Employing Gramscian analysis, this project examines the transformative and regressive potentials emanating from contemporary populist state society complexes in Venezuela and Bolivia. Contextualized within Coxian conceptions of historical structure, I argue these state forms represent a significant break from past manifestations of Latin American populism in two dimensions. First, patterns of ‘passive revolution’ are not reproduced as these societies reject neoliberal developmental models through alternative domestic and regional initiatives challenging traditional domestic and global historical blocs. Second, populist governments in Venezuela and Bolivia frame increased participation and citizenship to formerly excluded groups as a first step to transform ‘deeper’ issues surrounding capitalist social relations. Despite these emancipatory dynamics, Venezuela’s ‘radical Caesarism’ contains a series of regressive tendencies exacerbated by resurgent US supremacy and remains dependent on oil sales that help drive broader forces of capitalist accumulation. Bolivia’s radical populism ‘from below’, while sharing similarities to Venezuela, perhaps offers greater long term transformative potential in the current geopolitical framework.

Recent shifts in political contestation in Latin America from decentralized social movements to the emergence of left leaning populist governments have produced a range of reaction from critical academics and activists.Those most sympathetic to the rise of state centered resistance focus their praise on developments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador (Grandin, 2007; Ellner, 2005, Katz, 2007; Ciccariello-Maher, 2007; Renique, 2005; Gibbs, 2006; Rochlin, 2007). Here, evidence is cited highlighting the simultaneous success of progressive national and regional development projects and the extension and deepening of participatory democracy despite a geopolitical climate hostile to these ends. Arguing that the utopian moment of leaderless resistance emerging in the 1990s has passed, a two tiered strategy of organization outside of the state (social movements) and inside the state (parties) is called for to further facilitate resistance to renewed US imperialism and neoliberalism in the region (Katz, 2007: 40-41).

Critics of the state centered resistance in Latin America roughly fall along two lines. Non-Marxist academics, often tied to the transnational activist community critical of modern political projects, draw from a tradition that remains wary of the hierarchical nature of the state and its historical ties to implementation of neoliberalism in the region (Laclau, 1985; Desai, 2004: 169-185; Escobar, 2004: 220-7). In addition, concerns of corruption, clientalism, and undemocratic processes also are highlighted as rationale to focus on transnational social movements committed to struggle that remains …diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental and… decentralized (World Social Forum, 2008). Marxist critics of state centered resistance (Hardt and Negri, 2004; Gilly, 2006) argue that even while these states may challenge aspects of US power and neoliberalism, they remain immersed in and part of a broader framework of globalizing capitalism. Despite perhaps noble intentions, state managers within these new state forms remain dependent on the success of both national and transnational capital accumulation and investment and thus will shy away from deeply challenging private forces beyond symbolic gestures (Bowles and Gintes, 1986: 90; Block, 1977: 6-28). Dynamics within populist states on the left in Latin America thus arguably fit Gramsci’s conception of ‘transformismo; leaders elected on mandates from social movements to radically challenge existing social structures are unable or unwilling to do so but simultaneously attempt to maintain support from these same social movements through populist and nationalist appeals.

While these debates highlight important dynamics surrounding contemporary counter-hegemony in Latin America, they remain theoretically problematic and underdeveloped in three interrelated dimensions. First, framing the effectiveness of state centered or decentralized resistance as an either/or debate points to a tendency to mistakenly reify the social forces involved (states, social movements, capitalism) as externally related entities.As outlined by Marx and Gramsci, these social forces are not “suspended in mid-air” (Marx, 1979: 186). Social relations around production and the ‘extended’ state, primarily acting to reinforce and reproduce these productive relations through specific institutional arrangements and ideological frames, should be seen as mutually constituted (Gramsci, 1971: 268-9; Robinson, 2004:92-6). As such, an effective change in one aspect (productive relations/market or institutions/state/hegemonic ideology) changes the relationship as a whole, producing an open-ended process often laden with contradictory tendencies. New state forms emerging in Latin America thus must be analyzed in a framework that recognizes contradictory tendencies that emerge from processes of social change (Morton, 2000: 259; Ryner, 2003: 201-2).

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Social movements in the 1990s, often organized with a broader transnational network of activists, successfully blocked the most egregious components of the Washington Consensus in the region. These movements among others include: the Fifth Republic Movement (MVR) in Venezuela, the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil, the (Ecuadorian National Confederation of Indigenous People (CONAIE) in Ecuador and The Union of Bolivian Rural Workers. This same social movements were instrumental in electoral victories of leftist governments in Venezuela (1998),Bolivia (2006), Brazil (2003) and Ecuador (2007).

An internal relation is one in which each component is constituted in relation to the other. & so that one cannot exist without the other and only has meaning when seen within the relation, whereas an external relation is one in which each part has an existence independent of its relation to the other_ (Robinson, 2004: 96).

Gramsci describes the extended state as follows: “For it should be noted that the general notion of State includes elements which need to be referred back to the notion of civil society (in the sense that one might say that State=political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armor of coercion”(Gramsci, 1971: 262-263). Civil society, as a component of the state, becomes both the primary vector for reinforcing dominant class interests while simultaneously providing the framework through which transformative politics can be developed.