A Blessing and a Curse: Oil, Politics, and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela

The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela has gone through a cycle of hope and disillusion that is hard to grasp. The entire affective and social dimensions of these ups and downs cannot be understood without a fine ethnographic view of the everyday life of Venezuelans. Wilde's book does precisely that. This is an ethnography of the development of revolutionary political subjectivity from the point of view of a family of activists. Wilde's book traces in detail their involvement with the new ideas of participatory democracy under Chávez and how the condition of this political participation changed over time. Since the early 2000s, the transformation of Chavez's government into the Bolivarian Revolution produced one of the most hopeful moments in Venezuela's recent history. The rise to power of President Hugo Chavéz was the product of the disillusion Venezuelans felt with the previous democratic governments that were perceived as corrupt and ineffective. Venezuela was caught at the time in a cycle of economic and political crises that spanned the 1980s and 1990s. During this time, Venezuelans lost faith in the de facto bipartisan system that replaced the early 20th-century dictatorships. These 20th-century democratic regimes emerged at the same time that Venezuela became an oil-dependent country, producing what Fernando Coronil (1997) referred to as the magical state. This magical state depended on an economy almost completely based on the capture of rent from oil exploitation, which made it almost impossible to diversify other sectors of the economy and made the state produce seemingly magical acts of development and social welfare. This made the country rich at times but also very vulnerable to ups and downs of energy markets and geopolitical crisis in the Middle East. Ever since this transformation, economic fluctuations have been felt very directly in Venezuelans daily lives. This is what Wilde's interlocutors referred to as a blessing and a curse. In Venezuela, oil is at the same time the substance that makes possible the dream of individual, social, and national development and the reason why those dreams can dissolve overnight. Wilde's ethnographic research on Venezuela covers the period from 2008 to 2017, which was an extraordinary moment to capture the transition from the government of Hugo Chavéz to the authoritarian hands of Nicolas Maduro. This ethnographic research was done from one of the moments in which oil prices and the capture of rent by the state were at their highest in Venezuelan history to the complete collapse in oil prices in the mid-2010s. In this context, Wilde positioned himself within the life of a single family in El Camoruco, a barrio in the city of Valencia in central Venezuela. This is a positioning that seemed dictated as much by circumstance as it was by research planning. Rafael and Yulmi Hernández allowed Wilde to move into their expanding household. The Hernández were very active in social work around their neighborhood long before the Bolivarian Revolution started. As a matter of fact, they had met and started a family in the context of their social activism. For them, the rise of the Bolivarian Revolution presented an opportunity to embrace this leadership role in the community that resonated with their moral and ethical values. Wilde explores this ethical and moral dimension throughout the book in a way that is enlightening. In the book there is a constant movement of scale between El Camoruco and the larger national political context in Venezuela. This movement across contexts is necessary to understand how revenue from oil exploitation is involved in every aspect of the reproduction of the magical state. Wilde's ethnographic contextualization of this process is the mirror image of Fernando Coronil's because it is a view from below and from the periphery of this process. While Coronil shows the state formation from above, Wilde's book shows us the effects of the magical state from the eyes of the subjects it intends to transform. This is why his ethnography is an excellent window into the ethical world that Chavismo has intended to build and how it has been unable to escape the logic of oil dependency. The limits of this book are set up by its methodological positioning. The author's research shows the process of revolutionary transformation that a very committed family has undergone under the Bolivarian Revolution, and, of course, in a country as divided as Venezuela, this cannot be easily extrapolated to the entire country. The author seems very aware of this fact, and the reader is made aware of these limits. The ethnographic analysis is therefore as balanced and well positioned as any ethnographic analysis can be. Readers of this book will find it to be a very engaging book that presents a balanced ethnographic depiction of how the Bolivarian revolution has reproduced the magical state in the pursuit of making poor and working-class Venezuelans into Bolivarian revolutionary subjects. In my view, this is an excellent book to understand the ethical and moral dimensions of contemporary politics in Venezuela and it should be required reading to understand the current moment in Venezuelan politics. This review of Matt Wilde's book by Juan L. Rodríguez is part of a reciprocal review. Wilde has also published a review of Rodríguez's book, Language and revolutionary magic in the Orinoco Delta in this same issue of Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. We hope that readers may gain deeper understanding of emerging themes across these two books by reading them alongside one another.