: Notes on the New Scramble for Africa,â Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 1, no. 2 (2012): 181-203, DOI: 10.1177/227797601200100203, 187. Women in particular are disproportionately exploited by virtue of their uncompensated reproductive labor. For more on the position of women in Bolivarian Venezuela, see Venezuelanalysis.com .
[7]  Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 130. David Hilliard and Donald Weise, eds., The Huey P. Newton Reader (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2019), 210. Hartman similarly narrates the revolutionary experiences of black semi-proletarian women in the early twentieth-century northern US. See Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019).
[8]  Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 36. Curiously, Getachew does not mention these initiatives in the text, nor does she treat Cubaâs protagonist role in anti-imperialist worldmaking of the 1960s through the 1980s.
[9]  C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins; Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1963). Julius Sherrard Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (New York: Verso, 2018). Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
[10]  Formalist theories of populism like that of Ernesto Laclau empty movements of their particular content, placing Chavismo under the same analytical rubric as far right-wing populisms like that led by George Wallace. These approaches likewise tend to abstract the Bolivarian Process from a longer popular revolutionary tradition that includes the USSR, China, Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, among others. See George Ciccariello-Maher, âPopulism, Universalism, and Democracy in Latin America,â in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory (Oxford University Press, 2020). Benjamin L. McKean, âToward an Inclusive Populism? On the Role of Race and Difference in Laclauâs Politics,â Political Theory 44, no. 6 (August 3, 2016): 797â820, https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591716647771.
[11]  As Lenin observed in State and Revolution , âToday, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul.â My gratitude to Chris Gilbert for pointing this out to me.
[12]  These tropes regularly appear side by side. For instance, the Guardianâs Rory Carroll branded  ChĂĄvez a âdemocrat and autocrat, a progressive and a bully.â Carroll has since continued  to smear ChĂĄvez by regularly comparing him to Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Bhaskar Sunkara dubbed  ChĂĄvez a âpost-modern PerĂłnâ whose âradical populismâ he dismisses as a mere âstand-in for twenty-first-century socialism.â At no point, did the Jacobin editor mention the unremitting US imperialist assault that played a significant role in rendering Venezuela ultimately âincapable either of efficiently managing the capitalist state or offering a post-capitalist alternative,â through coup attempts, economic warfare, as well as internal destabilization.
[13]  W E Burghardt Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1935), 16.
[14]  Reinaldo Iturriza, Chavismo and the Left: A Conversation with Reinaldo Iturriza (Part II), interview by Cira Pascual Marquina, Venezuelanalysis.com, October 20, 2020, https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/15023.
[15]  Iturriza, El Chavismo Salvaje, 27, translation mine.
[16]Â Â I am grateful to Max Ajl for clarifying this point.
[17]  Chris Gilbert, âThe ChĂĄvez Hypothesis: Vicissitudes of a Strategic Project,â CounterPunch.org, May 19, 2017, https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/05/19/the-chavez-hypothesis-vicissitudes-of-a-strategic-project. See also George Ciccariello-Maher, Building The Commune: Radical Democracy In Venezuela (New York: Verso; Jacobin, 2016). Dario Azzellini and Ned Sublette, Communes and Workersâ Control in VenezuelaâŻ: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below (Chicago, Il: Haymarket Books, 2018). Cira Pascual Marquina and Chris Gilbert, eds., Venezuela, the Present as Struggle: Voices from the Bolivarian Revolution (New York: Monthly Review, 2020). On the petro-state and Venezuelaâs dependent rentier capitalism, see Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2008).
[18]  Cedric J Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 2000), 5; xv; xxxii.
[19]Â Â âLegado de ChĂĄvez: ChĂĄvez En Discurso El 15-01-2010 Parte 1-3 – YouTube,â www.youtube.com, July 14, 2013, https://youtu.be/SNB6QlDzdrY?t=3894.
[20]  See George Ciccariello-Maher, âVenezuela: Bolivarianism and the commune,â in Rethinking Latin American Social Movements: Radical Action from below, eds. Richard Stahler-Sholk, Harry E. Vanden, and Marc Becker (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
[21]  Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 40.
[22]  See Santiago Castro-GĂłmez, Revoluciones sin sujeto: Slavoj Zizek y la crĂtica del historicismo posmoderno (Mexico, DF: Akal, 2015). See also Zizekâs introduction to Mao Tse-Tung, On Practice and Contradiction (London: Verso, 2007), 4. âThis is the movement of âconcrete universalityâ, this radical âtransubstantiationâ through which the original theory has to reinvent itself in a new context: only by way of surviving this transplant can it emerge as effectively universal.â
[23]  Ciccariello-Maher, âVenezuela: Bolivarianism and the commune.â ChĂĄvezâs elder brother, AdĂĄn, was a militant of the PRV in the 1970s. See also, Ciccariello-Maher, We Created ChĂĄvez.
[24]  Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 16.
[25]Â Â Ciccariello-Maher, âVenezuela: Bolivarianism and the commune.â
Lucas M. Koerner  is a Doctoral Student in Latin American and Caribbean History. After completing his B.A. in sociology and Spanish at Tufts University in 2014, he lived in Caracas, Venezuela for five years, working as a staff writer and editor at the independent news outlet Venezuelanalysis.com. Lucasâ research interests include imperialism, populism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism(s) of the global South.
Featured image: File Photo.
Lucas Koerner is a journalist and political analyst based in Caracas, Venezuela. He currently serves on the editorial board of Venezuelanalysis.
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