This book is an adaptation of the author's Ph.D. thesis in Anthropology from the London School of Economics. Wilde is currently a lecturer in human geography at the University of Leicester, in the UK. His book is “an ethnographic study of the relationship between oil, politics, and morality as seen through the eyes of working-class barrio residents in El Camoruco, a low-income urban periphery located in the industrial city of Valencia [Venezuela]” (p. 3). It “draws on research conducted in three phases over the last decade – 2008-10, 2012, and 2017 – and documents the everyday lives of El Camoruco's residents during a period of rapid and conflictual social change” (p. 3). Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that aims to mix international political economy, politics, and the notion of economic morality, the author sets out to “explore how Venezuela's contradictory relationship with oil shaped both the conditions in which barrio residents made their lives and the terms in which they understood them over the last decade”. Wilde's main argument is that everyday barrio life in this period “was intimately shaped by the defining contradiction of the Bolivarian Revolution: that in its efforts to capture a larger portion of oil money and distribute it more widely among the population, this disjunctive political project pursued policies that ultimately entrenched Venezuela in the very position of dependency that Chávez sought to overcome” (p. 3). The focus on the interrelations of oil, politics, and morality is an adaptation of British cultural studies, as found in the works of E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, to the particular case of Venezuela; other theoretical references are also quoted throughout the book.
The book is divided into nine chapters. Chapter One summarizes Wilde's research proposals, his principal hypotheses, as well as the main aspects of Venezuela's recent history and the main theoretical premises adopted. In particular, Wilde explains that his chief argument is a response to Fernando Coronil's The Magical State,Footnote 1 which explored the view of a “moral disquiet around oil that has consistently characterized Venezuela's development as a petro-state, encapsulating the sense that a nation blessed with material abundance has somehow cursed itself through a Faustian pact with a social and moral pollutant” (p. 13). However, as “Coronil stopped short of applying it to the social and cultural spheres of everyday life and never had a chance to analyze the Chávez and Maduro eras in sufficient depth”, the book “extends his analytical approach into previously unexplored areas – primarily kinship, everyday economic life, grassroots politics, and morality – and uses this approach to understand Bolivarian Venezuela in both macro- and micro-terms, grounded in a longitudinal ethnographic perspective” (p. 14).
A summary of the following chapters can be found on page 22. Chapter Two “introduces the large family network that sits at the heart of the book and traces the early history of the Bolivarian Revolution through the family's recollections of Chávez's rise to power”. Chapter Three “explore[s] the impact of the government's flagship social missions on El Camoruco's residents, highlighting the moral ambiguities that characterized one of their unintended consequences: the deepening of localized forms of inequality in the barrio”. Chapter Four discusses in qualitative terms the continuing proliferation of violent crime during the administrations of Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, showing “from the point of view of young barrio men […] how their struggles with violence embodied an uneasy search for moral order that haunted Bolivarian Venezuela even in its most optimistic period”. Chapter Five focuses on grassroots policies, arguing that “many chavistas understood their political participation in religious terms, drawing on their respective faiths as they worked to fashion themselves as new kinds of political and moral subjects” (p. 86). It examines “the contrasting experiences of more recent ‘converts’ to the revolution and of long-standing community leaders, showing how tensions between these different segments of the chavista base reflected deeper uncertainties about the revolution's progress”. Chapter Six analyses the launch of a communal council in El Camoruco and its impact on local political life, with the main distressing conclusion being that the consejos comunales [communal councils] “became contested and morally hazardous spaces that were marked by local people's cultural associations with oil revenues and political power”. Wilde claims that as those involved “wrestled with a host of mundane challenges associated with bureaucratic administration”, the chief protagonists of the CCs [communal councils] “found themselves engaged in an embryonic democratic project that seemed caught between utopian and dystopian understandings of the state” (p. 105).
Chapter Seven critically analyses the construction of a new “multi-barrio commune” next to El Camoruco, which was intended eventually to replace municipalities in the area. Wilde pessimistically explores the contradiction between the official drive to foster “new structures of governance desde abajo [from below]” and the obligation to “show obedience to their president and participate in institutional structures that were increasingly designed and managed in central state ministries” (p. 127). Negative dialectics seem to have guided the process of creating multi-barrios communes: “this contradictory model of state-managed petro-democracy simultaneously enabled and impeded egalitarian aspirations, producing a series of what I term ‘utopian disjunctures’ for the actors involved” (p. 127). Chapter Eight results from Wilde's return to Venezuela in 2017, by which time the accumulated negative GDP growth rate since 2013 had reached about thirty per cent, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Adopting impressionistic descriptions, Wilde concludes that “a deep sense of mistrust had become a central feature of barrio life during the country's long crisis”. In particular, “El Camoruco's residents wrestled with the myriad challenges associated with endemic economic hardship”, with people stretching “scarce resources among those they trusted, giving households and kinship networks a heightened role in daily survival strategies”. At the same time, Wilde observes, “outside of these networks, many expressed suspicions about even the most mundane economic interactions and practices” (p. 150). Chapter Nine closes with reflections “on how [Wilde's] interlocutors’ lives have changed over the course of the last decade”, in the face of a massive economic and social crisis (which forced around seven million Venezuelans to leave the country). This last chapter returns to the book's “core argument and considers the relationship between the global political economy of oil and the present conditions of El Camoruco's residents, whose lives now stretch across Latin America in many cases” (p. 23). Despite the pessimistic vein adopted throughout the work, the author's final conclusions slip into poetical appeals devoid of objective criteria (“just transitions” should be made by “breaking down the imaginative boundaries […] between North and South”, as “the fate of populations in the Global North are entirely bound up with those in the Global South”, for instance (p. 186)).
However, Wilde's book has several virtues. It is a well-written academic work, with cold descriptions and analyses; sterile diatribes are avoided. The author bears a genuine human affection for his interlocutors and an adequate understanding (and even underlying sympathy) for the original Bolivarian process, but these do not preclude objective conclusions, at both local and national levels. Wilde outlines an interdisciplinary connection between cultural anthropology, contemporary politics, and political economy, and, despite some impressionistic sentences, analyses are rooted in reality and not fantasy. The methodological strategy of making general inferences for Venezuela from the study of a specific urban periphery might be contested on methodological grounds, but it can be accepted for an ethnographic study of this kind. The phenomenological approach brings to the fore how, with their problems and contradictions, ordinary, real people lived and organized politically, amidst a scenario of rapid and eventually chaotic social change and crisis. The ethnographic method allows clarity on the social phenomena that are often passed over in more theoretical or aggregate studies. The book's vivid and realistic descriptions of how a socialist Weltanschauung became a central part of Venezuela's political life, as well as the contradictions around it in an oil-dependent and underdeveloped economy, certainly make the book worthwhile reading.
Some aspects deserve criticism. There are excessive aleatory quotations, particularly in the conclusion to each chapter, which are introduced whenever the author tackles a more theoretical or general inference based on what has been described. This leads to somewhat eclectic or forced conclusions. There is also an uncritical acceptance of empty or superficial labels, particularly around Venezuela's economy (“petro-capitalism”; “rent-capitalist economy”; “petro-state”; “petro-socialism”; “petro-cronyism”; “petro-capitalism”; “post-colonial petro-state”; “subaltern modernity”; “post-colonial cities”; “truncated modernity”; and others). Regarding the crisis of the Bolivarian model, the author does not adequately stress the fact that the post-2013 crisis resulted not only from Chávez's inadequate exchange rate policies or excessive trust in decentralization, but also from causes that involved (i) the extended effects of the US financial crisis in 2008–2009 on oil exports; (ii) the consequent drop in oil prices; and (iii) the subsequent American embargoes; all these were connected with (iv) endemic corruption, economic sabotage from local producers, the foreign credit crunch, and the illegal expropriation of Venezuelan assets in the US and the UK. The author politely ignores US meddling in Venezuela (through legal and illegal means). Accordingly, the reader should avoid the eventual underlying impression that the whole crisis resulted solely from the flaws of Venezuela's political regime per se.
The author does sufficiently acknowledge the continued and even scandalous loss of hard currencies by corrupt methods within the Central Bank since 1999, involving the state apparatus and domestic and foreign corporations. But the argument that Maduro's administration should deregulate exchange rate markets amidst hyperinflation misses the point, that the scarcity of dollars should be fought by more and not less forceful means, as other command economies show. Finally, the recurrent recourse to racialist expressions, such as “black market” and “denigration”, which are used throughout this book, contradicts Wilde's own philosophical premises and is unacceptable.
