Few contemporary political phenomena are more widely misunderstood than Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution. In this book, Anderson Bean helps set the record straight, offering a crucial glimpse into Venezuela's flourishing, if besieged, experiment in grassroots democracy. A signal contribution to the expanding literature on Venezuelan politics from below.

George Ciccariello-Maher, Vassar College

Over the past decade, democratization globally has been waning. Anderson Bean’s gem of a book sheds hopeful light on one contemporary struggle to institutionalize democracy from the ground up, and in a place few people in North America or Western Europe would expect to find it: Venezuela. While food and medicine shortages, runaway inflation, rampant violence, political corruption, and general economic turmoil in Venezuela have grabbed the lion’s share of attention in the press, Bean’s rich ethnographic account of Venezuela’s communal councils and communes takes us deep inside one of this century’s boldest contemporary democratic experiments. His analysis of worker and peasant-driven development within the communal movement, and their alternative vision for the Bolivarian Revolution more generally, challenges the common misperception that the failed policies of the Maduro Government reflect and drive this process. This book will forever change the way you think about Venezuela and democracy.

John Dale, George Mason University