The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela

"There’s a personal reason why I chose this book, which is that this book by Fernando Coronil was published in English in 1997, when I was just wrapping up my PhD in Venezuela. A very good friend of mine called Bernardo Alvarez, who was an academic at the time, said, ‘You have to read this book, but only when it is published in Spanish.’ Bernardo went on to become oil minister in Venezuela and the Venezuelan ambassador in the United States. The Magical State was published in Spanish in 2002 and Bernardo called to say this was a moment of national pride. He was always referring to this work of Fernando Coronil and how central it was to how he saw the Bolivarian Revolution’s understanding of its relations with the US. There’s also an intellectual aspect for me. What’s fantastic about The Magical State is that it’s this wonderful ethnographic, anthropological analysis of how oil has shaped Venezuela’s perceptions of modernity, and how the assumption of oil wealth has created this idea of a transcendental president and an omniscient, omnipresent state, which is capable of granting all of the wishes of Venezuela’s people, because oil is seen as being such a lucrative commodity. Fernando Coronil provides a rich history of Venezuela from the period after the Second World War, when Venezuela was moving towards democracy. He carves the story wonderfully of how oil has influenced Venezuela’s development, on the one hand, being this black gold, but then becoming the devil’s excrement, because it’s so catastrophically mismanaged, and Venezuela becomes so over-reliant on it. It has become such an influential book, in particular understanding what Coronil himself referred to as ‘subaltern modernity,’ which is understanding the experience of people who are peripheral to global capitalism, and that experience of modernity in context, such as Venezuela. Absolutely. It’s this perception of endless wealth, that the state is permanently wealthy and can meet the needs of all of society. There is this notion of a positive-sum game that oil has structured. But obviously, the tragedy of Venezuela was that it was completely overdependent on its oil. So when it experienced oil price crashes, that had devastating economic consequences. It’s those contours of Venezuela’s political economy that Coronil really manages to navigate quite beautifully in this book."