The Social Fabric of Chavismo

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What’s happening in Venezuela?

Politics is not a game of chess, and much less so when the world is no longer divided along the unipolar axis of the 1990s, when the United States could make and unmake governments –the way in which the war in Syria has mutated is testament to this. Venezuela is hostile terrain for calculated outcomes, and the Venezuelan rightwing has been a costly, poor investment: this is the fourth attempt to seize power in six years. One reason for this repeated failure is in the nature of Chavismo itself, its complexities, potency, architecture, and capacity to fight back when it is against the ropes.

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Marco Teruggi — Verso

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Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power

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The first lie is that if finance is entirely free, globalised and unregulated, it will develop instruments to insure against risks (derivative products), rendering impossible the spread and intensification of the blaze. After two decades of stable inflation and financial liberalisation, the financial community, the media, and the political establishment loved to proclaim that systemic crisis had now become impossible (‘this time it’s different’). But the impossible did happen. This owed not to some external mega-event but rather to the fact that speculation had eroded from within any sense of reason and any barrier to the appeal of greed. This first lie is also the basis for the other two.

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Michel Aglietta — Verso

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Post Truth

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It is a cynical view of politics that envisages the public as a television audience. In an interview for the film Get Me Roger Stone Trump evaluates his campaign, his political ambition and its efficacy: “I’ve always got good ratings. Ultimately it’s all about the ratings, and it is all about people watching and the eyeballs”.[xvi] More recently he boasted that his ratings on Fox News ‘Face the Nation’ were the “highest they’ve ever had… It’s the highest for ‘Deface the Nation’ since the World Trade Center. Since the World Trade Center came down. It’s a tremendous advantage”.[xvii] It is the drive for these ratings that motivates his post-truth attitude to the media. For Trump ratings are akin to a traditional notion of democratic legitimacy. Crucially, this is not a public that speaks. This is a public that watches.

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Elle Aspell-Sheppard — Verso

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