The political success of Hugo Chávez and Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution has relied on the promise of both emancipation and improved terms of patronage for the urban poor. This thesis takes a journey through barrio Pueblo Nuevo, the oldest informal township in Mérida city, to consider the tension between these ways of thinking about the relationship between people and government as a context for community organising. Different kinds of evidence are presented from fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2014, when Mérida made international headlines as violent protests erupted and the middle-class neighbourhoods around Pueblo Nuevo barricaded themselves against the state. Observations from community meetings in and around the barrio show how different groups position themselves strategically in relation to political parties and city authorities. Experiences from nine months volunteer teaching work is used to explore the participatory methodology of the barrio’s famous ‘little school’ - the Fundación Cayapa education collective – and its work to reduce gang violence. Experiences of living and participating in Pueblo Nuevo and of building relationships with key community members are drawn on to explore perceptions of the lawlessness and political radicalism of Venezuela’s barrio populations. Interviews with activists, residents and local officials are used to map the intellectual landscape of the barrio, identifying different overlapping folk concepts about the urban poor – including as ghetto thugs and as social revolutionaries – and connecting these to notions about government and democracy. These connected areas of analysis are used to bring together the existing scholarship around Venezuela’s experience of Chavismo – as a public narrative, as a set of institutions and policies and as the context for barrio organising. The thesis contributes to these existing areas of literature by challenging the representation of Bolivarianism as a break from the pre-Chávez political era. Historical evidence is presented to connect the contemporary experience of Pueblo Nuevo with the history of the barrio as Mérida’s first so-called “land invasion” following ruralurban migration during the mid-Twentieth Century. Important continuities are identified with the pre-Chávez era in the strategies of community groups, their administration by partisan city authorities and within the Bolivarian public narrative of class warfare and popular empowerment. The thesis argues that community organising in Pueblo Nuevo is shaped by the inherited tension between processes of social emancipation and patronage and their premises in competing folk concepts about the urban poor.

This thesis exammes the notion of 'generation' as an approach to the political history of Venezuela. It falls into four parts. First, an extensive review of the use of the concept in the works of, particularly, Hume, Elster, Marias, Mannheim and Wohl, to highlight the problems and identify the possible advantages of generational analysis. Second, the application of a generational analysis to Venezuela's political history, which has a markedly cyclical/generational appearance and where the term has been frequently, though often loosely, employed.

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President Hugo Chavez was first elected President of Venezuela in 1998 on an anti-neoliberal platform that promised “power to the people” via processes of state-grassroots collaboration. The current process of social change is framed within a wider discourse and policy that aims to build “Socialism for the 21st Century” through the development of new forms of political, social and economic engagement based on new conceptualisations and practices of democratic participation. Central to this process are the Communal Councils and Social Missions; initiated by the government not only to provide essential services, but also to help educate and encourage marginalised individuals and communities to organise and mobilise for change. Supporters argue that the “Bolivarian Revolution” is promoting social inclusion, protagonist participation and the redistribution of power. On the other hand many critics see Chavez’s reforms to date as an outmoded, top-down model of social change or as a classical populist project that serves to consolidate authoritarian social structures. Based on extensive fieldwork in Caracas from January 2009 to April 2010, I look beyond the rhetoric to uncover whether or not the ongoing processes of social change have contributed to new forms of political awareness and popular agency and whether or not there has been a transformation of power relations and structures. In doing so I contribute to theoretical debates into how radical change can be achieved in the 21st century, through a focus on grassroots movements, education and their changing relationship with the state.