The ongoing economic crisis, which originated in the USA and has since spread rapidly to capital markets worldwide, is massive, complex, and many times contradictory. One could say the same for responses to the crisis as governments, firms and multi-national institutions struggle to grasp the full magnitude of the event. This article interrogates the key commodities involved-land, labor and money-and the always-uneasy relations between spaces of social reproduction and capital. Such ambivalence is critical to understanding how new economic realities are formed in light of retreating neoliberalism as markets become destabilized. The analysis provided suggests the commodities involved in the housing crisis are the basis for a countermovement against dispossession.
For much of the twentieth century, Venezuela was regarded as one of the developing nations destined to take its place among the affluent societies of the world. The spectacular infrastructure projects sponsored by the Venezuelan government and funded with revenue from the petroleum industry were taken as evidence of progress and the impending arrival of modernity. Showcasing the technical prowess of the Venezuelan state, these projects captured the national imagination and won consent for political elites by calling forth aspirations for total societal transformation. In this article, I explore the reconstruction of hegemonic consent as part of one such project-a hydroelectric dam in the state of Barinas-and the survival of a vision of progress through the built environment, even after the social-economic crisis of the late twentieth century. Drawing on fieldwork in areas near the formerly incomplete project site, I account for what, at first glance, seem to be drastic shifts in local political allegiances and incongruous support for the conservative military dictatorship of Marcos Perez Jimenez and the Bolivarian Government of Hugo Chavez. Suggesting that a high modernist vision of development is a pivot for hegemonic consent, I argue that the completion of this dam after a long hiatus has won the support of a caste of state workers and that the backing of these workers is crucial to the preservation of organized political power.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the highlands of Barinas, this article investigates the impact of “twenty-first century socialist” policies on the Andean peasantry and the relationships established as part of Venezuela’s ongoing agrarian reform. The analysis explores the historical and material-cultural factors surrounding coffee production in the Andes and the dynamics that have shaped a small group of growers. It examines the recent efforts of the Venezuelan government to increase domestic coffee production and support internal growers, suggesting that attempts to insert the state into the rentier structure of the coffee economy have somewhat inadvertently reinforced a working-class consciousness. The ethnographic vignette illustrates the present relationship of state functionaries to coffee growers and narrates their analysis of the conditions, showing the contradictory effect these relations have on the social awareness of growers.
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