Abstract
One of the striking features of Gabriel Hetland’s book is the attention paid to the quotidian minutiae of political life, and, in particular, the complex political pursuits of the popular classes at the local level. Hetland understands, because he has done the ethical, political and practical work necessary for such an understanding, that the exploited are capable of making history, even if they inherit the terrain on which they attempt to do so, and in spite of the fact that their ruling class combatants retain a structural advantage in the medium and longer runs. Perhaps the greatest virtue of Democracy on the Ground is that it escapes the enormous condescension of much of the recent literature on populism in contemporary Latin America. Such analysis so often boils down to the plebeian orders being duped by charisma and petty handouts, acting the part of cannon fodder for political wars waged against liberal rationality by demagogic leaders bent on centralizing and consolidating their own personal power. Instead of populist fairytales told by liberal political scientists to console themselves and to avoid grappling with the genuine sources of their own ideological and political crisis, there is a depth to Democracy on the Ground, achieved through the patient work of careful and repeated periods of fieldwork in the streets of Torres and Sucre in Venezuela and Santa Cruz and El Alto in Bolivia, during the high moments of national rule under Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales, respectively.
Hetland pursues ‘the only possible historic objectivism’, premised upon the simultaneous combination of an ‘open and undisguised’ disclosure of the author’s political ‘sympathies and antipathies’, and a ‘scientific consciousness’ that ‘seeks support in an honest study of the facts, a determination of their real connections’ and, finally, ‘an exposure of the causal laws of their movement’ (Trotsky, 2008: xviii). This is to be distinguished from the ‘treacherous impartiality’ on display in a considerable cross section of the anglophone social scientific treatment of Venezuela in recent decades, ‘which offers [the reader] a cup of conciliation with a well-settled poison of reactionary hate at the bottom’ (Trotsky, 2008: xviii). I admire the moral integrity of Hetland’s partisanship and honest assessment of the facts, even when I disagree politically or theoretically with some of the conclusions he draws in the process.
Appropriately for an ethnography, the breakthroughs and delights in this book are to be discovered in the details. By their very nature, they are slow building and narratively complex, and therefore difficult to reduce to snippets. The most astute and penetrating aspect of the book is its fine-grained analysis of the building, consolidation and ultimate undoing of far-reaching participatory democratic processes at the local level in Torres. Hetland’s triangulation of the moving parts of political life in that rural/urban locale portrays the dynamic, conflictual processes coming into being from above and from below. The narrative momentum in many of the Torres passages – rooted in interviews and careful observation, born out of relations of trust constructed over time – exhibits the actual tension and contradiction of participatory experiments, even during their peak intervals. On the whole, the treatment of Torres conveys a special intimacy and multi-sided grasp of the setting. It is also in the Torres investigations that Hetland’s most keenly felt political sympathies, hopes and expectations are most evident. Another highlight comes in a bird’s-eye view of Venezuela. Democracy on the Ground contains one of the premier attempts in English to concisely periodize and characterize the evolution and decomposition of Chavismo in Venezuela. It is an impressive, encompassing single chapter.
In terms of the book’s Bolivian content, despite an obviously difficult field experience in Santa Cruz, Hetland nonetheless is able to capture local elements of the rightward drift of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) that had not been sufficiently appreciated in existing accounts. The analysis of corruption and clientelism during the masista mayoralty of Edgar Patana in El Alto also unearths complexities and introduces novel clarifications regarding aspects of that period that were hitherto obscure. Together, these are major accomplishments that provide better foundations for everyone trying to understand political developments in Bolivia and Venezuela over recent decades.
The Argument
Stepping back from the fine particulars, what is Hetland’s basic argument in Democracy on the Ground? He starts with two sets of urban puzzles. In Venezuela, how was it that there were similar (positive) outcomes in participatory budgeting in two cases that most specialists would have expected to have been more sharply divergent? In both the impoverished Sucre municipality in eastern Caracas, which was run by a centre-right party during the period in question, and in the central-western, rural–urban municipality of Torres, which was run by a movement-left party during the period in question, participatory budgeting processes were established that were comparably robust in their involvement of ‘ordinary citizens’ in deliberative and binding decision-making, inclusivity in terms of ‘class, race and ethnicity, gender, and political views’ and institutional and political effectiveness (p. 3). Given the assumptions of the existing literature on participatory budgeting in Latin America, with its tendency to seek sources of explanation locally, the results were to be expected in Torres but confounding in Sucre. In Bolivia, likewise, the conundrum is how to explain two cities with distinct characteristics unexpectedly converging in terms of participatory budgeting results (but this time, negatively). In both Santa Cruz and El Alto, there was a shared failure to implement democratic participatory budgeting processes during the period in question. A movement-left party governed the rebellious municipality of El Alto between 2010 and 2015, and yet, against the expectations of the existing literature, the progressive period did not witness the introduction of democratic participatory budgeting. In Santa Cruz, meanwhile, the expectations of the literature were confirmed, given that a centre-right municipal party failed to introduce and consolidate democratic participatory budgeting.
Hetland believes that the unexpected results are best explained by better analytical accounting of the interaction between national and local politics and specifically by paying closer attention to distinct national political regime types and the balance of class forces at the local level in each municipal arena. On this basis, he argues that the establishment under Chávez of left-populist hegemony in Venezuela between 2009 and 2013, which was leftward moving, mobilizational and institutionally and discursively committed to deepening participatory democracy, ‘transformed the rules of the game of politics such that all parties, even right-wing opposition parties, were forced to play the game of politics on the ruling party’s populist terrain’ (p. 6). That national reality, combined with differently configured balances of class forces at the local level, led to an urban political regime of ‘participatory democracy’ (very good) in Torres and ‘administered democracy’ (less good) in Sucre (p. 25). By contrast, the establishment under Morales of a passive-revolutionary regime in Bolivia between 2010 and 2016, which failed to produce hegemony, and was rightward moving, demobilizational and only secondarily and mostly rhetorically committed to participatory democracy, meant that the local governments of Santa Cruz and El Alto, ‘faced little pressure to govern in a participatory way’ (p. 7). That national scenario, combined with varied balances of local class forces, resulted in an urban political regime of ‘inverted clientelism’ (bad) in El Alto, and ‘technocratic clientelism’ (much worse than bad) in Santa Cruz (p. 25).
These constitutive elements then inform the most far-reaching and controversial argument advanced in Democracy on the Ground. Hetland challenges the near consensus in liberal scholarship on democracy which holds that in order to best ensure the survival of democracy, the sanctified interests of the propertied classes must be enduringly and robustly protected through the sustenance of their ability to exercise unequal influence over the direction and governance of the society, polity and economy, lest they throw their weight behind authoritarian reaction. The best way to protect democracy, therefore, is to safeguard it against radical left proposals via the marginalization of far-left parties and the existence of relatively stronger moderate left parties that accept the underlying capitalist rules of the game, on one hand, and materially robust and well-organized conservative parties that can forcefully represent and protect the interests of the propertied, on the other. Hetland chafes at these restrictive boundaries, insisting that ‘the possibilities for real democracy are greater than most existing scholarship allows for’ (p. 257). Hetland rests his claim on the unexpected results of left-populist hegemony he claims to have discovered in the Venezuelan case: ‘My central argument is that the establishment of leftist hegemony forces the Right to “play the game” of politics on the Left’s terrain . . . [producing] a similar effect as right-wing hegemony: it compels the Right to “change its mind” and embrace ideas and practices associated with the Left’ (pp. 257–258). Right-wing parties in Venezuela, the argument goes, were effectively pushed ‘to promote participatory democracy to an extent rarely if ever seen in Latin America, or anywhere’ (p. 258).
Foundations of a Critique
With regard to the central lines of argumentation just summarized, I am, by and large, persuaded by the descriptive designations of the different ‘urban political regimes’ Hetland associates with Torres, Santa Cruz and El Alto, and even elements of the case that is most weakly argued, Sucre. I also am convinced by the idea that the interaction between national regime types and local class balances will have an influence on patterns of urban governance (although this borders on truism territory). That left-populist hegemony was established in Venezuela is also compelling.
At the same time, there are significant shortcomings to the arguments at the heart of Democracy on the Ground. I want to pose rather fundamental challenges to key elements of the book: its conceptions of left-populism, participatory budgeting and democracy. The problems in each of these areas are traceable to the book’s underlying analytical politicism and idealism. I will treat the first two problems – left-populism and participatory budgeting – only cursorily and spend the remainder of my remarks on the last item of democracy, given that it represents the absolute core of the book.
With regard to politicism, I am referring to an insight proffered by John Holloway and Sol Piccioto (1991) in their contribution to Marxist debates on the state a few decades ago. They discerned two antipodal but equally distorting tendencies in the Marxist conversation over the character of the capitalist state up until the time of their intervention. In my view, these tendencies persist into the present. The first, often characterized as economic reductionism or determinism, ‘is to argue (or more often assume) that the actions of the state flow more or less directly from the “requirements of capital”, and the weakness of this tendency, ‘is to overlook the necessary particularisation of the state as a discrete form of the capital relation’ (Holloway and Picciotto, 1991: 116). The second,
‘often basing itself on a criticism of the simplification of “reductionism”, is to insist on the “relative autonomy” of the political, denying (or more often overlooking) the need to relate the forms, functions and limits of the political to capital accumulation and its contradictions’ (Holloway and Picciotto, 1991: 117).
They call this second tendency ‘politicist’ because it ‘falls prey to the fetishized illusions created by the real particularisation of the social relations of capitalism’ (Holloway and Picciotto, 1991: 117). A politicist view of the state tends towards voluntarism because it understands the state to be endowed, by virtue of its relative autonomy from the economy, with capacities to regulate its way out of the contradictions of capitalist accumulation (Clarke, 1991: 14, fn 8).
Both tendencies, from their different vantage points, share
‘an inadequate theorisation of the relation between the economic and the political as discrete forms of expression of social relations under capitalism, and the failure to found both the· specificity of the political and the development of political forms firmly in the analysis of capitalist production’ (Holloway and Picciotto, 1991: 117).
The way out of this impasse is a materialist conception of the state (not to be confused with an economic theory of the state):
‘The economic should not be seen as the base which determines the political superstructure, but rather the economic and the political are both forms of social relations, forms assumed by the basic relation of class conflict in capitalist society, the capital relation, forms whose separate existence springs, both logically and historically, from the nature of that relation’ (Holloway and Picciotto, 1991: 121–122).
In the language of Gramsci – the Italian Marxist being one of Hetland’s key interlocutors – this can be translated as understanding the base/superstructure metaphor in Marx as a dialectical unity of internal relations, rather than one determinism (economism) or another (politicism). Gramsci, as Peter Thomas (2011) argues, ‘fundamentally redefines the concept of “superstructure” and strips it of the mechanistic and metaphysical encrustations that had been ascribed to it during the period of Marxism’s diffusion and vulgarisation’ (p. 96). Gramsci understood superstructure and ideology ‘in a non-reductive sense – that is, he views the superstructures not as mechanically derived from an originary “base”, but as constituting a dialectical unity or “historical bloc” with the dominant relations of production, the means by which they were organized, guaranteed, and made to endure (or, just as importantly, challenged and transformed)’ (Thomas, 2011: 100). Thomas (2011) makes it clear that, for Gramsci, the ‘superstructures are the terrains on which, or the forms in which, members of a social group come to ‘know’ in a particular, ‘practical’ way the determining conditions of their lives within a particular historical situation’ (p. 101). Democracy on the Ground suffers from politicism to the degree that it undervalues one moment of the dialectical unity, that is the organizing, guaranteeing and enduring powers of the dominant relations of production, as well as the determining conditions they represent for people’s lives and the politics they create under capitalism. That high oil prices are described by Hetland as having provided a material basis for left-populist hegemony in Venezuela is important but does not solve the theoretical problem just posed. The issue is even more sharply posed in the Bolivian case, where patterns of capital accumulation and their contradictions play almost no role in the analysis.
If politicism refers to the mistaken belief in a relative autonomy of the political, by idealism I mean the notion of a relative autonomy to the force of ideas. ‘In direct contrast to Germany philosophy which descends from heaven to earth’, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (2016) argue in The German Ideology, ‘here we ascend from earth to heaven’ (p. 47). By this they mean,
‘we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. . . . Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life’ (Marx and Engels, 2016: 47).
As we will see, it is not good or bad ideas that determine the character and politics of the Venezuelan right (descending from heaven to earth), but rather the strategic and tactical orientation the right develops in concrete situations within and through the struggle it wages, on behalf of the classes it represents, in the context of the dynamic, determining conditions of ‘material production’ and ‘material intercourse’, that is ‘their real existence’ (ascending for earth to heaven) (Marx and Engels, 2016: 47). So, while the Venezuelan right momentarily appears to embrace the principles and practices of participatory democracy in its heavenly pronouncements, it actually hastens a return back to its usual, earthly authoritarianism.
Left-Populism
Drawing on North American Political Science (Roberts, 1995; Weyland, 2001) and Sociology (Jansen, 2011), Hetland defines populism as, ‘a political strategy combining personalistic leadership, state or party-led mobilization of popular and middle classes, and Manichean rhetoric pitting the virtuous people against the amoral elite’ (p. 15). This suffers immediately from its capaciousness. Atatürk, Mao, Perón, Thatcher, Trump, Sanders and Corbyn – they all seem to fit (Wood, 2016). And so what, possibly, could this definition actually tell us about the substance of their vastly disparate politics? Just as seriously, this definition is thoroughly severed from the critical Latin American theoretical tradition, which despite its internal variegation and occasionally functionalist limitations, shared a disposition to explicitly relate the phenomenal forms of populism – understood as a regionally specific variety of left reformism – to the rhythms and contradictions of dependent capitalist accumulation (Cardoso and Faletto, 1979; Ianni, 1984; O’Donnell, 1973; Touraine, 1989; Vilas, 1988; Weffort, 1968). Maristella Svampa has recently surveyed this classical material in light of the Pink Tide of the 21st century (Svampa, 2016, 2017), and Adrián Piva (2013) and Juan Grigera (2017) have creatively and rigorously adapted elements of the tradition to the realities of present-day Latin America. Instead of the specificities of Latin American populism as a form of multiclass reformism conditioned by historical patterns of accumulation and their contradictions, Hetland’s approach requires the introduction of further left–right distinctions as subcategories beneath the amorphous umbrella category, which itself is concerned principally with political style, discourse and mobilization, as above political economy and material class conflict (the concerns animating the critical Latin American tradition).
Left-populism, according to Hetland, ‘is a subtype of populism . . . characterized by the centrality of class as a means of dividing the people from the elite’ (p. 15). It involves, ‘state and party-led mobilization and rhetoric pitting popular against dominant classes. Anti-imperialist nationalism, opposing the U.S. empire, is also a key feature of left populism in Latin Ameirca’ (p. 16). Left-populist parties tend to ‘mobilize popular classes but in a way that tends to undermine civic autonomy – for example, by linking popular mobilization to a clientelistic distribution of benefits. In so doing, left-populist parties inhibit the potential for genuine collective self-rule’ (p. 16). These critical caveats aside, left-populist hegemony in Venezuela between 2009 and 2013 led to uniquely positive outcomes, according to the argument of Democracy on the Ground. Most importantly, this left-populist hegemony is said to have caused ‘the transformation of Venezuela’s Right’ in the shape of its internalization of participatory democratic discourse and practice (p. 272).
The absence of left-populist hegemony in Bolivia, by contrast, put no such pressure on the right to internalize democratic commitments. In Bolivia, Hetland argues, Morales entered office on the back of 5 years of social movement mobilization and at the head of a movement-left party (rather than left-populist party). Facing destabilization from the right in his first term, ‘Morales did not need to build an already-existing popular bulwark, and feared civil war’, so instead of left-populist mobilization from above, he engaged in ‘limited mobilization and demobilization’ from 2006 to 2009, after which he moved rightward with an expressly demobilizational emphasis, establishing a ‘passive revolutionary regime’ (p. 148). This form of politics and directionality of travel contributed to the restriction of participatory democracy at the local level in El Alto and Santa Cruz, unlike the positive results in Torres and Sucre, influenced by Chávez’s left-populist hegemony.
Hetland does not shy away from the depths of the present crisis in Venezuela and wrestles with its significance for his left-populism thesis: ‘Does the evisceration of Venezuela’s left-populist hegemony invalidate the argument that Chávez established such hegemony and that this compelled the Right to embrace leftist ideas and practices regarding democracy’ (p. 272). Hetland lands on the negative: ‘The wager of this book is that this argument remains valid and relevant despite Venezuela’s crisis. The evidence I have presented shows that Venezuela achieved left-populist hegemony in the Chávez years. The end of this hegemony does not negate its prior existence. Nor does it negate the consequences leftist hegemony had, namely the transformation of Venezuela’s Right’ (p. 272). Nonetheless, Hetland acknowledges that the present crisis ‘does point to the need to think about the contradictions and limits of left-populist hegemony and, most importantly, its conditions of possibility’, pointing convincingly to the dynamics of the oil economy, and much less convincingly to ‘Hugo Chávez’s charismatic political leadership’ (p. 273).
I agree that left-populist hegemony was established in Venezuela between 2009 and 2013, but not because the Venezuelan right became supportive of democracy in rhetoric and practice (it did not, as we will see below). The hegemonic period was instead characterized by the dramatic political weakening and fragmentation of the Venezuelan right, the integration of parts of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie into Chávez’s Bolivarian project (the so-called ‘bolibourgeoisie’), and the correspondent uptick in material conditions auspicious for dynamic capitalist accumulation and oil rent lubrication of a multiclass, reformist coalition (Webber, 2020). When these conditions of possibility evaporated, as was inevitable, crisis transpired and the regime entered a period of a protracted bureaucratic sclerosis and heightening authoritarianism. For similar reasons, the ‘passive revolutionary regime’ of Evo Morales should not be counterposed to left-populist hegemony. Indeed, the passive revolution correctly alluded to by Hetland in Bolivia was essential to the establishment of left-populist hegemony in the country (Webber, 2025). Although not in the depths of crisis like Venezuela today, Bolivia’s left-populist experiment at the moment faces an irreparable crisis, as the two wings of the MAS, one backing Evo Morales and the other Luis Arce, engage in brutal internecine competition in anticipation of the election later this year. Our lens can widen still further. I would argue that left-populist experiments in Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador entered into comparable dynamics of exhaustion, crisis and, in these cases, at least temporary displacement by the far-right (Webber, 2024). While the present Venezuelan crisis does not ‘invalidate’ the prior experience of left-populist hegemony in the country, there is certainly no sociological line sufficiently powerful to delink the exhaustion/crisis of left-populist hegemony and the present Venezuelan scenario.
It is important, politically and analytically, to be much more emphatic in stating that there is really no way of properly coming to grips with the region’s present destituent conjuncture (Stefanoni, 2024) – negative rejection of the political elite, incomformity, electoral volatility, the ascendance of outsiders, a crisis of representation, short-sighted political horizons, citizen discontent and ephemeral authority of most existing political projects, all to the tendential advantage of the far-right – without careful examination of the self-undermining paradoxes characterizing the preceding left-populist era of the pink tide.
All else being equal, Robert Brenner (2016a, 2016b, 2016c) points out, reformism is more sustainable in periods of capitalist dynamism, that is in periods quite unlike the one the global economy is traversing at the moment. In periods of robust expansion, even limited popular struggle can wrestle concessions from capital because capitalists are keen under these conditions to keep production rolling over and profit flowing. Ideologically, reformism will appeal to more of the popular classes as a result. The opposite holds in conditions of capitalist contraction or crisis. Capitalists in such scenarios are above all interested in increasing their own competitiveness vis-à-vis other capitalists and will endure lengthy spells of labour and protest instability if they wager that endurance rather than compromise will improve the probability of lowering labour costs. With declining profitability, and absent an explosion of popular struggles, organization and political consciousness, capital’s power vis-à-vis the plebian layers will be enhanced. Reformist organizations and politicians will not be able to deliver meaningful reforms, the plausibility of collective struggle winning concessions from capital will recede in popular class consciousness, and the appeal of reformism ideologically will diminish. Individual survival strategies that presume the inevitability of adapting to reigning capitalist realities will predominate among a growing number of the popular classes, and conservative worldviews that explain and justify such adaptive strategies will become more attractive (Brenner, 2016a).
The paradox of reformism, for Brenner (2016a), is additionally premised upon an illusory conception of elections and the capitalist state: ‘that balance of class forces favourable to the working class can be constructed inside the state by electoral/parliamentary means, apart from the massive strengthening of workers against the capitalists in the shops and in the streets’. Electoralism in this sense is founded upon illusion because quotidian power in capitalist society is not exercised through state institutions but through the investment function that capitalists control by virtue of being the owners of the means of production. Short of transformation of capitalist property, capitalist control of investment remains the basis for all economic growth and stability, for employment and state revenue. ‘Since capitalist investment depends on the capitalists’ ability to make a profit’, Brenner (2016a) notes, ‘short of revolution, all elements of society find sooner or later in their own interest to ensure capitalist profitability’. Reformist governments managing capitalist states, like those of Chávez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia, can provide substantive reforms during periods of prosperity for the reasons noted above, and in so doing can expect to command the ideological loyalty or acceptance of significant layers of the popular classes. However, in the absence of militant popular class action in streets, workplaces and communities (the autonomous, self-organizing capacities for which are undermined by left-populism), periods of economic crisis will witness reformist governments being driven into the role of restoring capitalist profitability, and to the extent that they assume this mantle the ideological appeal of reformism will recede among popular class layers, helping to dissolve the bases of its own existence (Brenner, 2016a).
Participatory Budgeting
The participatory budgeting process in Torres is the most celebrated of Hetland’s cases, and he notes a kinship between it and Erik Olin Wright’s (2010) ‘real utopias’, ‘which are concrete attempts to build the world-as-it-should-be amid the imperfection of the world-as-it-is’ (p. 101). I think the comparison is apt, and for this reason, Hetland’s treatment of participatory budgeting in Torres as a real utopia is vulnerable to the same sort of criticism that Wright’s project received, namely that these utopias tended to be severed analytically from serious consideration of the dynamics of capitalist development (Burawoy, 2020; Riley, 2020). In abstracting the ‘principles’ of a process like participatory budgeting from the capitalist society of which it is a part, is, as Dylan Riley points out, to proceed abstractly, to engage in an ‘abstract empiricism’. This is because,
‘“actually existing” institutions “actually exist” in capitalist society, and their capitalist or anticapitalist character is determined by their relationship to the whole of which they are a part. It can only be determined by putting them in the context of capitalist society, and asking whether they serve to reproduce that society or not. The attempt to define a “real utopia”, however specified, in abstraction from a notion of society as a whole, faces intractable methodological difficulties’ (Riley, 2020: 101).
To his credit, unlike those who have studied participatory budgeting from an almost entirely localist angle, Hetland steps back to bring in the national regime type. But this is a limited methodological move, precisely because of its politicism – i.e. it does not, beyond a nod to oil prices, relate the national regime, nor local participatory budgeting, to the dynamics and contradictions of capitalist accumulation. The abstract empiricism that Riley warns is evident in passages dealing with the ‘socialist’ components of the Torres experiment. The left-movement mayor and his supporters in Torres often saw ‘participatory democracy as part of a larger struggle to construct socialism’ (p. 99). Hetland reports that ‘socialism was a common term in Torres, and throughout Venezuela, at this time’ (p. 100). Following quotations from several interviewees referring to various conceptions of socialism and relating these to their experiences in participatory budgeting processes in Torres, Hetland stresses that ‘socialism was a common, and contested, touchstone that citizens and officials constantly used to discuss and justify their choices with respect to PB and much else’ (p. 101). According to Hetland, ‘many viewed socialism as extending popular control from the political to the economic realm’ (p. 101).
But how well does this discursive commitment to socialism translate into participatory budgeting, even in Torres, the most robust case? Much is made of the fact that residents had ‘binding control over 100 percent of Torres’s investment budget (6.8 million USD in 2006)’ (p. 82), but too little is made of the fact that ‘due to its lack of industry, Torres has a very weak local tax base, with central government transfers accounting for up to 90 percent of its budget as of the mid-2000s’ (p. 110). It does not require any minimization of the genuinely deliberative and popularly democratic elements of the budgeting process in Torres to doubt how ‘real’ this utopia is, and how much of a move ‘toward socialism’ it can possibly represent. In the end, it is a process of deliberation for determining the best local use of contingent, irregular and vulnerable revenue streams provided at the behest of the left-populist national government. However participatory, the budgeting process is also a formalized and legalized process initiated, in its details, ‘from above’ in the figure of the movement-left mayor of Torres, under the umbrella framework of national legislation introduced by Chávez. What is more, it is worth mentioning that participatory budgeting at the local level became a priority of the Latin American Left precisely at its weakest point in the modern era (the late-1980s and early-1990s), marked as it was by an inability to any longer contest state power at the national level. The ‘participatory revolution’ (Lee et al., 2015) that this left turn to the municipalities was a part of, was coincident with decentralization initiatives encouraged by international institutions such as the World Bank, with the aim of cutting costs, facilitating privatization and breaking national union confederations. It is with overwrought enthusiasm, then, that Hetland proclaims near the beginning of his opening chapter: ‘If the world is experiencing a participatory revolution, a case can be made that it started in left-governed Latin American cities in the 1980s and 1990s’ (p. 8).
In many respects, the Torres experiment, for Hetland, represents the highest echelon of participatory democracy in the book. I would insist, though, that the self-organized, from-below rebellions of El Alto in October 2003 and May–June 2005 (the significance of the latter moment is seriously underappreciated in Hetland’s book) represent the real apogee of participatory democracy, the real utopias properly understood. In their dramatic, collective pursuit of a qualitative rupture with the reining social order, they far exceeded the institutional confines of participatory budgeting. If there was a spectre haunting Latin American capital in the early 21st century, it took shape in El Alto’s insurrectionary processes, rather than in the participatory budgeting processes of Torres, as important as the latter were within their strict limits. ‘To be “real”’, Riley (2020) contends, ‘a utopia must surely approximate to a utopian society – a total alternative system of production and reproduction’ (p. 102).
Democracy
How should we understand democracy? Hetland opens with the uncontroversial observation that it is a ‘profoundly contested concept’ (p. vii), which to some, ‘refers to a form of competitive elite rule’, and to others, ‘a system in which ordinary people can and do exercise real control over decisions affecting their lives’ (p. vii). Democracy is sometimes, ‘used to refer to a broad array of political – as well as social, economic, and cultural – processes, procedures, rules, institutions, structures, beliefs, practices, and more’ (p. vii). He notes that the ‘classical, and still literal, meaning of democracy – rule by the people – is profoundly threatening to those with power and privilege’ (p. viii). None of these competing notions of democracy, posed at a high level of abstraction, are explicitly adjudicated anywhere in the book. Hetland shifts almost immediately from the challenge of defining the form and content of ideal democracy to a lower level of abstraction – the ‘problem of democracy’ as posed in (liberal, anglophone) contemporary scholarship, which contends that in order for democracy to be ‘safe’ it must be less ‘real’ – and remains at that level in all subsequent analytical moments of the book in which the concept of democracy is explicitly broached (p. viii).
The minimalist conception of competitive elite rule as democracy, then, is never ruled out by Hetland as non-democratic and is, in fact, implicitly accepted as democratic throughout the book. For example, Hetland stresses that the 1980s and 1990s witnessed ‘the Latin American Right (and the U.S. government) largely came to accept democracy’, principally because of ‘the defanging of the Left, due to decades of brutal repression, and neoliberalism’s regional and global ascendance. Together these related processes ensured that democracy would be safe for elites’ (p. 256). But Hetland’s desire is that democracy runs wider and deeper than this limit, and he is inspired by concrete historical examples in recent Latin American history in which it has developed in that direction.
That Democracy on the Ground never explicitly breaks with the validity of liberal democratic minimalism has much to do, I think, with the absence of capitalism from the discussion of democracy. In this sense, capitalism becomes naturalized as part of the assumed background. This pragmatic, or realist, point of departure shares a certain affinity with the liberal-social-democratic foundations of Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens’ seminal text, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Rueschemeyer et al., 1992), but the latter is superior at least insofar as it makes explicit its own assumptions regarding the perimeters of the category of democracy. They begin by casually dismissing all Marxist criticism of the limits of bourgeois democracy – an easy enough step in the heady days of the early 1990s, the beginning of the ‘end of history’, as it were. Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens wave away the Marxists with the justification that ‘no actually existing democracy can claim to constitute in a realistic sense the rule of the many; but “bourgeois” or formal democracy does make a difference for the process of political decision-making and for the outcomes of that process’ (Rueschemeyer et al., 1992: 10). For a state to be formally democratic it must, for them, be responsible to parliament, possibly with the complement of an elected executive, and there need to be regular free and fair elections, freedom of expression and association and universal suffrage (Rueschemeyer et al., 1992). Beyond defending these formal baselines, they advocate the explicit abandonment of ‘the most far-reaching ideals of democratic thought’ in favour of ‘the more modest forms of popular participation in government through representative parliaments that appear as realistic possibilities in the complex societies of today’ (Rueschemeyer et al., 1992: 10). Of course, as I have argued elsewhere (Webber, 2017), this commonly restrictive definition is far from innocent, formally equating as it does the different concepts of liberalism and democracy (on the historical timing of the eclipse of ancient conceptions of democracy by democracy-as-liberalism, see Wood, 1995). The presumptive realism in Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens, asks us, ultimately, to quieten down and accept the inevitability of capitalist class rule as the only possible foundation of our socioeconomic, ecological and political existence, and acclimate ourselves to the thoroughgoing alienation of our collective capacities of self-rule that this necessarily entails.
Even as Hetland avoids adjudicating between different democratic claims at a high level of abstraction in the opening pages of the book, it is quickly made clear that he prefers a democratic result that deviates from (becomes more ‘real’ than) merely a ‘form of competitive elite rule’, and this preference is made more obvious throughout the empirical sections of Democracy on the Ground, as he celebrates instances involving more participation of the lower orders in local affairs, and condemns instances in which such participation is restricted or non-existent. Even if he implicitly accepts minimalist liberal rule as some kind of democracy, he is less sanguine than Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens about what that means, desires more from democracy and believes more is possible even in ‘the complex societies of today’. Hetland refers approvingly to the by now ample historiography that firmly associates the left ‘with efforts to make democracy more real by extending it from the political to the socioeconomic realm and deepening it through the creation of new participatory institutions’ (my emphasis) (p. ix). But because Hetland does not incorporate into his discussion of democracy an explicit critique of capitalism and thus also evades the important issue of whether genuinely democratic rule is possible in a society premised upon class rule, the grounding of one of his most important arguments around democracy ultimately operates on the terrain established by liberal social scientists.
Democracy in the limited sense of formal representative competitive rule by elites is said by the bulk of liberal social scientific literature on the matter to be safer to the extent that the protection of the propertied classes is baked into its predictable operations, procedures and outcomes. Liberals point out those countless historical situations in which, because the sanctity of property has been violated by a radical left political force or has at least been perceived by the propertied to be under imminent threat by such a force, the right-wing political representatives of the ruling class have done what was necessary for democratic heads to roll. Of course, the liberal commentary in question generally omits the authoritarian disposition of liberals themselves across a few centuries of their sordid global history (Gordon and Webber, 2023). Even though he challenges the liberal consensus regarding protections for the elite against democratic excess, Hetland sees that there is substantial evidence that can be marshalled in defence of that position: ‘Across time and space, the Right has regularly opposed democracy when it becomes threatening to elites and shown greater willingness to tolerate democracy when it appears relatively safe’ (pp. 255–256). On the liberal consensus, Hetland cites this representative passage from Harvard political scientist, Daniel Ziblatt:
‘The price that advocates of democracy must pay is that the propertied and powerful not only have a diffuse but disproportionate influence on society all the time, but also that it be protected by organizationally strong and well-endowed political parties that have the chance of winning elections at least some of the time’ (quoted on p. 257).
Hetland categorically rejects Ziblatt’s conclusion, whereas I would suggest that Ziblatt’s diagnosis of the limit of capitalist democracy is more or less correct. Under capitalism, with its daily conflict and systemic tendencies towards crisis, the propertied will support, or better tolerate, limited, formal, representative and competitive elite rule only to the extent that the source of their power (property) is never threatened, or potentially threatened in the imminent future. Hetland argues that where a left political force that is devoted to the expansion of deepening of democracy is able to establish hegemony – that is to establish ‘moral and intellectual leadership such that other political forces, including forces on the Right, are compelled to “play the game of politics” on the left’s terrain’ – one result can be ‘the widening of the space within which democracy can operate, conceptually and politically’ (p. ix). Under such conditions, ‘non-left parties will be forced to embrace, or appear to embrace, these practices’ (my emphasis) (p. ix). The crucial qualifier in this sentence, ‘appear to embrace’, which critically restricts the meaning and scope of the argument and determines what kind of evidence is necessary to substantiate it, disappears in later articulations of the same argument in several instances. To point to just one example, left hegemony is later said to ‘compel the Right to “change its mind” and embrace ideas and practices associated with the left’ (p. 258). The strong version is the most susceptible to the charge of idealism. The problem of the right, in other words, was that it had the wrong ideas. Once it had been persuaded by the better ideas offered up by left-populism, it also changed its practice and role in society, even as its class compositional base among the propertied, and the interests of those propertied classes, remained unaltered. The weaker version of the argument is less vulnerable to the charge of idealism because the right is not persuaded by new ideas, but is rather compelled by a change in the balance of forces to appear as though it has been persuaded. But if the weaker version protects itself against the charge of idealism, it simultaneously undermines the basis for the argument of left-populist hegemony advanced in the book, because the right never really ‘changed its mind’.
There are two primary sources of evidence that Hetland mobilizes in support of his argument, both from Venezuela. The first, and most important, source of evidence is the municipal case of Sucre, in which ‘Primero Justicia, a center-right party with a middle-and upper-class core base’, surprisingly ‘embraced participatory rule in an unexpectedly robust way’ during the period of left-populist hegemony at the national level (2009–2013) (pp. 105–106), even embracing as its own some of the language and practice of Chavismo to justify its actions. Once left-populist hegemony declined at the national level, beginning in 2013 after Chávez’s death, the centre-right municipal government of Sucre began governing ‘in a more “typically right-wing” nonparticipatory manner’ (p. 107). There are immediate problems with the argument. Offering governmental practices of the Sucre government (at the municipal level) as evidence to challenge the liberal consensus on democratic safety (by definition, a thesis operative at the national level) is a category error. No right-wing municipal government, by definition, will ever be in a position to overturn democratic rule at the national level, and so their rhetorical or practical opposition to democracy, or effusive support of democracy, is a sideshow. Another problem: the Sucre case provides no evidence for the strong version of Hetland’s core thesis (i.e. the one where the Right actually embraces democracy, rather than merely appears to do so). It provides some evidence, and here only at the municipal level, that it appears to do so. The centre-right municipal government of Sucre only appeared to embrace participatory democratic rule, because if it had actually embraced that commitment it would not have immediately returned to ‘typically right-wing rule’ once Chávez had exited the national scenario.
The secondary primary source of evidence for Hetland’s democratic thesis poses a different problem. He points to the fact that Primero Justicia (the same party as the municipal government in Sucre) was the leading oppositional force in Venezuela between 2009 and 2013, under the leadership of Henrique Capriles. During this period, Capriles ‘campaigned on a platform of extending democracy, explicitly promising to expand and better manage Chávez’s signature social missions . . . . Had he lived, Chávez could have referred to Capriles as his “greatest achievement”’ (p. 258). Hetland compares this political platform to the perspective advanced by Capriles’ successor as leading oppositionist, Juan Guaidó, who openly ‘calls for military coups and U.S. military intervention from 2019 to 2021’ (p. 270). However, on the basis of Hetland’s own evidence earlier in the book, Capriles’ embrace of extending democracy between 2009 and 2013 had to have been at the level of superficial appearance, given that, following his close second place finish to Nicolás Maduro in the April 2013 election, the opposition leader
‘[adopted] a confrontational stance, in which he refused to recognize the results as valid and called for opposition protests in the streets, some of which turned violent and led to a number of civilian deaths. Polarization was further exacerbated during the February-April 2014 protest wave’ (p. 142).
This seems to me very solid evidence in support of the liberal safety consensus that the propertied classes and their political representatives have a purely pragmatic relationship even to minimalist, formal democratic rule. Should it open the door to political forces that potentially threaten the sanctity of private property, the propertied will line up behind authoritarian reaction.
Concluding Reflections
The product of years of fieldwork and deep mining of the secondary literature, Democracy on the Ground is a careful, challenging and provocative book that deserves a wide readership and is likely to permanently alter aspects of ‘standard accounts’ of the Pink tide in the two countries in question. I have tried to capture the moral integrity behind Hetland’s partisan effort to honestly assess the balance of facts on the ground. More than a few contributors to contemporary debates on Bolivia and Venezuela have failed that test, so Hetland’s honesty and effort to get to the truth are commendable. The minutiae of participatory democracy in Torres, the bird’s-eye periodization of Chavismo, the local rightward drift of the MAS in Santa Cruz and the corrupted clientelism of masista Edgar Patana’s mayoralty in El Alto together make this book a weighty contribution to our collective efforts to better understand Bolivian and Venezuelan politics. These insights will undoubtedly endure independently from how persuasive I have been in pointing to some of the book’s theoretical weaknesses concerning left-populism, participatory budgeting and democracy, weaknesses that I trace to an underpinning analytical politicism and idealism.
