Book Reviews

Ellner, S. (2008) Rethinking Venezuelan Politics; Class, Conflict and the ChavezPhenomenon, Lynne Rienner (Boulder, PA), xiv + 256 pp. $55.00 hbk.

Steve Ellner is a well known historian of Venezuela who has produced an accessibleand informative account of the Chavez presidency to date. His approach is moderatelysympathetic toward Chavismo, though the work never degenerates into polemic. Thiswork fills an evident gap in the literature and its general tone of reasonableness andlucidity marks it out as a refreshing read on a subject that has involved so muchpolemic. There is a lot of valuable information here, and the book would be an idealtext at master’s degree or advanced undergraduate level. Ellner naturally seeks to placehis subject in historical context and most of the first half of the book deals essentiallywith the period before Chavez was elected to the presidency in 1998. There are thenchapters detailing the evolution of the Chavez presidency, from its early moderationto the more confrontational period starting late in 2001 and the attempt to introducefull-scale socialism after around 2004, as well as chapters dealing with internationalaspects of the Chavez government and his efforts to stimulate popular participation.

While generally sympathetic to Chavez, Ellner does make the claim in his historicalchapters that any wholesale condemnation of all of Venezuela’s post-1958 governmentsfor being out of touch and elitist would be exaggerated. In its early years, democraticVenezuela was governed by a multi-class if somewhat corrupt partidocracy, whichredistributed the country’s oil wealth out of a mixture of motives that included both agenuine desire for social progress and cynical political calculation. This model, whichwas acceptable in principle to the vast majority of Venezuelans, ran into trouble

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Book Reviews

in the 1980s and was effectively abandoned by the political elite in 1989. It wasthis abandonment in favour of ‘Washington consensus’ neoliberalism that stimulatedpopular rejection of the entire system, and this ultimately led to the election of HugoChavez. Ellner’s interpretation of the decline of the pre-Chavez democratic systemis mostly convincing but it does not really address the issue of whether the secondPerez and Caldera governments had much autonomy over policy-making given the lowinternational oil prices prevailing between 1986 and 1999. No government can forlong redistribute income that it does not have, though Lusinchi tried to do so in themid-1980s and built up a serious degree of national debt to add to Venezuela’s otherproblems. It was the mismanagement of the 1970s oil boom when Venezuela’s rulers didhave feasible alternatives that set the scene for the later economic and political declineof the old system. Incidentally it was also the comprehensive failure of Venezuelangovernance during this previous oil boom period that also makes it insufficient to regardthe Chavez government as being simply a lucky beneficiary of high oil prices.

Turning to the Chavez government itself, Ellner points out that it started outcautiously and then roused the opposition to fury by radicalising. Then, once oppositionattacks on his presidency had been beaten off, it adopted a model that was far moreopen to ‘bottom-up’ pressures for direct redistribution than his rather paternalisticpredecessors were. His foreign policy has also been much more openly hostile toWashington than any of his elected predecessors, though this is an area in which Ellnerrather downplays the extent of Chavez’s headline-grabbing radicalism.

Conceptually, the work is a reasonably straightforward piece of political history,in that it is primarily an attempt to interpret events rather than theorise problems.Broader ideas about class and economic structure are used as ways of characterisingthe course of Venezuelan politics, and Ellner’s treatment of some of the interpretativeliterature on Chavez (notably the claim made in some other works that Chavez isjust another populist) is sophisticated and convincing. However, there is rather littlediscussion of the economy or society as independent influences on politics or evenas long-term structures. Discussion of oil and oil related issues is conspicuous by itsabsence. Moreover, the actual discussion focuses mainly – quite understandably - onpolitical events. This is quite defensible as an approach, but the word ‘class’ does appearin the sub-title without being very much developed in the discussion itself. For example,the chapter entitled ‘conflicting currents in the Chavez movement’ divides governmentsupporters into soft and hard liners and does not really dispel any supposition thatthese may be heterogeneous sets of actors within a loose multi-class coalition. This mayindeed be a correct understanding, but it would be good to have had more discussionof the general issue.

George PhilipLondon School of Economics

© 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2010 Society for Latin American StudiesBulletin of Latin American Research Vol. 29, No. 2 255